Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation 9780823291717

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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan David Tracy Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

D. C. SCHINDLER

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

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

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2004

Copyright © 2004 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series, No. 34 ISSN 1089-3938 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schindler, D. C. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the dramatic structure of truth : a philosophical investigation / by D.C. Schindler.—1st ed. p. cm.—(Perspectives in continental philosophy, ISSN 1089-3938 ; no. 34) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2321-3 (hardcover)—ISBN 0-8232-2322-1 (pbk.) 1. Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1905- 2. Truth. I. Title. II. Series. BX4705.B163S34 2004 121.'092—dc22 2003024302 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

Abbreviations

ix

Note on Translations

xi

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

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1

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

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2

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

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3

Truth as Gestalt Gestalt and Motion Characteristics of the Gestalt

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Gestalt as Epiphany and Conversio Gestalt as Unifying Knowledge Truth as Fruitfulness 4

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

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

350

Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth

422

Bibliography

429

Index

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Abbreviations

Below is a list of abbreviations used in this work. Books or essays listed without the author’s name are by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Full titles and information are provided in the bibliography. ADS CA CathPhil CJ CPR CSL De pot. De ver. DK E EuP GL 1–7 GW HA KL LA Meta. MetaPrz MTG

Apokalypse der deutschen Seele Der Christ und die Angst “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time” Kant’s Critique of Judgment Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason The Christian State of Life Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae, De potentia dei Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae, De veritate Diels and Kranz’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker Epilog Evangelium und Philosophie The Glory of the Lord, vols. 1–7 The Grain of Wheat Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus Kosmische Liturgie Love Alone Aristotle’s Metaphysics “Die Metaphysik Erich Przywaras” “Movement toward God” ix

MW PCM PF PT Rep. RT SCG ST TD 1–5 TE TL 1–3 UBC

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My Work “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism” “Persönlichkeit und Form” Presence and Thought Plato’s Republic “A Résumé of My Thought” Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas’s Summa Theologica Theo-Drama, vols. 1–5 Test Everything Theologic, vol. 1 (English translation) and Theologik, vols. 2 and 3 Unless You Become Like This Child

Abbreviations

Note on Translations

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

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Acknowledgments

There is no solitary fruitfulness, in intellectual work as much as in any other. A number of people have helped, directly or indirectly, to bring this book into being, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. First, there are my professors at The Catholic University of America who offered many suggestions for this work in its dissertation stage: Richard Velkley, Eric Perl, Peter Casarella, and Robert Sokolowski. I am especially grateful to my director, Riccardo Pozzo, who also encouraged me to work the dissertation into a book. I would moreover like to thank the people who made the time of research and writing in Freiburg and Basel so rewarding: Anton Schmid, for his noble patience and generosity with his vast knowledge of the German language and culture; the members of the Littenweiler Lesekreis for stimulating conversation and good food; and Cornelia Capol, and the others at the Balthasar Archiv, for their kindness and constant readiness to help. Conversations with many people provided the impetus and the direction for the reflection in this book. Among those whose insights have most directly contributed to it, I would like to mention my father, who has been my first and most important teacher; Adrian Walker, who read through drafts and always had significant and helpful comments; Juan Sara, who shared his profound knowledge of Balthasar and Balthasar’s own teachers and companions; and most recently, Michael Hanby, who has been a model for me of the integration of faithful commitment and bold speculation. In a special way, I owe my thanks to Nicholas Healy, for years of friendship and intense xiii

discussion, in particular while this work was being written. The best parts of this book spring directly from conversations with him. I would also like to express my gratitude to Andrew Matt for his careful proofreading of this book at an early stage, to Sonya Manes for her excellent final copyediting, and to Michael Metcalfe for his help in preparing the index. My thanks are due, moreover, to the editor of this series, John D. Caputo, for his encouragement and help in bringing this book to the light of day. Finally, I wish to thank the Johannes Verein, of Trier, Germany, and Communio: International Catholic Review, whose financial support enabled its publication. This book is dedicated to three Stellas: my sister, my mother, and my grandmother. Christmas, 2003

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Acknowledgments

Introduction

This book aims to develop a dramatic concept of truth using the resources of the thought of the Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), in dialogue with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. The concern that forms the background of my study is the one that has occupied much of contemporary Continental thought, namely, the desire to overcome what is often called today a “metaphysics of presence,” that is, a reduction of the object of knowledge to its immediacy to the knower,1 or, in other contexts, “identitarianism,” that is, the privileging of identity over difference in relation. This desire is connected—particularly in response to Edmund Husserl—with an attack on efforts to provide an absolute foundation for knowledge, under the assumption that because knowledge is essentially “egocentric,” such a foundation entails a kind of tyranny of human subjectivity, the mastery of the human subject over the world. Driving this concern is the need to safeguard a genuine and abiding difference in the truth relation. And yet, in addressing this concern, many philosophies of the past two centuries have taken for granted, to varying degrees of explicitness and often unwittingly, the “identitarian” model of truth that lies at the heart of the problem. Rather than develop a more

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

adequate concept of truth, they have often opted to overturn the privileging of the epistemic relation to the world in favor of that of feeling (Romanticism) or some form of will (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, later existentialism), or to displace the subject by some “non-egological” structure, such as tradition (Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics), the unconscious (psychoanalysis and semiotics), language (structuralism, deconstruction, and Ludwig Wittgenstein), or cultural systems (critical theory). To the extent that these philosophies fail to address the question of difference within the structure of truth, however, they leave the core of the problem untouched. They are forced to make any genuine encounter with an other irrational precisely because they have restricted truth to the object’s immediacy to—its unmediated identity with—the knower. Indeed, the irrationality of otherness tends more often than not to collapse into another version of immediate identity (an identity of feeling, experience, an undifferentiated mystical night, and the like). I hope to show, in this book, that the resources provided by Balthasar open up another possibility, one that takes full account of difference as a matter of truth and reason itself. To affirm the ultimate irreducibility of difference, it is not necessary to abandon truth. One of the hallmarks of Balthasar’s philosophy is his constant insistence on mystery as intrinsic to truth as truth, and vice versa. If mystery is characterized by abiding difference (or, as some would have it, absence as opposed to simple presence), then Balthasar’s intrinsic linking of truth and mystery indicates a refusal to identify truth with difference-excluding identity and mystery with identity-excluding difference. Rather, the mutual implication of truth and mystery reveals a mutual implication of unity and difference in knowledge. The disclosure implied in truth is never one that brings the object wholly and helplessly under the control of the subject. Balthasar’s assessment of the great figures of the history of Western thought is guided, among other things, by the concern for an abiding otherness in the truth relation. For Balthasar, the birth of self-conscious philosophy in the mythic world of ancient Greece represented a moment of “crisis,” or a time for judgment (krinein). It confronted human self-understanding for the first time with the question that has remained the central one for philosophy, namely, whether philosophy allows a properly “dialogical” sense of reason. As he puts it: “The one, unique, fundamental question of all philosophy remains this: Has the act of transcendence already found the transcendental object? Is it, as act, therefore one with its object or not? Is the light in which we accomplish the act of transcendence identical with the illumination (Ein-Leuchten) of transcendence? Or, to put the 2

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question another way: Can the light of reason bring the radiance and the glory of myth within its purview?”2 In other words, if we interpret the light and illumination Balthasar speaks of here as the grounding a priori aspect of knowledge, the question is whether this light “breaks in” in any sense from outside the subject (as an “Ein-Leuchten”) or whether it is wholly projected by the knowing subject, something that is already a function of the subject himself. In this latter case, Balthasar goes on to say, reason is essentially “monological,” and it is exclusive of relation to an other as a matter of its structure. If we consider premodern philosophies generally from the perspective of this “one, unique, fundamental question of all philosophy,” we find a persistent ambiguity, which Balthasar himself repeatedly identifies in his treatment. The mythic or religious context in which these philosophies for the most part emerged tended to emphasize an “open-ended” sense of reason. Only God or the gods are wise; the philosopher himself is always “on the way” to truth, and therefore possesses an openness to the transcendent other as part of his nature. It is significant that many more recent attempts to show how ancient philosophy—and Plato most typically— avoided what Balthasar calls a “monological” sense of reason, have retrieved this religious context.3 But retrieving the religious context does not yet clarify the ambiguity: To what extent is the open-endedness part of the structure of reason as such, and to what extent is it merely a result of its context? Prior to Balthasar, a number of early twentieth-century French Catholic philosophers (Maurice Blondel, Pierre Rousselot, and Joseph Maréchal) sought to make the in via sense of reason philosophically thematic.4 In reaction to the increasingly closed structures of modern essentialism, these thinkers articulated various forms of what might be called 2. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity [= GL 4], trans. Brian McNeil et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 155–56. 3. Catherine Pickstock, for example, has argued that Plato resists a “metaphysics of presence” by virtue of his sense of the essentially “doxological” nature of language: After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). For a sense of the philosopher as always in via, see Eric Voegelin’s interpretation of Plato: Order and History, vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985; originally published 1957). Compare, likewise, William Desmond, Being and the Between (Ithaca, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995). 4. See Maurice Blondel, “Illusion idéaliste,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (November 1898): 726–45; Pierre Rousselot, “Amour spirituel et synthèse aperceptive,” Revue de Philosophie (March 1910): 225–40, and its sequel, “L’Être et l’esprit,” Revue de Philosophie (June 1910): 561–74; and Joseph Maréchal, Le point de départ de la métaphysique, vol. 5: Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949). Introduction

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an “intellectual dynamism.” According to this intellectual dynamism approach, taken generally, reason is of its essence open to the otherness of objects because, in its finitude, it is open to the infinitely transcendent Other. The objectivity of objects, or their abiding difference within knowledge, is grounded ultimately in the striving that constitutes the nature of finite human reason. My claim with respect to these various attempts at articulating difference into the structure of reason is that they leave the profound ambiguity intact. To affirm that reason in via is open to the other as other prompts the question of the nature of reason in fine. What, in other words, is the structure of reason in its most complete and ideal form? The fundamental question Balthasar puts to philosophy, we recall, is whether the transcendence of the act of knowing is accounted for wholly by the subject, or whether it is something the object coenables. This question brings to light a fundamental inadequacy in the intellectual dynamism approach and, indeed, in any approach that attempts to open reason up only by emphasizing its incomplete character: if the ground of the object’s objectivity is nothing other than the “transcendental” striving of the subject, then the subject’s openness ends where the object begins; the object’s otherness is lost precisely to the extent that the subject’s union with it is consummated. Merely emphasizing the finitude and hence openness of reason in via does not yet address the problem of an ultimate reciprocity of union and difference in knowing, but only postpones it. To get to the heart of the matter, then, we must raise the question, not in the first instance about the structure of reason, but about reason in its ultimate teleological fulfillment; in other words, we must address the question of the structure of truth. The most significant recent thinker to raise the question of the structure or nature of truth is Martin Heidegger, and so it may be worthwhile at the outset to say a word about how Balthasar’s understanding of truth differs from his. (Heidegger will repeatedly provide a point of comparison and contrast with Balthasar over the course of this study.)5 Like Balthasar, one of Heidegger’s fundamental concerns in reflecting on the essence of truth is to avoid a reduction of truth to human subjectivity. The heart of the Kehre (turn) in Heidegger, in fact, is the dramatic reversal of no longer viewing being in function of the “ego cogito” of metaphysics or the “rational animal” of humanism, but rather of

5. This book will engage primarily with the later Heidegger’s notion of truth, although some key concepts from Being and Time will also be discussed. 4

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understanding the human essence itself on the basis of being. 6 This reversal is accomplished, in part, by a criticism of the traditional identification of truth with the concordance of mind and reality, and the related association of being in its essence with idea (as that which is open to the human gaze), to the extent that these conspire to yoke being to (a superficial conception of) the mind.7 In contrast to these traditions, Heidegger claims to recover the pre-Platonic notion of truth, “a”-letheia, which shelters being from human consciousness as much as it opens it: the alpha-privative refers to the darkness out of which that which becomes visible emerges. Such a model makes hiddenness equiprimordial with revealedness in the essence of truth. 8 It is this coessentiality of concealment, for Heidegger, that persistently wrests being from human control (what Heidegger calls Machenschaft).9 The question of the reciprocity of union and difference in truth, however, is not eliminated even in Heidegger; it is merely transposed to a deeper level. What Heidegger calls the “subject-object-relation” of metaphysics is in turn founded on the ultimate reciprocal relation of being and the human essence (das Sein und das Menschenwesen).10 It is on this point—the precise nature of the relationship between man and being— that the difference between Heidegger and the approach articulated in this book emerges most sharply. Heidegger affirms the radical finitude of both being and man, identifying being with nothing and defining the human essence as “the placeholder of the nothing.”11 The essential relation that each has to the nothing is what links being and man to each other. In other words, being and man belong essentially together because there is precisely nothing, so to speak, to keep them apart. But, in this case, the question arises about whether Heidegger merely exchanges a negative identity in darkness for the identity in light he was trying to overcome, and therefore, whether he, at the most profound level, does not leave in place the impossible alternatives of an identity-excluding 6. See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 201–4. 7. Heidegger attributes the origin of this traditional understanding to Plato: Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997). 8. See Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 114; and “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, 132. 9. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 47–49. 10. Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956), 28. 11. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, 110; and Zur Seinsfrage, 38. Introduction

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difference and difference-excluding identity.12 Without a positive and abiding otherness at the heart of this “belongingness,” I suggest, there is nothing to prevent the mystery of being from losing its “strangeness” and degenerating into merely the final horizon of human consciousness. The basic thesis of this book is that the reciprocal relation that constitutes the heart of truth will avoid some version of a reduction to immediacy only if it is understood dramatically. An essentially dramatic relation is an unreleased tension, an inward relation of terms that resist one another, and a union that frees into ongoing difference. A dramatic conception of truth is the opposite of a monological one: it is encounter. In Balthasar’s philosophy, drama occurs in the interaction of (positive) centers of freedom. Thus, in contrast to the intellectual dynamism approach, which views reason’s “other” as, so to speak, the inert object of its striving, a dramatic approach understands truth in a more comprehensive sense as the whole that emerges in the encounter of mutual dynamisms. Furthermore, in contrast to Heidegger, who connects truth to the mystery of being as something lying in darkness beyond particular beings, Balthasar shows that the mystery of being is revealed, that is, made immediately apparent, in and through the mediation of the encounter of particular beings in their simultaneous unity and difference. The mystery of being is, for Balthasar, not the murky night of ambiguity in which being and man dissolve into one another, but it is instead the translucent joy of genuine mutuality.

The Plan of the Present Work I do not intend to present an introductory overview of Balthasar’s philosophy, in its development, sources, and its influence, or a detailed exposition of his philosophical works. Such an overview and exposition have already been admirably achieved in a number of published dissertations covering the major themes in Balthasar’s philosophical thought. First, the most profound is no doubt Juan Sara’s Forma y amor: Un estudio metafísico sobre la trilogía de Hans Urs von Balthasar.13 This work is a careful study of the relationship between form (Gestalt) and love in Balthasar’s main work,

12. For example, Heidegger objects to the proposition that being and man “are the same” not because of the undifferentiated identity it implies, but because it still permits the slightest difference: “In Wahrheit können wir dann nicht einmal mehr sagen, ‘das Sein’ und ‘der Mensch’ ‘seien’ das Selbe in dem Sinne, daß sie zusammengehören; denn so sagend, lassen wir noch beide für sich sein.” Zur Seinsfrage, 28. 13. Juan Sara, Forma y amor: Un estudio metafísico sobre la trilogía de Hans Urs von Balthasar (Kösel, Germany: Private Printing, 2000). 6

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his fifteen-volume trilogy, on the basis of the trilogy’s concluding epilogue. Second, Eliecer Pérez Haro, in his El misterio del ser: Una mediación entre filosofía y teología en Hans Urs von Balthasar,14 provides an outstanding illumination of Balthasar’s philosophical thought in relation to the fundamental theme of being’s role as “mediator” between God and the world. Both of these works offer, in addition, excellent overviews of the most significant philosophical influences on Balthasar’s thought (Erich Przywara, Gustav Siewerth, and Ferdinand Ulrich)—although one may wish to claim that Pérez Haro goes a little too far in his distinction between the early, more “Przywarian” Balthasar I, and the later, more Siewerthian-Ulrichian Balthasar II. A third book, Georges de Schrijver’s Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez Hans Urs von Balthasar,15 gives a thorough account of what may be the most central dimension of Balthasar’s philosophy, the theme of the analogia entis (analogy of being). Finally, there has appeared a study of the development of Balthasar’s understanding of the transcendentals by Mario Saint-Pierre, entitled Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar.16 Besides these foundational works, there is a book by Pascal Ide, called Être et mystère: La philosophie de Hans Urs von Balthasar, which offers a more general exposition of Balthasar’s philosophy in relation to traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic thought.17 And finally, there are several shorter studies of Balthasar’s most systematic philosophical work, The Truth of the World, one of the best of which is perhaps Jörg Splett’s dense but penetrating essay “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit: Auf Balthasar hören.”18 Further works on Balthasar’s philosophy are listed in the bibliography. The number of significant possibilities opened up by these studies is a testament to the fruitfulness of Balthasar’s philosophical insights. His dramatic theory, in particular, promises enormous fruitfulness. Until now, however, it has only been studied within the framework within which Balthasar developed it, namely, as a means of understanding the relationship between

14. Eliecer Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser: Una mediación entre filosofía y teología en Hans Urs von Balthasar (Barcelona: Santandreu Editor, 1994). 15. Georges de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1983). 16. Mario Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Quebec: Laval University Press, 1998). 17. Pascal Ide, Être et mystère: La philosophie de Hans Urs von Balthasar (Brussels: Culture et Vérité, 1995). 18. Jörg Splett, “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit: Auf Balthasar hören,” Theologie und Philosophie 69 (1994): 411–21. Other articles on this book are listed in the bibliography. Introduction

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God and man as it plays itself out historically, and as a key to interpreting action in light of the transcendental property of goodness.19 But the notion has a usefulness beyond situations that are “dramatic” in an obvious sense. Indeed, I hope to show that the notion of drama presents a powerful way to deal with problems in the philosophy of knowledge. More than just providing a key to anthropology, it provides one to metaphysics. Insofar as this notion implies a way of integrating unity and difference that is neither monological nor dualistic, I want to claim that a dramatic approach to truth enables a new response to a series of persistent problems in Continental philosophy. The novelty of this approach is confirmed by the fact that while the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie mentions “drama” as a possible subject of philosophical reflection, it provides no listing whatsoever for the “dramatic” as a philosophical category—dramatic, here, meaning more than merely a theme, but, like dialectic, a distinctive mode of philosophy.20 Moreover, if indeed an understanding of the dramatic is indispensable for preserving the genuine mystery of being, which is a central topic in all of the studies mentioned above, then a profound reception of Balthasar’s thought requires working out the implications of his thought toward a dramatic philosophy. My method will be more constructive and systematic than historical. The engagement with Balthasar will be guided by the demands of the theme itself more than by the order of Balthasar’s texts. Characteristically, Balthasar elaborated his own ideas through engagement with other thinkers in the tradition. In this spirit, I aim to set key philosophical implications of his thought into relief, not primarily through textual analysis, but by engaging that thought with the specifically philosophical questions raised by other thinkers according to the various aspects of the problem of truth. 19. The first, as far as I know, to envision a philosophical dramatics, drawing inspiration from Balthasar’s “theodramatics,” is Balthasar’s cousin, Peter Henrici, in “La dramatique entre l’esthétique et la logique,” in Pour une philosophie chrétienne: Philosophie et théologie (Namur, Belgium: Culture et Vérité, 1983), though he provides only a sketch of what it might look like. A couple of studies, which will be discussed in this chapter, engage Balthasar’s dramatics from a theological perspective: Ben Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” in Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 139–71; and David Stuart Yeago, Theology and Drama: A Study in the Work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). Stephan Grätzel explores the philosophical presuppositions at work in Balthasar’s dramatic theology in “Der philosophische Hintergrund von Balthasars Theodramatik,” in Theodramatik und Theatralität: Ein Dialog mit dem Theaterverständnis von Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Volker Kapp, Helmuth Kiesel, and Klaus Lubbers (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2000), 33–42. 20. J. Steiner, “Drama,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 1972), 289–90. 8

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More specifically, I try to frame a dramatic concept of truth on the basis of elements of Balthasar’s metaphysics, his theory of consciousness, his theory of judgment and knowledge, his anthropology, and his understanding of the transcendentals. The primary sources used in this book are the philosophical parts of Balthasar’s fifteen-volume trilogy (along with its brief but potent Epilog), which he composed from 1961 to 1987: Herrlichkeit, in seven volumes (translated into English as The Glory of the Lord = GL), Theodramatik in five volumes (Theo-Drama in English = TD), and Theologik (= TL; the first volume of which has alone thus far been published in English) in three volumes.21 The titles of the volumes are provided in the bibliography. The trilogy, apart from the first volume of the third part, Theologik volume 1: Wahrheit der Welt, represents the mature expression of Balthasar’s thought. TL 1 is peculiar in this context: Balthasar originally published the book in 1947, intending to follow it up with a second, more theological volume. Never returning to this original project, he decided to republish it, unchanged, in 1985 as a philosophical prolegomenon to the Theologik. When a distinction is made, in this book, between Balthasar’s earlier and later thought, TL 1 is understood to belong to the earlier writings, while the rest of the trilogy is grouped with the later. The main philosophical sections of the trilogy, and thus the primary sources for the present book, are the following: The Glory of the Lord, volume 1, called Seeing the Form, which contains a development of the concept of Gestalt and the foundations of Balthasar’s aesthetic theory; and volumes 4 and 5, called The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (vol. 4) and The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age (vol. 5), which provide an overview of the development of Western thought in relation to the question of “glory” or the analogia entis. The Theo-Drama is primarily theological, though philosophical themes are scattered throughout; most notably, Balthasar outlines the principles of his dramatic theory in the Prolegomena, vol. 1, and he develops the philosophical aspects of an anthropology in vol. 2, Dramatis Personae: Man in God. With regard to the Theologic, as mentioned above, the first volume, Truth of the World, is a phenomenology and metaphysics of truth. Finally, the central, and longest, section of the Epilog is an essay on metaphysics, recapitulating

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

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themes from the trilogy in relation to the question of polarity in created being and the transcendentals. The plan of the book is as follows: chapter 1, “The Gift of Being Given,” expounds the dramatic structure of being itself that provides the ontological foundation for a dramatic conception of truth. In relation to Heidegger’s sense of the ontological difference, and the metaphysics of certain twentieth-century Thomists, this chapter discusses the reciprocal relationship between being and action, which Balthasar claims is the essence of drama. The chapter begins with an analysis of the rich text from GL 5 on the “Fourfold Difference,” to show the philosophical implications of the finitude of worldly being, namely, the irreducible—and creative—difference in the heart of all being. This difference is worked out in its various polarities as Balthasar sets them forth in his Epilog. Then, the theme of “Trinitarian difference and the ontological difference” from TL 2 is discussed. Finally, these themes are related explicitly to action in the light of the divine ideas (understood as dramatic roles) through an engagement with certain passages from TL 1. Chapter 2, “The Birth of Consciousness”: One of the most provocative problems to arise in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy concerns the nature of the unity of consciousness and its relation to experience. This chapter lays out the aporias that this question raises, and it proposes once again a properly dramatic solution on the basis of Balthasar’s notion of the birth of consciousness. In opposition to a “monological” or, as it is called in this chapter “monophoristic,”22 understanding of consciousness, Balthasar insists that even in its most transcendent unity, consciousness is essentially dialogical. The event of the unity of consciousness, such as Balthasar describes it, eludes the alternatives that Kant’s philosophy has seemed to set up as mutually exclusive, namely, apriority and aposteriority, and it thus allows us to understand conscious spirit as always already “ontological,” without conflating (idealistically) the spheres of being and knowing. The main source for this chapter is Balthasar’s essay “Movement toward God,” a section from GL 1 that treats the relation between the soul and being, and the discussion of the analogy between being, consciousness, and God in TL 1. Making use of Balthasar’s aesthetic notion of Gestalt, chapter 3, “Truth as Gestalt,” attempts in a systematic fashion to work out a “dramatic” sense of relation at every stage in the act of knowing—that is, a relation that is

22. Monophorism borrowed from Blondel, designates the attempt to understand a phenomenon in terms of only one of its constitutive elements. 10

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simultaneously and asymmetrically unitive and differentiating, one that both surprises and resolves at a single stroke. The basic “levels” of this relationship are appearance/perception; self-gift and (free) judgment; and then union in knowledge. The chapter culminates with one of the most important conclusions of the thesis: a dramatic approach views truth most basically as simultaneous unity and fruitfulness and therefore in every case as both mediated and immediate. In other words, truth is an objective Gestalt that both transcends and includes the subject and object in their dramatic existence. Here, in light of this new sense of truth, aspects of Balthasar’s thought on logic and language are briefly compared to that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Husserl. The primary sources used are GL 1, TL 1, and TL 2. Chapter 4, “Meta-Anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth,” first turns to the implications of this sense of truth for questions of philosophical anthropology in relation to certain contemporary religious thinkers, on the basis of texts from TD 2, GL 1, and TL 2. Second, this chapter addresses the book’s most explicitly dramatic theme in the question of man’s role in providing a foundation for truth. Through an interpretation of Heidegger and Plato, I show that the appearance of the transcendent whole that is necessary for truth arrives only through a dramatic act, which for Heidegger is the facing of death, for Plato is martyrdom, and for Balthasar is the analogy between drama (art) and the total gift of self in the definitive life-decision represented paradigmatically in the professing of vows. Here, the main sources are TD 1 and TD 4. Chapter 5, “The Transcendentals,” inquires into the ontological dimension of truth in the context of the other transcendentals (goodness, unity, and beauty). I argue that the only way to see truth as ontological is through the dramatic encounter of particular beings. This encounter is described here as an event of “reciprocal causality,” which proves to be the fundamental logic of the dramatic Gestalt. In this chapter, I give a brief account of the development of the notion of the transcendentals and show Balthasar’s place within this tradition. Then, I develop a more systematic dialogue between Balthasar and certain figures in twentieth-century Thomism on the question of the relationship between truth and goodness and beauty, using texts from TL 1 and the Epilog, and from Aquinas’s De veritate. It is beauty’s mediating role, I propose, that makes truth (and goodness and unity) dramatic. The dramatic character of the transcendentals reveals, in turn, the dramatic character of being itself. Being, as manifested in the encounter of beings, is always more than itself, and it is so because of the difference that lies originally within it. We thus reach, at the end, the point from which the book began: the fourfold difference of being. Introduction

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Before we start, it may be helpful to provide an introductory sketch of two of the most pivotal terms in this book and their significance for Balthasar: Gestalt and drama.

Drama and Gestalt in Balthasar The history of new ideas—their provenance, birth, and growth—is always mysterious. However, even if there can be no question of following the trails of the notions of drama and Gestalt in Balthasar to their absolute beginning or end, evidence suggests that Balthasar began to see the importance of these two notions at roughly the same time, and that he developed them in tandem. His notion of Gestalt, of course, comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a fact he emphasized every time he gave an account of his thought.23 The significance of drama for Balthasar may be due to his reading of the French poet and playwright Paul Claudel, who had a sharp sense of the dramatic24—unless, that is, Balthasar’s native interest in drama brought him to Claudel. At the end of the thirties, Balthasar dealt with Goethe at length in his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele,25 published an article on Claudel,26 and worked on translations of Claudel’s poems and dramatic masterpiece, The Satin Slipper.27 These two thinkers early and often occupied Balthasar’s attention and colored the atmosphere in which he thought. It was apparently only later, however, that two notions of drama and Gestalt moved explicitly to the center of 23. See, for example, one of the clearest accounts: “Dank des Preisträgers an der Verleihung des Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-Preises am 22. Mai 1987 in Innsbruck,” in Elio Guerriero, Hans Urs von Balthasar: Eine Monographie, trans. Carl Franz Müller (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1993), 419–24, esp. 420–21. A good account of the history and meaning of the notion of Gestalt can be found in Michael Waldstein, “Expression and Form: Principles of a Philosophical Aesthetics According to Hans Urs von Balthasar” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dallas, 1981), 65–84. 24. Claudel presents a brilliant explanation of the significance of the dramatic in a letter to the journal Le Temps, dated June 1914, published in Claudel, Positions et propositions (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1928), 237–43. 25. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele [= ADS]: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. 3 vols. 3rd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998), 1:4–7, 514. 26. Balthasar, “Auch die Sünde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel,” Stimmen der Zeit 69 (1939): 222–37. 27. Balthasar’s admiration for Claudel can be seen in the fact that he returned repeatedly (six times) to rework his translation of the Satin Slipper; moreover, when he mentions the few books of his that continued to be a source of joy to him toward the end of his life, he singles out his anthology Origen (Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, trans. Robert J. Daley [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984]) and his many translations of Claudel’s poetry: My Work: In Retrospect [= MW], trans. Kelly Hamilton et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 109. 12

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Balthasar’s thinking. Peter Henrici cites a personal letter from 1950 in which Balthasar mentions he had been meditating on writing a philosophical “dramatics,” with action and event at the center. 28 In 1952, Balthasar published an article, “Persönlichkeit und Form,” which expounded the importance of Goethe’s notion of Gestalt/Form for synthesizing Greek, medieval, and modern forms of thought. The reason for this parallel development is clear. From his first writings, Balthasar had been looking for a way to privilege the “existential” without thereby surrendering (or destroying) conceptual or “essential” forms.29 He sought to engage intellectual problems against a horizon of ultimate meaning and the fate of concrete human beings.30 And, finally, he wanted to discover a sense of the “revelatory” character of being, that is, a mystery dimension that belongs to being itself and does not have to become immediately theological.31 He eventually realized these possibilities in the convergent notions of Gestalt and drama. Each, as we shall see, is crucial to the meaning of the other, and we will thus fail to understand both if we neglect either. We can avoid certain common misunderstandings if we approach them together from the outset.32

28. Peter Henrici, “La structure de la trilogie,” Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 19. Balthasar confirms this, MW, 29, when he writes (in 1955) that he had been increasingly occupied with, and lecturing on, the significance of the dramatic in all things Catholic. 29. See, for example, his early study on Gregory of Nyssa (Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa [= PT], trans. Mark Sebanc [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], esp. the introduction, 15–23), wherein he claims that the Church Father can be understood only if we approach his thought in an existentialist mode that nevertheless integrates essential thought-forms. 30. See Alois Haas, “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘Apocalypse of the German Soul,’ ” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 45–57, esp. 52. 31. This is a general theme in Balthasar’s volumes on the “realm of metaphysics,” GL 4 and 5 (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. Oliver Davies et al. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991]). See, for example, GL 4, 232–41. The role is played primarily by “Myth,” which Balthasar understands essentially as a revelation of Being. The “mystery” character of being itself, then, becomes a crucial mediator between philosophy and theology. See Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser. 32. There is a tendency to view these notions in isolation from each other: for example, in his very helpful book on the basic elements of Balthasar’s philosophy, Pascal Ide nevertheless shows a tendency to think of Gestalt as an essentially static concept that needs to be complemented by other dynamic notions: Être et mystère, 178. Similarly, and perhaps more gravely, Ben Quash misunderstands Balthasar’s sense of the dramatic by precisely pitting it against any relatively stable or transcendent forms. Because of the importance of this issue, I will discuss Quash’s treatment of drama at greater length later in this chapter. Introduction

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Gestalt In his 1952 article, Balthasar compares the ancient/medieval notion of form with the modern notion of personality.33 The ancient/medieval notion of form represents finitude, not in the modern sense of imperfect limitation (for example, the emptiness suggested in the modern use of the term formal), but rather as fullness, perfection, and determination. Balthasar contrasts form with the “un-Greek” notion of person, which represents the infinite indeterminateness of freedom. In spite of their apparent opposition, Balthasar shows how these two senses come together in Goethe.34 The key point of unity between them, according to Balthasar’s interpretation of Goethe, is Bildung (formation or education). We see this most clearly, for example, in Faust. Education is the formation, the making determinate, of a personality, and yet it occurs not in static isolation but rather in the tension and danger of engagement in the world and the making of choices. Likewise, movement (the modern sense of striving in the infinite) is genuine movement only in decision, and decision is precisely exclusion, limitation, and determination (the ancient sense of the finite).35 Moreover, the increase of determinateness, and thus the formation of personality, is in turn a deepening of freedom, to the extent that it unifies and opens the otherwise dull and formless chaos of subjectivity. “Form,” Balthasar says here, can never be translated by the (rigid, definitive) Greek term ananke(fate/necessity) but must be seen in its relation to elpis (hope), which he interprets in this context as a moving openness to the infinite. Thus, the essential Goethean paradox is the simultaneity of “the form that brings to a close and the mysterious, outward-bound hope.”36 The determinateness of form is constituted in the openness to the beyond. By relating it to Bildung, we therefore see that Balthasar from the beginning thinks of Gestalt as dramatic. Only thus conceived does it point the way toward resolving 33. Balthasar, “Persönlichkeit und Form” [= PF], Gloria Dei 7 (1952): 1–15, here: 1. Interestingly, in this context Balthasar translates the Platonic Eidos with the German Bild/Idee and the Aristotelian Morphe- with Gestalt. Clearly, he sees Goethe more in line with the Aristotelian tradition, which thinks of “form” first of all in terms of concrete, natural, living entities. 34. Ibid., 3–5. It may be more accurate to say that Goethe shows a way to bring them together. Balthasar judges, in fact, that a certain unresolved tension remains in Goethe, and indeed all of German philosophy, in relation to the question of how ultimately to bring together the infinite and the finite. In the end, Goethe seems more modern than ancient, preferring the constant striving in the infinite to the final perfection of form. 35. Ibid., 5–6. 36. Ibid., 8: “das goethische Paradox von schließender Form und geheimnisvoller, schweitender Hoffnung.” 14

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what would otherwise be merely contradictory, namely, the relation between the infinite and the finite. Balthasar’s later, “aesthetic” use of the term Gestalt includes but goes beyond the relationship to personality, since it determines the more general, fundamental phenomenon of the appearing of any being at all. Nevertheless, he retains to the end a dramatic sense of form, even if the term dramatic receives more analogous application. As Balthasar employs the term in the opening volume of his trilogy, first published in 1961, Gestalt designates not an inert thing in relation solely to itself, but essentially a movement that already possesses in itself a tension. Gestalt is the appearing of the depths of a thing’s being and as such has a twofold nature. This polarity, moreover, finds expression in the classical articulation of the beautiful as the inseparable instance of species (or forma) and lumen (or splendor).37 On the one hand, we have the hidden depths that appear, and on the other, we have the appearance of those depths: The appearance of the form (Gestalt), as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths. In different periods of intellectual history, to be sure, one or the other of these aspects may be emphasized: on the one hand, classical perfection (Vollendung: the form which contains the depths), on the other, Romantic boundlessness, infinite (Unendlichkeit: the form that transcends itself by pointing beyond to the depths). Be this as it may, however, both aspects are inseparable from one another, and together they constitute the fundamental configuration of Being.38 What we should notice in this passage is that Gestalt itself is the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical dimensions, an essential tension between the finite and the infinite. As such, it is not a static entity that may then be set in motion or inserted into a larger movement, but it is rather the “structurality” of event. Balthasar describes Gestalt in terms of tension, and tension by its very nature is concrete: if we remove the “here and now” character from the Gestalt, it will no longer be a tension, which means it will no longer be the appearing of depths, that is, the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical. Instead, it will be merely an empty form. Henriette Danet and Vincent Holzer are therefore right to see the 37. Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis [= GL 1] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 118. 38. Ibid., 118–19. Introduction

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concept of Gestalt as seeking to reconcile the “vertical” plane of being with the “horizontal” plane of history.39 The finite-infinite tension, however, is not the only one involved in a Gestalt. As the appearance of depths, it represents a ground or unity that simultaneously transcends its parts, even while being manifest in and thus codetermined in some sense by its parts. Balthasar alludes to this tension in the principles that ground his approach in volume 1 of Herrlichkeit, Seeing the Form (Gestalt): “Our first principle must always be the indissolubility of form, and our second the fact that such form is determined by many antecedent conditions.”40 Furthermore, Gestalt similarly features a tension between part and whole, since the whole (unity) is never accessible except in its “parts,” that is, in its appearing, even while every part always remains less than the whole.41 Finally, the fact that a Gestalt appears means that the phenomenon necessarily includes a subject-object tension, since every appearing implies an appearing-to or -for. We can see that this aspect also sets in relief the essential “event” character of every Gestalt, insofar as it does not exist except in the encounter between a subject and an object. The “twofold,” or polar, structure of Gestalt (as appearance [1] of depths [2]) is reflected in the twofold structure of the encounter: on the one hand, the object is seen (appearance); on the other, the seer is transported (toward the depths).42 The movement inherent in the object in its act of expressing its depths is, in other words, met by the movement of the beholding subject, and this interaction of movements gives rise to a situation that is clearly analogous to the encounter of figures in a drama. In his study of Balthasar’s philosophical aesthetics, Michael Waldstein explains that the German term Gestalt has a multiplicity of meanings that cannot be covered by any single term in English. He lists the various 39. The concept of Gestalt “permet de donner une solution à la tension voire à la dichotomie être-histoire. L’ontologie risque toujours de donner une interprétation pointilliste de l’histoire. Balthasar y répond par la théorie de l’intégration. En effet, l’éclat qui enveloppe l’object et le sujet, l’être et l’étant [tension essence/existence] appartient à une centre intégrateur, une source commune”: Henriette Danet, “Le concept de figure [Gestalt] dans la gloire et la croix de Urs von Balthasar,” photocopy, Institut Catholique de Paris, 1979, 314, cited in Ide, 171; and Vincent Holzer, “La vérité comme figure [Gestalt], l’histoire comme chair: La contribution du théologien Hans Urs von Balthasar à l’intelligibilité du rapport vérité/histoire,” in Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 53–73. 40. GL 1:26. 41. Some have said that the best definition for Gestalt in Balthasar is the title he chose for his book developing the principles of a theology of history, Das Ganze im Fragment, a title, according to Henrici, that has become proverbial in German: “La structure de la trilogie,” 18. 42. GL 1:120. 16

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meanings of Gestalt as follows: (1) outward shape or outline; (2) intelligible form; (3) life-form, in the sense of an entire being; and finally (4) historical figure.43 But it is crucial that we also see these various senses in their fundamental unity: first of all, the concept of Gestalt reveals an analogy between human being and all other nonhuman being, since all being is shown to have inward depth (uniting meanings 3 and 4); and, second, the concept holds together internal, metaphysical principles with external, concrete phenomena (meanings 1 and 2). I will return to and develop all of these senses, and further aspects not yet mentioned, specifically in relation to the problem of truth (especially in chapter 3). For the moment, it is important to note that the tension-filled event-like character of the Gestalt—as well as its involvement of a subject-object encounter—show that the notion of Gestalt, intrinsically and from the beginning, is related to the notion of drama. Without drama there can be no Gestalt in Balthasar’s sense. And I will now suggest why the reverse is also true.

Drama The term drama refers, in the literal sense, to the form of art created in Attic Greece, in distinction from the lyric and epic forms of poetry that are also due to the Greeks.44 What makes drama unique in relation to these other forms is, in the first place, that it is essentially dialogical, involving the interaction of relatively autonomous characters.45 Second, drama is not merely recited but performed and, indeed, performed before an audience. These two points come together in the fact that in a good drama, the interaction of “freedoms” is more than just a display of movement, but a revelation: this is why drama has an audience. As Balthasar observes repeatedly, drama has been such a force throughout history precisely because of its singular capacity to shed light on existence: To be presented with [a] meaning, to be able, as a spectator, to explore oneself within its context at one remove, is [another] pleasure of the 43. Waldstein, “Expression and Form,” 65–67. 44. From the Greek term meaning “action” or “deed.” 45. See Aristotle, Poetics, 4.1449a15–20. All citations of Aristotle in this book will use the translations provided in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). The earliest tragedies, for example, from Thespis, seem to have had only a single “free” character, who was set off against a basically immovable chorus. When it grew into its “natural form,” as Aristotle puts it, in the three great tragedians, the number of characters gradually increased while the role of the chorus diminished. See H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1950), 23–32. Introduction

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theatre: it grants us an insight, however limited, into the world’s embracing horizon of meaning, within which a complex action unfolds, illuminated and judged by it. And this action is acted by real human beings lending their own reality to realize a fictional role, so that, through them, the embracing revelation of meaning may interject itself into the concrete world that unites both actor and spectator.46 A play is capable of shedding light on existence because it is not a mere “naturalistic” repetition of life, with its confusion and resolved problems, but a complex event that is given unity by the creative idea of the playwright.47 Moreover, a play is not merely a mechanical transcription of this creative idea. Rather, this idea itself passes through the creative freedom of the director; it is further interpreted through the creative talents of the actors; and finally it is conditioned in surprising ways, not only by the atmosphere of the theater itself and the creative contribution of the staging, but also by the subtle yet unmistakable interaction between actors and audience. Reading the text of The Winter’s Tale, for example, makes an impression that is vastly different from the one received in seeing it performed. The meaning of the play in this case becomes different, as it would if it were played by different actors, under a different director, or even before a different audience. In short, drama presents a complex phenomenon: an overall meaning is given (which does not mean an obvious or univocal meaning), but it is not “dropped in” simply from above. Rather, this meaning is conditioned in surprising ways by the concrete medium or media that communicate it. At the same time, these media are not scattered and formless; they are gathered into a unity by the very meaning they mediate. In the center of his trilogy, the five volumes of the Theo-Drama, Balthasar makes use of these rich elements in a straightforward manner to construct a whole theology: volume 1 outlines the principles of the project, namely, the meaning of the theater of the world ultimately as a play within God’s (Trinitarian) play; volumes 2 and 3 present the “dramatis personae”; volume 4 concerns the action, and volume 5 displays the “final act” (Das Endspiel in German, translated as Le Dénouement in French). This theodramatic

46. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1: Prolegomena [= TD 1], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 265. See this whole section, called “Drama and the Illumination of Existence,” 259–68. 47. “For the performed drama should never be merely a poor imitation of life in the concrete with its unsolved problems. Even when showing life ‘as it is,’ the drama must show how it ought to be and why it appears in such a way, or why things are not as they seem.” TD 1:262. 18

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approach is endlessly fruitful in bringing new dimensions out of traditional teachings, and it is no doubt a major achievement in the history of theology. But we would miss the full impact of this approach if we saw it only as a helpful metaphor, enabling a new hermeneutics.48 For Balthasar, the reason for the power of a theodramatic approach, and indeed the reason drama has always been a dear art, is that drama is the expression of the structure of Being. When he articulates the essence of drama “in a nutshell,” he puts it thus: “Only the action itself will reveal who each individual is; and it will not reveal, through successive unveilings, primarily who the individual always was, but rather who he is to become through the action, through his encounter with others and through the decisions he makes. There is at least a reciprocal relationship between the ‘was’ and the ‘will be.’ ‘Agere sequitur esse’ [action follows upon being] also requires ‘esse sequitur agere’ [being follows upon action].”49 Drama is the mutual implication of the metaphysical principles agere sequitur esse and esse sequitur agere. In other words, the meaning of any thing, its being, is revealed only in that being’s activity even while the activity is an interpretation or unfolding (Aus-legung) of the being. It is not the case that the being “essentially” comes first, and then it merely manifests in action what it always/already was in being: for esse sequitur agere. And yet the action does not only give rise to being from nothing, but in fact follows upon being in every moment as its enabling presupposition.50 Being and action follow each other! How are we to understand this mutual implication? Drama is the simultaneity of movement “from above” and “from below,” or the intersection of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. To be sure, the simultaneity does not mean that the movements or dimensions are symmetrical. Indeed, they are essentially asymmetrical, because the movement from above can comprehend the movement from below in a way that

48. David Yeago tends in this direction in his article “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Paradigm for a Theology of Culture,” Renascence 48, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 95–109. Although it does not go so far as to deny the possibility of a deeper anchoring of the principle of drama, Yeago’s otherwise excellent and insightful essay seems to see this principle primarily as a new “interpretive practice” (106). 49. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: Dramatis Personae: Man in God [= TD 2], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 11. 50. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets this point, which from the perspective I am developing is what undermines his interpretation of the phrase “existence precedes essence”: see L’Existence est un humanisme (Paris: Les Éditions Nagel, 1970), 17–27, where Sartre argues in a unilateral fashion that “l’homme existe d’abord . . . [et] se définit après.” On the other hand, philosophies that are founded on an abstract conception of nature as a “pre-given” essence often forget the previous point. Introduction

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the latter cannot comprehend the former. On the other hand, the asymmetry does not mean that the movements are not genuinely reciprocal. Indeed, they are essentially reciprocal, inasmuch as the vertical dimension could not bring a unity to the horizontal dimension unless it included that dimension and was to that extent “conditioned” by it, even while the horizontal dimension depends on the vertical in order to receive a unity it could not produce on its own. The fact that drama requires the mutual inclusion of two “opposed” principles means that at no point can we take merely one aspect in itself and then, in a second moment, bring in the other by way of deduction (which would essentially reduce the one to the other), or by way of mere addition (which would imply that the two principles did not include each other from the beginning). The phenomenon of drama, as Balthasar understands it, is a complex, organic whole. We will end up viewing drama “undramatically” if we fail to take it as such. Because of its simultaneous unity and complexity, the phenomenon of drama is by its nature a mysterious event. Our discussion of some of its principles is not meant to dispel this aspect of mystery in the least, but merely to draw attention to what constitutes it: drama will in any event always remain a fascinating mystery, even if it is one with which all of us are very familiar. David Yeago identifies the essence of the experience of this mystery as the simultaneity of “surprise” and “fittingness”: “In a well-crafted drama, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, both things are true: the plot is so constructed that it could have no other satisfying conclusion, and at the same time the conclusion is altogether surprising and unforeseen.”51 This observation about our experience of drama equally describes the relation of principles we indicated above. For the conclusion to be genuinely satisfying, Yeago continues, it must in some sense already be contained in or prepared for by the premises of the play. The end is already in the beginning, in a certain sense. However, the conclusion is not deduced from the premises of the action in the manner of a logical syllogism, but rather it emerges from these premises in a way that gives room for freedom and thus surprise. We may elaborate on this point by saying that if the conclusion could be simply deduced from the premises, then we would not have the complex whole that characterizes drama: the “whole” would in this case be entirely reducible to its parts.52 If we are to have a whole

51. Yeago, “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace,” 99. 52. There is, of course, room to object that syllogistic logic is, itself, not altogether undramatic. The fact that a conclusion does not follow from a single premise alone, but requires the “interaction” or combination of several premises, as well as the fact that the inference itself is a kind of movement, suggests that we might read even logic 20

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that is inclusive of its parts, then the unity that makes the whole must emerge at the end, when everything has “played itself out,” rather than intruding somewhere in the middle, and in this way excluding from relevance everything that comes later. At the same time, the unity cannot emerge only at the end as one of the play’s elements; it must come from outside the various elements, and in this sense it can be present already in some sense at the beginning. In other words, a coherent drama requires an author who is not merely one of the players: “The coherence of a drama is established from the end of the story, not at its beginning, although that end is aimed at by the playwright from the beginning.”53 To sharpen our understanding of what Balthasar means by drama, it may be helpful to consider a counterexample. In his essay “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” Ben Quash presents what he takes to be Balthasar’s understanding of drama as an attempt to overcome the modern, post-Enlightenment, fascination with “ends”:54 that is, clear and distinct ideas,55 “brutely given” truths,56 individualistic subjectivity or solipsism,57 a war against the dispersion of temporality by means of organizing the flux in terms of fixed patterns: the “spatialization of time,”58 a focus on the consummation of relationships as opposed to an ongoing play,59 a drive toward tidy resolutions, and so forth. Quash explains that Balthasar uses a typology he inherited from Hegel, presenting drama as a middle way that avoids the extremes of epic and lyric. Epic, on the one hand, presumes a timeless perspective, which allows a privileged grasp and mastery of the whole in a detached stance of crude objectivity. Lyric, on the other hand, with its submersion in inner experience, represents a tendency toward “asocial and atemporal subjectivity—the subject’s presence to herself in a consciousness around which the world revolves.”60 Drama, by contrast, insists on our always being “in the middle,” without allowing us to escape either into a detached

dramatically. A syllogism is a kind of Gestalt, that is, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and it can come to be in this form (rather than a loose collection of inert propositions) only through the activity of the logician, which is transcendent of the propositions and therefore “free” in relation to them. Nevertheless, even if drama and syllogistic logic are not wholly without analogy, there still remains a great distance between them. 53. Yeago, “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace,” 99. 54. Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 141. 55. Ibid., 141–42, n.7. 56. Ibid., 140. 57. Ibid., 149. 58. Ibid., 148. 59. Ibid., 162. 60. Ibid., 148. Introduction

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objectivity or a detached subjectivity. It blurs lines and frustrates the establishment of fixed forms, forcing them to become “social,” to undergo constant revision within the interplay of creative persons. A genuine “theo-dramatic” approach, Quash contends, “will restore to theology the forgotten knowledge that we can only think towards the truth ‘from the middle’ of creaturely existence, and that this necessarily involves a continuous activity of imaginatively constructive participation, in which we develop our own interpretive readings of God’s ways in the world alongside the readings of other people.”61 Such an approach will require, specifically, a reinterpretation of analogy, which sees the vertical space held open in all God-world analogies reflected in horizontal analogies as the “superabundance of the world’s particulars and their ‘wonderful commerce,’ ” a superabundance that is not foreclosed by a premature ending or resolution.62 With such a notion of drama as a criterion, Quash judges that Balthasar is not sufficiently dramatic; he fails in overcoming the modern preoccupation with “ends,” because, under Hegelian influence, he inadvertently slips into modern thought forms: We perceive this debt to Hegelian thinking when Balthasar talks of drama’s “unificatory endeavor that sheds light on existence,” . . . as mirroring “the eternal, divine plan,” . . . or of “the indivisible unity of the play’s ideal content,” or of “the pleasure of being presented with a ‘solution.’” . . . He fuels the suspicion that he is often in danger of looking for an innate stability in the constitution of human life and its interactions which it is not theirs to possess. This can only compromise Balthasar’s attempt to restore to life once again a “cor inquietum” in modernity’s breast.63 To put it most directly, according to Quash, Balthasar is unable to carry through a “dramatic” approach and in the end falls, like Hegel, back into a narrative, epic mode. Quash’s judgment, however, misses the target in a basic sense: Balthasar’s use of terms suggesting transcendent meanings, ends or solutions, ideal wholes, spatial forms, and so forth, is not “inadvertent” but deliberate, because, for him, such transcendence, far from undermining a dramatic approach, is essential to the possibility of drama.64 61. Ibid., 154. 62. Ibid., 155. 63. Ibid., 158–59. 64. In this, Balthasar is much closer to the Aristotelian approach to “the narrative arts” proposed by Francis Slade: “On the Ontological Priority of Ends and Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts,” in Beauty, Art, and the Polis, ed. Alice Ramos (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 58–69. Slade shows how 22

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Quash presupposes that all ends are essentially opaque and “monistic,” and that they so cannot fail to stop up dramatic movement.65 Balthasar, by contrast, rejects such a “modern” interpretation of ends, proposing instead a more organic, paradoxical sense, which is simultaneously determinate and open. Understood dramatically, the stability of form or “ends” does not stop up, but rather it enables genuine movement. Drama, for Balthasar, is a matter of tensions, not merely disruptions and blurry lines, and tensions arise in the fullest sense when opposed principles are seen to be intrinsic to each other. Horizontal movement is dramatic only in relation to a vertical end that transcends it.66 Thus, while Quash (and Hegel and Foucault) would want “definitively” to “overcome” epic and lyric modes, Balthasar recognizes them as good, indeed necessary, even if insufficient in isolation. So he seeks instead to integrate, rather than exclude, them.67 In short, if Yeago is right in saying that drama represents the simultaneity of surprise and resolution, then we could say that what Quash

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

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wants in the end is not, in fact, drama in the strict sense. Rather, in his own words, what he is proposing is something much more similar to a “perpetual rehearsal.”68 Nevertheless, Quash’s essay is helpful in allowing a further clarification on the relationship between Gestalt and drama. The objections he raises against Balthasar give voice to a more general criticism against modernity: specifically, that one of the deepest problems of modernity has been its tendency towards the “spatialization of time.”69 Quash sees this tendency reflected in Balthasar’s use of Gestalt, which is clearly a “spatial” term, in his interpretation of drama, which is essentially a temporal art.70 However, if Balthasar uses the notions of Gestalt and drama to illuminate each other, it is because he does not see time and space as opposing or mutually compromising principles. Drama and Gestalt are not fundamentally inimical expressions of time and space, but are rather both the paradoxical expression of the intersection of both time and space, according to a more temporal order or a more spatial order, respectively.71 Indeed, Balthasar explains that the notion of Gestalt, which is primarily a spatial metaphor, was first suggested to Christian von Ehrenfels by analogy to melodies,72 which are temporal forms.73 Similarly, we could interpret the “horizon” that Balthasar insists is crucial to genuine drama as its 68. Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 140. 69. Lucy Gardner and David Moss express the same criticism as one of their basic cases against Balthasar. “Something like Time; Something like the Sexes—An Essay in Reception,” Balthasar at the End of Modernity, 69–137, esp. 100–104. These two authors and Ben Quash attribute the inspiration for this critique to an essay by Catherine Pickstock, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity,” Modern Theology 12, no. 4 (October 1996): 405–33, sections of which were reprinted in After Writing. 70. On the one hand: “Drama needs time. More than that, it relishes time, instead of trying to mitigate its effects.” Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 165. On the other hand: “Dramatic interchange can succumb to a composite patterning, and because this patterning aspires to the wholeness of Gestalt, it becomes precisely a pseudo-spatialization.” Ibid., 157; cf. 155. 71. Although it lies outside the scope of this book to pursue an engagement between Balthasar and Pickstock on this point, I wish at least to suggest that for Balthasar, the loss of a sense of “time” does not arise because of “spatialization” but is in fact coterminous with the loss of a sense of “space.” 72. Christian Freihen von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) was an Austrian psychologist and philosopher. He studied under Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong. In addition to introducing the Gestalt principle into psychology, he wrote many studies on ethics and metaphysics (cosmology). 73. GL 4:33. Waldstein presents a brief history of the concept of Gestalt in “Expression and Form,” 73–80. In Epilog [= E] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1987), 47, Balthasar observes: “die Gestalt kann auch zeitlich fließender Rhythmus sein oder theatralisch ablaufende Handlung,” thus characterizing the temporal aspect of drama as a kind of Gestalt. 24

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“spatial” dimension.74 The decisive difference between Balthasar and these other approaches is that although he too jealously protects the “event” character of existence, he insists that “the character of event belongs not only to the art of time but also to the great art of space.”75 Drama without Gestalt becomes a one-dimensional, formless, and tasteless mass that lacks real movement, insofar as movement requires the tension of directionality (space). Gestalt without drama becomes the one-dimensional, mechanical imposition of rigid structures that do not open up beyond themselves, insofar as opening requires movement and movement requires time. Only when we take both together do we have a genuine Gestalt and a genuine drama; only in their mutuality do they reveal the paradox that is essential to each. Gestalt, when understood dramatically, acquires the paradoxical simultaneity of the infinite and finite, which is what makes it the appearance of hidden depths. Drama, when understood as a form, acquires the paradoxical simultaneity of the vertical and horizontal dimensions, which is what makes it the revelation through the interaction of freedoms of a transcendent meaning that both surprises and resolves. The purpose of introducing the fundamental notions of Gestalt and drama in relation to each other is to reject from the outset any inclination to break apart and set in opposition the constitutive elements of the structure this book aims to articulate. Gestalt and drama converge as irreducibly different, and yet mutually necessary, aspects of a single whole. Drama refers to the moving, event-like character of structure or order, while Gestalt refers to the structurality or order of event. Taken together, they are part of a transcendent whole that appears only through the mediation of the interaction of irreducibly different elements, even while that whole is, in a reciprocal sense, presupposed by that interaction. It is this paradox— which I merely indicate here, but which will obviously require extensive

74. TD 1:314–23. This interpretation is “negatively” confirmed in the absence of the term horizon (or anything related) in Quash’s treatment, which at the same time urges an overcoming of “spatialization.” 75. GL 4:33. Cf. Balthasar’s criticism of the “actualism” that results from a tendency to affirm the “lightning-like” event character of time at the expense of the spatial, structural dimension of form: GL 1:522–53. According to Balthasar, such actualism inevitably becomes anticontemplative. It is perhaps this criticism that leads him in Theologic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 1: Truth of the World [= TL 1], trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 220; and “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time” [= CathPhil], trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 184–85, to refuse to identify being and time, even if he accepts that the mystery of time must be seen to reach into the very heart of being. Introduction

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elaboration—that points the way to dealing with the problems surrounding truth in Continental thought. Anticipating the investigation that follows, I conclude this introduction by mentioning two aspects of the solution. First, truth possesses the formally “egocentric” structure that much of modern philosophy rejects only if the act of knowledge that represents reason’s teleological fulfillment comes to an ultimate rest in the mind of the knower. If this is the sole possible model for truth, a desire to salvage real difference and otherness would require the sacrifice of truth. The affirmation of a dramatic Gestalt as the final locus of truth, by contrast, allows a genuine union of subject and object even while preserving their difference. It does so, I will argue in chapter 3, because it represents a distinct whole that transcends both the subject and the object and is therefore able to include both integrally. For truth to “occur,” then, the subject cannot merely take the object into the mind, but must come out ecstatically to meet the object within this greater whole: hence, the dramatic structure of consciousness elaborated in chapter 2. Likewise, if truth is to be an encounter with a positive other, and not merely the assimilation of a “lifeless” object, being itself must possess its own inherent mystery and spontaneity: hence, the dramatic structure of being developed in chapter 1. Second, as I have already made clear, an attempt to account for reason’s openness to the other simply by stressing its essential incompleteness fails to address the question of whether reason in its complete form still remains open. The sketch of drama in its relation to the notion of Gestalt in Balthasar’s philosophy offers a different possibility. Rather than identifying transcendent form with mere closure, Balthasar’s dramatic sense of truth reciprocally intertwines the transcendent and the immanent with one another. Thus, on the one hand, it implies a transcendent meaning that is in some respect already present at the beginning, so even in via, reason is not open in a wild and irrational sense but already participates in the completeness of the end. On the other hand, it does not anticipate, but in fact indispensably requires, the immanent working out of that meaning, so the end in turn participates in, and includes something of, the openness of the “journeying.” The unfolding of the event of truth therefore both surprises and resolves at once. In sum, if we are to overcome a reductionism built into the very structure of truth, it can only be by opening that structure as radically as possible to otherness and difference, even while refusing to relinquish genuine presence, the unity of mind and reality, without which truth is no longer truth. A conception of the structure of truth as a dramatic Gestalt promises to avoid reduction by comprehending the elements or principles 26

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that appear to be mutually exclusive within a greater, complex whole that both connects those parts and frees them into difference. If Aristotle is able to describe the dramatic event as a kind of truth, that is, a “change from ignorance to knowledge,” we will see that an adequate concept of truth warrants the definition he gives to drama: it is a reversal (peripeteia) that brings about a revelation (anagnorismos: discovery).76

76. Aristotle, Poetics, 11.1452a22–31. Introduction

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1

The Gift of Being Given [D]enn Fruchtbarwerden der Gabe, das allein ist Dankbarkeit für die Gabe.1 —Meister Eckhart

The depth dimension of the problem of truth will come into view only if we have first gathered a sense of what the great mystery of being means for Balthasar. As he himself often says, the beginning is decisive; foundations must be laid as deeply and comprehensively as possible, because what is not anticipated in principle in the beginning will not be able to be included later. Thus, he says, even the specific discussions of theology cannot dispense with an engagement of the fundamental question of metaphysics, the question of being as such.2 Balthasar’s engagement with the mystery of being is in dialogue primarily with Hegel, Heidegger, and Aquinas, although directly behind Aquinas stands the mighty figure of Dionysius the Areopagite.3 In relation to contemporary thinkers, he

1. Gratitude for the gift is shown only by allowing it to make one fruitful. 2. Balthasar, Theologik, vol. 2: Wahrheit Gottes [= TL 2] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1985), 159. 3. Balthasar’s relation to Aquinas, Hegel, Heidegger, and Neoplatonism on the question of being is variously emphasized by different commentators: Henrici emphasizes Hegel (“The Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991], 163). Emmanuel Tourpe emphasizes Aquinas, though directly in contact with Heidegger and especially Hegel (“La logique de l’amour: À propos de quelques volumes récemment traduits de H. U. von Balthasar,” Revue Théologique de Louvain 29 [1998]: 202, 210–11). Mario Imperatori draws attention to Heidegger’s presence in Balthasar’s thinking: “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 122 (2000): 191–210. Emmanuel Bauer emphasizes the Neoplatonic influences: “Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988): Sein philosophisches Werk,” in Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3: Moderne Strömungen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Emerich Coreth, Walter M. Neidl, Georg Pfligersdorffer (Graz, Austria: Verlag Styria, 1990), 299–300. All of these emphases must be kept in mind. 28

was strongly influenced early on by Erich Przywara, who himself had a deep knowledge of the major thinkers in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, and who brought them into a unique synthesis primarily under the “primal figure” (Urtyp) of Augustine.4 This influence was succeeded by that of his younger friend Ferdinand Ulrich and by Gustav Siewerth.5 The latter was a student of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s in Freiburg, had a profound affinity to Hegel and German Idealism, and brought all of these influences to bear on his unique interpretation of Aquinas. In my treatment of Balthasar’s metaphysics, I will not make explicit the presence of Balthasar’s influences or his relationships with other thinkers except where it is helpful to clarify a point. Nor will my treatment be in any sense comprehensive. His metaphysics is far richer and more wideranging in its implications than I can suggest. The fruitfulness of his metaphysics is due in part to the fact that Balthasar himself was always more interested in finding the heart of a problem, opening it up, and showing the directions to take in order to remain faithful to the problem, than in giving lengthy systematic treatment aimed at finishing with it: “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should always become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.”6 The primary goal in this chapter is to sketch the basic ontological structures that will ground Balthasar’s understanding of truth. The chapter title is an attempt to give succinct expression to the multifaceted mystery that Balthasar sees at the heart of reality. “Being given” means simultaneously that being, which is deepest in all things, is not dead matter but a translucid event: it is a gift. And “being” can also be interpreted here progressively: what is given does not come to an end in itself but is (actively) passed on in a concrete, historical manner: it gives itself. Finally, these two aspects, the foundation (für-sich) that is given and the centrifugal movement of receptive relation and generosity (für-andere), are not two separate things in competition with each other, but are unified in a single gift that comprehends both at once: the gift of being given.

4. See Balthasar’s essay “Die Metaphysik Erich Przywara” [= MetaPrz], Schweiz. Rundschau 6 (1933): 489–99, here: 491, 493–94, where Balthasar compares Przywara to other recent thinkers in Catholic philosophy, for example, Blondel and Maréchal. 5. For an excellent summary of the thought of Przywara, Siewerth, and Ulrich in relation to Balthasar, see Juan Manuel Sara, Forma y amor, 66–86. 6. Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms [= GW], trans. Erasmo Leiva (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 21. The Gift of Being Given

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One of the most basic implications of this metaphysics is to deepen the sense and the significance of action. Balthasar seeks to show that when a being expresses itself in action (taken in its largest possible sense to include everything from the manifestation of qualities to personal selfexpression), it is a matter not of surfaces (appearance) but of depth (being). The “stuff” of activity is not extrinsic “contact” but real communion, in the sense suggested at the end of one of Balthasar’s aphorisms: “Individuals nourish one another not only by their reciprocal knowing and willing, but also through the unity of their blood or, more deeply, of their being.”7 That which entails change—all action, acts, deeds, movement, events, in short, everything designated by the word history—concerns the interaction of the depths of reality itself. But if history has to do with being, it is only because being has to do with history.8 In other words, we can have such an understanding of action only if being itself is in motion in some sense, if it itself is basically act. When Balthasar approaches metaphysics, one of the primary issues he pursues is the “question of the relation between Being and act, or the question of the event-character of the actus (essendi) [the act of being].”9 The title of a major unpublished philosophical exploration, Sein als Werden (Being as Becoming),10 shows how concerned Balthasar was in overcoming a dualism that would think of change as merely extrinsic to the meaning of being. The key, for Balthasar, to revealing the act-character of being is attending to its gift character. As we will see, its being due to the “wholly other” is what opens being “upwards, downwards, and outwards” from within. This, in turn, means that being cannot be resolved in itself except by being resolved in another: it is finite; that is, it is penetrated all the way through by difference. However, because this “differentiating” is not dualistic for Balthasar but “polar,” it does not destroy unity but charges it with life. To borrow from Kierkegaard, created or

7. Ibid., 17. 8. Without seeing history in a Hegelian manner as the process of conceptual necessity, Balthasar nevertheless insists that we recognize “both the historicity of Being as a fundamental ontological category, as well as the significance of history in terms of Being.” CathPhil, 187. 9. MW, 24. 10. This text, along with another entitled Geeinte Zwienatur, is presented by Jörg Disse in Metaphysik der Singularität: Eine Hinführung am Leitfaden der Philosophie Hans Urs von Balthasars (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996). When consulting this presentation, it is important to realize that the texts belong to those of Balthasar’s works that he himself decided not to publish. 30

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finite unity is unity that is “recollected forward.”11 Balthasar’s metaphysics provides the possibility of grounding such a notion. Specifically metaphysical discussions arise often in Balthasar’s work. I will not give an account of all of these discussions, but I will engage a few of the most important metaphysical sections in the trilogy, since these address the fundamental themes that concern this book. I will begin with the dense, fifteen-page section at the end of the Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, volume 5 of the Glory of the Lord, entitled “The Miracle of Being and the Fourfold Difference,”12 which many regard as the centerpiece of Balthasar’s philosophy. In essence, it is Balthasar’s version of what is called the “ontological difference” in Heidegger and what is referred to as the distinctio realis in Thomism. This section will provide the governing structure for the rest of our discussion. Aspects of the fourfold difference will be spelled out further in an engagement of the middle section of the Epilog on the polarity of created being, and then the discussion of “Trinitarian difference and ontological difference” in TL 2. Finally, we will use these later texts to illuminate a related theme in TL 1, Truth of the World. This latter will allow us to connect the metaphysical themes with the question of truth specifically.

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

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

11. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. 12. The Glory of the Lord, vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age [= GL 5], trans. Oliver Davies et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 613–27. The English translation gives distinction rather than difference. I will refer to it as difference in order to allow the other term to indicate the various “distinctions” made within the basic difference. The Gift of Being Given

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wonder.”13 It is not a mere fact to be talked about from without; it is a “wonder” to be contemplated from within, even while this wonder always has an object that is not reducible to the experience of that object. To put the point from another direction, wonder is not a merely subjective experience, but it is rather the objectively adequate response to the reality of being. Likewise, since it is the nature of being to cause wonder, being cannot be perceived as it is except from within this experience. This becomes clearer when we ask what constitutes “wonder” for Balthasar and how this wonder relates specifically to the question of difference in being. Metaphysical wonder is a particular form of surprise, and surprise is the reaction to an event that is in some fundamental respect unforeseen. To put it another way, surprise (and therefore wonder) is possible only in an encounter with something that transcends the horizon of expectation. Wonder in an ontic sense, therefore, would be the arrival of an unanticipated person or thing within the horizon of a person’s particular field of attention or concern. Metaphysical wonder, however, is possible only where the horizon of being itself is not closed but is constituted in such a way as to include a “more”: in other words, to include a difference. We might get a better sense of what Balthasar means by considering how he distinguishes genuine wonder from mere admiration. Admiration is the astonishment one experiences that “everything appears so wonderfully and ‘beautifully’ ordered from within the necessity of Being.”14 What is lacking here—even if we grant that such admiration is indispensable and may itself be a profound experience—is precisely the element of surprise. Let us take the term necessity, which Balthasar uses in this context. It is a word to be contrasted with freedom, understood not in the psychological sense of having choices and not being under constraint, but rather in a metaphysical sense connected with a notion of “positivity,” that is, the arrival of an unanticipated “more.” Necessity is related to negativity, in the sense of the sort of movement we could describe by analogy to logical deduction: an inference proceeds deductively if its conclusion is already

13. Ibid., 615. As a rule, I will capitalize Being whenever I use it in a technical sense, indicating the transcendence of Being over particular beings. Correlatively, beings will refer to the things that make up the world qua particular things as distinct from Being either as act or as totality. Whenever I use the term being (singular, lowercase), it is meant in the most general and inclusive sense possible—roughly the same as “reality.” 14. Ibid., 613–14. 32

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fully contained in the premises.15 In this case, that which is new, namely, the conclusion, does not emerge by means of any addition to what is already given but rather by subtraction, so to speak. In other words, the movement occurs at every turn through a distinction (the one is not the other) and therefore through negativity. Freedom, by contrast, is related to positivity insofar as it designates a movement that is genuinely new, because it genuinely adds something to what was already given. But, to return to the logical analogy, this means that the source of the “conclusion” cannot simply re-reduce back to the premises from which it was de-duced, but rather it must owe itself to the premises and something besides. Thus, admiration may be the “adequate” response to an inner, necessary ordering of being, which is beautiful perhaps because of the harmony that results from its reducibility to a single principle. But only wonder is adequate to freedom. And without freedom, there can be no wonder. Balthasar’s understanding of freedom allows us to grasp a little better his assessment of Heidegger. On the one hand, Heidegger affirms that it is precisely difference (of a particular sort) that permits wonder, since real difference means irreducibility and irreducibility means “freedom.”16 It is the difference and the freedom that emerge when one poses the question, Why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?17 As Balthasar explains it, the wonder Heidegger intends here is that caused by the difference between Sein (Being) and Seiende (beings), expressed in the specific form of a particular existing being who wonders “at Being in its own

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

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distinction from Being.”18 Because thinking is precisely an attunement to Being, wonder, for both Heidegger and Balthasar, is not simply the starting point of thinking but the abiding principle or medium of all philosophy.19 But Balthasar claims that Heidegger is incapable of affirming wonder over Being itself. He cannot do so because Being, for Heidegger, is the last horizon, as it were. We notice he does not ask: Why is there Being at all? Instead, it is: Why are there beings? Presumably, he formulates the question as he does because the other formulation would strike him as meaningless. Strictly speaking, Being does not exist. The fundamental difference for Heidegger lies therefore in a certain sense between Being and beings and not within Being itself. We thus return to the fruitless ambiguity mentioned earlier (in the introduction) expressed in the notion of Ereignis, which Heidegger precisely does not allow to be defined in terms of freedom, or as a genuinely transcendent “third.”20 The meaning of the possibility of their being a difference within Being itself I hope will become clearer as we proceed. Before we turn to consider Balthasar’s version of the ontological difference, there are two further preliminary points to help clarify what will follow. The first is the connection between freedom and irreducibility. It would seem, at first glance, as if a distinction or difference “created” in the mode of necessity rather than freedom would best ensure the irreducibility or autonomy of the “term” that was inferred. If B follows A with necessity, B itself exists necessarily if A exists, and thus it has no cause for fear that it might not have existed: it is therefore “independent.” However, this appearance is misleading insofar as the necessary existence of B is merely

18. GL 5:614–15. 19. Ibid. Cf., Heidegger, What Is Philosophy?, 79–85. 20. “If (with Heidegger) we regard the Sein-Dasein distinction as ultimate, we risk the nihilistic and tragic conclusion that being overall, instead of offering illumination and significance to the world of Dasein, is an organic, impersonal and alien process of fate or necessity.” Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner,” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 21. See also Matthew A. Daigler, “Heidegger and von Balthasar: A Lover’s Quarrel over Beauty and Divinity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 375–94, here: 390–91. It seems, in fact, that Heidegger approaches the possibility of wondering over Being itself in his understanding of Ereignis as the expression of the Es that gibt Sein (“It gives being”; colloquially, “There is being”) (see, for example, Zur Seinsfrage, 38), and, indeed, this is the direction in which John Caputo interprets him (Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics [New York: Fordham University Press, 1982], esp. 167–76). However, as Siewerth argues, Heidegger himself rejects the identification of Ereignis with God: see Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Gotteserkenntnis” and “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3: Gott in der Geschichte (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1971), 264–93. 34

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the alternative expression of its reducibility back to A. If A is by itself the sufficient cause of B, then it needs nothing else to bring B about. B, in this case, “adds” nothing to A and represents only a part or aspect of A. This sort of relationship, then, is the simultaneity of total independence and complete tyranny. By contrast, if the relationship between A and B is free, then it means that B possesses the sort of dependence that expresses contingency, and yet this is precisely another expression of its relative freedom with respect to A: if it cannot simply be reduced back to A, it is in some respect “more than” A. This sense of the simultaneity of dependence and freedom will be important for us at various stages in the argument. The second point is a comment in relation to the question, Why does Balthasar discuss the ontological difference as a fourfold difference? There seem to be two aspects to the answer. First, I propose that the difference turns out to be fourfold precisely because, as marking a fundamental difference, it does not permit unilateral or univocal formulation. To put it bluntly, difference is so radical that even difference is different.21 For Balthasar, the single fact of the ontological difference, which is just another way of expressing creatureliness and finitude, multiplies the dimensions of difference into a more complex configuration than the unilateral SeinSeiende difference.22 Moreover, it valorizes difference itself to such an extent that it can go beyond Heidegger’s somewhat abstract notion of the “historicity” of Being in its temporality to include the concrete differences that subsist ontically. Thus, where Heidegger always shows an impatience

21. Lucy Gardner and David Moss have made a similar observation, referring not to Balthasar’s metaphysics but to his theology: “Difference, then, is always plural, is always more; it is always opening on to more. Difference is always the differencing of difference. Difference is never only two, even when it is ‘a’ difference between two things, because that difference will always make a difference.” Gardner and Moss, “Something like Time,” 127. However, the affirmation of this point does not necessitate the conclusion that these commentators draw, namely, a fundamental directionlessness and undecidability at the heart of things (see ibid., 133–34). Such an undecidability would follow only if “differing difference” necessarily precluded order. I wish to propose, on the contrary, that only such an order will in the long run sustain a sense of fundamental difference. 22. Because the difference is itself intrinsically differentiated and so includes further differences as part of its own meaning, it is important to realize that although Balthasar occasionally in this section speaks of the various distinctions, he is nonetheless discussing a single (fourfold) difference. We should therefore try to avoid reading the four distinctions as a linear series, one after the other. Martin Bieler, for example, seems to take the distinctions in just this linear way: see “The Future of the Philosophy of Being,” Communio: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 468–72, and also “Meta-anthropology and Christology: On the Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 129–46. The Gift of Being Given

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with anything ontic—even, for example, with any question of intersubjectivity—and insists instead that we need in every case immediately to penetrate to Being, Balthasar sees ontic differences (paradigmatically the differences of intersubjectivity) as intrinsic mediators of the ontological difference. Thus, these differences themselves are already worthy of wonder. Balthasar begins with the ontic experience—which is “first for us”— and, moreover, asks this question with the same radicality with which he asks the fundamental ontological question. If this latter question is put most radically as a question concerning Being itself (and not just beings), the ontic question is likewise put as primordially as possible. It aims at the very (ontic) origin of intersubjectivity, that is, the child’s wonder at first recognizing his difference from his mother. And so we come full circle: we began talking about wonder, which led us to difference, and difference, when radicalized, led us back to wonder—now in its most concrete form.

The Stages of the Difference Balthasar’s fourfold difference is a single, complex reality constituted out of four irreducible differences: (1) the intersubjective difference of the awakening child’s “I” from his mother (and, implicitly from all else in the world), (2) the difference of Being from beings, (3) the difference of beings from Being, and (4) the difference between God and all of these. I will address each of these in turn.23 1. The difference between the child’s “I” and his mother. The first “stage” of the difference is itself a manifold phenomenon: it is the difference between a child’s “I” and the “other,” who is initially the mother but implicitly everything else that will be an other to the child. In spite of the complexity of 23. At this point, a comment about Balthasar’s terminology, in relation to that of Aquinas and Heidegger, is in order. It is important to note from the outset that though the meaning of “difference” here is clearly indebted in different ways to both Aquinas and Heidegger, it does not line up cleanly with the thought and terminology of either one. Indeed, with the notion of a fourfold difference, Balthasar makes a genuine, creative contribution to philosophy, and so it is not surprising that it demands a new light on terminology borrowed from other thinkers. A detailed exposition of the difference between Balthasar’s use of these basic terms and that of others would require a dissertation in itself. I hope, in any event, that the following presentation of the fourfold difference gives some sense of the unique way Balthasar uses the terms. One of the studies on Balthasar that is most helpful for understanding Balthasar’s terminology is Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser. Pérez Haro explains that Balthasar’s metaphysical language varies according to the problem he has at hand. This movement is particularly clear in his shifting back and forth between the Thomistic distinctio realis and the Heideggerian ontological difference. Balthasar does not take pains to show 36

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this first difference, the whole of it—and indeed the whole development of the further stages—is already contained in nuce (or perhaps in embryo) in a single event: namely, the child’s awakening into his own self-consciousness (difference in unity) within the comprehending grace of the mother’s love (unity in difference), which is expressed in her smiling on him: Its “I” awakens in the experience of a “Thou”: in its mother’s smile through which it learns that it is contained, affirmed and loved in a relationship which is incomprehensively encompassing, already actual, sheltering and nourishing. . . . Existence is both glorious and a matter of course. Everything, without exception, which is to follow later and will inevitably be added to this experience must remain an unfolding of it. There is no “gravity of life” which would fundamentally surpass this beginning. There is no “taking over control” of existence which might go further than this first experience of miracle and play. There is no encounter—with a friend or an enemy or with a myriad passers-by—which could add anything to the encounter with the first-comprehended smile of the mother.24 In order to appreciate the full breadth of implications of this “starting point,” we would have to compare it to the understanding of self-consciousness and the “transcendental ego” in modern philosophy, the dialectic of self and other in German Idealism, and the fundamental experience of Angst in Heidegger. This will be a matter for the next chapter and chapter 4. For now, I simply record it as arguably the most fundamental insight in Balthasar’s philosophy, an insight that affects everything else.25 It nevertheless bears remarking that this starting point in a sense already satisfies the criteria of both metaphysics and phenomenology. Some recent the difference between the two, or even make explicit which one he is talking about at any given point, presumably because, as Balthasar himself explains, the two are ultimately similar in their significance. While Bauer finds such a comparison “somewhat bold” (Bauer, “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 302), Pérez Haro claims that his use of these various terms is harmonious, and is due primarily to whether he is distinguishing Being from universal essences (essentiae) or from particular beings (Seiende): Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser, 179–80. For a list and explanation of Balthasar’s basic metaphysical terminology, see ibid., 171–72. The difficulty is sometimes increased by the fact that the German term Wesen can stand both for universal, abstract essences and for concrete beings. This duality allows for a certain fluidity in Balthasar’s use of concepts that is sometimes ambiguous in translation. 24. GL 5:616–17. 25. Rowan Williams states that it is precisely the question of the constitution of consciousness that most radically distinguishes Balthasar from Karl Rahner: “Balthasar and Rahner,” 31. See also David Schindler (Sr.), “Preface,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, xi. The Gift of Being Given

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thinkers criticize metaphysics for trying to find an absolute beginning, unaffected by the vagaries of history. They insist that such “privileged” perspectives are impossible: we are always and will always remain “in the middle” of things.26 The anti-intellectualism that such an insistence often betrays reveals that “beginnings” are somehow natural and even essential to thought. How can we integrate a need for starting at the beginning without disregarding the legitimate insistence that we remain within the necessarily relative perspectives of history? It seems there is only one possibility: we begin with what is both historical and a genuine beginning, namely, the fundamental experience of the child.27 As historical, it is relative, but as fundamental and, as we shall see, paradigmatic, it is at the same time in a certain sense absolute. Now, the content of this fundamental experience, which lies “unacknowledged but alive” in the child’s first awakening to his “I,” has two dimensions, each of which is itself twofold. The first is, so to speak, the ontic dimension. There is, on the one hand, a radical contingency at the heart of the child’s selfhood: “the infinite prodigality of the act of generation” (which Balthasar remarks has received inexplicably little attention from philosophers) gives rise to an ego with a certain necessity and universality in its capacity to open to the world and Being as a whole and in its own reditio completa (the complete return of consciousness to itself), which cannot itself be the product of chance.28 This means that the child cannot be reduced back to his source; he stands before it separated by an ineradicable chasm. Simultaneous with this irreducible difference, however, is the mother’s love for the child, a “sheltering and encompassing world” that gives the experience of this difference precisely the character of “being permitted to be.” From the very outset, therefore, difference occurs primordially as positivity; the different is a “more” that is affirmed, rather than a product of loss or a fall (negation). But this positive difference immediately unfolds into a twofold ontological dimension. On the one hand, the child’s spirit positively transcends Being as a whole (in the strict sense of the child’s capacity to view it as a whole). Balthasar uses

26. See Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 139. Although Quash believes the “in the middle” approach is the only way to be genuinely dramatic, I wish to argue that such a perspective, as he understands it, actually undermines the possibility of drama. The tension of drama is possible only with a real “beginning.” We will see the full implications of this in chapter 4. 27. See Gustav Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1957), 11–15. Siewerth argues here that Heidegger’s discovery of the temporality of Being necessarily points to the philosophical significance of childhood. 28. GL 5:615. 38

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Heidegger’s neologism nichten (to “nought” or “nihilate”), which was appropriated by Siewerth, to express this transcendence, which is at once an expression of the freedom, irreducibility, and contingency of the spirit (Geist) in relation to Being. On the other hand, because the positivity of the difference implies a “more” that is to be attributed to both sides of the difference, it is likewise the case that being transcends the spirit. In other words, if the spirit is irreducible to being, then being is irreducible to spirit. The verb nichten, moreover, helps us to see that the twofold transcendence is at the same time and in the same respect the openness of the one to the other.29 The word nothingness understood verbally is as it were the act of opening, and it is thus both ek-stasis (Heidegger’s term: “to stand out”) and receptivity. Balthasar summarizes the ontological dimension of the first stage as follows: And thus there occurs an opening within me as spirit to the lightspace of Being, which does not in any sense align itself with the Being of the world as a whole: if in the first aspect my spirit “nihilates” with respect to the Being of the world into which I find myself to be thrown and constrained, then in the second aspect the Being of the world “nihilates” within the opening of my spirit, which can attribute to the Being of the world no necessity within itself which would excel our wonder at its existence: both are related to each other, but they do not coincide.30 2. The difference of Being from beings. Balthasar then develops the two aspects of this ontological dimension as the second and third stages of the difference. The second stage unfolds the “more” aspect of Being; we might formulate this stage as the difference of Being from beings. No matter how many beings there may be, have been, or will be in the universe, no matter how perfect or complete any being may be—even if we could per impossibile imagine a single being so perfect that it comprehended the totality of the universe—the superabundance of Being itself would not thereby be exhausted in its instances, or even barely “tapped.” In this respect, 29. According to Balthasar, this simultaneity is one of the key principles in Heidegger’s philosophy (See “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus,” Stimmen der Zeit 137 [1940]: 1–8). The fundamental difference in Balthasar’s use of the notion lies in the fact that Balthasar sees the mutual “nihilation” in its primordial positivity (rather than negativity) because in no case does it become itself ultimate but is always seen as the fruit of a higher union. 30. GL 5:618 (translation slightly modified). Note that the reciprocal transcendence spoken of in the passage is not symmetrical: Being transcends the spirit within the spirit’s transcending of Being. The Gift of Being Given

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Being rises sovereignly over all of its participants: “The relationship that each of the parts has to nothingness is not carried into the whole; and yet Being, which opens itself to be participated by the world-totality, possesses its own form of nothingness [nichten], namely, as an ineradicable indifference with respect to all that participates in it.”31 This theme, the “superessentiality” of Being (esse; actus essendi), has been one of the most creative developments in twentieth-century Thomism.32 Balthasar refers to it in particular as part of the Neoplatonic heritage,33 and he sees it specifically expressed in Aquinas’s attributing “to the actus essendi its own bonumpulchrum [goodness-beauty] in which the individual essentiae [essences] and the world which is constituted by them only participate.”34 What perhaps makes Balthasar’s approach to this mystery unique in comparison with that of other Thomists is that he insists that the openness to this superabundance of Being, or philosophy’s movement into it, does not occur in the first place through the process of abstraction, nor even through the separation of Being from all limiting differences (separatio)—although these are both eventually included as essential moments—but rather initially in the inexhaustible fullness of the child’s joyful awakening in love.35 As we shall see, this point is crucial because it keeps us from falling into a dualism of competing principles, where the superessentiality of Being

31. GL 5:618 (translation significantly modified). 32. The most obvious examples would be Etienne Gilson, e.g., his Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952); Cornelio Fabro, e.g., his Participation et causalité selon Saint Thomas (Louvain, Belgium: Publications universitaires de Louvain, Belgium, 1961); or Joseph Pieper, e.g., his The Silence of Saint Thomas, trans. John Murray and Daniel O’Connor (New York: Pantheon, 1957). More directly connected to Balthasar, there is Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas von Aquin bis Heidegger (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1959); and Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo Abyssus: Das Wagnis der Seinsfrage [= HA], 2nd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998). I do not intend to imply that the identification of the Being that transcends all particular beings with the actus essendi immanent within each being is necessarily something Aquinas himself explicitly affirmed. There is of course some controversy surrounding this point. Nevertheless, it is a move made in certain schools of Thomism, if not by Thomas, and Balthasar would certainly place himself within this tradition. 33. Balthasar presents the transcendence of Being over its participants as what - metekhetai, GL 5:618. Moreover, in GL Proclus intended by his notion of amethektos 4:374, Balthasar suggests that Dionysius anticipated this Thomistic insight. 34. GL 5:619. 35. Williams compares Balthasar’s starting metaphysics with the rich multiplicity of concrete forms of Being to Rahner’s beginning with a formal Vorgriff of the “unlimited possibility of esse.” “Balthasar and Rahner,” 14–21. It would be interesting to compare Balthasar’s principle that metaphysics begins with the child’s wonder with Aquinas’s principle that it begins with separatio. See John Wippel’s explanation of this method 40

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would be emphasized precisely to the exclusion (separation) of the rich variety of essences, or where the wealth of particular essences would be seen to overshadow the comprehensive fullness of Being. The dualism is avoided, we see, only by a concrete method, which attends to the fundamental, concrete experience that includes all at once the various elements that will later be distinguished.36 Therefore, Balthasar begins to open up the third stage already within the second stage, when he shows that the twofold aspect of consciousness (intellectus agens [agent intellect] and also the necessary conversio ad phantasmata [return to phantasms]) already has a necessary counterpart in Being itself: the actus essendi cannot be act without a subject, and so it is in some respect dependent on essences.37 3. The difference of beings from Being. If the second stage of the difference is the difference of Being from beings, then the third stage, which Balthasar expounds at the greatest length, might be formulated as the difference of beings from Being. This difference is clearly related to the previous one, but it is also clearly distinct. It is at least initially possible, for example, that Being might be more than (different from) beings without beings in turn being more than (different from) Being itself. But this would ultimately mean that beings are merely a function of Being, and so even the initial difference collapses. According to Balthasar, a difference (within the created order) cannot remain a difference if it is merely “one-sided”; we must therefore, he says, posit a third difference, namely, one between beings and Being. It is not simply the case that all beings depend on Being since they have or are nothing other than Being (all that they have other than Being is by definition nonbeing, i.e., nothing); rather, the reverse is also true: Being, which Balthasar interprets along with Siewerth and Ulrich

in “Metaphysics and Separatio in Thomas Aquinas,” in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 69–104, and Frederick Wilhelmsen’s contention that it begins, not with the second act of the mind (judgment) as Gilson suggests but with the third act (reasoning): see The Paradoxical Structure of Existence (Irving, Tex.: University of Dallas Press, 1970). As I read Balthasar, the point would not be to oppose these methods but rather to integrate them into a more fundamental context. 36. However, if a concrete starting point is necessary, it does not suffice on its own but must be seen as the manifestation of a greater comprehending unity, which we will see in the fourth stage, to be elaborated at the end of this section. 37. I will say more on this point later, but it bears remarking that a dualism occurs only if we think of God as creating esse first and only then creating essences or, in any event, creating them separately. But, in fact, this is not the case. What God creates is the ens, the always-already actualized being, which within itself bears the real distinction between esse and essence. The Gift of Being Given

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as “completum et simplex sed non subsistens” (complete and simple but nonsubsistent), does not itself subsist, and so it needs particular beings “in” which to become actual. As Balthasar puts it, “not only ‘concepts without intuition are empty,’ but the ‘idea’ or the ‘light’ or the ‘abundance’ of Being remains so too.”38 So, how are we to understand the relationship between Being and beings? According to Balthasar, once we have penetrated to the depth of this third distinction, we have only two alternatives. The first alternative is that Being’s relation to beings may be described variously as explicatio-implicatio (unfolding-enfolding), ground-expression, or actualization-evolution. The second alternative “refuses to close the circle between Being and beings”; that is, it insists on avoiding the unfreedom of a direct, one-to-one, relationship. Why such a relationship is necessarily “unfree” we shall see in a moment. The difference between these two alternatives is essentially whether we can affirm the second and third stages simultaneously, or whether we oscillate between reducing the former to the latter and the latter to the former. Into this second category Balthasar groups any evolutionary theory (materialist or otherwise), German Idealism, and even Plotinus and Neoplatonism. He proposes a surprising but compelling criterion for determining the success of a given metaphysics in avoiding this alternative: namely, the capacity to appreciate the wealth of forms of subhuman nature as an irreducibly positive value.39 The first approach, evolution, “mechanizes” these forms, and so it finally misses both their freedom and their necessity. The second, which begins with the Spirit in search of itself, cannot explain how an as-yet imperfect and therefore needy source could give rise to such perfect and free forms in Nature. The third, finally, cannot answer and does not ask “why a divine abundance of Being should explicate itself precisely in beetles and butterflies and not also in entirely different, unpredictably various, forms and figures.”40 In each of these cases, Being is ultimately forgotten because it comes to be identified with its “self-explication” in beings: there is thus no way to affirm the dependence implied in Being’s being manifest in beings without “automatically” compromising the freedom or distinction of Being in relation to that manifestation. The second of the two alternatives mentioned above preserves a difference between Being and beings from two sides: it not only views Being essentially as a “letting-be” (which allows the difference within unity of beings from Being), but it simultaneously “lets Being be” (which 38. GL 5:619. 39. Ibid., 621. 40. Ibid. 42

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allows a difference in unity of Being from beings). Here, then, is the essential connection between this problem and the issue of subhuman nature: Being can be seen as a letting-be only if we, in our being, “let it be,” which means granting a space for all other realities rather than rushing as quickly as possible to close the space between us and Being in an identity of thinking and Being. Only by granting such a space can we affirm the freedom of the relationship, because only then can we hold the difference finally open. Balthasar goes on to show, however, that this difference, this gaping “hole” or “wound” so deep within the heart of reality, brings reality into a sort of risk; the cosmos stands precariously before this difference, and its deepest determination comes from the meaning that is ultimately given to this difference. It can mean alienation: and thus the cosmos darkens in guilt, death, valuelessness, cold neutrality, and fear. On the other hand, it can mean glory: and thus the cosmos is bathed in light, grace, and power.41 Balthasar contends that a leaning in the one direction or the other has marked whole epochs in the intellectual history of the world, and it is therefore of the utmost importance how the move is made from the second and third stages to the fourth. The meaning of the difference cannot be determined from within the difference itself, because all that comes into view at this level is the fact of the difference. Heidegger, who is closest to Balthasar on this point, comes to a rest precisely here, making this fact the final mystery, ne plus ultra. According to Balthasar, because Heidegger does not allow this mystery to open up beyond itself as well, it hardens for him into a sort of mathematical necessity.42 For Balthasar, by contrast, it leads us to the fourth dimension of the distinction, namely, between God and created being as a whole. 4. The difference between God and the world. As Balthasar remarks in a later section, this fourth step is not a solution that we conveniently apply to the metaphysical problem at hand (in the manner of a “God of the gaps”), but it is one we make “gingerly, almost against our will.”43 The point seems to be this: the movement to God is not carried through in order to dispel the mystery, but in order to preserve it. Moreover, we cannot preserve mystery from outside of it, but only from inside, which means we must work through the inner dimension of the problem on its own terms without “short-circuiting” it by appealing directly to a “theological 41. Ibid., 622–24. 42. Ibid., 625. 43. Ibid., 636. The Gift of Being Given

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response.”44 The problem, in short, is fundamentally how the multitude of particular beings can be positive in their difference from Being if Being itself is comprehensive. The only way to affirm this multiplicity—without, in reaction, reducing Being in turn to this multiplicity—is by positing a “unicum” beyond and within the ontological difference.45 Being, as nonsubsistent, cannot on its own decide or will to create the multiplicity of forms, because such a willing requires the freedom that can belong only to a subsistent, and indeed personal, Being (God). At the same time, God does not create beings “directly” but rather through the creative medium of Being,46 since such an immediate creation of beings would fuse the fourth distinction to the second and third together. Such a fusion would once again sap beings of their positive otherness. Nevertheless, we do not simply deduce God from the mutual relation of Being and beings: doing so would comprehend God’s freedom within the necessity of a logical inference. Instead—precisely because the mutual relation is a mystery of freedom—we are referred beyond the freedom and finitude of worldly difference to an ultimate freedom, which is the ultimate guarantor of the positivity of the multiplicity of created forms.47 It is important to see that the passage from the third to the fourth distinction is not a movement from philosophy to theology, insofar as God enters here in the guise, so to speak, of the principium et finis mundi (origin and end of the world). At the same time, it is not merely philosophy, since it is precisely here that the opening to theology occurs. We can understand 44. Balthasar insisted strongly on this point in a late lecture he gave to theology students in Freiburg, November 1975, published as “Evangelium und Philosophie” [= EuP], Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 23 (1976): 3–12, see esp. 3–5, 10–12. Balthasar here claims that one of the root causes of modern atheism has been the failure on the part of Christians to think through the problem of God in relation to the being of the world in a way that is philosophically responsible. 45. GL 5:625. Balthasar says that this move is one that “Plotinus correctly and definitively saw.” 46. Siewerth characterizes Being, which is the first effect of creation according to Aquinas (“Prima rerum creatarum est esse. Sed esse rei creatae non est subsistens”: Summa theologica [= ST], 5 vols. [Ottawa: Commissio Plana, 1953], 1:45, 4 ad 1), as a peculiar sort of mediator between God and beings; see Tourpe’s presentation of this issue in Siewerth, E. Tourpe, “Différence ontologique et différence ontothéologique: Introduction à la pensée de Gustav Siewerth, I,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 3 (1995): 331–69, here: 352–59. Ulrich likewise develops this issue in profound ways in HA. For both Ulrich and Siewerth, esse as “pure mediation” does not violate the Thomistic principle that “non potest aliquid esse medium inter creatum et increatum” (Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 1: De veritate [= De ver.] [Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1949] 8, 17), because, as non subsistens, esse is precisely nothing (“non aliquid”). See Ulrich, HA, 15–19. 47. GL 5:625. Georges Chantraine explains this point in Balthasar, “L’Épilogue de la trilogie: ‘Une bouteille lancée à la mer,’” Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 26–27. 44

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this essential ambiguity by analogy with the first distinction: there, the meaning of the difference between the child’s self and the world, which is in a sense undecided in itself, was given in the love of the mother—it was shown to be positive in the mother’s free (and personal) turning toward the child. Here, the philosophical problem of the meaning of the difference between Being and beings, which mediately implicates the difference between God and created being, turns on God’s freedom. In other words, it will be given its sense only in God’s free self-revelation, his turning-toward the world (or indeed his free not-turning-toward the world). Thus it follows that if theology and philosophy have any point of intersection, it is here, where God’s self-revelation fills and opens further the space already opened up between the third and fourth distinctions: God’s word, in other words, emerges from the very heart of being.48 There are two incidental observations in more wide-ranging topics and one essential further point to make about this fourth dimension of the difference. The first is to notice that because the fourth does not eliminate the second and third distinction, but rather “sanctions” it even while it transcends it, the “protective accompaniment” it brings does not eliminate the “uncanny alienation” that this uncloseable circle between Being and beings implies.49 It does not do so because the fourth distinction does not operate, as it were, within the same order as these other two distinctions— in which case it would precisely have to substitute for the other two—but rather it includes that order even while not allowing the alienation it implies to be the last word. And so, on one hand, we see how Balthasar can appreciate in great depth the role of Angst as Heidegger articulates it, though he includes it (without foreshortening) within the more fundamental transcendent act of faith, hope, and love.50 On the other hand, we likewise 48. “The formal object of theology . . . lies at the very heart of the formal object of philosophy.” GL 1:145. “But however at odds the revelation may be to all that is foreseeable, and however little it may appear to be the supplying of a missing fragment, it must nevertheless enter into the distinctions as a form of completion: the word of God must be written into the word of Being, the word of Being into the words of creatures which are exchanged as comprehensible words among existent creatures.” GL 5:631. See also GL 1:244–45. Ulrich has a similar understanding of the relation between grace and being: “Grace must come along the ‘path of Being’ ” (“die Gnade muß auf dem ‘Weg des Seins’ kommen”), HA, 110. 49. GL 5:628. 50. See the philosophical discussion in Balthasar, Der Christ und die Angst [= CA] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1951). In this book, Balthasar shows how a refusal to allow philosophy to open up to theology cannot avoid identifying that aspect of Angst that is due to fallenness with the Angst in general that is an essential expression of finitude: in other words, when philosophy closes to (the possibility of) theology, sin and creatureliness as such get conflated. In a sense, this reduction would be the mirroring of the conflation of the third and fourth distinctions we mentioned earlier. The Gift of Being Given

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understand the basis for Balthasar’s general insistence on overcoming a dualism between contemplation and action: if contemplation (indifferencia, apatheia) is the subjective correlate so to speak of the second difference (Being over beings),51 and action is the subjective correlate of the third difference (beings over Being), then the fourth distinction gives us a place “beyond action and contemplation,”52 which allows us to integrate both into a unity. The deepest form of detachment, Balthasar says, is not the static detachment from all that exists, but a detachment from Being itself, since this allows an availability simultaneously for Being (contemplation) and beings (action).53 The second observation moves along similar lines: if it is true, as Heidegger has said, that we attain to Being in a full way only if we can transcend in some sense the ontological difference (between Being and beings) itself,54 then the fourth distinction allows us to transcend it precisely without closing it, which is in a sense Heidegger’s temptation. Moreover, if Husserl is right that the philosophical act finds completion only if it goes beyond the thematizing of beings from within Being (i.e., from within the “interestedness” of the natural attitude) to reach a disinterested thematizing of Being itself from the perspective of the transcendental ego— detached as it were from the world—this fourth distinction shows how such a move can be made without denying the finitude of the human spirit or calling into question in any respect the existential status of the world. It can do so because it confronts the finite “I” with the absolute otherness of the infinite “I” on the other side of created being, an “I” who is still Being even if he is not created Being.55 Husserl’s transcendental

51. On this sense of contemplation as the heart of philosophy, which was then taken over and integrated into the monastic orders during the Christian period, see Balthasar, “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism” [= PCM], in Explorations in Theology, vol. 2: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 333–72. 52. Balthasar treats this issue in “Jenseits von Kontemplation und Aktion?” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 2 (1973): 16–22. 53. GL 5:651. 54. See, for example, Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 250–51: “Deshalb gilt es, nicht das Seiende zu übersteigen (Transzendenz), sondern diesen Unterschied [that is, the ontological difference] und damit die Transzendenz zu überspringen und anfänglich vom Seyn her und der Wahrheit zu fragen.” 55. The relation between God and Being, which has become a particularly pressing question since Heidegger’s critique of “ontotheology,” will be addressed in part later in this chapter and then again more thoroughly in chapter 5. Nevertheless, it warrants strong emphasis that though he speaks often about divine being and created being, Balthasar by no means understands “being” as a univocal concept that can be participated in indifferently either by God or by creatures. Rather, for Balthasar, the term remains analogous to the core and therefore neither equivocal nor univocal. 46

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ego, it seems, enjoys the absolute solitude that Heracleitus once said belonged to God alone.56 The final point to make about the fourth distinction concerns the paradox of the simultaneous wealth and poverty that it reveals in both divine and created being. This theme is perhaps the heart of Ulrich’s philosophy, and Balthasar makes explicit reference to Ulrich as he enters upon this discussion.57 The second distinction brought to light the inexhaustible fullness of Being, but it was immediately complemented by the third distinction. This distinction showed that this fullness is not in itself actualized,58 but finds its actualization only in the relative otherness of the various beings, even if these never actualize Being in its totality.59 That this tension does not fracture is due to the fourth distinction, namely, the revelation of the Being beyond the polarity of the ontological difference, which is the actuality of the very fullness of Being, totum et totaliter. This, then, is the wealth of divine Being. However, precisely because divine Being, as absolute perfection, knows no limitation that needs to be overcome, there 56. Heracleitus, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [= DK], 3 vols. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1985), 108. 57. GL 5:625. 58. By no means is this observation meant to compromise Aquinas’s statement that esse is the “actuality of all acts and the perfection of all perfections.” Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2: De potentia dei [= De pot.], ed. Raymond M. Spiazzi (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1949), 7, 2, ad 9 (esse est actualitas omnium actuum et propter hoc est perfectio omnium perfectionum). But the point is just that: it is not actuality in reference to itself but in reference to another, i.e., “actualitas omnium actuum.” Created esse is never actual as esse, because it is nonsubsistent; what subsists is the concrete substance, even while the actuality of substance comes not from itself but from esse. See Kenneth Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Milwaukee University Press, 1982), 116–17. In his explanation of this point, Schmitz highlights the dependence of the composite being on esse but he seems to neglect the genuine reciprocity. In fact, he reads the possessive genitive in the term actus essendi as esse’s appropriating the being in which it subsists, whereas I, without denying the validity of that point, would want to emphasize the particular being’s appropriation of esse. The grammar more clearly supports this latter interpretation. On the other hand, we may read essendi as an objective genitive, which, far from canceling the being’s possession of the act, makes this possible by grounding it. The whole then, founded on the self-giving of esse implied in the objective genitive aspect of the verbal noun, which is the “other-centeredness” of esse, is a real reciprocity. 59. This is not to say that created beings actualize only part of the perfection of esse. Rather, insofar as they exist at all, they completely exist: “Wird Sein im Sinn von Wirklichkeit genommen, dann besitzt ein wirklich Seiendes nicht einen Teil von Wirklichsein in sich, sondern das Ganze, obgleich es neben ihm unzähliges anderes Wirkliches gibt.” E, 38. The distinction is more subtle and is best captured in Aquinas’s phrase “totus sed non totaliter” (“the whole, but not in every respect”): created beings actualize the whole perfection of esse (because they do not partially exist!) even if they do not do so totally, i.e., in every possible manner. The Gift of Being Given

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is nothing to prevent it from passing itself on: “Nothing is richer and fuller than Being in its incomprehensibly glorious and absolute victory over nothingness . . . and yet this fullness can unfold absolutely only once: in God. But since there is nothing against which it must assert itself (for nothingness is nothingness), it does not need, holding on to itself, to enclose itself in the casing of an entity in order perhaps to break out from this and communicate itself beyond its borders (which it does not have).”60 This “not holding on to itself,” then, is what Balthasar calls the poverty of divine being. Now, the fourth distinction does not set God over/against man as one particular being to another: rather, this relationship is mediated by the analogical “allness” of Being. Moreover, the relationship between God and creature is more than a relationship between a being and (created) Being, but it transcends this as free personality. These two simultaneous aspects, divine Being and freedom, illuminate the God-world relation, which in turn receives illumination from the inherent “poverty-wealth” paradox. If God were merely rich, then the creature would be mere poverty, that is, sheer negativity, in relation to God. The identification of creature and loss is the danger of any philosophy or religion that posits an impersonal god, which as hen kai pan (all-in-one) does not have the freedom to permit a (positive) other. But God is so rich, as it were, that he can afford to be poor: in other words, in his wealth he does not need to hold onto himself but can allow a corresponding wealth on the part of creatures in relation to him.61 Now, the positivity of the creature that results from God’s creative act gives rise to a genuine analogy of being rather than a mere dialectic. Ulrich describes dialectic as an attempt to “revive” through violence what is taken to be dead: that is, the negating of a negation.62 A “dialectical” relationship would posit the world as simple negativity in relation to the simple positivity of God, and it would then attempt to mediate this simple difference by simply negating this simple negativity of the creature and thus building a complex (pseudo-) analogy between God’s positivity and the world’s non60. GL 5:625–26. 61. See Schmitz, Gift, 97–130, where he accounts for the possibility of the otherness of the world from God (creation) by interpreting esse, or actus simpliciter (act par excellence), as generosity. The note that what Balthasar (and especially Ulrich) adds to this understanding is to see generosity not merely as the capacity to give but also the capacity to receive in some reciprocal (but not symmetrical) sense. Schmitz dwells at length on this aspect with his profound phenomenology of gift giving earlier in the book, but he specifically denies this aspect in God’s generosity in relation to the world. The question is whether this aspect needs to be denied in order to present a consistent and Christian understanding of God. 62. Ulrich, “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe: Ein Fragment,” in Leben in der Einheit von Leben und Tod (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1999), 152. 48

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negativity.63 Balthasar’s “analogia entis,” by contrast, begins with God, not as a simple positivity but as an absolute poor-wealth, in relation to the relative rich-poverty of the creature. In this case, the difference between God and creature is not compromised by similarity, but rather it paradoxically increases directly with similarity.64 More concretely, it means that what is negative or imperfect in the creature on account of its finitude is not to be merely “opposed” to God’s (positive) perfection (for what can be opposed to the absolute?) but becomes rather, in and because of its very finitude, an image of the divine.65 More concretely still, in this case, it means that the “poverty” of the creature in its finitude paradoxically becomes a positive image of the divine poverty/wealth, since it is now to be seen as an aspect of the creature’s own goodness and generosity: if poverty positively means the capacity to receive from another—which means giving the other the gift of giving—and creation, as God’s letting an “other” be, is the expression of divine goodness, then the poverty of the creature becomes an image of God. As Balthasar puts it, the creature is not the image of God 63. What I have described as a dialectical as opposed to a genuinely analogous understanding of the God-world relation is, in fact, in oversimplified form, the method Przywara uses in Analogia Entis, 2nd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1962), 104–41. Here, Przywara distinguishes himself from the dialectic of German idealism by founding his “analogy” on the principle of noncontradiction while dialectic is founded on the principle of identity. (For a good account of this method, see Juan Sara’s discussion in “Forma y amor,” 69–71.) But this only plants the “negation of a negation” method deeper. The “early” Balthasar seems to have affirmed this approach wholeheartedly (see MetaPrz), even though he generally avoided this language himself. However, if Balthasar was deeply influenced by Przywara, not only intellectually but also personally, he nevertheless developed in his mature writings a unique understanding of analogia entis. See James V. Zeits, “Przywara and von Balthasar on Analogy,” Thomist 52, no. 3 (1998): 473–98; and Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu, esp. 284–88. 64. Balthasar explains in greater depth what he calls the essential Christian principle, namely, the paradoxical relation between distance and nearness when comparing God and creation in his important early (1939) essay published in English as “The Fathers, Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio: International Catholic Review 24 (Summer 1997): 347–96. 65. If this assertion “jars,” we need only consider what denying it implicitly entails: namely, that finitude as such is not good, which is another way of denying creation or the positivity of otherness. If creation is not evil but good; if created goodness is always an image of the divine goodness; and if creation necessarily means the coming to be of something other than the infinite God, and therefore something finite, then the very finitude of creation must be an image of God’s goodness. A person may, of course, want to deny creation or even deny that it is good. At this point, I have not provided any philosophical argument for creation as such. Nevertheless, I have given reasons for the necessity of the fourth distinction, and one who would want philosophically to deny creation (and thus the fourth distinction) would have to deal with the fragmentation of the other differences, or at least offer an argument why they would not so fragment. The Gift of Being Given

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in such a way that the finite “first” constitutes itself as a “closed” entity or subject (through the seizing and hoarding of the parcel of actuality which it is able to take into oneself from the stream of finite Being) in order “then” (and perhaps for the rounding-out of its own perfection) to pass the surplus on. But rather in such a way that the finite, since it is subject, already constitutes itself as such through the letting-be of Being by virtue of an ekstasis out of its own closed self, and therefore through dispossession and poverty becomes capable of salvaging in recognition and affirmation the infinite poverty of the fullness of Being and, within it, that of the God who does not hold on to Himself.66 What we should notice in this passage is that a dynamic analogia entis, as Balthasar here employs it, suggests that the creature is not first created as a self-enclosed unit, which then images the divine creativity/generosity/ receptivity in a second moment, that is, in its subsequent action. Rather, the creature is constituted already “on the move”: the “passive” reception of its own being—since that being is itself the simultaneity of poverty and wealth, or receptivity and generosity—occurs precisely in its active letting-be and passing-on. I will return to this important, but difficult, point in the discussion of the Epilog and TL 1 to follow.

On the Fourfold Structure as a Whole Niemand versteht besser die wahre Unterscheidung, als wer zur Einheit gekommen ist.67 —Johann Tauler

Having gone through each of the four stages of the distinction, we must now consider them all as a whole. If we compare the various distinctions with one another, a certain peculiarity comes immediately to the fore. The second, third, and fourth distinctions seem to be properly metaphysical, while the first seems to be merely phenomenological, or perhaps even psychological. What does the personal experience of the child’s awakening to self-consciousness in the love of its mother have to do with the structure of Being? One might reply that it ensures that we are working with a concrete method. There is heavy emphasis in recent philosophy on remaining concrete, as if a concrete method is self-evidently good and needs no

66. GL 5:627. 67. No one has a better understanding of genuine difference than the one who has attained to unity. 50

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argument to justify its necessity. But we have to ask whether and why such a method is necessary. In what way is it more philosophically adequate than the traditional method that philosophizes precisely by abstracting from concrete experiences and therefore attaining to a universality that is lacking to those experiences? Or, we could ask in relation to the discussion at hand, What would be lost in terms of the philosophical content of the difference if we removed the first distinction and carried through the other three, accompanied perhaps by a constant reminder to “remain concrete”? I propose that the only way to understand the philosophical import of the first distinction is to view the four stages not as a series of distinctions, one after the other, but as the gradual unfolding of a single, concrete structure. Balthasar’s own elaboration of the structure may mislead because of its complexity, and because it presents what are in fact four relatively distinct differences. But Balthasar is nevertheless clear about the relation between them: he titled the section “The Fourfold Difference” (Die vierfache Differenz), and he relates each part as a relatively distinct phase or stage of “the difference,” namely, that which characterizes finite being as a whole. If we break these apart into so many separate differences, we end up with a series of dualisms, which can be brought to unity only dialectically. We must therefore take them all together at once, which means beginning concretely (con-crescere: the organic growing together of the parts). At the great risk of oversimplifying and thus falsifying certain aspects, it may be helpful to see the whole fourfold difference intuitively at once, as a single “constellation” of irreducibly distinct elements (and therefore as a Gestalt):

God

Being

beings

(Mother-) Child Figure 1. The Gift of Being Given

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This figure is inadequate in a number of ways: It suggests that the elements are separate from each other, when in fact the child, for example, or any particular being for that matter, would never simply stand “outside of” Being. Moreover, it is not evident in the figure how the whole structure occurs within the child’s initial wonder. And, perhaps most significantly, we do not see in what way the child’s experience comprehends the whole, and further how God comprehends even the child’s experience. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind its limitations, this basic structure, which reveals a set of relative oppositions and intersections, will eventually help us to understand what Balthasar means by drama and Gestalt, or the involvement of Being in history. The fourfold difference is Balthasar’s most fully articulated version of the basic structure of being, whether formulated in terms of the Heideggerian ontological difference (between Sein and Seiende) or the Thomistic distinctio realis (between esse and essentia). The structure, in its four points, forms a relatively stable tension, not only within the whole but between any two terms as well. The removal of any term would eventually collapse the tension of the whole and that between any two other terms. Now, the full structure of the difference is often implicit in discussions of the “real distinction,” but making the structure explicit can help us to avoid some of the problems into which these discussions tend to drift. For example, it would be possible, through separatio, to begin immediately with the second distinction, the transcendence of Being over beings. In this case, we are struck at once by the fullness of Being that is greater than any actualization but immediately also by the emptiness of this fullness, which does not exist precisely to the same extent that it transcends all that is actual. Being, taken by itself, thus shows itself to be what Siewerth calls “an unbearable contradiction,” since “the real act that actually grounds all of the real-being of things, and thus that which is most real in them, would be for itself . . . something unreal, a mere ‘thought-object,’ an aimless streaming in the void, the unchecked passage over and fall into non-being, or the constant loss of self.”68

68. Gustav Siewerth, Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Sein und Wahrheit (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 665: “Der wirkliche, alles Wirklichsein erwirkende Aktgrund der Dinge, also das Wirklichste an ihnen, wäre für sich selbst . . . etwas Unwirkliches, ein Gedankending, ein haltloses Verströmen ins Leere, der ungehemmte Übergang und Untergang ins Nichtsein oder der währende Selbstverlust.” Cf., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2: Der Thomismus als Identitätsystem (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 130. 52

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In order, then, to resolve this unbearable contradiction, Being must find actualization by making a “decision against the nothing.” Since this decision cannot be realized in particular beings insofar as they subsist only by virtue of the act of being itself, Siewerth leaps over the third distinction, as it were, and proceeds immediately to the fourth distinction, wherein God as esse subsistens (subsistent act of existence) appears as the resolution of the contradiction inherent in Being. Such an approach, however, will inevitably disfavor genuine analogy: it falls instead into the pattern of a dialectical movement, which begins with contradiction and resolves the contradiction through negation. According to Martin Bieler, in his excellent introduction to Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus, this is one of the most significant points on which Ulrich differs from Siewerth, from whom he has otherwise assimilated so much.69 While Siewerth brings his reflection on Being to the point where it reveals its essentially contradictory nature, Ulrich sees the meaning of Being as lying so fully in its movement into finite actualization (i.e., the ever-present Verendlichungsbewegung, a term Ulrich borrows from Siewerth),70 that there is never a moment when Being is not always already realized, either in God or in the creature: “If Being as completum et simplex sed non subsistens is seen as a gift from God poured into beings, then it becomes clear that the apparent contradiction of Being is always already resolved.”71 The contradiction arises only when we think of Being as “something” lying between God and the creature, which means when we fail to take the metaphysical structure of reality in its concrete moving character (Verendlichungsbewegung) and instead freeze the dimensions of it into so many abstract, isolated moments.

69. Martin Bieler, “Einleitung,” in HA., xxv–vii. 70. The term Verendlichungsbewegung is difficult to translate except periphrastically. We might translate it as “the essential movement Being has into finitude.” 71. Italics mine. Ibid., xxvi: “Wenn das Sein als completum et simplex, sed non subsistens als in die Seienden hinein entäusserte Gabe Gottes gesehen wird, dann wird deutlich, dass der scheinbare Wiederspruch des Seins immer schon gelöst ist.” It is crucial to see, once again, that “Being” is not meant here as a universal concept that can be actualized indifferently either in God or in creatures. This would be a univocity, which both Balthasar and Ulrich plainly reject. To the contrary, what grounds a genuinely analogous notion of Being is precisely the fact that “Being” has no “in itself” but is rather pure mediation, insofar as this indicates that, even while Being mediates between God and man (and therefore avoids equivocity), it does not do so as a universal concept (thus avoiding univocity). Instead, as a “self-less” mediator, it has its own meaning only either as divine being or as creaturely being. The key to analogy, in other words, is being’s nonsubsistence. The Gift of Being Given

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If in general Balthasar’s philosophy—and this volume of GL in particular—has been deeply stamped by Siewerth,72 he is closer to Ulrich on this point. And, indeed, Balthasar follows this point to the new methodology it demands.73 The point in fact requires a different methodology. We can understand the reason a new methodology is needed if we consider what most essentially distinguishes dialectic from analogy, as I have so far presented it. Dialectic proceeds by negation, and analogy affirms positivity. Or, more accurately: dialectic includes positivity within a more comprehensively negative movement, while analogy includes negation within a comprehending positivity.74 The key, then, turns on the peculiar nature of the positive. If we consider thought forms, the “positive”— that is, that which is posited, affirmed—is what is taken without demonstration or systematic verification as a place from which to begin, whether as the “given” premises in argumentation or that which is “given” to sensible intuition, upon which knowledge is founded. In short, the positive precedes thinking as the starting point from which thought proceeds. It is not produced from thought itself, but it is rather “received” by thought; it is that which is “given” to thought to think. In this respect, the positive is what connects thought to what is more than just thought; it introduces a new order into thinking by linking thought to an extracognitional order. Because the “given” is the locus of the encounter of thought and reality, it becomes crucially important what value is accorded to the positive in thinking, in relation to everything else, or what role the positive plays in a particular philosophy. Dialectic, and one might say modern philosophy generally, aims to minimize the significance of the positive as much as possible: we might consider Hegel’s allowing only the emptiest of all possible concepts, sheer indeterminate “Being,” as the

72. Balthasar says explicitly that the two volumes of Herrlichkeit that deal explicitly with the history of metaphysics could not have been written without Siewerth, MW, 90–91. 73. Both Siewerth and Ulrich have likewise explored these methodological implications. See Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit; and Ulrich, Der Mensch als Anfang: Zur philosophischen Anthropologie der Kindheit (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1970), esp. the second part, “Der Mensch als Kind, personaler Symbolos der Einheit von Reichtum und Armut des geschaffenen Seins als Liebe,” 47–111. 74. This is what characterizes the two as methods, i.e., methodologically. More would need to be said to characterize the full principles of the two approaches. Thus, the sentence is not meant to deny the classical definition of analogy, namely, the inclusion of similarity within ever-greater difference. Unfortunately, there is no room here for an argument about this point, but I would affirm that the methodological priority of the positive is the only way to affirm the formal priority of difference. 54

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sole given. 75 We might also consider Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s critique of Hegel’s neglecting the positivity of even this merest of concessions—Being as the sole given—the recognition of which would cause the upset of the whole system.76 Analogy, by contrast, affirms the given precisely because it affirms the positivity of difference; this means, in turn, that the given is received as gift.77 And so we look to the child, in his first experience of his own existence as a gift. The wonder over this gift, indeed, embraces not only the child’s being, but necessarily also the existence of the mother and eventually all of being as such, insofar as the experience is precisely that it is good to be at all. The further articulations of the meaning of this original gift are not the addition of new elements, or a movement outside the sphere that designates the first experience, but are an unfolding of what is already contained in the beginning. The whole complex structure of the fourfold difference is but the inside of the sphere of the child’s first conscious experience of the love of the mother: “The first experience contains what cannot be surpassed, id quo majus cogitari non potest. It is an experience in which distinction slumbers in the unopened unity of the grace of love—at once before and after the tragedy of its dissolution.”78

75. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 136–39: “Pure being makes the beginning, because it is pure thought as well as the undetermined, simple immediate, [and because] the first beginning cannot be anything mediated and further determined. . . . But this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is equally nothing.” 76. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137–41. Schelling eventually insists that a dialectical system such as Hegel’s fails to grasp the character of actuality in objective being (i.e., that which distinguishes that something is from what it is: see Kierkegaard’s notes from Schelling’s Berlin lectures on the “Philosophy of Revelation,” published as an appendix to The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], 335). According to Schelling, the recognition of this distinction gives rise to a positive philosophy. Schmitz echoes Schelling’s critique to some extent when he argues that Hegel’s Wirklichkeit differs from the Thomistic actualitas in that the former designates mere result, while the latter designates a principle: see Gift, 102–3. Where Schmitz would differ from Schelling is in reading Being’s actuality in the Thomistic sense of a complex principle that includes the various orders of causality (see ibid., 118–19, 123–25) rather than in the Suarezian sense Schelling seems to accept, namely, actuality as sheer “thereness.” 77. See Schmitz, Gift, 35–48. 78. GL 5:617. The “tragedy of its dissolution,” here, refers to what Balthasar had said earlier about the fact that the idyllic beginnings of the child’s existence in the mother’s womb and later in her arms will necessarily be invaded by the violence of life in a fallen world. The Gift of Being Given

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To enter more deeply into the point: since the difference between Being and beings is in fact irreducible from both sides, it is impossible to get either to Being from beings alone (because this will always end up reducing Being to beings to the same extent it has deduced Being from beings) or to beings from Being alone (because the same occurs from the other direction). It necessarily follows, then, that we must either deny a difference altogether, or we must take them both simultaneously and in their difference. This cannot happen in one or the other. And so we must begin with a “third” distinct from them both, in which both are simultaneously given in their difference. But what is this third? On the one hand, we would want to say, as Siewerth does, that the unity is given in God himself, who is the identity of existence and essence or who is the actuality of the whole fullness of Being. But we immediately run up against a problem: God is not the actualization of Being in the “ontotheological” sense of one being among other beings; rather, he transcends all beings as the “wholly other.” If we always philosophize from within our experience, we have to ask in what way God enters into experience so as to inform our philosophizing with the concrete unity that makes the genuine ontological difference possible. If we say that we attain God philosophically by eliminating the limitations that necessarily determine our experience—somewhat in the manner of the via negativa or of Aquinas’s remotio as it is sometimes interpreted—then we precisely eliminate the actuality aspect, since everything actual in our experience is inevitably bound up with limitation.79 We therefore project the form of infinity given in the nonsubsistence of created esse onto God and so lose the simultaneity of Being and beings that we were seeking. On the other hand, if we turn instead to the given unity of Being and beings that appears in every particular being, a particular being taken as one of the countless items we encounter every day, we will receive only a partial instance of that unity, which will remain ambiguous and therefore always relative and provisional. A limited beginning will give rise to a horizon that is too narrow, and it will inevitably tend to absorb the meaning of Being as such into the meaning of its finite “realizations.” In short, it seems that we are caught between a whole that is unattainable (and, as unattainable, therefore abstract; and, as abstract, therefore partial and not a whole at all), and a part that can only more or less successfully— and always imperfectly—project the whole.

79. It may legitimately be argued that, not actuality per se but only the limited form of actuality is eliminated in this approach—to which I would reply that what is attained by this method is merely the idea of perfect actuality and not an actual experience of actuality. And if actuality means precisely reality rather than mere ideality, then what is attained in the idea of actuality is in fact not actuality at all. 56

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The only way out of this dilemma, then, is to understand the third, which is the guarantor of the difference in unity of Being and beings, not simply univocally as one thing or another but as itself polar in a certain sense. Thus, unity is both concrete and transcendent. In a certain sense, the child’s experience comprehends the whole, and in a certain sense God comprehends the whole. Or, to affirm both at once, we have to say that the experience of the child is, as it were, the coming to light of the always already comprehended difference between Being and beings in the unity of God. This is the reason for Balthasar’s insistence on the unsurpassable fullness of the child’s awakening to love. The unity is not first “forged” in the mother’s loving the child, but is always already complete, so to speak. Yet this fullness is not something projected on the basis of a partial and finite instance, but it is itself incomparably (and in this respect “absolutely”) manifest within that experience. There is no infinity that the child will experience greater than the infinity of its awakening of consciousness, which is the same gesture as his inexhaustible wonder at being permitted to be. But this does not mean that God, as God, appears immediately to the child’s consciousness. Rather, the “immediacy” of God to the child is nevertheless mediated, first by the mother (whom the child does not at first distinguish from God, or even from Being itself), and then also by the irreducible difference between Being and beings.80 As Balthasar says over and over again, however immediate God may be, we can never reach him except through Being.81 If we refer again to the figure drawn above, representing the fourfold difference, we see the complexity of the structure that emerges: the “metaphysical” relationship between Being and beings is mediated and to that extent interpreted by the “personal” relationship between the child and

80. See Balthasar’s essay “Movement towards God” [= MTG], in Explorations in Theology, vol. 3: Spiritus Creator (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 15–23. 81. See, for example, Balthasar’s criticism of René Descartes, who begins with an immediacy of God to self-consciousness that bypasses the mediation of Being, GL 5:455–62. Here, Balthasar comments, “But there is one other line which must be drawn from this Cartesian thought which is forgetful of Being to the various forms of spiritual metaphysics of his century (Francis de Sales, Lallement, Bérulle, Fénelon), which in a similarly devout immediacy of God to consciousness which was likewise forgetful of Being, was inclined to ignore the world and our fellow men.” Cf., the comment made in GL 1:447: “In the same way it follows from what we have said, that a ‘supernatural’ piety, oriented to God’s historical revelation, cannot be such unless it is mediated by a ‘natural’ piety, which at this level presupposes and involves a ‘piety of nature’ and a ‘piety of Being.’” This is the reason for Balthasar’s frequent assertion that one cannot be Christian without being in some sense (not necessarily professionally) a philosopher: see EuP, 5, and PCM, 359. The Gift of Being Given

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God, while at the same time the personal relationship between the child and God is mediated and to that extent interpreted by the metaphysical relationship between Being and beings. The unity and difference of each illuminates the unity and difference of the other. It is impossible to say which comes first, if this means that one aspect is fully revealed and then in turn provides a sort of foothold to enter into an understanding of the other aspect. It is impossible to say which comes first because they all come first: the complex whole lies in embryo in the child’s first wonder.82 And it is important to see that this wonder is vast enough to contain such a complex whole, because it is not the closed wonder of the child’s simple discovery of himself but is an infinitely open wonder, a wonder at the absolute greatest of all graces: namely, being permitted to be by another. It is an infinitely open wonder because the child wonders precisely at one who is wholly other, and the mother is the wholly other because the child did nothing himself to bring about such a gift. He can only receive it as a sheer grace. To say that all other occurrences happen inside this wonder is another way of saying that all further experiences are a further interpretation of this fundamental experience: the child will never in the course of his life know anything greater than the experience of being given being even if it takes the whole of his life (and more) to learn what it means. Similarly, the wonder implied in what Heidegger calls the fundamental question of metaphysics—Why is there something rather than nothing?— is in every case a recollection (anamnesis) of the most radical way each of us ever put the question at the moment of our birth of consciousness: Why do I exist at all rather than not? Why is this world given to me and me to the world? . . . To whom do I owe my gratitude?

Polarity: The Moving Image The fourfold difference has provided the background for everything that will follow concerning the question of truth. In particular, it has placed us before the mystery of Being and moreover shown that this mystery remains mystery only to the extent that it involves a fluid relationship between being and person.83 The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to

82. Cf., the comment Balthasar made in 1946: “But these first principles cannot be abstract propositions, since it is precisely not on the basis of abstraction that we arrive at them: they must necessarily be concrete and immediate encounters, not only with the laws of Being, but with Being itself.” CathPhil, 150. 83. Many authors have noted that Balthasar’s metaphysics surpasses itself toward a meta-anthropology: See Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology”; Scola, Hans 58

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amplify aspects of this relationship, in order to bring into relief the “dynamic” character of being itself, and its relation not only to act but indeed to action in its concrete sense. To this end, I turn first to a pair of later writings, the central section of Balthasar’s Epilog and a brief section from TL 2. Our discussion of these sections will then be used to illuminate two related sections from the earlier writing The Truth of the World. Balthasar wrote the Epilog at the end of his life, immediately after finishing the last volume of the trilogy, in response to requests from friends that he provide some “way in” to his Meisterwerk, which over the years had grown to epic proportions. Rather than summarize the contents of that work (in the manner of an American “digest,” as he put it),84 he made a new beginning, a new attempt to think through in a succinct fashion problems that had occupied him from the beginning. This book is therefore helpful, not only because it presents some of his most mature thoughts on these subjects, but also because of the great unity, comprehensiveness, and elegance of the presentation.85 The first section, “The Vestibule,” offers a dialogue between Christianity and the world religions. The final section, “The Sanctuary,” is an exploration of the central Christian mysteries. The middle and longest section, “The Threshold,” deals with the basic questions of metaphysics.86 There are seven subsections in this “threshold”: the last three are on the transcendentals, which I will discuss in the chapter 5; the first is on the role of the thinking of being—which is the first thing present to the mind (Aquinas) but nevertheless that which must always be questioned (Aristotle)—in Christianity. I will focus, here, on sections 2 through 4, which evaluate the polar structure of created being. The metaphysical section of the Epilog is concerned with explicating the mystery of created being in its “pluriform” unity in relation to the unity of divine being. The initial question driving this section, then, is “Where is unity to be found in finite being?” The answers given to this question are

Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 84–100; and Disse, Metaphysik der Singularität, 17ff. Balthasar recognizes this as a central theme in Maximus Confessor (See Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners [= KL], 2nd ed. [Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961]); it is moreover a major theme in Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus. Disse, however, is correct to insist that a metaphysics cannot be thereby replaced but must be transformed. The question of meta-anthropology will be addressed in chapter 4. 84. E, 7. 85. According to a good source, Balthasar composed this book in about two days. Having emerged all in one breath, so to speak, it has a perfect unity and is one of the few books by Balthasar without an extraordinary number of footnotes. 86. On the method and structure of the Epilog, see Chantraine, “L’Épilogue de la trilogie.” The Gift of Being Given

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

Being and Beings Balthasar initially revisits the paradox inherent in all of Being itself, which we saw strung out between the second and third distinctions in the previous section. The “readiness” of Being to actualize essences is always greater than the essences that are actualized (Being over beings).87 At the same time, since Being itself does not exist, it cannot produce its own essences, even if it has the possibility for these essences in itself. This paradox, again, turns on Aquinas’s definition of Being: “Esse significat aliquid completum et simplex, sed non subsistens” (de Pot. 1, 1), which Balthasar translates in a straightforward manner: “Actuality [Wirklichsein = realbeing] designates something perfect and simple, but without existence [Bestand] in itself (but only in individual beings).”88 Whereas Balthasar previously showed how this difference was unified in God and manifest in the experience of the child coming to consciousness, here he develops this unity in difference further. The unity of Being and essence in God is revealed concretely in the hierarchy of being in the world, which is ordered according to the depth of interiority. At the lower level, we see vegetative life, which internalizes its environment, albeit unconsciously. Next, animals do so consciously, but not self-consciously. Finally, human beings internalize more than just their environment (Umwelt): they internalize a world (Welt), and they can do so because they possess their environment and themselves self-consciously.89

87. E, 38. 88. Ibid.: “Wirklichsein besagt etwas Vollständiges und Einfaches, aber ohne Bestand in sich (sondern nur in einzelnen Wesen).” 89. Although Balthasar does not mention it explicitly in this context, a central point in his thinking generally is that all beings, without exception, have something 60

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The reason “interiority” is the manifestation of God’s unity is that it represents the coming together of existence and essence: We see [the unity in God] by virtue of the fact that there is an ascending hierarchy of beings in the world, which, according to this hierarchy, have an ever clearer perception of [or: internalize ever more clearly] both their actuality and their actualized essence, or more precisely: the capacity (dynamis) given to their actualized essence for self-actualization (energeia). And insofar as they have this capacity by virtue of the actuality given to their essence, they are given an insight into actuality in general.90 Becoming aware or “taking in” (innewerden) is, here, the fundamental character of interiority, and it is what brings the irreducible aspects of being— existence and essence—into a unity. This difficult passage seems to mean the following: interiority is a being’s simultaneous appropriation of its actuality (esse) and its actualized essence. Perhaps we could say, then, that interiority is in fact the reception of being created.91 But this single “act,” Balthasar says further, has two distinct aspects: it both grounds the creature in itself and relates it to others. In the first case, the reception of existence takes the form of internalizing activity and the capacity for activity that makes the

analogous to interiority and therefore freedom to the extent that they exist at all. For, to exist is to “take in” the gift of being. Balthasar develops a certain implication of this point at length in TL 1:80–107. Here, he shows that the mere having of a quality of any sort is in fact an activity, namely, a “movement” of expression. This movement implies a difference between the external expression and the inner ground that expresses itself. Thus, to have a quality is to have interiority. This notion—that all things have an interiority insofar as they exist at all—is an old one, found especially within the Neoplatonic tradition. It has largely gotten lost, however, in modern and contemporary thought, and even thinkers such as Heidegger, who seek to retrieve an ancient view of the world, often neglect this fundamental point. 90. E, 39: “Dies kommt dadurch in Sicht, daß es eine Stufenfolge der weltlichen Wesen gibt, der gemäß diese sich immer klarer sowohl ihrer Wirklichkeit wie ihres verwirklichten Wesens innewerden, oder genauer: der ihrem wirklichen Wesen geschenkten Kraft (dynamis) an Selbstverwirklichung (energeia). Und sofern sie dies durch die ihrem Wesen geschenkte Wirklichkeit vermögen, erhalten sie den Blick für Wirklichkeit überhaupt.” 91. Every being has interiority to the extent that it exists, because existing means being the subject of the act of existing; it means “possessing” this act, the act that brings about subsistence. It therefore means in a certain sense “standing in itself,” which will be analogous to self-possession (freedom). As Aquinas says, freedom, as reditio completa, is just the complete form of existing/subsistence/standing in oneself: see his Commentary on the Book of Causes, proposition 15, trans. Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles R. Hess, and Richard C. Taylor (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 98–102. The Gift of Being Given

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being a (self-actualized) “self.” In the other case, since what actualizes the self as self is perfectly identical with what actualizes other beings, the reception of existence is at the same time a being-placed-in-relation to all other beings. Receiving existence, in other words, is the same thing as learning “from the inside” what it is like to be all other beings. Interiority, we see, is not merely what makes a thing distinct in itself but simultaneously what brings it into communion with others. So, interiority is in a certain sense the essential appropriation of Being, and this is what makes it an image of the unity of Being and essence in God. At the pinnacle of this hierarchy of worldly beings is the self-conscious human being. There are two points to make about man’s place here. First, it is important to note that what Balthasar means by self-consciousness is not a wholly heterogeneous phenomenon that is “tacked on” to being at the end, but it is rather the “flowering” of a phenomenon that is to varying degrees part of all created being as such. If consciousness is going to have a role in unifying being, which we will see at greater length in the next chapter, it is because consciousness is already essentially ontological and, indeed, the union of ontological principles. Second, though Balthasar elsewhere talks about Being as the image of God,92 here he insists that Being cannot be the imago dei because of its nonsubsistence. Concrete beings subsist, but, at the lowest limit, esse and essentia come together for them only “accidentally” and are not inwardly integrated to the fullest extent. Thus, in the end, the subsistent being that most adequately stands as the “image and likeness of God” is man, because, in him, interiority is self-consciousness. By virtue of his capacity for “Re-flection,” man can not only appropriate existence into essence but can appropriate it as existence. In man, therefore, we have not only being in itself but also for itself.93 Nevertheless, man is only an image, insofar as this appropriation is not original and originating but receptive.94 This qualifier is significant; it is what keeps the “whole” from coming to a final rest in man’s self-consciousness. As we shall now see, interiority is what it is only in concrete relation to others, and this relation to others is possible only because of Being. Thus, what makes man imago dei is also what makes him dependent on (others in) Being. It will follow that man cannot be the image of God alone,

92. TL 2:159–70; see also Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 5: The Final Act [= TD 5], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 67–75. 93. E, 39. 94. Ibid., 39–40. 62

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but must be so in relation to Being, which eventually means in relation to all that exists.95

Appearance and Hiddenness Balthasar begins this section by recalling the paradoxical unity of an essence’s “being-in-itself” (In-sich-Sein) (which in spiritual essences reaches its fullness in “being-for-itself” [Für-sich-Sein]), and its “being-with” (MitSein) (which in spiritual essences reaches its fullness as “Being-for-oneanother” [Für-ein-ander(es)-Sein]).96 In spite of their apparent opposition, they form a unity because they have a common cause, namely, actuality (esse). But their unity further means that the interiority I spoke of above as the concrete inward unification of essence and Being, the interiority that I, in fact, characterized as the reception of existence, cannot be “indifferent” to the concrete actuality of being in relation, namely, interaction or communication. Thus, we saw earlier that because of the gift character of existence, the being of any given creature is not constituted at once (immediately, or at one single time), “behind the curtains” in order then that the creature may appear and perform its relations with other creatures. Rather, the creature’s (vertical) being-in-itself is constituted simultaneously with its (horizontal) relatedness to others. Now, if we understand the relatedness to others not abstractly as a mere capacity to relate to others, or even merely “mystically” as being always already related to others “on some level,” but rather in the concrete, historical sense implied in the horizontal (dynamis-energeia) actuality of essences, then we see that the simultaneity of being in itself and of being with others means that the ontological identity of any creature “arrives” in its concrete interactions with others, even as this relatedness to others is made possible by the creature’s being itself.97 To put this another way, we have to say that “substance” is an event that occurs within relation. And this means, in turn, that specific acts of communication are events of being. A being’s

95. One might consider the passage in Genesis in which God creates man in his image and likeness and sets him to multiply and “subdue” the earth, as saying not merely that man’s “dominating” the earth is an expression of his capacity as imago but is in fact at the same time the way he acquires that stamp. Thus, man’s “subduing” the earth—which means in fact cultivating it, bringing it to itself—as a community is, taken as a whole, the imago dei. 96. E, 41. 97. “Wirkliche Wesen vollenden sich ineinander.” Ibid. In the ontological sense, to become perfect is to realize one’s being, which Balthasar says happens for beings reciprocally within each other. The Gift of Being Given

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movement of self-communication, in other words, is not merely the conveyance of its inner being, which is itself already complete and contained; rather, the communication is at the same time genuinely creative of the being that it communicates. The act of communicating is, in fact, a complex phenomenon. On the one hand, the being that communicates must actually express itself, its being, if the expression is not to be mere deceptive semblance, and if the being is moreover to find its perfection in that communication, which would otherwise be a fully gratuitous gesture. Thus, Balthasar explains, viewing the act from the other direction, the spirit (Geist) that receives the communication must understand what it receives not as a projection of its own self, but as the very being of the other that addresses it: “the spirit’s knowledge is not founded on the appearances lying in its own inner space, but is rather immediately based on the other, self-expressing essence, or its ‘Ding an sich,’ through the appearances.”98 Balthasar illustrates this notion by an analogy with speech: When a person talks, he does not want you to attend to the physical sounds issuing from his mouth but to himself. On the other hand, a precondition for genuine communication is that the self-expressing being should have a self to express. Even if, in one respect, the appearance of a being must be identical with its being-in-itself, in another respect there must be a difference. The self-expressing being remains in every case transcendent to what it expresses. Thus, the receiving spirit “does not have the other as other in himself—which would be a contradiction—but interprets and understands the other’s expressions as the expressions of his inner being or subsistence.”99 The fact that the appearance is the expression of the other’s inner being (In-sich-Sein) is what makes it other than me even in my apprehension of it. Even if, Balthasar says, a being “pours its heart out to me,” it does not for all that become me. Apprehension of an other, therefore, if understood radically, is not a swallowing up of the other but a being taken into his service: “my taking in his appearance is not so much my taking him into my possession as his being given a claim on me.”100 98. “Seine Erkenntnis bezieht sich nicht auf die Erscheinungen in seinem Innenraum, sondern unmittelbar durch diese hindurch auf das andere sich äußernde Wesen, das ‘Ding an sich.’ ” Ibid. (emphasis mine). 99. “Es hat das andere als anderes nicht in sich—was ein Widerspruch wäre—, es deutet und versteht aber dessen Äußerungen als die seiner Innerlichkeit oder Subsistenz.” Ibid., 41–42. 100. “Und dies so sehr, daß ich, indem ich seine ‘Erscheinung’ in mich aufnehme, ihn damit nicht in Besitz nehme, sondern vielmehr von ihm in (seinen) Anspruch genommen werde.” Ibid., 42. Ferdinand Ulrich develops this insight in great depth in “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe: Ein Fragment,” in Leben in der Einheit von Leben und Tod (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1999), 145–227. 64

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Finally, the phenomenon of communication has a further dimension with regard to its reception. Reception of communication by a spirit is possible only if that spirit is able to unify the multiplicity of what it receives. It must therefore be gifted with the “unity of apperception.”101 However, if the spirit simply “imposes” this unity on the matter of sensation that it receives as the appearance of the other, it will not in fact be the unity of the appearance and therefore not the appearance of the being of the other. Thus, the phenomenon of communication requires that the spirit simultaneously participate in the unity of its object and give rise to it. How are we to fit all of these aspects together so that we are able to have a complete phenomenon of communication? The question appears particularly difficult once we note that these aspects seem bluntly contradictory. The expression of self in communication presupposes that the being already has a self to communicate. But if the act of self-expression is not a superfluous “extra,” it can only be because the being’s own being arises in that expression, which means, then, that the being cannot have its being simply before its expression. Furthermore, the unity of apperception presents a similar “contradiction.” It cannot cause unity in the appearance if it does not already have this unity itself, and yet if it itself has unity already, it cannot “find it” in its object. Now, it is clear that if each of these affirmations were taken separately, we could never integrate them. The straightforward meaning of each excludes its relative opposite. However, if these requirements cannot be all satisfied at once, the communication cannot happen. The only way to see these principles as reciprocally related is by avoiding seeing them as coming one after an other, but rather taking them all at once. This can happen only if they have their unity in something that transcends all of them.102 And they do: according to Balthasar,

101. E, 41. 102. Aimé Forest articulates a similar sense of metaphysical unity in his book La structure métaphysique du concret selon s. Thomas (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1956). For Forest, there can never be created unity without complexity; nor can there be complex unity unless the principles joined, as it were, stand in a relation of reciprocal (though asymmetrical) causality to each other, which is in every case analogous to the act-potency relationship. Thus, Forest discusses the real distinction within unity of essence and existence as that of reciprocal causality (potency to act), where essence limits (determines) act and act gives existence to essence (162–63). Moreover, the concrete unity of essence is given in the reciprocal causality of form and matter (215–26). While he sees the capacity for the (unified) reciprocal causality of matter and form as due to their identity in existence, he also similarly looks for the identity of essence and existence in God’s creative act, which completely transcends both and so presupposes neither. Thus, for Forest, the key to the unity of created being is a notion of creatio ex nihilo (70). The Gift of Being Given

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the unity of esse’s actuality, which comprehends essences, is what allows the essences a communion with each other but one that preserves the difference between them: “it thus requires the comprehending unitive medium of actuality, in order to ‘let the other (or every other) be’ in his own unity, in the mystery of his existence, which I will never be able to grasp.”103 The principles of communication, therefore, are integrated because they “come into existence” always already in relation. This “coming into existence,” we should note, is not some thing that happens once and is then left behind (which would present us all over again with the same problem); it is always a transcending actuality. It is “now” and is always also “later,” because it is always.

Polarity in Being The foregoing brings us directly to the question of the meaning of polarity and unity in created being. When we ask the question, Where is unity in created being? we seem to get two answers. There is a certain unity in existence and a certain unity in essence.104 Indeed, we saw at first that existence, as actuality, does not have unity in itself, but it “seeks” its own unity in actualized essences and, in particular, the human spirit. However, the discussion of interiority and the phenomenon of communication showed us that the multifaceted reality of essences in relation does not have its unity in itself but, rather, in the actuality that comprehends it. Or perhaps we could say that essence and existence each have their own unity only because of the other. They thus both presuppose each other. But this means that these unities can never ultimately be brought to a single unity,105 any more than existence or essence can be reduced to each other: This polarity remains so mysterious precisely because one cannot say that the finite essence is not itself also Being and to that extent

103. “Es bedarf demnach des umgreifenden einheitlichen Mediums von Wirklichkeit, um den Andern (oder überhaupt alles Andere) in seiner ihm eigenen Einheit ‘sein zu lassen,’ im Mysterium seines mir ungreifbaren Daseins.” E, 42. 104. Forest likewise notes that Aquinas himself talks about both the unity of existence and the unity of essence. However, Forest goes on to deny any irreducibility to this polarity. Instead, he explains that since there cannot be two unities, the latter reduces ultimately to the former, La structure métaphysique du concret, 156–57. 105. This affirmation needs to be qualified. If they could not come together at all in a single unity, we would ultimately wind up with a dualism. The affirmation means simply that the unity of essence can never be reduced to the unity of existence, nor can the unity of existence be reduced to the unity of essence. We will eventually see, however, that these two unities finally come together in action, understood most profoundly as receptivity to Being. 66

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must be removed from actuality as its self-fulfillment; but neither can Being once again be represented, because actuality as such, since it does not subsist and therefore cannot design any essences, cannot give rise to this essence out of itself (for the sake of its self-fulfillment) and thus also cannot produce the whole array of determinate and limited essences that are formed to one another.106 This irreducible polarity is precisely the finitude of created being. It will never be “overcome” as long as there are finite beings. Now, this polarity, as Balthasar says, points back to an Identity as its ground. We are at this stage in a position to take up the question of the relation between created being and Uncreated Being more exactly. There are two observations to make on this point, followed by a third in the next section on difference in God. We recall what was said earlier, namely, that the dialectical version of the God-world relation, as a relation between the simple positive and the simple negative, is for many reasons inadequate; the same observation applies here. Balthasar insists that we do not simply juxtapose the polarity of created being to divine being as duality to identity. This has implications for the meaning of both created being and divine being. First of all it means, Balthasar explains, that we cannot simply construct the divine identity out of what is lacking in created being, as if once these elements were subtracted, the remainder could be added together into a simple perfect being.107 Not only would this approach make created being, as created, the simple opposition of divine being in the sense of representing only a simple “loss” with respect to that being, but it would also simultaneously compromise the transcendence of God. The only form of being we know is the finite being of the world, whether we think primarily of esse or essence, and this being is limited and fragmentary. Both esse

106. “Diese Polarität bleibt deshalb so geheimnisvoll, weil man nicht sagen kann, daß das endliche Wesen nicht selber auch Sein ist und insofern aus der umfassenden Wirklichkeit zu deren Selbstvollendung entlassen worden sein muß, man sich dies aber wiederum nicht vorstellen kann, weil Wirklichkeit als solche, sofern sie nicht subsistiert und deshalb kein Wesen planen kann, solche auch nicht aus sich (zu seiner Selbstverwirklichung) zu gebären vermag, und zwar schon gar nicht diese ganz bestimmte, begrenzte und einander zugestaltete Anzahl von Wesenheiten.” E, 44. 107. To a certain extent, what Balthasar criticizes here is the method Thomas Prufer uses in fashioning an analogy between God and created being in “Sein und Wort Nach Thomas von Aquin” (Ph.D. diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, 1959), 48–53. Following Siewerth’s suggestion to think of esse in itself as a contradiction, Prufer shows that it can be resolved simultaneously in the direction of the world (finite beings) and God: God, as ipsum esse simplex ET subsistens = esse simplex SED NON subsistens + ens subsistens SED NON simplex. Compare Prufer’s method to Balthasar’s comments, E, 40, and 71–73. The Gift of Being Given

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and essence are “nonabsolute.” It is therefore not enough simply to combine them; two nonabsolutes do not make an absolute. In other words, we cannot simply follow the individual lines of created esse and essences until the point where they intersect and then call that point God. For this reason, Balthasar says: “the actual ‘identity’ of God . . . lies, to speak with Plato and once again with Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius, ‘epekeina tou ontos,’ over and beyond what we are able to conceive of as ‘beingness’ [Seindsein].”108 Attempts to think of God in this way inevitably create false idols,109 and fall into the “thinkably” identical, such as Benedict de Spinoza’s causa sui. In this, Balthasar affirms Heidegger’s criticism of ontotheology (even though, as we will later see, he does not for all of that deny that God is Being). But there is a further implication that we have already hinted at. If we do not equate the divine identity simply with one aspect of created being to the exclusion of what we see as the limitations of finitude, then we are freed to see this “limitation” in a new way. Thus, if the divine identity simply excludes what is meant by polarity in created being, and if God does not lack perfection, then the multiplicity of created being must necessarily be seen as a fall from divine identity. But if, on the other hand, divine identity is more than the negation of created polarity (plurality), then we are led to ask in what way this polarity, even in its implied limitation, can be an image of the divine identity and therefore in a certain way something positive. To put it bluntly, we need to ask in what way limitation is itself a perfection. In fact, we find an immediate opening in this direction the moment we consider that such plurality is involved in the communication among beings that I spoke of earlier. Thus, limitation is part of what enables beings to come together, in freedom and spontaneity, to make 108. “Die wirkliche ‘Identität’ Gottes . . . liegt, um mit Platon und wieder mit Gregor von Nyssa und Dionysius zu reden, ‘epekeina tou ontos,’ oberhalb und jenseits dessen, was wir noch als ‘Seindsein’ absehen können.” Ibid., 72. Balthasar in fact dis- ousias,” because for tinguishes himself from Plato, who had written “epekeina tes Balthasar, God is not beyond Being as such but rather beyond created being. On Balthasar’s treatment of this issue in Gregory of Nyssa, see PT, 22–23: “God is hyper pasan physin kalou pantos epekeina. He is hyper to agathon. Since, for Gregory, ‘God’ denotes the attribute of universal Providence . . . God is even ‘above God.’ But to say that God is above Being would make no sense, since Being is that Great Beyond.” Cf., Balthasar Theologik, vol. 3: Der Geist der Wahrheit [= TL 3] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1987), 219, n. 25, where Balthasar says God is not only beyond all that can be thought or longed for but also “beyond the beyond”: hyper epekeina, in reference to Gregory of Nyssa. 109. See the philosophical treatment of the theme of idols by Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance: Cinq études (Paris: B. Grasset, 1977), and God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 7–24. 68

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room for each other, to dwell within one another—in short, it is the precondition for love and for the reciprocal self-fulfillment I mentioned above. This implication in fact perfectly dovetails with what we saw there. Because of its polar structure, the finite being does not have unity merely in itself. Alone—if indeed any being could ever be completely alone—it has only “half” a unity, which is no unity at all. Created unity, because of its polar structure, is always more than any “one” thing; it is more than any one being can “stand for” on its own. To cite a scholastic maxim, “quod non potest fieri per unum, fit aliqualiter per plura” (That which cannot be accomplished by one is accomplished in a certain way by many). Thus, created beings do not achieve their own unity, nor, which is the same thing, do they image the divine “identity,” by standing still or by moving backward: by exclusion, regression, or subtraction. No, they are one by moving forward: by multiplication. Paradoxically, the most direct sign we have of divine identity is not solitude but human fecundity, that is, love or unity that multiplies itself.110

Identity and Difference in God But if it is true that created beings image God in their multiplicity, we must ask whether it is ultimately adequate to speak merely of a divine “Identity”: “And yet thought cannot rest content with these observations. For how could worldly difference in its ‘maior dissimilitudo’[greater dissimilarity] with respect to the divine identity not be judged ultimately a degradation, and not something ‘very good,’ if this difference did not possess in God himself a root compatible with his identity . . . ?”111 In the second volume of the Theologic, The Truth of God, Balthasar engages explicitly the question of “divine and created difference.”112 Here, he makes a sharp and perhaps controversial observation: outside of Christianity,

110. Cf., Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, 72: “whence it was necessary that what is one and simple be represented in created things in diverse modes and dissimilar ways . . . so that the diversity of things might imitate the divine perfection in its own way.” Cited in TL 2:167. Balthasar immediately points out in relation to human fecundity as image of God’s unity, however, that “physical” fecundity, like the bearing of children, is bound to nature and, although an image, it is only an image, which will therefore necessarily be inadequate in certain significant ways. E, 45. 111. “Und doch kann sich das Denken bei diesen Feststellungen noch nicht beruhigen. Denn wie könnte die weltliche Differenz in ihrer ‘maior dissimilitudo’ der göttlichen Identität gegenüber nicht doch als ein Abfall, und nicht als ein ‘sehr Gutes’ gewertet werden, falls diese Differenz nicht in Gott selbst eine mit seiner Identität nicht konkurrierende Wurzel besäße . . . ?” TL 2:169. 112. Ibid., 165–70. The Gift of Being Given

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no religion or system of thought has succeeded in finding a positive ground for difference in God. In other words, in no other worldview is difference given “equal billing” with identity as ultimate. Rather, insofar as it is philosophically consistent, non-Christian thought cannot avoid a tendency to read the world’s multiplicity as due to some fall and therefore something that must be overcome.113 In Christianity, by contrast, God (as G. K. Chesterton has wittily put it) “is a Society”: the revelation of the Trinity is the revelation of a God who is wholly one and at the same time three Persons. In his excellent discussion of this section of the Theologic, Emmanuel Tourpe shows that basically at issue here is an “ontology of gift,” which “sanctions” the polarity of created being: “The polarity of created being, historically distended between being and essence, therefore does not have to be overcome, or even radicalized: it is the dynamic image of the intra-Trinitarian event of love, in which identity and difference are made possible and interwoven by the common love of the Persons.”114 But what can the simultaneity of identity and difference in God mean philosophically? To work this out, Balthasar follows the analyses of Siewerth. According to Siewerth, we cannot simply project the created ontological difference on God and make it thus absolute, for, as he explains, we would be led back to Hegel, for whom God (Being) has to produce essences out of himself in order to actualize himself. We can understand his point if we refer back to the fourfold distinction. There, we saw that beginning with the second distinction in relation to the third; we are immediately thrown into a dialectic, which, no matter in what direction it resolves itself, must always end up in the elimination of difference. Thus, Siewerth 113. It is interesting to note that some of the most profound attempts to find such an ultimate difference in philosophy—those of Hegel and Schelling—were explicitly Christian. It may nevertheless be the case that one can find attempts outside the Christian tradition to see multiplicity as a perfection: in Greek thought, one can point to elements in Heracleitus, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, for example. The question remains to what extent these attempts can be sustained by an ultimate affirmation of multiplicity. 114. “La polarité du créé, historiquement tendue entre être et essence, n’a donc pas à être surmontée, ni d’ailleurs radicalisée: elle est l’image dynamique de l’événement divin intratrinitaire de l’amour, dans lequel identité et différence sont possibilisées et entrelacées par l’amour commun des Personnes.” Emmanuel Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 214. The sentence that follows is also to the point: “C’est pourquoi l’altérité du domaine créé, le temps et l’espace, les dualismes (acte-puissance, actioncontemplation, homme-femme, individu-communauté), la potentialité et la prière ellemême sont la mémoire vivante de la vie trinitaire, et ne sauraient, sans préjudice grave de la ressemblance, être isolées en elles-mêmes (sans modèle divin) ou supprimées dans un état supérieur.” 70

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affirms an “absolute positivity of difference” as a basic foundation,115 in reference to an astonishing passage from Aquinas: “The very difference by reason of which beings are distinguished from one another is a certain being; God is therefore not the creator of a tendency towards nothingness, but the creator of every being; he is not the principle of an evil, but the principle of multiplicity.”116 Instead of speaking of a real distinction in God between his Being and his essence, Siewerth speaks in a more Trinitarian fashion of an ultimate difference between “being and subsistence,” which Balthasar takes to mean being and hypostases.117 According to Tourpe, the Trinitarian ontology of gift that Balthasar (and Siewerth) lay out here means two things: (1) only a Trinitarian God can create in the genuine sense; and (2) creation bears a Trinitarian stamp.118 The first point, though contested, seems fairly straightforward. In order to create, God must be free, which means, rather than needing to create in order to love, God must already be love in himself, in some sense “prior” to creation.119 To the objection that this projects an anthropomorphic sense of freedom and necessity onto God, we could simply refer to the previous point that the positivity of created otherness presupposes a kind of otherness in God. Thus, Aquinas is able to say that we do not understand creation properly unless we see it as a Trinitarian event: The knowledge of the divine persons was necessary . . . for thinking correctly about the creation of the universe. For by our saying that God made all things by his Word, the error of those who assert that God produced the universe out of a necessity of nature is ruled out. Moreover, by the fact that we affirm in him a procession of love, it is shown that God did not produce creatures on account of some need, nor for the sake of any cause outside of himself, but for the sake of the love of his own goodness.120 But how are we to understand the second point, namely, the Trinitarian stamp in creation? Tourpe, for his part, reads it precisely in terms of the

115. G. Siewerth, Der Thomismus, 104. On this point, see Sara, Forma y amor, 74–76, and Manuel Cabada Castro, Sein und Gott bei Gustav Siewerth (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1971), 276–83. 116. Aquinas, De pot., 3, 16 ad 3. 117. TL 2:170. 118. Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 209. 119. See Norris Clarke, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,” in Explorations in Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 211–28, here: 221–27. 120. Aquinas, ST, 1:32, 1 ad 3. The Gift of Being Given

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polarity between being and essence, which, like the Trinitarian event itself, has an event-like character and therefore gives rise to a historical, horizontal interpretation of the analogia entis.121 In fact, Balthasar himself, in this section and in other places, particularly in TD 4, explains the imago trinitatis in terms of the being-essence polarity.122 However, we have just seen that this difference is profoundly inadequate in relation to the divine difference, inasmuch as the difference in God, thus conceived, would lead to a Hegelian dialectic. We could say that this inadequacy only serves to bring to light the maior dissimilitudo that will always govern any God-world analogy. This is no doubt true. And yet, even without violating this necessary dissimilarity, it seems that our earlier discussion of the fourfold difference provides resources to bring this question even further. As Siewerth describes it, the ultimate difference in God is between Being and Subsistence, or Being and Persons. If we consider the fourfold difference on the basis of the light that this ultimate difference casts, a profoundly new possibility comes into view. Rather than affirming the being-essence or Being-beings polarity as the primary imago trinitatis, which in a sense remains two-dimensional, could we not say that the whole four-dimensional fourfold difference is the only one adequate to image the Trinity?123 Here, in addition to the metaphysical polarity, we have the personal polarity involving the child-mother relationship, which, because it designates the unity in difference of two persons, in principle represents any intersubjective relationship. Each, as we saw there, is inadequate on its own, but each grounds and in turn interprets and therefore fulfills the other in a simultaneous relation. The mystery of the Trinity is the mystery of the relation between Being (Substance) and Persons (Hypostases). It seems that we could interpret this mystery itself, not “linearly” and in two dimensions, but rather as itself a multifaceted difference. In other words, on the basis of the fourfold difference, we might view the difference in God as a complex “tension” between the intraTrinitarian mystery of Being as the unity of substance within the processions of Persons, as well as the “inter-Personal” mystery of unity and difference in love. The mystery of God is the mysterious relationship between these two mysteries.

121. Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 211–14. 122. Cf., TD 5:67–68. However, beyond the interpretations of Siewerth and Tourpe, Balthasar specifically refers to the transcendentals in addition to the polarity in being as the imago trinitatis: TL 2:159–64. 123. “Adequate,” of course, in the sense permitted by the definition of analogy. 72

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Understanding the mystery of God thus, in turn, would allow us to ground the fourfold difference as a form that emerges from the complex interplay of several differences: between Being and beings, between Being and God, between Being and man, between God and man, and then in principle all interpersonal relationships. In short, the so-called ontological difference illuminates the meaning of interpersonal relationships, and these relationships illuminate the meaning of the ontological difference.124 Without pursuing this notion further, it is at least possible to grasp the general direction this line of thinking would take us. The ontological difference would illuminate the meaning of interpersonal relationships by contributing the “not-holding-onto-oneself” (self-gift) that belongs to Being as nonsubsistent,125 on the one hand, while, on the other, contributing the perfection of form that belongs to essences.126 Correspondingly, what interpersonal relationships illuminate about Being in the ontological difference is freedom, mystery, the positivity of otherness, and love (the interplay of giving and receiving).127 Thus, all of these together at once, in

124. The phenomenon of reciprocal illumination is something we often find in great works of art, where the meaning of a part sheds light on another part or even on the whole, which in turn reveals the meaning of the part. This phenomenon can sometimes occur dramatically, with overwhelming power: we may think of Prometheus Bound—in which the lot of Io sheds light on Prometheus’s own situation—or the interplay between the fool and the king in King Lear. One of the causes of such power, it seems, is that the reciprocal illumination suddenly gives rise to a depth that could not be contained, as it were, by the two-dimensional explication of the meaning of a thing in itself. The phenomenon gives rise, one might say, to an organic whole, which has a life of its own. But a similar phenomenon can also be sought in philosophy. Perhaps this is what Balthasar had in mind in this aphorism: “In this Schelling was right: artfulness is a part of the credibility of a philosophy. An artless thinker can produce little truth” (GW, 24). And it may also account in part for Plato’s greatness. 125. See, for example, Balthasar’s discussion of the meaning of self-possession in anthropology in light of the nonsubsistence of Being, TD 2:240. 126. On the relation of (personal) freedom to determinate form, see PF, 1–5, the discussion of freedom as decision for a particular idea, TD 2:285–309, and the understanding of the perfection of the person as adopting and being adopted by a lifeform (e.g., marriage), GL 1:23–24. 127. One might call the whole of The Truth of the World a development of this theme. See, in particular, the section on the freedom of the object, 80–113, and on mystery, 233–55. The exceedingly rich notion that metaphysics and intersubjectivity mutually illuminate each other unfortunately cannot be pursued further in the space of this thesis. What will be important for us later is the basic principle suggested here, that being and person mutually illuminate each other, albeit within relatively autonomous orders. This notion is crucial if we are to be able to comprehend the eventual argument of this thesis that personal/existential questions are intrinsic to even the most objective and logical concerns of truth. The Gift of Being Given

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all their historicity and complexity, form the “moving image” that brings to light the inexhaustible richness of the divine . . . “Identity.”128

Being in Action: The Moving Idea Pensare una cosa veramente è realizzarla.129 —Giovanni Gentile The world is realized idea. —F. Hebbel

At the beginning of TD 2, Balthasar writes that we can know God and man only in history.130 Given our discussion of the structure of created being generally, we can see why something analogous can be said about all beings: we know things ultimately only in history, which means we know them ultimately only when we see them “in action.” To illustrate what he means here, Balthasar uses the analogy of watching a play. One can get a certain idea of who the characters in a play are and how they are related to each other by reading through the program before the start of the show. But, the moment the play begins, the program is set aside, and one learns “directly” who the characters are by watching their interaction. And it is a genuine, and gradual learning because in fact the characters become who they are only by making decisions and by acting. They thus make manifest what they “have inside.” And the more intense and dramatic the activity, the more deeply the characters reveal and become themselves. Claudel gives decisive expression to this point by describing the difference between knowing ourselves “inertly,” as we are in ourselves in isolation, and knowing ourselves in action: We know that it is not we who are interesting: what is interesting is instead the goal that we were made to attain and make manifest, each in our own way. What we possess within is not a mass of inert things that we may take stock of and parade out at our leisure; rather, what we have are energies that we must employ at full strength and beyond for a battle, the loss of which costs more than death. Is it by inspecting the shape of his foot, of his knee, of his thigh, by measuring the 128. On Balthasar’s concept of God as so to speak beyond the immobility of sheer identity, which does not fall into a “mythological” God who is subject to the world’s changing and suffering in a crass sense, see Gerard O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 129. Genuinely to think a thing is to bring it about. 130. TD 2:9–14. 74

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breadth of his chest that a runner learns what he is able to give? Or is it not by running? In the same way, all of our faculties will remain unknown to us, and among all those things that trouble us, we will experience the feeling of emptiness that accompanies idleness, if we refuse to embrace the cross that stretches us on all sides to the furthest extremities.131 At the same time, the action of the characters in the play is a genuine revelation and manifestation only because the meaning of the characters in relation to the meaning of the whole was present from the beginning in the author’s idea. But even if the audience knows the idea beforehand, for having seen the play before or having read it, the performance is a new event, a new revelation, a kind of fulfillment of the idea, which is in fact indispensable to the idea. The idea in itself may be a kind of fullness, completeness, and perfection, but in comparison with the new fullness and perfection of its dramatic performance, the idea may seem barren indeed. Profound and passionate expressions of the necessity of action in twentieth-century philosophy can be found in the work of Blondel and Joseph de Finance. De Finance, in particular, affirms the necessity of action as stemming from the meaning of being itself. According to him, Being (esse) is a perfect act; it is superabundance and supreme determination. As such, it tends by itself to overflow its “limits.” Thus, de Finance integrates the Aristotelian elements deeply into Aquinas’s fundamental insight by showing that the ordering of form beyond itself to action is an expression, as it were, of the superactuality of esse.132 If this is the case, we should understand action (l’opération) not as a mere reduplication of essence, nor as the simple addition of something new, but rather as a “being-more,” a kind of

131. Paul Claudel, “Lettre au ‘Temps,’ ” in Positions et propositions, 242–43: “Nous savons que ce n’est pas nous qui sommes intéressants: c’est le but que nous sommes construits pour atteindre et pour manifester, chacun à notre manière. Ce qu’il y a en nous, ce ne sont pas des choses inertes dont il nous est loisible de faire inventaire et parade, ce sont des forces que nous devons exercer suivant toute leur puissance et au delà pour un combat où la défaite est payée de plus que la mort. Est-ce en regardant la forme de son pied, de son genou, de sa cuisse, en mesurant son tour de poitrine, qu’un coureur se rendra compte de ce qu’il peut donner? Ou plutôt n’est-ce pas en courant? De même toutes nos facultés nous demeurent comme inconnues, et parmi tous nos vains tracas nous avons cette sensation de néant qui accompagne l’oisiveté, si nous n’embrassons cette croix qui nous tend de toutes parts jusqu’à l’extrême.” 132. Of course, de Finance qualifies this point: it is not the case that action perfects esse itself, which would compromise the primacy of esse, understood as the “perfection of all perfections.” Rather, action perfects being in the essential order, which is distinct from the order of esse: Être et agir dans la philosophie de saint Thomas (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1965), 242. The Gift of Being Given

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excess of being itself.133 Act, in general, can be both transitive or intransitive, and also expansive (self-communicating) or integrating (receptive/internalizing). Since esse is the perfection of acts, then, it is to be understood as both that which grounds a particular being in itself and also that which relates beings to each other out of superabundance. In this respect, beings can be themselves only by being more than themselves: “A creature is never so much itself as when it does not remain in itself. A thing fulfills itself only in transcending itself, and it transcends itself only in its relations.”134 Now, as we have seen, Balthasar’s thinking falls much along the same lines. However, there remains in de Finance’s formulation of the issue a certain vulnerability to an “actualistic” interpretation. If esse needs to overflow itself in the activity of creatures, what is there to prevent us from reducing esse to that activity? On the other hand, if we consider esse as perfect in itself, then how can we prevent seeing the creature’s activity as a mere addition to esse? Or, moreover, how do we think of esse as perfect in itself if it is nonsubsistent? Balthasar avoids these various quandaries precisely through a dramatic conception of the relationship between Being and action. As I already mentioned in the introduction, drama for Balthasar means the simultaneous affirmation of two principles: agere sequitur esse, and esse sequitur agere. Each is relative to and dependent on the other, albeit asymmetrically. Balthasar is able to affirm both simultaneously because God, the “author” of both the “characters” and the “plot”—both the being and the action—unifies both at once in his creative idea.135 The notion that creatures have their being in God’s creative idea is, of course, a basic principle in many traditional philosophies.136 Balthasar

133. “L’opération serait vraiment un plus-être, non un être de plus.” Ibid., 249. (What de Finance means by “operation” is an intransitive form of activity, such as knowing, which is more perfect than merely transitive activity insofar as it remains in the agent.) Cf., Blondel, “Agir vraiment, n’est-ce pas toujours introduire du nouveau?” L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Spes, 1928), 34. The truth of Blondel’s statement would have to be read in light of de Finance’s: i.e., the real novelty introduced by action is itself paradoxically an expression of the “excess” of Being that was always already there. 134. Être et agir, 251: “Un créature n’est totalement soi qu’à la condition de ne pas rester en soi. On ne s’accomplit qu’en se dépassant; l’on ne se dépasse qu’en se rapportant.” 135. To be sure, de Finance himself shows openings in this direction when he draws attention to creation through God’s idea (ibid., 134), and when he later insists that what God creates are not beings that then act, but rather acting beings (ibid., 237). Nevertheless, de Finance does not thematize this aspect when he discusses the relation between being and action, and moreover he seems to be lacking a thoroughgoingly historical sense of God’s creating; i.e., he views the principle of God’s creating acting beings merely formally and not also materially. 136. See, for example, Josef Pieper’s treatment of this basic idea: Wahrheit der Dinge, 4th ed. (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1966), 48–55. 76

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differs somewhat from the general understanding of this notion by speaking of a “moving idea,”137 which he sees, both in terms of its inception and its fulfillment, as “dramatic creativity” and “dramatic realization.”138 The moving idea, as we will see, is a “free” idea that “governs” history as much as essential structures. If created being is a moving image—which, indeed, remains image only to the extent that it is moving—it is because it corresponds to God’s moving idea. And since we have seen that the difference and therefore the movement of the creature have their ground in something like difference in God—as Balthasar explains, God must be not ossified movement but the source of all movement139—we understand that the meaning of the idea is, indeed, also in some sense dramatic: the divine idea is not a fixed, eternally predetermined schema already fitted out for the creature, but in fact as eternal, it likewise accompanies the creature all through its history (i.e., “providentially”). To see more specifically how Balthasar understands this relation, we turn to two sections of the Truth of the World.140

Essence and Existence in Idea In his consideration of things in the world, Balthasar never forgets their finitude, which is not so much a quantitative limit as a quality that runs through all created being.141 This leads him to see all things in terms of tensions. Even ideas, which would seem to be necessarily simple, do not escape this law of creatureliness. Thus, Balthasar draws out the very meaning of created things as itself a complex intersection of two tensions, namely, essence and existence, each of which is itself “polar”: essence can be understood as eidos (idea) or morphe- (entelecheia), and existence as either esse 137. TL 1:180–85. 138. Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ [= TD 3], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 532–35. See also a theological elaboration of the notion of divine ideas in TD 2:270, and TD 5:391. Moreover, in TL 1:238–39, Balthasar affirms an analogy between the ideas as mediating between God and the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, the imagination, which mediates between the senses and the intellect. 139. TD 5:72–73. 140. Specifically, TL 1:55–61, on “The Object,” and 179–206, on “Truth as Situation.” 141. TL 1:244–45. Balthasar compares the quality of finitude in created being to the sort of quality a connoisseur perceives in tasting a wine and judging its age and provenance. We might compare Balthasar’s sense of finitude to that of Heidegger, who also rejects the notion of finitude as a quantitative boundary. For Heidegger, finitude is the relationship to Nothingness; it follows, therefore, that man as the “placeholder of the nothing” is the most finite of all creatures. Balthasar would agree, it seems. But he would add, beyond Heidegger, that such finitude emerges specifically out of man’s relationship to the infinite. It is not the case that man becomes less finite the closer he approaches the infinite; rather, the contrary is true. The Gift of Being Given

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(actus essendi) or existentia (esse accidens). We might illustrate the intersection of these polarities thus: eidos

existentia

actus essendi

morphƝ Figure 2.

Each of the terms represents not a “part,” but rather the whole seen from a particular perspective. Thus, existentia is the whole being seen in its incomparable uniqueness, while morphe- is the whole being seen in its individual intelligible structure. Similarly, eidos is the whole seen in terms of its universal intelligibility, while the actus essendi is the inexhaustible fullness that comes to expression in this being. It is crucial to see that the polarity in each order, whether essential or existential, is an interplay of transcendence and immanence, which are not therefore juxtaposed as opposites but are rather various (albeit irreducible) dimensions of the same phenomenon. I will first say a word about this interplay in relation to each order, and then the following two sections will elaborate each at greater length. As we will see in these sections, the essential pole describes the various aspects of the structure, the formal meaning of a thing, while the existential pole describes the temporality of being.142 142. A comment on Balthasar’s terminology is necessary at this point. So far, we have been discussing mature works by Balthasar. The terms I have just mentioned, since they occur in a relatively early work, carry a somewhat different meaning here than they will later. Pérez Haro explains that Balthasar’s sense of the meaning of basic metaphysical principles changes over time due to the early influence of Przywara and the later influence of Siewerth (Haro does not mention Ulrich’s influence in this context). The shift, he says, is particularly evident in the understanding of the relation between esse and essence. Przywara, who is closer to German than to scholastic philosophy (Aquinas) on this point, had privileged essence (“So-sein”) over existence (“Dasein”), attributing the wealth and fullness of being in its possibilities to a thing’s essence, which is always only partially realized in any given moment of its existence. Thus, for him, esse is understood principally in the sense of “facticity.” Siewerth, by contrast, 78

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Balthasar expressly describes the relationship between the universal and the particular (which we will take here to mean the eidos and the - as a “polar” one,143 which means that it manifests a unity that morphe) is not monadic and a duality that is not dualistic. It is a polar relationship, specifically, because each aspect contains the other (asymmetrically), and so they can be understood only with respect to each other. For example, “just as humanity occurs only as man, so too man occurs only as humanity.”144 The universal contains the particular: the eidos, taken as universal idea, is truly transcendent of all of its instances (morphai). This means that it is not a mere generalization based on the similarity of individuals, what Wittgenstein referred to as “family resemblances.”145 Rather, it is who vehemently attacked Przywara for this sense of esse (see Sara, Forma y amor, 73), privileged esse, as actus essendi, over essence, as the inherent richness of being: the inexhaustible fullness of being is its “superessential” actuality rather than its (unreal) limitless possibility. (Fabro criticizes a similar misunderstanding of Aquinas, which he takes to be common and moreover reflected in Heidegger, in “Actualité et originalité de l’esse thomiste,” part 1, Revue Thomiste 56 [1956]: 240–70, esp. 251–60.) With regard to this development in Balthasar, Pérez Haro remarks: “La comprensión del esse, limitada en el primer Balthasar, crecerá, bajo el influjo de G. Siewerth, hasta llegar a la comprensión del ser como mediación no subsistente entre Dios y el mundo en el segundo Balthasar.” Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser, 117, n. 46; for a further elaboration of this observation, see 110–11. While Pérez Haro goes so far as to speak of a “first” and a “second” Balthasar, it does not seem to us necessary, even if Pérez Haro’s judgment about the evolution is just, to exaggerate the difference between these two periods in Balthasar’s work, as if the second simply corrects and replaces the first. Indeed, it seems that Balthasar never simply followed Przywara on this point (Jean-Marie Faux, who studied the relationship between the two thinkers, remarked that Przywara’s relationship to Balthasar was “important, although it cannot be called the influence of master to disciple.” “Un théologien: Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 10 [1972]: 1009–30, cited in James V. Zeitz, “Przywara and von Balthasar on Analogy.” Thomist 52, no. 3 [1998]: 476). There are references, for example, already in TL 1 to esse as the “source” of all of the essence’s possibilities (TL 1:194), and Balthasar also specifically contrasts the interpretation of existence as naked “thereness” (Dasein) with the fullness of esse (ibid., 188). Moreover, it is significant that Balthasar took his 1947 book over unchanged into the trilogy in 1985, which suggests that whatever shortcomings exist in the earlier work may be “filled out” in light of the later, and in any event are not irreconcilable. I would thus tend to agree more with Aldo Modo’s judgment, namely, that “l’influenza di G. Siewerth sullo sviluppo ulteriore della produzione balthasariana conduce ad approfondimenti, ma non a mutamenti sostanziali.” Hans Urs von Balthasar: Un’esposizione critica del suo pensiero (Bari, Italy: Ecumenica Editrice, 1976), 117. Accordingly, except where necessary, I will only rarely draw attention to differences, preferring to interpret any ambiguities in the direction of later developments and “deepenings.” 143. Balthasar’s treatment of the universal-particular relationship occurs in his elaboration of the “world of images,” specifically, TL 1:153–58, but I insert it here because of its appropriateness to our discussion. 144. Ibid., 154. 145. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1958), sec. 67, 32. The Gift of Being Given

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a strict identity, which exists as such an identity in each individual. Moreover, this also means that as a comprehensive unity, the universal idea likewise contains every possibility of its instantiations. As Balthasar puts it, no matter how much a single person may achieve, what he does always remains “merely” what a man can do.146 In this respect, the morphe- adds nothing to the eidos. On the other hand, however, the eidos does not exist as such; it exists always only in individuals. But this means that the particular has a certain relative priority over the universal. If the individual cannot add any further “possibility” to what is already anticipated by the universal, what it can add is the real actualization of the universal’s merely latent possibilities. In another respect, therefore, one could say that what the individual morphe- contributes to the eidos is everything.147 Balthasar goes on to say that each existing thing has two centers of unity, a general unity and a substantial unity. Since these are related as a polarity, we see that they are not extrinsically but rather intrinsically related to each other. They therefore cannot be separated. But neither can they be brought together, since each represents a certain mysterious “more” with respect to the other.148 He thus concludes that they can only be grasped as a movement, from the universal to the particular and from the particular to the universal. However, the gnoseological possibility must have an ontological ground. As we have seen several times already, polar unity requires a concrete “third” to preserve the polar nature of the relationship. We will see at the end of this section how action serves to bring these together. To borrow Przywara’s idiom, we could say that esse is both in and over essence, whether considered concretely or abstractly. However, since esse is not abstract possibility but rather superessential actuality, its mysterious fullness is primarily manifest in real beings, and esse is only relatively what stands “over” beings as what is “superadded” to their essence.149 Thus, we can take existence as esse accidens, or existentia. In this case, it is the mysterious “here and now” element of concrete being. However thoroughly we analyze a thing into its most minute qualities, we will not have the whole being: the qualities, as universals, cannot account for their particular configuration in this particular time and place. A thing’s existence, then, is a sort of surd element in relation to the essentiality of being, which in some thinkers is treated as the “facticity” of being. On the other hand, esse can 146. 147. 148. 149. 80

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TL 1:155. Ibid. Ibid., 150–58. Balthasar discusses these two senses of esse in ibid., 193–94.

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be considered in its fullest sense as the perfection of all perfections, and therefore as the fullness inherent in concrete beings. As nonsubsistent, it is the “givingness” of being, that which makes actual all that is actual and that which always has more to give than it gives. Existence, then, because of its difference from essence, is both what makes being full, and also what surprises us in the being’s facticity. Although these are both dimensions of a single cause, esse, they are irreducible to each other.150 In Being and Time, Heidegger asserted the primacy of possibility over actuality,151 presumably because of an identification of actuality with mere “presence-at-hand.”152 The critique of a “metaphysics of presence” is clearly indebted to Heidegger’s concept.153 However, insofar as this critique fails to see the superessentiality of actuality, understood as esse, it grasps only a reduced form of the phenomenon of presence. It is therefore forced to “overcome” the “obviousness” of actual presence in the direction of absent possibility, which represents a fullness only deceptively, as continuous withdrawal. If, by contrast, we see the irreducibly different aspects of existence as inwardly related within a common pole, we understand that fullness does not have to be sought somewhere other than in what is given.

150. “Nach beiden Richtungen also geht das Dasein [existence] über das Sosein [essence] hinaus: sowohl in der durch kein Denken bezwinglichen ehernen Tatsächlichkeit, mit der es sich gegen das Nichts absetzt und die ihm den Anschein einer unauflösbaren Einheit und Einmaligkeit verleiht, wie in der ebensowenig aufzuarbeitenden Fülle, die jeder denkenden Bewältigung durch Ordnung und Übersicht spottet.” Ibid., 211. 151. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), sec. 7, 63. When Heidegger makes this assertion, he is not speaking directly of presence-at-hand but rather to the state of phenomenology. Nevertheless, his remark represents a general judgment being made in Being and Time. Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown the connection between temporal presence and the derivative form of being, presence-at-hand, which lies at the basis of Heidegger’s elevation of the future as more fundamental. See his essay “The Marburg Theology,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 34–35, and in the same book, “The Language of Metaphysics,” 72–74. 152. See Fabro’s critique of Heidegger, “Actualité et originalité de l’esse thomiste,” 501–7, and also Schmitz, Gift, 105. 153. The “metaphysics of presence” is basically a pinning down of being to the “brutely given” (a term quoted from John Milbank, “Magisterial . . . and Shoddy?,” Studies in Christian Ethics, 7, no. 2 [1994]: 29–34, cited in Quash, 140), at the expense of the real mystery of “absence”: “We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, as substance/essence/existence [ousia], temporal presence as point [sigmè], of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity.” Jacques Derrida, cited in Pickstock, After Writing, 69. The Gift of Being Given

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Thus, we overcome the need to overcome a metaphysics of presence: no longer do we have to see actuality as the “brutely given,” cut off from life conceived as ever-new possibility, but we can understand it as the superpossible made manifest. Its givenness, then, is not an opaque banality, but a luminous gift, and being’s contingent “facticity” reveals itself to be a concrete sign of the mystery of the actus essendi, which is “evergreater” than any concrete being.154

Constellations (Essence in Existence) We may now develop Balthasar’s understanding of essence within the broader context of its relationship to the existential aspect of being. While we initially looked at the essential pole somewhat abstractly as the interrelation between universality and particularity, we can consider the phenomenon more profoundly in terms of the concrete meaning or intelligibility of a being. Now, just as the transcendence and immanence of existence to essence could not be separated, so too must we view the transcendence and immanence of essence to existence as inwardly related. Thus, it would be improper to separate the eidos (or ideality) from the morphe- (as reality) into two independent “things” that must somehow find a way to come - the concrete historical shape or Gestalt, is together. Rather, the morphe, - 155 the reality of the eidos, even while the eidos is the ideality of the morphe. But we can specify the relationship between morphe- and eidos even further. Balthasar asks, But at what point does the immanence of this essence (as morph-e) in existence give way to a growing transcendence (as eidos) that, as rising to the divine idea, finally coincides with it? Who can say? Things are always more than themselves, and their constantly selfsurpassing transcendence opens ultimately onto an idea that is not the things themselves, but God, and their measure in God. Things are turned to this idea, from which they receive, every moment anew, their ultimate truth.156 If we see the morphe- in its union with the eidos, then it is not merely immanent but is a transcending immanence, a form opened up constantly beyond itself. Not only does a concrete thing open up into the generality 154. Balthasar proceeds to discuss the “existential” mystery of reality as the “personality” of being: TL 1:188–92. 155. On the interplay of ideality and reality, see ibid., 59–61, 104–6. 156. Ibid., 59. 82

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of its idea, but it likewise simultaneously opens up horizontally in its concrete relations to other beings in history. Balthasar shows that existing things are entelecheiai. They reveal a certain inner plan that includes more than just themselves; it involves a network of relations in historical development. A plant, for instance, as Aristotle saw, exhibits an intelligence and order that does not have its source in the plant itself. In following this plan, “creatures fulfill purposes that are not immediately entailed in their essences [Wesen] alone.”157 Not only does the plant require the elements of its environment, and so can be said to include these things in a certain sense within its own plan, a plan that transcends the plant’s limited concrete form, but the plant can also in turn be used for food by an animal, or it may be plucked and presented in a bouquet as a gift. Conversely, the eidos of the plant indicates the general structure and laws that are given in the plant’s nature, as genus and species, and to this extent a relative abstraction from “historical contingencies” is legitimate.158 The rejection of the universal meaning of a thing not only compromises its intelligibility, but from a dramatic perspective, we could say that it collapses a fundamental tension inherent in being. Nevertheless, the whole idea of a thing is more than its universal essence; it includes the concrete mystery of the thing and the historical plan into which the thing is inserted and to which it contributes its part. The very meaning of a thing is always given in a context, and even if this context can be disregarded in order to attend to the thing’s universality, the context can also be integrated within that universality, and even thematized. Thus, Balthasar concludes, “the knowledge of this idea must therefore be definitive and normative, on the one hand, and historical and adaptive, on the other.”159 Considering the intersection of the two poles, we could say that essence, which is always interwoven with existence, may be considered more in terms of itself (and thus determinate, whether immanently as fixed morpheor transcendentally as definitive idea) or more in terms of existence (and thus historical, whether immanently as open entelecheia or transcendentally as involved in a larger plan). The whole meaning of a thing is thus not the assemblage of pieces, the abstract essence added together to the 157. Ibid., 57. 158. Ibid., 181: “Abstractio non mentitur.” In discussing mythos and the issue of abstraction in TL 2, Balthasar says that because the presence of God in the Incarnation includes but is not limited to myth, Christians do not have to take abstraction in every case as something negative: “Denn es könnte sogar Formen der sogenannten ‘Abstraktion’ geben, die Ausdruck einer bestimmten Tiefe der Leibhaftigkeit des Logos zu sein vermöchten” (239). 159. Ibid., 183. The Gift of Being Given

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equally abstract historical circumstances. It is the emergence of a transcendent meaning directly through and in the particular combination of circumstances. This is what Balthasar likes to refer to as a constellation (Sternbild), or a situation, or later, as a kairos (i.e., the “right time,” the culmination of significance). “Constellation” means that the convergence of elements is not a meaningless collection of things that just happen to find themselves together. Rather, they form a genuine whole, even if it is a whole that emerges in every instance historically. Balthasar thus intends the term “in the strong sense of something that presides over one’s destiny.”160 - historThe fullest meaning of a form, the convergence of eidos and morphe, ically considered, is “a matter of certain constellations of truths, whose particular composition, mixture, and coloring produce a particular oneof-a-kind synthesis, something like the moment of destiny brought about by a certain constellation in the horoscope.”161

Being and Time (Existence in Essence) The mention of kairos in particular points to the essentially temporal aspect of the mystery of a thing. In his essay “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” published a year before The Truth of the World, Balthasar claims that Heidegger, in Being and Time, performed a “masterful stroke in his transposition of the question of time from special metaphysics (cosmology) to fundamental ontology,”162 and that recent Catholic philosophy had not yet taken sufficiently into account the temporal aspect of Being. However, Balthasar remains critical of Heidegger for exhausting Being in its temporality, and he suggests that the Thomistic notion of the real distinction might allow us to find the mystery of time inside Being without for all that ultimately identifying the two. A year later, Balthasar writes: “This does not mean, of course, that being and time are the same thing. . . . [It] does mean, however, that the phenomenon of time belongs to the core of the creature’s ontological make-up, and that the philosophical analysis of time is the most adequate entryway to a living, concrete understanding of the real distinction.”163 The phenomenon of time, indeed, has a direct relationship to the mystery disclosed by the existential pole of created being’s structure, because the excess of presence that results from the actus essendi means that all 160. 161. 162. 163. 84

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of being cannot be given all at once. Rather, it requires the “gradualness” implied by temporality. Now, Balthasar’s analysis of time differs from Heidegger’s in two fundamental respects. First, whereas Heidegger interprets time in a primarily “subjective” way, following (but radicalizing) Kant, as identical with the “transcendental imagination,”164 or in Being and Time as the existential structure of the “disclosedness” of Dasein,165 Balthasar sees time first “objectively,” as a characterization or property of concrete being, but as an objectivity that at the same time includes subjectivity. Second, whereas Heidegger sees time in a sense as opposed to “eternity,” since the extases of temporality characterize the transcendence of Dasein in its finitude precisely in contrast to the eternity of immortality he takes to be merely an everlasting ontic continuation of existence,166 Balthasar sees precisely the openness of time to the “ever-greater” as an image of eternity.167 Hence, eternity, for Balthasar, is not a never ending, “past-bound” and dull “present” but more a “present” that is pure “future.” Now, Balthasar does not merely assert this characteristic of eternity; rather he draws it from the phenomenon of worldly time. As he explains, the polar structure of worldly being is not a mere negative, set over against the positivity of divine being; it is a “moving image” of that being. Correspondingly, the phenomenon of worldly time, which is as it were an expression of that polarity, itself is not merely negative, but it is a paradoxical “mixture” of the positive and the negative. In this respect, it both positively and negatively reveals something about the quality of eternity.168 When we discussed the existential pole in the structure of created being, we noted that the fullness of the act of being is not to be seen as separate from the “thereness” of concrete actuality, but is instead the openness inherent in concrete actuality to this “ever-more.” Balthasar spells this out further in terms of time. The present (Gegenwart), properly conceived, is not “indifferent being at hand” but is the mysterious disclosure of the existence of a thing, “with a sharp emphasis on the Da in Sein.”169 We understand it especially

164. See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 178–201, where Heidegger calls the transcendental imagination—in its receiving, reproducing, and anticipating images— “primordial time.” 165. Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 68, 384–401. 166. Ibid., 292. 167. TL 1:196. 168. Just as Balthasar said finitude should not be thought of so much as a qualitative limit but rather as a quality of created being, so too it seems that we should think of eternity not as an immense or even limitless quantity but rather as a quality. 169. TL 1:196. The Gift of Being Given

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as such when we see its presence as precisely an excess, and thus as a promise of more “to come.” The futurity of being (Zukünftigkeit) is precisely this presence that comes toward us (zukommt).170 Futurity, therefore, is the temporal expression of the sheer giftedness of being, an expression that there is more there than we can at any moment receive. The mutuality of presence and futurity, in this sense, is what gives being its “comparative character.” Futurity, in other words, is the fullness (transcendence) that is present (immanent) to being. But this comparative character is lost if we separate presence and futurity: presence then becomes dead fact, and futurity becomes no longer the presence of the unable-to-be-fully-grasped fullness of being but, rather, a deceiving absence, as limitless but unreal possibilities, which must precisely be contrasted with what is in fact given. Balthasar goes on to explain that the urgency of the fullness of being is fully revealed only when we consider the past. The “past,” in fact, in light of the foregoing, appears as a threat: it is the transitory nature of being, the constant reminder that what is present now as promise will flow away, never to return. It is therefore negative, but is of such a negativity as to highlight the “gift” character of being, insofar as proper “timing” and response are inherent to gift. Thus, the distinctiveness of the temporality of worldly being is a persistent call to decision, because the preciousness of the present, if not seized upon, will withdraw. The “negativity” of the past is therefore ambiguous. It can either be taken as part of the (positive) meaning of the gift of being itself, in which case it adds a note of urgency to the reception of existence, or it can be “focused on” as an end in itself, in which case existence is no longer open to its own inherent wealth, but is closed upon its bygone realities that are no longer real. If eternal life is the “future-laden present,” eternal damnation “would be a life whose present is turned eternally toward the past.”171 The created mystery of time thus forms an image of eternity by “reducing” the negativity of the past to the sheer positivity of the present future, all of which expresses the superabundance of the divine life.172

170. Ibid. 171. TL 1:198. 172. It seems strange that Balthasar should characterize the past as something simply negative and the future as simply positive. Indeed, insisting merely on these aspects would tend toward a kind of actualism, wherein everything that exists is to be momentarily “grasped” but nothing peacefully “held.” Although the decisiveness that Balthasar emphasizes is crucial, it seems that the “giftedness” character of being would require that this aspect be complemented and therefore relativized by a sense of duration and remaining in what is given. A life turned completely toward the past is no doubt hellish, but the relatively stable structures of reality, the living continuation of 86

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In short, the “existential pole” in the structure of created being reveals and receives illumination from the mystery of time. What is interesting to note, here, is how the need for decision is woven into the meaning of Being, since as time means decision, and time is a necessary quality of the real distinction, a distinction that permits the “ever-greater” of the act of being to appear concretely. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that decision lies within being. Decision is not something simply added to Being from without; it is in a sense the freedom that helps Being itself come to decision, a freedom that consents to the movement already inherent in Being, but which nonetheless in turn requires and waits upon this consent.173 The mystery of time as an expression of the polar structure of created reality means finally that Being cannot fully be what it is without the decision that allows it to make present its full wealth.174 Balthasar’s ontological interpretation of time leads us back to the term kairos, which represents the historical emergence of a “fated” constellation of events that calls for a decision. According to an etymology of kairos (which is probably legendary),175 the word refers to a god’s lock of hair. When a god would make his unexpected and momentary appearance to a hero, the hero could

tradition, and the memories acquired over the course of a lifetime, for example, are not for all that simply negative. Moreover, we might add as well that futurity is not only positive. Because it expresses the transcendence of Being over beings, which I have been referring to as the second distinction, it will always include in its finite form the element of Angst. Thus, perhaps it would be more adequate to say that eternal life is the transformation of futurity and “past-ness” rather than the elimination of the past for the sake of pure future. Ulrich expresses this possibility excellently: “Was sich als Weg erschließt und auftut, als Horizont der Zukunft zu erkennen gibt, dies erwächst aus dem Akt einer Selbstüberbietung, in der ich mich gleichsam vom Rücken her nach vorne hin ‘verlasse,’ ohne freilich dadurch meine Vergangenheit bloß durchzustreichen. Ich nehme sie vielmehr verwandelt in diesen Überschritt hinein mit und thematisiere in der Art einer Wiederholung eben das, was ich gewesen bin. Ich lasse vergessend los, weil ich die Kraft habe: zu erinnern.” Leben in der Einheit, 154. One can only wonder, if Balthasar had returned to a thematic consideration of the problem of Being and time in his more mature period when he had deepened his unique understanding of the ontological difference and the meaning of gift, whether he would have integrated these other aspects. 173. I will develop this notion more fully in the next chapter and in chapter 5. 174. Man’s intrinsic role in the meaning of being as helping being come to decision (der Krisis des Seins) is treated in great depth by Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo Abyssus. Moreover, Ulrich has also written a profound study of time, being, and intersubjectivity, “in conversation with Nietzsche,” Gegenwart der Freiheit (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1974). 175. Richard Onians offers an alternative etymology, which is less colorful but in fact conveys a very similar sense: The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 4th repr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 343–48. The Gift of Being Given

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“confirm” this appearance and make it real, only if he were quick enough to seize a lock of hair before the god departed. The grace of being, its evergreater richness, is a beckoning that calls for a nimble response.176

Action as the Convergence of Tensions Thus, the consideration of the existential pole of created being adds a temporal dimension, while the essential pole designates the structural dimension that gives created being meaning. If we were to separate the poles, each of these aspects would fracture and fall apart. The “thereness” of individual things would degenerate into the irrationalism of some forms of existentialism or nominalism, or else it would be sacrificed altogether to a kind of mysticism of “presencing” that disdains any particular instance of presence. On the other hand, the immanent forms of concrete things would be absolutized and allowed meaning only in terms of practical functionality at the expense of any theoretical distance or relative abstraction, or else the eidos would be simply cut off from its relation to the concrete and thus be transformed into the rationalistic monster of essentialism. The only way to avoid these various problems is to see every aspect simultaneously comprehended at once. Balthasar’s answer to this problem is in a sense the same as his answer to the problem of the unity of the fourfold difference. Rather than taking any one element as the starting point and trying to integrate the others on its basis, Balthasar sees the whole given at once in the divine idea. The divine idea is therefore not merely the eidos,177 as it may initially seem, nor is it the eidos in union with the - rather, it is the whole structure of created being taken at once. morphe; In other words, all that we said about Being in temporality is not something extrinsic to the idea of a thing, not a matter of particularities that come after its universal meaning and are therefore unrelated to its sense. Instead, historicity belongs essentially to the divine idea of a thing. A conventional reading of Platonism sees the divine ideas only as universal thought-contents, or forms. Balthasar, by contrast, sees the divine ideas not only as God’s thought of the creature but also his will for the creature.178 God knows creatures “contemporaneously” in their universality 176. We might say that, for Balthasar, kairos is the shape of concrete time, when we view it as the intersection of eternity and finite temporality: consider, for example, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2: Theological Styles: Clerical Styles [= GL 2], trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 67. 177. This is how Pérez Haro seems to interpret Balthasar: El misterio del ser, 112–14. 178. Balthasar refers to the idea ultimately as the totale Idee God has of his creatures, TL 1:58, which comprehends the plan into which the creatures are included. It 88

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and in their historical particularity.179 Moreover, God’s knowing is also the willing of the creature into existence; his idea itself is the source of the creature’s being.180 Although a finite mind is not capable of grasping all these aspects explicitly at once, finite being is nevertheless the unity of all these aspects gathered together in a single whole, and as such it manifests the unity that lies in God’s creative idea. This prevents the finite mind from ever simply isolating the aspects from each other. Quite to the contrary, to the extent that the truth that man grasps is always necessarily a participation in the truth that things have and are, which is in turn a participation in God’s own truth, human knowing will always exhibit implicitly all these aspects, it will always grasp one pole or aspect of the truth of a thing on the basis of an other, and it will finally itself be both fluid and certain to the extent that it forms itself adequately to the living reality it seeks to know. But if we remain here with the solution we run the risk of a sort of banal idealism, which simply makes gratuitous assertions about the home of truth lying in God, and equally gratuitous assertions that the being of things and their meaning are a participation in this truth. To avoid this risk, we have to ask in what way this hidden truth is accessible; in what way it is finitely “realized,” that is, made real. We faced a similar issue in the fourfold difference, and resolved it by pointing to a concrete method. And here it is necessary to do the same. Insofar as God’s idea is a moving idea, involving not only the abstract intelligibility but also the historical intelligibility, and indeed the very being, of a thing, the participation in that idea must likewise be a moving participation. Participation, then, is not simply what establishes any given being in itself, but because it designates a reality that belongs to a creature only as something transcending the creature, participation is an activity involving all the creature’s energies. To borrow an image Balthasar uses in a different context, a creature’s participation in the divine idea is similar to swimming in the sea. Regardless of the swimmer’s mastery at keeping afloat, he can never for a moment let his strokes simply cease. Similarly, the reception of being is never something a creature has simply finished doing. Balthasar emphasizes should be noted that if a conventional reading of Platonism sees the divine ideas as “mere” thoughts, the genuine Neoplatonic tradition interprets them as “thought-wills.” See, for example, Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt (N.p.: Kessinger Publishing, 1920), 5:8, 824c. In fact, this tradition may be the primary source of the insight, both in Balthasar and in Siewerth. 179. See Aquinas, De ver., 2, 5. 180. Siewerth developed at great length the notion of esse precisely as God’s “idea of ideas.” See Cabada Castro, Sein und Gott bei Gustav Siewerth, 200–202. The Gift of Being Given

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the fundamental receptivity that belongs essentially to every object as object.181 By its very nature, being is “ecstatic.” We need to consider this principle not only formally but materially as well. Being is not just open as such, but it is open for a task. God’s idea is a moving idea because it is an idea of a particular thing that simultaneously involves both the whole of Being as esse, the ever-greater fullness of all that is, and also the whole of Being as the concrete and historical totality of all beings. Because of this simultaneity, it is the same thing for a being to receive its own being (and identity and intelligibility) and to be placed at the service of the concrete totality that comprehends that being. It is the same thing, even if, within this unity, the two remain distinct when looked at, in a manner of speaking, from underneath. The paradigmatic instance of this “moving” participation in the moving divine idea, that is, the receiving of one’s being/identity and the receiving of one’s task, is Balthasar’s understanding of person as mission.182 Balthasar explicates this notion in part on the basis of an analogy with the actor playing his “assigned” role, filling it with his substance, and thus giving rise to a genuine character. In the present context, we must see that this paradigm has analogous counterparts all through the various levels of being. The point is that what could fracture into a dualism between being’s universality and particularity, its structurality (essence) and temporality (existence), and its being and action, here come together into one whole. What a being does—its work, its action, its activity: ergon183— both presupposes its being and is the “place” where that being is received, as we recall from Balthasar’s “dramatic principle” agere sequitur esse and esse sequitur agere. But, also, the being’s activity mediates between its particularity and its (abstract) universality, insofar as the concrete activity of a being is both where it actualizes itself as an entelecheia, that is, attains its end, which is what ultimately defines the being universally, and,

181. Ibid., 59. 182. See Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4: The Action [= TD 4], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 61, where Balthasar explicitly connects exemplary identity with mission. Cf., TD 1, on the distinction between “I” and allotted role (252–54), and “Transition From Role to Mission,” 481–643; cf. also Balthasar’s discussion of the distinction between person and “Geistsubjekt” in the development of his Christology, TD 3:203ff. Also, on “personality” as overcoming particular-universal dualism, see TD 5:391ff. On this theme in Balthasar generally, see Marc Ouellet, “Existence comme mission: L’anthropologie théologique de Hans Urs von Balthasar” (Ph.D. diss., Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome, 1983). 183. The Greek ergon, act/activity, is cognate with the German Wirk (as in Wirklichkeit) and the English work. 90

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because this end itself has as its ultimate meaning the service of and participation in the whole, it is also where the being “universalizes” itself concretely as the member of a concrete community. Blondel expresses this profound significance of activity: Action seems to me to be the “substantial bond” that constitutes the concrete unity of each creature by assuring its communion with all other creatures. Is action not, after all, the convergence in us of thought and life, of individual originality and social or even cosmic order, of science and faith? By translating all that is singular, original [inédit], a creative impulse in each of us, action is no less subject to the influences of both the lower world and the higher world: it proceeds from the universal and returns to the universal, but in doing so it adds a decisive element.184 In other words, each being has both an abstract and a concrete universality, and these are so to speak founded on the twofold particularity of a being in its inner being and its outward concrete activity. We might take an illustration from The Magic Flute. The “Three Boys,” who Tamino was told would be his guide, have a single counsel for him: “Be a man!” In other words, “Embody your universal nature!” This advice, however, is not imposed from without; it is merely the articulation of what had already been driving Tamino, burning within him, but what he himself could not name. At the same time, Tamino’s desire to be a man is not an “abstract” idea, even if it is genuinely universal. Indeed, the idea of being a man is immediately connected in Tamino’s imagination with a particular task, namely, the rescue of Pamina. The carrying out of this task, the realization of the deed, requires Tamino to be disabused of his quickly formed “prejudices” about the nature of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, which means that Tamino’s “immanent” plans have to be reconfigured in his being inserted in a larger order. The role he plays in this order is not something he could have anticipated ahead of time, even if carrying out his great deed serves this order and contributes an indispensable part to bringing it to completion. But his deed moreover fulfills him personally, fulfills him as a “being-in-itself,” while this fulfillment is in fact called becoming a 184. “L’Action me parait être ce ‘lien substantiel’ qui constitue l’unité concrète de chaque être en assurant sa communion avec tous. N’est-elle pas, en effet, le confluent en nous de la pensée et de la vie, de l’originalité individuelle et de l’ordre social et même total, de la science et de la foi? En traduisant ce qu’il y a de singulier, d’inédit, d’initiateur en chacun, elle n’en subit pas moins les influences du monde inférieure, du monde supérieur: elle vient de l’universel, elle y retourne, mais en y introduisant du décisif.” Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel, 36. The Gift of Being Given

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man, that is, realizing his universal nature. It is Tamino’s action that therefore brings about his own self-actualization, by “saturating” his “general” universality and at the same time “universalizing” his individuality concretely by actualizing the order of the “community” into which he is inserted. If we were to ask what in particular in this gathering of elements represents the divine idea, we would have to say it is the whole Magic Flute. And to see the full scope of this understanding of ideas, we would have to see that this example from Mozart’s opera illuminates not just human life and human activity, but in fact whatever is brought into existence by God’s creative knowing, which is every existing thing in the world. In a manner analogous to what unfolds in the plot of The Magic Flute, everything that exists finds the irreducibly different aspects of its being brought into unity in action.185 Balthasar’s concept of the providential divine idea thus allows us to harmonize and integrate Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle had criticized Plato for an incapacity to secure the unity of ousia (essence), which must therefore fall apart into a “heap” of abstract essences.186 He proposes, therefore, a concrete and dynamic sense of form by connecting energeia and entelecheia,187 and so he finds the concrete unity of a thing when it performs its task, which is the activity of a thing’s final causality.188 And yet if a thing achieved its unity only through action in the sense of spontaneity, that is, action “from below,” the being’s particularity and universality would once again fall apart: activity would be wholly immanentized and thus reduced to mere particularity, which in turn would be juxtaposed to a purely abstract universality. The only way to prevent the slide into rationalistic positivism, which seems an inherent tendency in Aristotelianism, is by understanding “Platonically” that the divine idea includes the full existential, historical, and horizontal plane of a being’s activity, so not only being, but action too, is a “communion” (parousia or koinonia) with a transcendent form.189 The spontaneity of action, therefore, since it too 185. Balthasar offers examples, particularly in art and love, where the most intimate and personal actions are simultaneously the fulfillment of (abstract) nature and the achievement of ends that lie beyond the individual, i.e., the ends of the species or the community: GL 1:445–46. 186. Cf., Aristotle, Meta., 8.6.1045a7–20. As often happens in Aristotle, this is a caricature of Plato, who in principle provides a possibility for “concrete unity” in his notion of the supraformal good, which brings unity to the forms. 187. Ibid., IX, 3, 1047a30. 188. Ibid., IX, 8, 1050a3–24. 189. Cf., Plato, Phaedo, 100d. All citations of Plato in this book refer to the translations provided in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). 92

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ultimately has the form of participation in an idea, is not just putting an already-received idea into practice; it is also and more profoundly the way an idea is received. Action, too, must be understood, in its spontaneity, as a gift “from above.” We would be tempted to think of the realization of an idea in the dualistic sequence of “knowing” and then “putting into practice” if we thought of ideas merely formally or essentialistically. It is crucial, therefore, that we see that the essential aspect of the idea is mediated by the actus essendi. This aspect is what gives action and interaction a kind of creative fullness. Whereas Blondel interpreted the “inexhaustibility” of action in terms of the always-inadequate translation of the “infinity” of the will, we have to see that this infinity is always subordinate to the “actual” infinity of Being itself. The divine idea, interpreted thus existentially, is manifest as a sort of never-failing “inventiveness” of Being, which is always and ever anew capable of gathering the fragments of reality into a meaningful form.190

Conclusion: The Originality of Being Aspects that I have just touched on here will receive further development later on in more specific contexts, particularly the phenomenon of consciousness, the relation of the activities of disclosure and knowing, and the implied relation of transcendence and immanence. But here we were concerned primarily with sketching the basic ontological principles that govern what will come later. To conclude this first chapter, I indicate more specifically how these principles are integrated. In the first section, I elaborated the complex structure of the fourfold difference. Although it is made up of irreducible differences, (the child’s) radical receptivity prevents it 190. Including the creative, existential dimension of being and even history within an idea would seem to suggest a Hegelian determinism. There is no room in this context for a full argument in response to this objection, showing how Balthasar differs decisively from Hegel on this point, even if it is true that they have much in common (see Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 210–11, and Henrici, “La structure de la trilogie,” 21). But it is possible at least to point out that such a determinism results only if we think of ideas essentialistically, or as purely conceptual in the finite sense, and then reduce the existential and historical aspect of being to the idea thus conceived, rather than expanding the sense of idea as paradoxically able to include both Being and essence in their utterly irreducible difference from each other. God’s ideas are therefore free ideas; their eternity does not exclude time, nor does it include it reductivistically, but rather comprehends time in its integral temporality and so in its “contingency” and “freedom.” The ideas are not flat abstractions, but four-dimensional “beings.” We would have to say that God’s idea knows a particular event in history, for example, from all eternity, but only after it happens! To say any less, to neglect either side of this paradox, would destroy the analogia entis. The Gift of Being Given

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from fracture. In the second and third sections, I elaborated the polarity of created being and its meaning in a more horizontal direction, and I emphasized that primarily because of the “moving” or spontaneous character of created being, the multiple and irreducibly different aspects do not fracture. I must now briefly show how these two dimensions are not contradictory, realizing that a full answer will have to be given over the course of the book. Ontological receptivity and spontaneity are not to be “balanced”; nor are they to be simply “harmonized.” Rather, they form a union, and they do so because they are asymmetrical: the radicality of the receptivity, since we understand it as pure gift, is what grounds the possibility of inclusion of the whole breadth of spontaneity. The key to seeing this unity is understanding the originality of Being, its Ur-sprünglichkeit. Being is the absolute first. It is the “creating” in God’s creatio ex nihilo, and so, preceded by nothing, it is a “spring,” creativity itself. The absolute primacy of Being means that what will later “unfold” as a distinction between the act of giving, the gift itself, and the act of receiving, are “primally” joined together metaphysically in the supercore of the actus essendi. The unfolding of this core in time is not merely a sequential process, but a lightning event, holding a fullness that will never be outstripped or overtaken. And yet this fullness does not happen in itself but only through the unfolding. Even if Being is creativity itself, it cannot decide on its own to create. What is more, it is not enough to say (merely) that God alone creates, because we have seen that the creative idea not only anticipates but is also attendant upon what is analogous to freedom in each being that exists, that is, the interiority that welcomes existence and thus welcomes itself. This interiority is paradigmatically expressed in man’s freedom, and his capacity for decision, and so it is here that we see most clearly expressed what occurs in fact in everything. Man’s decision works within God’s decision ultimately to help bring Being to decision, that is, to realize actuality. This is the essence of all creativity. As we will see, it also lies at the heart of the event of truth. Balthasar expresses the “categorical imperative” that follows from the event of Being thus: “Act in such a way, we are now told, as if you yourself, your fellow-man and fellow-object, owed your existence to a boundless grace.”191 How would we characterize the activity that Being thus inspires? If Being is ur-sprünglich, so too will such “beingish” activity be: namely, it will be a “springing forth” from the primal source. If in

191. GL 5:633. 94

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our “first act,” in our “be-ing,” we receive the “self-giving” gift of Being, the most profound way to receive it is in giving ourselves.192 Conversely, since our giving ourselves is the deepest way in which we exist, what we give when we give ourselves is our very being, is Being itself. To exist, then, is to pour one’s very substance into what one does. And this is not a sterile act of self-assertion but a genuine creativity; it is not the production of something (banally) novel, but a being creative in the creativity of Being.193 The whole act, then, lies beyond the passive/active alternative.194 Thus, the inclusion of action, time, and the whole horizontal order of being in motion does not come about in the first place because Being “coaxes” action through withdrawing into absence, but inclusively provokes all such spontaneity by virtue of an excess of its presence. It is precisely because Being is everything that the response can be so complete, full, and total. Activity is the more spontaneous the more it amounts to a releasing of the “allness” of Being even here, even now. But this means that the furthest extremes of movement and activity in the world, far from competing with a receptivity to Being, are in fact the expression of that receptivity. Existence, the most wonder-full of all gifts, is a total giving . . . as being given.

192. See the magnificent presentation in Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names, 4:10–13, where the Areopagite grounds the ek-static nature of all things in the fact that they receive existence from an ek-static (erotic) God. Ferdinand Ulrich often gives expression to the metaphysical simultaneity of giving and receiving: “Geben heißt: das Sein als Gabe, durch das ich subsistiere, in mir selbst gründe, tun. Die Gabe, durch die ich bin, tun, heißt: Sich geben.” Ferdinand Ulrich, “Zeugen und Verursachen: Das Machen und die schöpferische Armut der suchenden Macht der Liebe,” in Leben in der Einheit von Leben und Tod, 346. 193. Compare Plato’s “begetting in the Beautiful,” Symposium, 206e. 194. This principle, which is fundamental in Balthasar’s thought and appears everywhere therein, makes Donald MacKinnon’s comment almost incomprehensible: “The concept of receptivity is one Balthasar surely needs, and through Kant, he might have found his way to the notion of a receptivity which is as far from abject, passive acceptance as autonomy . . . is from blind obedience to despotic command.” Donald MacKinnon, “Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Christology, with Special Reference to Theodramatik II/2, III, and IV,” in The Analogy of Beauty, 173. The Gift of Being Given

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2

The Birth of Consciousness Consciousness is relation and thereby is interest, a duality that is perfectly and with pregnant double meaning expressed in the word “interest”: inter-esse, being between. —Kierkegaard

Consciousness is a sadly abstract-sounding word designating a reality that is no less rich in mystery than being itself. Its mysteriousness arises from the fact that while it represents, at bottom, the most secret inner life of the human being, it belongs at the same time in a certain sense to the world itself. Consciousness, as the scholastics once said and as Brentano and Husserl have reminded us, is always intentional, that is, it is always consciousness of the world. Now, though the of here clearly marks an “objective” genitive, it would be somewhat artificial in this case simply to deny therefore that it is in some profound sense equally “subjective”: as Balthasar says, being known is a certain way of existing outside of oneself, that is, existing in another.1 In other words, the object of consciousness, if it is not to be merely a lifeless surface and therefore essentially a projection of the knowing subject but the thing itself, must present itself to consciousness in its being. It must be seen to subsist there in some manner. This means that we could speak of the object of consciousness in some genuine sense as being also the subject of consciousness, as vitally sharing in consciousness, and perhaps as giving rise to it along with the knowing subject. The point, in any event, is to refuse from the beginning to understand consciousness as a closed circle, from within which the subject peers out, as from behind iron bars.2 Instead, the reality of consciousness itself demands

1. GL 2:346. Balthasar makes this observation in a presentation of Saint Bonaventure’s understanding of the mystery of being as manifestatio. 2. Robert Sokolowski presents this “egocentric predicament” in very colorful terms: “Consciousness is taken to be like a bubble or an enclosed cabinet; the mind comes in a box. Impressions and concepts occur in this enclosed space, in this circle 96

that we understand it as the “common” meeting place of subject and object, in the sense of belonging in some original way to both. This is not to say, however, that consciousness is not at the same time an “interior” reality, or that the “meeting” place requires the elimination of the difference between subject and object, their unique inner being, in order for it to be common. Quite to the contrary, the meeting place is itself the “inner” of being; the “ever-mine-ness” (Je-meinigkeit) of consciousness is not lost in being opened up to others, but, as we will see, it both finds its inwardness in this opening and allows the others to find the same. This is what constitutes the mystery of consciousness: being with others by being in them. It is important to underscore the mystery character of consciousness. Calling consciousness a mystery is not a rhetorical device that aims to make its subject matter interesting. Rather, for reasons similar to those we saw in relation to being, mystery belongs so essentially to consciousness, it would be correct to say that if we lose sight of its mystery, we will inevitably falsify consciousness in its basic structure. As we saw in the last chapter, mystery is the correlate of wonder, and it is essentially related to “freedom,” understood not in the first place as capacity for choices but as positivity and irreducibility. All of these related notions arose from a consideration of the ineradicable difference that lies at the heart of being and in some way constitutes it. Being is mysterious if it cannot be reduced to a single univocal “thought” object but has difference in it; it has a more than itself in itself. Similarly, if consciousness is going to be “consciousness of”—that is, if it is going to involve essentially a union of realities that are irreducibly different—it will be a mystery to the end.3 Forgetting the mystery of consciousness, and thus speaking “banally” about it, is therefore not just a stylistic issue: it flattens the reality, and to the same extent it makes the reality incapable of bearing the burden that is precisely assigned to it, namely, that of

and experiences, and our awareness is directed toward them, not directly toward the things ‘outside.’ . . . We get to things only by reasoning from our mental impressions, not by having them presented to us. Our consciousness, first and foremost, is not ‘of’ anything at all.” Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9. See the entire chapter, 8–16. 3. Pierre Rousselot refers to just this mystery in his thesis on the problem of love in the Middle Ages: “Le problème de l’amour est donc analogue à celui de la connaissance; d’un côté, on se demande si et comment l’être peut avoir conscience de ce qui n’est pas lui-même, de l’autre, si et comment l’appétit d’un être peut tendre à ce qui n’est pas son bien propre; de part et d’autre, une réponse affirmative semble de plus en plus difficile quand on approfondit davantage et la notion de conscience et la notion de l’appétit.” Rousselot, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. 6: Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au moyen age (Munster: Verlag der aschendorffschen Buchhandlung, 1908), 1. The Birth of Consciousness

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holding an other from within. The reality, thus conceived, cannot help breaking down into its most obvious elements: the subjective “sphere” and the abstract image. By contrast, only inspired speech is capable of holding together many elements at once in an integrated whole, because inspiration is an “ek-stasis,” a “going-beyond-oneself,” which alone is in a position to meet the other as other, without reducing it.4 These are preliminary observations, but they allow us to glimpse the whole that needs to be explicated. In a word, we could say that consciousness is, in its essence, a common form of inspiration (in-spiratio). We must let the object itself give the method. General accounts of the history of philosophy tend to describe the modern movement as a “turn to the subject.”5 Balthasar, himself, sees this shift, with some qualification, beginning already in the Renaissance.6 While it is clearly an exaggeration to say that the ancient and medieval world had no sense of the subject, consciousness, or interiority, the subject was generally taken as an “organic” aspect of a more comprehensive “objective” reality.7 Subjectivity was indeed present, but for the most part indirectly (not as an object) and often unspoken. It is only in the early modern period that consciousness, subjectivity, first becomes a theme in

4. The best elaboration between proper speech (style) and inspiration in relation to the reality of otherness is, of course, Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates caught the flaw in sophistry thus: “I paid attention only to the speech’s style. As to the other part, I wouldn’t even think that Lysias himself could be satisfied with it. For it seemed to me, Phaedrus, . . . that he said the same things two or even three times, as if he really didn’t have much to say about the subject, almost as if he just weren’t very interested in it” (235a). Uninspired speech, i.e., speech that lacks an interest in its subject, cannot attain the other as other, but merely repeats the same and so in the end does not have much to say. 5. See, for example, Schmitz, Gift, 89, where Schmitz says that in modern thought there has been a shift away from the “interiority” of being to the highlighting of human subjectivity. Consider also Hegel’s observation in this regard: “In this new age the leading principle is thought, the thought which originates from itself. . . . It is now the principle universally admitted, to hold fast to interiority as such, rejecting, and regarding as impertinent and lifeless, externality and authority.” Cited in Erich Przywara, “St. Augustine and the Modern World,” trans. E. I. Watkin, in A Monument to Saint Augustine: Essays on Some Aspects of His Thought Written in Commemoration of His Fifteenth Centenary (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), 251. 6. According to Balthasar, the Renaissance in fact merely recovered the sense of man as “microcosm” that was common in antiquity and the patristic period. But this old theme, occurring in a new context, took on a radically new sense, accompanied by a gradual “demythologization” of the cosmos and the religious controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See Balthasar, Love Alone: The Way of Revelation [= LA], trans. Alexander Dru (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 25–42. 7. For example, see Joseph de Finance, Cogito cartésien et réflexion thomiste (Paris: Beauchesne et ses fils, 1946), 5, where de Finance maintains that it is impossible to understand what Aquinas means by intellect (consciousness) without first seeing what he means by being. But, of course, the same can be said for nearly all of Greek philosophy. 98

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itself as a condition of possibility for objects, and therefore in some sense as a measure for them. If we say that Balthasar insists on the importance of consciousness and subjectivity, however, it does not necessarily mean that he fits into the modern, critical tradition, as Pascal Ide seems to suggest.8 Rather, consciousness plays a crucial role in Balthasar’s philosophy, as we will see, because of a dramatic sense of truth, which requires that reality not be seen simply as “out there” but as an objective reality, which, even if it is always more than me, is always something in which I participate, in which I am always already involved. At the same time, Balthasar can affirm the modern turn to the subject without becoming “modernist,” because he attends to the genealogy of consciousness, the objective history of its constitution. What seems and indeed is a very simple point, as we will see, is one of Balthasar’s most fundamental contributions in philosophy. His insight here brings a veritable sea change: subtle to the point of defying description but waking such a deep difference in the atmosphere, there is scarcely anything left untouched. Indeed, when we compare Balthasar’s approach to consciousness with the majority of contemporary accounts, we can hardly avoid speaking of a “paradigm shift,” revolutionary in precisely the sense Thomas Kuhn meant.9

8. Ide, Être et mystère, 154–57. Ide reproaches the original French translator of The Truth of the World, Robert Givord, for rendering the book’s title as Phénoménologie de vérité, presumably because it emphasizes this aspect. See ibid., 18, n. 4. Jean Greisch, by contrast, praises Givord for having understood Balthasar “mieux qu’il ne s’est compris luimême,” “Un tournant phénoménologique de la théologie?” Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 62 (1997): 81. An argument over this point loses its urgency once we understand that for Balthasar the phenomenological approach to being—which gives an essential role to consciousness—is precisely necessary for a genuine, “objective” metaphysics. Heidegger would be correct about the need to overcome metaphysics only if it is not possible for the infinite, or absolute, genuinely to enter into history. The meaning of this assertion will become clear through the course of this chapter, particularly in relation to the preceding one. It should be noted, as well, that Balthasar’s “aesthetic” approach is not related in the first place to Kant, as Ide suggests, but more fundamentally to Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint John of the Cross: See GL 1:112. 9. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). This is not to claim that Balthasar single-handedly created this new sense of consciousness ex nihilo. He is clearly indebted to many other thinkers in the past and also to his contemporaries. Hegel is evident in his understanding, as are the “dialogical” or personalist philosophers who in a certain sense complement and correct Hegel: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Ferdinand Ebner. (For a discussion of the import of these thinkers, see TL 2:45–53. See also Balthasar’s monograph on Buber: Martin Buber and Christianity. [Einsame Zwiesprache: Martin Buber und das Christentum] [Cologne/Olten, Germany/Switzerland: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1958].) But if all genuine revolutions are the cresting of a groundswell, the succinct and synthetic articulation of a preceding and comprehending movement or idea, then Balthasar’s notion of consciousness is indeed revolutionary. The Birth of Consciousness

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The issue of consciousness contains countless related issues: for example, the self, identity, self-referentiality, reflection, self-possession, intentional being, and so on. In this chapter, I will focus on a single issue, namely, the unity of consciousness in relation to the world of objects. This single issue, of course, bears immediately on the others mentioned, which in any event can be separated from each other only artificially. Nevertheless, I choose this particular aspect of the issue because it is directly related to Balthasar’s understanding of truth. As he says in The Truth of the World, the unity of consciousness (in its immediate relation to being) is what makes possible the grasping of an object as an existing object.10 In the Epilog, moreover, Balthasar mentions the “unity of apperception” explicitly as that which alone is capable of grasping a Gestalt.11 In order to appreciate the significance of Balthasar’s understanding of the unity of consciousness, I will first present, briefly and in simplified form, an aspect of Kant’s understanding of the transcendental unity of apperception, and the inherent aporias the subsequent thinkers in German philosophy immediately seized on and tried to answer, each in his own way.12 I will follow this presentation with a discussion of the pertinence of Balthasar’s own approach to this issue. This discussion will take place in several stages: (1) an analysis of the interpersonal origin of consciousness, and the relation of Balthasar’s understanding of this origin to critical and transcendental methods; (2) a discussion of consciousness as attunement to being; and (3) a synthesis of these two discussions in a presentation of the nature and unity of consciousness. Finally, I will draw out certain basic implications of this understanding in relation to the role consciousness plays in philosophy generally, and in a dramatic conception of truth specifically. Before I begin, it is important to note a couple of difficulties in presenting Balthasar’s understanding of consciousness. First, although Balthasar

10. See, for example, TL 1:133–36. Plato makes the same point in Theaetetus, 184b–87a. 11. E, 48. It should be noted that what Balthasar means by “unity of apperception” includes, but is not limited to, what Kant means in his most technical use of the term, i.e., the “I think” that accompanies, most often implicitly, all of a mind’s representations in order that they be representations of a single mind (which eventually means in order that they be representations at all). 12. To follow this development, I will draw primarily on a collection of essays on this topic, entitled Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy, ed. David E. Klemm and Günter Zöller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

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makes regular allusions to his particular understanding of consciousness (which, for reasons we shall see, he calls the phenomenon of the “mother’s smile”)—indeed, it may well be the most commonly mentioned point in his mature thought—he never presents a systematic philosophical treatment, but only lays out its general principles. The most sustained philosophical treatment of consciousness, nevertheless, occurs in The Truth of the World. But this presents our second difficulty: Balthasar’s most decisive insight into the constitutive nature of consciousness came after his composition of this book. We saw a similar evolution in his understanding of esse; what distinguishes the present case, however, is that Balthasar does not return later to a full philosophical analysis of consciousness, whereas he does in fact deal at length in his mature work with the nature of being. Thus, in order to get at Balthasar’s understanding of consciousness, I will fill out the general indications he leaves in his dialogue with the problem of consciousness in German philosophy, which will in turn allow us to “reweight” elements that are in fact present in the earlier work, and to integrate them in light of later developments. Keeping this evolution in mind provides a fruitful way of interpreting The Truth of the World. My general method in this chapter, therefore, will be to give a “problematic” reading of Kant and the Idealists, rather than attempting to appreciate the complexities that abound in these great thinkers, in order to obtain a set of problems that will allow us to unlock the rich implications of the paradigmatic passages in which Balthasar formulates the principles of his understanding of the “birth of consciousness.” Given the nature of these passages, this method will necessarily require some “speculative” development, but the goal of such development is merely to remain true to the original insight.

The Transcendental Unity of Apperception and the Problem of Self-Consciousness A perennial issue in philosophy, the soul’s unity and capacity for self-possession, became a central problem in the nineteenth century as a result of the terms in which Kant set the issue toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Kant and German Philosophy According to Kant, the finitude of human reason comes to expression in the fact that the scope of its knowledge is limited to that which can be sensibly experienced: “All our knowledge falls within the bounds of possible

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experience.”13 “Experience” here means that which is given to the senses. In order to avoid the “Humean quandary,”14 that is, the inability to ground universally necessary knowledge on the basis of a pure empiricism, Kant introduced the transcendental application of the categories of the understanding. While these concepts provide the rules governing appearances, however, only the faculty of reason can bring the manifold of concepts into a unity, and thus ultimately ensure their “objectivity.”15 Reason itself operates according to “concepts,” but since these must be distinguished from the concepts of the understanding since they can have no possible corresponding objects “given” in sense experience, and moreover so that, transcending the understanding, they are in a position to unify its multiplicity, Kant calls these the supersensible and purely spontaneous “ideas.”16 The first of these is the idea of the soul. In its purely formal role as that which “contains the form of each and every judgment of understanding and accompanies all categories as their vehicle,” the soul’s unifying function is expressed logically by the proposition “I think.”17 Kant refers to this epistemological function of the soul both as apperception and as selfconsciousness, and he insists on its indispensability in all knowing whatsoever: “Apperception is itself the ground of the possibility of the categories, which on their part represent nothing but the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, in so far as the manifold has unity in apperception. Self-consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and is itself unconditioned.”18 In other words, it is not the case that sense intuition and understanding have their own unity, to which the purely transcendental unity of apperception is subsequently added; rather, the unity at each step is in fact the manifestation of the unconditioned unity of self-consciousness. It therefore becomes

13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [= CPR], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), A 146 = B 185 (A refers to page numbers from the first edition [1781], B from the second edition [1787]). Balthasar, too, refers to this fundamental principle in Kant: “omnis cognitio incipit a sensu,” GL 5:490. 14. See Wayne Waxman, Kant’s Model of the Mind: A New Interpretation of Transcendental Idealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 163–82. 15. Kant, CPR, A 309 = B 365. 16. Ibid., A 327 = B 383–84. 17. Ibid., B 406. There is a good deal of debate on the relationship between this proposition and the soul as such, and also the extent to which this proposition must, explicitly or implicitly, accompany judgments or must merely in principle be capable of accompanying such judgments. On aspects of this debate, see Karl Ameriks, “Kant and the Self: A Retrospective,” in Figuring the Self, 55–72. 18. Kant, CPR, A 401. 102

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absolutely crucial, Kant says, whether this ground of unity can itself be in some way secured, or whether it is “only an idea.” Here we stand before a controverted point. Some commentators argue that Kant believed the unity of apperception is “manifest” through selfreflection.19 The problem with this notion, whether or not Kant held it, is that insofar as the subject reflects on itself, and thereby makes itself an object, it cannot know itself as it is, namely, as a subject. Richard Aquila, by contrast, argues that the purely formal unity of apperception, like all formal functions in Kant’s philosophy, requires a corresponding matter. Aquila finds that matter in the unity manifest in mental activity, and thus in the soul’s “inner sense.”20 Without entering into this complex debate, we can at least affirm that Kant strictly rejected any knowledge of the soul in itself, because knowledge is always the conditioned unity of theoretically grasped sense experience, and the soul is the unconditioned unitygiver. The exercise of the various paralogisms thus led Kant to the conclusion of a thought of the unity of consciousness as a simple, absolute, and identical subject, but without the corresponding “object” of an “existing” substance.21 The soul, in this respect, is a function of the supersensible project of reason, and precisely therefore is not an object of knowledge.22 Removing the soul from the scope of knowledge is a primary example of what Kant meant by his famous phrase “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”23 And this faith, here, takes the specific form of a “practical,” rather than speculative, idea, which, as we see later in the third Critique, concerns ultimately the subject’s activity in bringing about the ideal of a moral culture.24 The soul, we might say, does not know itself contemplatively (theoretically), but rather it spontaneously gives itself to itself in its work toward this

19. Dieter Henrich believes that the self’s “relation to the self is brought about by the subject making an object of itself.” Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1967). Cited in Karl Ameriks, “Kant and the Self,” 61. 20. Richard E. Aquila, “Self as Matter and Form: Some Reflections on Kant’s View of the Soul,” in Figuring the Self, 45. 21. Kant, CPR, B 427. 22. According to Frederick Beiser, one of the most decisive and characteristic turns in Kant’s philosophy, in relation to the philosophies of his contemporaries, was precisely this elimination of a strict correlation between reason and knowledge: The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 113–18. 23. Kant, CPR, B xxx. 24. Kant, Critique of Judgment [= CJ], trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), Ak 429–34 (Ak refers to the numbering of the Akademie edition, which is the standard edition of Kant’s works). The Birth of Consciousness

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cultural ideal, and in this practical work it “actualizes” the ground for all of its subsequent theoretical activity.25 As Balthasar explains, the problem with this notion of consciousness, as Kant left it, is twofold. On the one hand, there remains a chasm between the pure (transcendental) ego, represented by the purely “spontaneous” unity of apperception or subject of thought, and the receptive, empirical ego that is the object of the perception of the inner senses.26 On the other hand, the resultant sense of unity is in every case purely formalistic.27 These two are clearly connected, because the division between the transcendental and empirical ego is predicated on an identification of unity with form, explicitly to the exclusion of any a posteriori matter or content. A further problem with such a notion of the soul is that we can no longer legitimately speak in the strict sense of “self-consciousness” as consciousness of the self. The result of this difficulty is that the very thing that provides the possibility of knowing any other thing whatsoever is put in the precarious position of not being able to be itself secured, or in any way taken into cognitional possession. This problem, in general, was one of the driving engines of German philosophy. Although we cannot explore any one of these thinkers at length, a review of some of the basic attempts at solving the problem can be helpful in filling out the issue at hand. As we will see, this single problem reveals a remarkable unity in all these philosophies.

25. For Kant, reflection on reflection is the purely spontaneous activity of the positing of positing, CPR, A 261 = B 317. The passage from Kant to Fichte is, thus, not a very great step indeed. 26. Kant himself insists that this dichotomy is absolute: “the least object of perception (for example, even pleasure or displeasure), if added to the universal representation of self-consciousness, would at once transform rational psychology into empirical psychology,” i.e., into things that represent for Kant irreducibly different realms, CPR, A 344 (emphasis mine). Aquila’s notion that the unity of apperception is manifest within inner sense as form to matter is provocative, but insofar as he regards the manifestation of unity in mental activity as the projection of the unity of apperception and therefore as spontaneity, he raises the question of how it is possible to be aware (receptively) of this unity itself, which can only be spontaneous in Kant’s terms. Kant, it seems, refuses to talk of any awareness of unity, but mentions merely an inference of unity as the condition of possibility for any manifold. An awareness of unity, indeed, would require the complete inversion of Kant’s system, since he always insists on moving in precisely the other direction. Thus, he says, it is an illusion to think that the unity of inner sense is an actual perception of the soul: “We can thus say of the thinking ‘I’ (the soul), . . . that it does not know itself through the categories, but knows the categories, and through them all objects, in the absolute unity of apperception, and so through itself.” Ibid., A 402. 27. Balthasar mentions both of these points in GL 5:495–96. 104

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte, first of all, sought to ground the soul in itself and thereby finally bring “unity and coherence into the entire human being.”28 He did so, as Günter Zöller explains, by uniting the knowing and doing of the subject in a notion of consciousness, not as a thing but as a pure activity. The being of the “I” is “to posit itself as positing,” which Fichte refers to as the “intellectual intuition,” and which he offers as a “replacement” for the Kantian “I think.”29 If both what posits and what is posited are identically equivalent to “positing,” there is thus no difference between subject and object. They are identical and therefore absolute in the activity of positing. However, the transitive nature of the activity of positing seems, no less than the activity of self-reflection, to leave in place a fundamental dualism. Thus, Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both the notion of self-consciousness as reflection and Fichte’s “overcoming” of this notion through pure self-positing. He proposed, by contrast, that the unity of consciousness is a union of thinking and being, that it, as a perfect unity, “precedes” the mediacy of reflection, not in the spontaneity of positing, but in the pure receptivity of being posited: that is, in the immediate consciousness of the absolute feeling of dependence (schlechthinniges Abhängigkeitsgefühl).30 However, the conception of immediate self-consciousness as das Gefühl (feeling) faces the problem of accounting both for the subsequent capacity of a (mediated) thinking “I” within this immediacy,31 and also for the “objective” validity of what he himself takes to be purely subjective.32 Schelling, in his “early middle” period, strives to overcome the “infinite contradiction” between the infinite “activity” of unconscious nature—the immediate unity of thought and being, subject and object—and the finite consciousness of mediated human reflection, in the “genius’s” production 28. Fichte, cited in Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1. 29. Günter Zöller, “An Eye for an I: Fichte’s Transcendental Experiment,” in Figuring the Self, 83. From what we have seen, however, in Kant’s way of understanding the soul’s self-reflection, Fichte’s turn is not so much a “replacement” but a making explicit of a latent structure. 30. See David E. Klemm, “Schleiermacher on the Self: Immediate Self-Consciousness as Feeling and as Thinking,” in Figuring the Self, 174–76. 31. Klemm rejects the criticism that Schleiermacher’s immediate consciousness is “subjectless”; ibid., 174. However, to do so on the grounds that the subject is always “potentially present” in the immediate self-consciousness merely begs the question. How, then, does Schleiermacher account for the passage into actuality as anything other than a loss of this immediacy? Or, to put it another way, how does the immediate consciousness of self allow for the mediated consciousness of a self that knows and reflects? 32. On Balthasar’s criticism of this aspect of Schleiermacher, see LA, 29–33. The Birth of Consciousness

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of art. As Richard Velkley puts it: “This intuition, combining the unconscious production of nature with conscious human reflection, is the wonder, the incomprehensible gift, the grace granted by nature, which makes possible the impossible: the wholly unexpected harmony that philosophy seeks.”33 But, Velkley continues, the contingency and ephemerality of this “solution” left even Schelling himself unsatisfied. In his later thought, he therefore offered a more universally “tragic” approach, which had the self endlessly eluding itself and yet simultaneously enriching itself with the Socratic wisdom: I have attained myself in the “knowing non-knowledge” that I cannot attain myself.34 We see a similarly “tragic” conception in the contemporary “philosophical poets”: Novalis held that the Absolute and therefore genuine self-consciousness is attained only in the renunciation of it,35 while Friedrich Hölderlin sought the ultimate reconciliation in the experience of beauty, which, in its most perfect form, means precisely the death of the “I.”36 Finally, there is Hegel. In a profoundly new twist to the problem, Hegel affirms that the Absolute is not original but rather ultimate: “Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is”; “only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself— not an original or immediate unity as such—is the True.”37 We thus arrive at exactly the opposite pole from which we began. If Kant’s “I” had to be purely abstract (i.e., to exclude all content) in order to be “one,” Hegel’s needs to be comprehensively concrete (i.e., to include all content) in order to be one. In other words, for Hegel, the “immediacy” of the “I” in relation to itself cannot exist prior to all mediation but only posterior to all mediation. Leaving Hegel’s approach aside for a moment, we notice a remarkable similarity in all these attempts at solving the problem of the unity of selfconsciousness in relation to the world. Each is governed by the assumption that reflection, with the mediation it necessarily entails, introduces

33. Richard Velkley, “Realizing Nature in the Self: Schelling on Art and Intellectual Intuition in the System of Transcendental Idealism,” in Figuring the Self, 158. It should be noted that this approach, in 1800, was not Schelling’s last word on the problem. He shortly afterward put forward a more systematic Identitätsystem and later reintegrated a sense of the unpredictability of freedom in his philosophy of mythology and his “positive” philosophy of revelation. 34. See Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1993), 136. 35. See Jane Kneller, “Romantic Conceptions of the Self in Hölderlin and Novalis,” in Figuring the Self, 139–40. 36. Ibid., 144. 37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10–11. 106

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the distance that always attaches to otherness, and therefore that in every respect it represents a fall from an original unity. Reflection, however, is meant to be actual “taking-hold-of-oneself”: self-possession. If this is the case, then what one “possesses” in reflection, thus conceived, is never oneself, and what one is can never be possessed. Selfhood proves to be, at its heart, frustration. We may add that this difficult problem does not affect only German Idealism. In his presentation of Aquinas’s notion of consciousness and self-reflection, de Finance remarks that the unity of consciousness must be ultimately explained by the substantial unity of the individual. What senses, what wills, and what thinks, is not sense, will, or intellect: it is the concrete person. . . . Rather than disclosing to us the profound core of our powers, [reflection] gives us immediately only the network of their activities. . . . But the unity of this network appears conditioned by a deeper unity, the presence of which the soul perceives but without being able to contemplate it directly. Beneath the multiple activities that follow one upon the other or intrude upon my consciousness, there is a mysterious center wherein I can feel with certainty that everything converges. Only—and this is the paradox—this center of thought does not lie within my thought. Its reality is evident to me—and when I try to fix it in order to perceive it in itself, it eludes me.38 If we force this paradox in its most extreme sense (more extreme, to be sure, than de Finance here understands it), we separate consciousness and unity; what we have is a complete fragmentation of self-conscious being. If, on the one hand, we grant that the unity of self-consciousness is not a reflective self-possession but rather pure immediate feeling, then any reflective consciousness of oneself, and the duality that it inescapably implies, is again another “fall” from unity. Or if, by contrast, we remove all receptivity from self-consciousness and make it a kind of self-positing, we are eventually left with two alternatives: either (1) it is a pure identity 38. Emphasis mine. Joseph de Finance, Cogito cartésien et réflexion thomiste, 44–45: “Car l’unité de la conscience doit s’expliquer, en définitive, par l’unité substantielle de l’individu. Ce qui sent, ce qui veut, ce qui pense, ce n’est pas le sens, le vouloir ou l’intellect: c’est l’homme concret. . . . Au lieu de nous découvrir le noeud profond de nos puissances, elle ne nous donne immédiatement que l’entrelacement de leurs activités. . . . Mais l’unité de ce réseau apparaît conditionnée par une unité plus intime, dont l’âme perçoit la présence sans pouvoir la contempler à découvert. Sous les multiples opérations qui se succèdent ou interfèrent dans ma conscience, il y a un centre mystérieux où je sens bien que toutes se nouent. Seulement—et c’est là le paradoxe—ce centre de la pensée n’est pas intérieur à ma pensée. Sa réalité m’est évidente—et quand j’essaie de le fixer pour le percevoir en lui-même, il me fuit.” The Birth of Consciousness

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that excludes everything else, in which case we have the pure formal abstraction of Kant’s transcendental unity, which has no relation to the “real,” that is, empirical “I,” or (2) it is a pure actuality that includes everything else, in which case we have no way of distinguishing any finite mind from the mind that creates the world and holds it in being. Here is where Hegel appears: he reveals thereby that he does not have a different conception of the relation between immediacy and mediacy from the other thinkers we have been discussing, but only sees them in a different order, in that he cannot avoid strictly identifying any given thinking subject with the (Aristotelian) unmoved mover, that which is the act of everything that is in act, that is, everything that exists.39 Clearly, this is not far from Fichte’s own understanding of the “I.” In short, the only possibilities these basic assumptions allow are the “I” as irrational nature or feeling, the “I” as pure abstraction, or the “I” as God.40

Aristotle and the Self-Moving Soul Before turning to Balthasar’s own approach to the issue of self-consciousness, it will be helpful to turn first to Aristotle, whom I have just mentioned. Although Aristotle does not of course engage in the “modern” problem of self-consciousness, his discussion of the issue of “movement” in the soul bears a remarkable similarity to the problem we have been discussing, and in a “symbolic” way it serves creatively to synthesize what we have just seen, introducing a new dimension that will prove helpful to us later. In fact, if we grasp it deeply enough, we see that it is not merely similar but is the same problem.

39. This affirmation is not, of course, accepted by all Hegelian scholars. I do not intend it as the summing up of his philosophy, which is indeed one of the richest and most subtle in the history of thought, but merely to point out what seems to be demanded in a basic sense by the logic of his assumptions. It is perhaps not accidental that Hegel cites the entire lengthy passage from Aristotle on the self-thinking thought at the end of his Encyclopedia, as the conclusion, as it were, of the whole system. 40. This is somewhat oversimplified: there is also the “I” as dead (Hölderlin), which is not altogether unrelated to Schelling’s (and in a sense Novalis’s) idea of a knowing unknowing, or a renunciation made wise. But this notion contains a deep ambiguity, which seems inevitably to incline Schelling toward a kind of tragic irrationality. Kenneth Schmitz, in fact, points out evidence of a kind of Gnosticism in Schelling’s (and Hegel’s) philosophy: see “The Transfiguration of Gnosis in Late Enlightenment German Thought,” Communio: International Catholic Review 24 (Winter 1997): 691–712. A consistently positive understanding of this principle, that is, an “unknowing” that is genuinely also a knowing, requires, as we shall see, a more positive sense of being than Schelling has. 108

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One of the first issues Aristotle raises for himself in discussing “early opinions” about the soul is whether the soul can be “self-moving,” and if we understand movement not only physically but metaphysically, we see that the problem of self-consciousness in its basic logic is the same as that of self-movement. Now, Aristotle says that the soul cannot be a self-mover. One of the major arguments he offers against this idea has to do with the question of the unity of the soul. First of all, the soul must be one, because only such a noncomposite unity would enable it to know, which is one of the soul’s primary activities;41 furthermore, the unity of the ensouled being implies a single unitive principle, and so if we were to think of the soul as a complex array of functions, the single principle that holds these functions together, rather than the manifold of functions itself, would most appropriately be called “soul.” To avoid an infinite regress, we must eventually reach the ground of a wholly noncomposite first principle.42 On the other hand, movement, as Aristotle shows both here in the De Anima and in the Physics, always necessarily implies divisibility, or complexity:43 at the very least because that which both moves and is moved necessarily contains difference.44 In this respect, a self-moving soul could not move itself wholly but only incidentally, since that which moves is stationary with respect to that which is moved. This problem leads Aristotle to think of the soul not as a self-mover, but as that which moves others while remaining itself unmoved.45 More specifically, it leads him to posit an immovable “kernel,” within the soul—the nous—which seems on the one hand only indirectly connected with the rest of the soul, understood as the actuality of the body, by which we live, perceive, and think,46 while on the other hand, it seems to “converge” in the end with the mind that makes all things, which is, like the nous, an unmoved mover.47 The relevance of Aristotle to our discussion of the problem in German Idealism should be clear. Real self-consciousness would require the possibility of the soul’s moving itself as a whole, which seems not to be given because of the duality implied, or else to “move itself” as being the

41. Aristotle, De Anima, 1.5.411a23–25. 42. Ibid., 411b5–13. 43. See Aristotle, Physics, 7.1.242a15, and also ibid., 8.4.255a12–15: “Insofar as a thing is one and continuous not merely in virtue of contact, it is impassive: it is only insofar as a thing is divided that one part of it is by nature active and another passive.” 44. Aristotle, De Anima, 1.4.409a4. 45. Ibid., 409a17. Cf. ibid., 1.2.406a3–5; and 1.5.411a29–411b1. 46. As “capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers,” and as that alone in the soul that is capable of surviving death. Ibid., 2.2.413b24–30. 47. Ibid., 3.5.430a14–25. The Birth of Consciousness

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comprehending totality of all movement in the universe at once. But there is a third possibility, which Aristotle in principle catches sight of in the Physics but does not mention here. If Aristotle had integrated this possibility into his thought at this point with all its implications, it would have entailed nothing less than a radical upheaval in his whole sense of the mind. The possibility is that the soul moves itself totally, not incidentally, by being moved by another.48

Consciousness as Birth: Donum Doni The phrase “birth of consciousness” is in a nutshell the essence of Balthasar’s approach to the issue we have been discussing. However, he uses it only once, in passing, in an analysis of the “origin” of language. The passage is worth quoting because it touches on all of the themes we will have to develop: “The birth of the word has its ground in the mysterious birth of self-consciousness, which does not so much ‘emerge’ [entsteht] as it is ‘awakened’ to itself in the capacity to interpret an appearing image as the call of a Thou: the child understands the smile of his mother in such a way that, behind the world of images, the world of being as a whole is lit up: simultaneously in the I and the Thou, in the interior and the exterior.”49 In his earliest philosophical writings, Balthasar insisted on the need to begin with the identity of Being and consciousness, since that which is not given at the outset will not be able to be constructed later; in this specific sense, he affirms that Descartes’s point of departure (the cogito) is basically correct.50 Although he never tempered the insistence that Being must be present to consciousness from the very beginning, Balthasar nevertheless began to complement this insistence with the claim that this presence needed to be “mediated” by its historical—and interpersonal—coming to be.51 This shift may seem at first to be a move from a philosophically

48. See the brilliant argument Aristotle makes in the Physics, 7.1.241b25–242a16: that which moves itself essentially is in fact moved by another. 49. TL 2:231: “Die Geburt des Wortes hat ihren Grund in der geheimnisvollen Geburt des Selbstbewußtseins, das primär nicht ‘entsteht,’ sondern zu sich selbst ‘erwacht’ in der Kraft, ein erscheinendes Bild als den Anruf eines Du zu deuten: das Lächeln der Mutter wird vom Kind verstanden, wobei hinter der Bildwelt die Welt des Seins im ganzen sich lichtet: gleichzeitig im Ich und im Du, im Innen und Außen.” 50. Cathphil, 180. See also TL 1:43–44, 93, 164–70. 51. Not, however, as if the interpersonal relation is itself unmediated. Rather, as we have already many times seen, and as the quotation from TL 2 itself already suggests, the interpersonal relation is itself mediated by being: they mediate each other reciprocally and asymmetrically, which means further that each likewise represents a certain immediacy with respect to each other. 110

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rigorous, systematic starting point to a more empirical, perhaps even positivistic, point of departure. In fact, however, we shall see that Balthasar’s method refuses these alternatives from the outset. A philosophically rigorous approach requires a unity between thinking and being, but this unity has to be given, and what is more, it can be given only within the fundamental personal event of being welcomed into conscious existence. At the same time, as Schelling saw, a “systematic” philosophical approach needs to “begin” as originarily as possible: in 1801, Schelling accused Fichte of “philosophizing about philosophizing” rather than entering directly into philosophy itself, because Fichte started, according to Schelling, with the already-completed structures of consciousness. Thus, if Fichte indeed penetrated to the first foundations of conscious experience, he nevertheless began merely with the “cognitional beginning” and not the “real beginning,” and so he left the essential behind already at the outset. But, while Schelling thus opts to begin “really,” with the infinite unconscious, a beginning that binds him inescapably to a kind of irrationalism, Balthasar is able to offer a beginning that is both real and conscious, and so he fulfills the criteria for philosophical rigor. But this beginning does not fulfill these criteria without radically transforming them: in the end, we will see how Balthasar’s approach to consciousness recovers philosophy’s ancient vocation to totality without thereby forcing it to become “system.” In any event, we should note that Balthasar’s starting point is the beginning of all beginnings in a literal sense: not only does he begin as originarily as possible in Being but likewise as originarily as possible in real history. The child in his awakening both to himself and the world within the unsurpassable goodness of his mother’s love, as we saw in the last chapter, is a beginning that is both relative and absolute, inasmuch as it is a historical embodiment of the comprehensive whole. The most profound presentation of this mysterious and “fateful” event occurs in the first pages of Balthasar’s 1967 essay “Movement toward God.” The opening sentences show immediately how far Balthasar stands from the Kantian approach of transcendental subjectivity: The little child awakens to self-consciousness in his being-called [Angerufensein] by the love of his mother. The spirit’s being raised up to alert self-possession is an act of simple fullness, which can be broken up into diverse aspects and phases only in abstracto. It is not in the least possible to account for this event on the basis of the formal “structure” of the spirit: sensible “impressions” that bring into play an ordering, categorial constitution [Verfaßtheit], which in its turn would be a function of a dynamic capacity to affirm “Being in The Birth of Consciousness

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general” and to objectify the determinate and finite existing object present to consciousness.52 There are a number of points in this rich passage that deserve attention. The first is to notice that the awakening to self-consciousness, or what amounts to the same, to self-possession, is identical with the Emporkunft des Geistes (“the spirit’s coming up” or “being raised up”). The preposition empor, meaning “up,” or “upward,” coupled with the verbal noun Kunft, formed from kommen, suggests a movement that is achieved at a point beyond the spirit. If this movement is the same as the achievement of consciousness, it means that the self comes to itself only by coming out of itself or, more concretely, only by going to another, indeed, by being raised up by the other, to the other. To grasp the significance of this point, we might compare its basic direction to the approach taken by Husserl. Husserl overcomes the subjectobject dualism by showing that the world of objects is always already disclosed to consciousness; that is, the object is already in the subject. While not by any means denying this point, Balthasar goes one step deeper into the origin of this phenomenon. The object, he says, is always already in the subject because the object has first called the subject to itself (the object). What results is a profoundly different sense of “objectivity” from that which we are accustomed to find in philosophy since the sixteenth century,53 although the real father of this sense, at least since the Middle Ages, is Goethe. I will discuss this new sense of objectivity when we discuss the role of Gestalt in the event of truth in the next chapter. What we already see here, in any event, is that the “objectivity” of the object is not in the first place “constituted,” “merely” theoretically through merely intellectual rays of intentionality, radiating outward from a static center of subjectivity; instead, the objectivity of the object is given to the subject in the subject’s going out of itself, or, more accurately, being called outside of itself, to meet the object, in a movement that is intellectual, but more than intellectual. This is not at all to deny that the subject constitutes the objectivity of the 52. MTG, 15 (translation modified). One of the most thorough studies of the implications of Balthasar’s starting point, the awakening to consciousness through the call of another, for his difference from the transcendental approach is the dissertation by Lorenz Gadient: “Wahrheit als Anruf der Freiheit: Hans Urs von Balthasars theodramatischer Erkenntnisbegriff in vergleichender Auseinandersetzung mit der transzendentalphilosophischen Erkenntniskritik Reinhard Lauths” (Ph.D. diss., LudwigMaximilian-Universität, Munich, 1997). 53. See Christophe Potworowski, “An Exploration of the Notion of Objectivity in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 48, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 137–51, esp. 139–45. 112

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object; it is only to insist that the subject’s own movement of constituting is not “hurled” from a great distance at the object; it is in fact an intimate participation in the object’s own condescending movement, the characteristics of which we will see spelled out as this chapter proceeds. A nice example of such a sense of objectivity can be found in Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities.54 Rather than “subjectively” taking the other “in,” according to preestablished conditions of possibility, and therefore according to the subject’s own measure, in this sense of objectivity, the subject actively goes out “objectively” to the other on the strength of the other’s invitation and is actively received there. Objective consciousness, then, has essentially the structure of being invited (receptively), going (spontaneously), and being received. But the whole is a single event. Now, precisely because of the “objectivity” of the mother’s smile, the child’s “subjectivity” is guaranteed. Insofar as subjectivity requires transcendence, and transcendence means being outside of oneself, then, as Balthasar put it, consciousness cannot be simply derived from the spirit’s a priori structures. What is thus derived remains necessarily identical to the subject himself. Here we have the heart of the problem that arises with Kant. Beginning with the a priori structures of consciousness as already complete in themselves, the only way to conceive of transcendence, and thus unity, is as pure spontaneity. But pure spontaneity never reaches an other as such but is always only itself. It may be “transcendental,” but it is never genuinely transcendent. It would be wrong, however, to understand this constitution of consciousness as “pure receptivity,” if we mean something opposed to spontaneity; that is, if we mean “passivity.” Spontaneity is clearly an inalienable aspect of consciousness and subjectivity; pure passivity—if there could ever be such a thing—would be indistinguishable from the pure inertia of what the scholastics meant by prime matter, and which they took for granted could never exist as such. Rather, we have to see this “pure receptivity” as simultaneous with, and inseparable from, total spontaneity. To do so, we must see what distinguishes Balthasar’s approach from the traditional Aristotelian-Thomist notion of self-consciousness as arising not before but simultaneously with consciousness of the other.55 Indeed, 54. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 194: “We do not get to know people when they come to us; we have to go to them to learn what they are like.” 55. Josef Pieper, in Wahrheit der Dinge, 70–71, argues, against Nicolai Harmann, that the “subject” does not “constitute itself” as the subject of objects, nor does it first “posit” itself as the bearer of a relation to the world. Rather, the relation to things in the world is given in human nature, and so man cannot help but find himself alwaysalready “in” relation to things, in a sense prior to the use of his freedom. The Birth of Consciousness

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at first it seems that Balthasar is not saying any more than what this traditional principle had always affirmed, which may have been forgotten after the Middle Ages but which has been recovered in a sense by phenomenology and recent Thomism. Indeed, that consciousness is always already involved in the world is a principle that Balthasar himself clearly affirms.56 What distinguishes his understanding of this principle from others is that whereas the traditional notion tends to begin “abstractly” with the already mature mind, involved in the world and finding itself reflected back to itself therein, Balthasar begins concretely with the real beginning, the child’s coming to himself, which is the original experience that grounds the possibility of being always already involved in the world.57 What seems like a minor point reveals its supreme significance the moment we consider the concrete content of that original experience. The mother’s smile is the outward expression of her love for the child and thus her “self-gift” to the child. The “positivity” of this original experience, which does not allow at this point any “room” for the child to take a “skeptical distance” (which would already presuppose a formed consciousness), is what enables the child to “read” the (noumenal) being of the mother—who gives her self in the smile and not just the physical movement of her curling lips—immediately through the mediation of the (phenomenal) appearance. It is not merely immediacy, which the child would not be able to read, or interpret, since doing so requires the movement that only the difference of mediation can allow. Nor is it merely mediation, which would require from the child a capacity for “reflective” inference that he cannot possibly yet possess. Instead, it is a mediated immediacy, a presence that bears within itself an “open space.” This open space within the positivity can be put more concretely: the spontaneous gift of self on the part of the mother is not mere spontaneity, which would in fact smother the child, and force his consciousness into the ill-fitting mold of a pure passive receptacle for the mother’s own self. But this is not consciousness at all. Rather, the content of the mother’s self-gift is her receiving her child. 56. See, for example, TL 1:171–72. 57. This is also the starting point for Heidegger, which he articulates as thrownness. Heidegger’s term is striking in both its similarity to and its difference from Balthasar’s principle of the “birth” of consciousness. The term is drawn, in fact, from the event of the animal’s birth: a cow “throws” a calf, for example. The calf, then, finds itself suddenly “in” the world, and its “finding itself” therein precedes in an almost violent manner any “entering” there in full self-possessed consciousness. Balthasar’s insight, however, as we will see, is that this is a personal event, that the birth is therefore not in the first place a “being thrown” but a “being welcomed,” a “being-permitted-to-be.” (On a related theme, see the comparison between Heidegger’s Seinmüssen [to have to be] and Balthasar’s Seindürfen [to be permitted to be], in Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser, 157–62). 114

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Her spontaneity has the form of receptivity. The way she gives herself, her being, is by giving the positive space of welcoming to the child’s being. This is why Balthasar says that the love of the mother is a creative call; it is a spontaneous receptivity that gives rise to a receptive spontaneity. If we were to begin “in the middle,” like traditional approaches to consciousness, that is, if we begin with the assumption of the structures of consciousness as already formed in themselves,58 or in other words, outside of the event of gift, we are forced to oppose mediacy and immediacy, spontaneity and receptivity, and so cannot avoid eventually falling into a flat, or linear, epistemology. The inclusion of spontaneity within a comprehending receptivity is perhaps most clearly expressed by the fact that the child’s receiving his mother’s love is not a “merely” contemplative act detached from any action, but is both contemplative and active at once, concentrated together in the child’s single primal impulse toward his mother. Thus, Balthasar insists that what the mother reveals in her loving smile is not only a meaning but simultaneously also a value: the child grasps “that this love is the highest good and is absolutely sufficient and that, a priori, nothing higher can be awaited beyond this.”59 Because, thus, what calls to the child is not an inert, neutral state of affairs but a superabundant positivity—and, in fact, it calls precisely because it is such—the child responds, as it were, without reflecting: “the little child does not ‘think it over’ in order to decide whether he will respond to the inviting smile of his mother with love or un-love, for as the sun draws forth green life, so does love awaken love.”60 It is not the case, though, that this responding is an unconscious or irrational act, because it comes before deliberation. Instead, the responding movement is itself simultaneously a conscious act; in the child’s moving toward the mother, the child experiences himself, becomes conscious of himself, as the subject of this activity: “Insofar as he gives himself, the child perceives: I give myself.”61 We can compare this understanding with Fichte’s. Fichte sees that in order to secure a genuine unity for the human being, and therefore a unified self-consciousness, it is impossible to begin with a static “I,” because, 58. The most profound exception to this claim is no doubt Plato, who had a keen sense of the dramatic nature of the origin of consciousness, the nous: what is the analogy of the cave other than an attempt to articulate the “awakening of consciousness” through being called by another? Plato, moreover, describes both nous and “truth” as being born from the intercourse between the soul and reality: Rep., 490a–b. 59. MTG, 15. 60. Ibid., 15–16 (translation modified). 61. Ibid., 16 (translation modified). The Birth of Consciousness

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insofar as a movement cannot be avoided when this “I” grasps itself, the movement causes a displacement, and it thwarts the attempt: a static I would have to be grasped (transitively) statically, which is a contradiction. Thus, for Fichte, “the intellect is a doing (ein Tun), and absolutely nothing beyond that; one should not even call it something active (ein Tätiges), because this expression denotes an existing something in which activity inheres.”62 The sheer acting activity of the intellect is what allows Fichte to bring together the practical reason (will) and speculative reason (intellect) that Kant’s system drove so fatefully apart.63 But we are now in a position to see more specifically why such an approach, precisely in its seeking perfect identity, is bound to be dualistic. The key is that Fichte understands activity merely spontaneously, and he cannot avoid doing so to the extent that he begins with the subject in and by itself. Starting, as it were, from a neutrality or nothingness, activity can be conceived only as an assertion, a going out, a positing. However, a positing cannot unite itself with another positing; a unity of activities is possible only if they are reciprocal and asymmetrical.64 The identity of the positing of positing is therefore an illusion: it is rather a case of two parallel lines that never touch, inasmuch as the action of each is by definition the exclusion of the other. To use Przywara’s expression, we might call Fichte’s positing of positing an “explosive unity,” that is, a dualism that wants to be an identity and so cannot fail at some point to rupture. If, by contrast, we begin with the event of this gift, activity from the outset means simultaneous spontaneity and receptivity. Once we see this simultaneity, we do not have to reject Fichte’s “original insight.”65 Quite to the contrary, we can embrace it all the more radically, since we see that the fundamental activity that brings unity to the self is at the same time “at one” with the unity of the other, and thus the coherence Fichte seeks is exponentially multiplied. More on this later. One of the most profound and important insights that emerges from Balthasar’s treatment of the mother’s smile is that the objectivity of the call that awakens the child to consciousness in the same gesture that inspires his basic knowing-action is what allows the child to move his whole self. As we saw in Aristotle, the idea of a self-mover seems impossible, since it implies a divisibility in which one part moves while the other remains at rest.

62. Fichte, cited in Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity, 109. 63. See ibid., 13–31. 64. This, as we recall, was Aimé Forest’s great insight into Aquinas’s sense of unity: in every case, it amounts to the reciprocal causality of act and potency, Forest, La structure métaphysique du concret, 76, 163. 65. Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, 1967. 116

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Everything that is in motion, Aristotle concludes, is therefore in every case moved by an other, even and especially if movement belongs to it essentially.66 Balthasar shows that the mother’s smile, her love, is a gift, not of appearance, but of her self, or her being, and it is precisely for this reason that her smile is essentially a call. It is precisely for this reason, moreover, that the call penetrates not to the child’s phenomenal surface, but likewise to his very being: “Where . . . love calls into being-permitted-to-answer, there the I is touched in the core of his being; he can give his full answer only with his totality, his center, his fullness; he must muster all that is best in him in order to respond to the call. He comes into play as a complete whole, all at once.”67 We saw above that the child’s “being-called” (Angerufensein = “being-called” as a mode of being) by the mother’s love was the revelation of both a meaning and a value, which set the child, as it were, primally into motion. However, we would catch only half the mystery if we saw this merely as the mother’s offering herself as a good to the child’s striving. It is perhaps here, if anywhere, that we strike up against the limits of Plato, who sees the good primarily (though not exclusively) in terms of being an object of desire. Although it is true that goodness is what is desired, if we remain with this single affirmation, it would give rise to a “one-sidedly” spontaneous sense of activity. Balthasar’s insight goes a step deeper: the good in the mother’s “gesture” is not just a value, but also, at the same time and in the same respect, a valuing; the good of the mother is not just a revelation of her own worthiness of being loved, but in exactly the same sense is the revelation of the child’s worthiness of being loved. In other words, the mother is loved in loving, and she loves in being loved. Only thus can we see that the child is grasped in his innermost core, and that he is enabled, with his whole being, freely to grasp in turn. If the mother’s smile were only the manifestation of an object of love, the call would be a call for the child to set himself in motion, which would in fact fall back into (Fichte’s) dualism. But the smile is both a revelation of the mother’s being and the child’s being, because it is a gift to the child of his own “belovedness,” his being himself an object of love. The mother, Balthasar writes, does not love something in the child, but loves him, the whole person. And this is what enables the child to respond with his whole person. If the child merely attempted to give himself or merely strove by his own efforts (i.e., spontaneously) toward his object, there would be an insuperable gap between the (stationary) “he” that gives and the (moving) “himself” that is given. What Balthasar therefore sees

66. See Aristotle, Physics, 7.1.241b27–242a5. 67. MTG, 16. Translation modified. The Birth of Consciousness

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lying at the deep root of this possibility is a “total-being-laid-claim-to” (Ganzbeansprucht-Sein).68 This, Balthasar says, belongs to the highest joys of love: indeed, it is joy, because it is the heart of freedom, namely, ek-static beingwith another and so being infinitely more than oneself. The “other” thus can reach me more deeply than I can reach myself, which is the case both physically and metaphysically, and so if I am ever to “have” the whole of myself, it will never be because I have successfully “grasped” myself, but because I have been given to myself by another. And if this act of “laying-claim” is itself self-giving love, as it must be in order to be a total call, then the gift itself is what enables an answer. This leads to a profound paradox: the child’s giving of himself, which is in fact the only thing the child has to give and is thus his most interior, intimate act, lies in a strict sense beyond his means. It occurs as a grace, not stemming from the child himself, but stemming from the mother, whose smile the child knows he himself did not create. Thus, what is most personal is ultimately a gift from an other. Balthasar brings intrinsically together pure spontaneity and pure receptivity, and with that single movement, he snaps in two the critical method bound by its own (“self”-imposed) conditions of possibility. But there is a further step to take. So far we have seen that consciousness is constituted both from above (receptively) and from below (spontaneously). If it came merely from below, it would be a closed circle, a finished product, and therefore incapable of receiving. But if it were incapable of receiving, it would not be consciousness, insofar as consciousness is essentially intentional, that is, ordered to the other as other. At the same time, consciousness constituted simply from above would lack the active receptivity that characterizes genuine subjectivity and connects it with a free self. It is what distinguishes the receptivity of consciousness from that of putty. So, consciousness must be constituted simultaneously from above and from below. There is something that has been present all along in these reflections but that we have left implicit, and it is this: as we have seen in every case thus far, two things cannot have a reciprocally intrinsic relation unless they are grounded in something else; a bipolarity can be a unity only if it is both held together and held apart simultaneously by a “third” that is distinct from the two. To put it concretely in terms of the case at hand, if the mother and child were taken abstractly—if they were “isolated” in a unilateral one-on-one relationship—the child could not avoid being overwhelmed by the responsibility the relationship would lay on him: it is too much to ask a child, in his fragile first attempts at being a

68. Ibid. 118

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self, to reciprocate, eye to eye, the love of a wise and mature adult.69 And, if he cannot, the love that “passes between” mother and child would arise wholly from the being of the mother. But, thus titanically surging up from nothing, the love would be opaque and monolithic. It would crush the child’s unreciprocating consciousness. The only way, then, to preserve the unity and difference of the child’s personhood or selfhood in relation to that of the mother is to understand the child’s consciousness, not as something produced “immediately” by the mother’s love, but as both mediated and immediate in its emerging as the fruit of the parents’ mutual self-gift. Now, Balthasar does not put the issue in these terms when he talks about consciousness (except implicitly in the use of the phrase “the mysterious birth of consciousness”), but in the last book he ever wrote, Unless You Become Like This Child, a book he intended as a Christmas gift for his friends, and which lay as a completed manuscript on his writing desk the morning he died, he moves clearly in this direction. In the second chapter of this small book, Balthasar unfolds the “primal form” (Urgestalt) of the child’s existence. On the one hand, he says, the child “begins” in an “original identity” (urbildliche Identität) with the mother, as he subsists in her womb.70 And yet, this “identity” is not of the “night in which all cows are black” sort,71 that is, not formless or undifferentiated, because from the very beginning the child has its own identity: as Balthasar points out, even in the identity of the womb, the child grows just as much from the father’s seed as from the mother’s substance. In other words, the child is distinct from the mother within his union with her because his substance is not derived wholly from hers, but owes itself to her and something besides, namely, from the father’s substance. In other words, it is (also) rooted in a “third” distinct from both the mother and the child. In this respect, the child’s substance cannot simply be reduced back to the mother’s. Thus,

69. Thornton Wilder observes: “the important thing is that when you give your attention to the child, you give your entire attention. Then you mark off clearly when you have withdrawn your attention, returning the child thereby into a child’s world and a child’s thoughts. . . . The child has great need of this intermittent entire attention . . . yet he cannot sustain it for long; it is dazzling and disconcerting; from it he can return with reassurance to his child’s world.” Cited in Gilbert A. Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (New York: Fromm International Publishing, 1986), 311. 70. Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child [= UBC], trans. Erasmo LeivaMerikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 15–16 (translation modified). 71. This phrase of Hegel’s (from Phenomenology of Spirit, 9), said to have intended Schelling’s sense of the Absolute, can equally apply to Schleiermacher’s “absolute feeling.” Andrew Bowie (and Manfred Frank, whom Bowie cites in support) contends that Hegel did not in fact aim this particular criticism at Schelling but rather at a more generally held conception: see Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, 55–56. The Birth of Consciousness

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the mother does not “produce” the child but “givingly” receives him, even while the father, likewise though asymmetrically, “had to receive from his wife in order to become fruitful in her.”72 The otherness-in-unity of the child is therefore best conceived as the fruit of the mutual self-giving and receiving of the parents. The point, for our purposes, is this: what characterizes the Urgestalt of the child’s being likewise characterizes his self-conscious being. Thus, the mother’s smile is not the ultimate origin for the child’s self-consciousness; it is itself the manifestation of a ground that lies more originarily. As we have seen, the event of this birth of consciousness turns on the gift character of the encounter, self-gift responding to self-gift. The mother’s own gift of self, which initiates this “exchange,” is possible only if she in turn has been freed for this gift in being loved by another. The child’s consciousness therefore springs organically from this communion of persons in love, just as his body springs from their bodily communion.73 (This point has an unexpected depth that will first come to light in the discussion of marriage in chapter 4.) The mother’s smile, then, is where this ground becomes concrete. Accordingly, we are not speaking in the first place of the “constitution,” or “self-grounding,” or even “emergence” of consciousness but of the birth of consciousness. Consciousness is born(e), just like a child is born(e). And this is likewise why it is so original, so rooted in being, and not a mere epiphenomenon. The best name for consciousness, then, the name that grasps the thing in its most mysterious inner being is not merely gift but donum doni (the gift of a gift).74 72. UBC, 16. 73. This observation is, in part, inspired by the profound essay by Antonio Sicari, “The Family: A Place of Fraternity,” Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 290–305, in which Sicari notes that people often miss the point in the question they ask about a child: “what sort of relationship does the mother have to the child?” or “what sort of relationship does the father have to the child?” The deepest question about the child is “what sort of relationship do the parents have to each other?” 74. It is not accidental that Balthasar uses this term as a basic name for the Holy Spirit (TL 3:149), who, as Geist, is in a sense the basic analogue for the meaning of consciousness or subjectivity. In saying this, we seem to be moving dangerously close to Hegel. However, it is also precisely on this point that Balthasar differs most definitively from Hegel. As Balthasar himself says, what Hegel lacks most is a sense of unity as fruitfulness (ibid., 38–41). And, we might add, Hegel has to lack fruitfulness in the end because he begins abstractly, with an already-constituted consciousness: see the opening section, after the introduction, of the Phenomenology of Spirit. What seems so utterly “receptive” and concrete, i.e., the most primitive experience of sense perception, is in fact a pure abstract thought-projection: how is it possible for any “actual” mind to be at any point aware merely of “is” or of “this” and nothing else besides, no content whatsoever? Thus, his relating of history and concept will necessarily reduce the former to the latter, rather than seeing them as “fruitfully” associated in a relation of simultaneous identity and difference, as Balthasar does. 120

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This name becomes immediately indispensable philosophically, for it suggests that a kind of fruitfulness lies within the structure of consciousness, where “fruitfulness” means not only openness to the other as other, which in itself as a principle could fall into abstraction, but even more concretely as an “always already” being involved in the other, as the other is always already involved in me. The simultaneity of these two opens out further (ahead! not behind!) to a new “third,” which then in principle means all possible others. The difference between Balthasar and Hegel is most keenly felt at this point. While they both have a certain concrete and triadic “logic,” Hegel’s is modeled on “the concept” while Balthasar’s model is fruitfulness. We will discuss this principle at greater length in the next chapter, but for the moment we need to see its immediate implications in relation to consciousness. The principle of fruitfulness implies that the “stability” of the “triad” is not closed in on itself, but that it is inwardly, of itself, in principle open to a “fourth,” and a “fifth,” and so on. Here, we have to see that the inner fruitfulness of the child’s consciousness is the result of its being the concrete manifestation of the love that transcends both of the parents in the sense of being a Gestalt not reducible to the sum of its parts. This point will be developed in the chapter 4. More immediate to our present point, and in relation to the preceding chapter, I note an observation that Balthasar makes in Unless You Become Like This Child, namely, that the child’s “original identity” with the mother rests on an even more primordial original identity that exists between the child and God’s idea of the child, an idea that is both God and different from God, according to the traditional understanding.75 If we recall the “full” sense of the divine idea that we saw in the last chapter, we will understand how this originally implicit—and always mediated—relation of consciousness to God provides the ground for the unity and difference between consciousness and being, which I will address next. And, indeed, it is precisely the fruitfulness character of consciousness that points to Being as its most direct other.76 Because of the gift lying at its basis, consciousness is essentially objective in the profound sense. It is not a merely psychological phenomenon, but it is ultimately a “joint” event that takes place between the subject and being itself.

75. UBC, 16–17. Prufer has a lucid discussion of this way of conceiving the divine ideas. “Sein und Wort,” 10–24. But the most elaborate “speculative” development of this notion in recent philosophy is Gustav Siewerth’s Thomismus als Identitätsystem. 76. “Being,” here, specifically as that which is more than the finite series of beings. The Birth of Consciousness

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Attunement to Being What is “lit up” in the child’s consciousness-constituting movement toward his mother is not just self, Balthasar says, but being as a whole. The mutual illumination of being and intersubjectivity that we saw in the previous chapter on metaphysics is equally necessary in a discussion of consciousness. Had we begun merely with the mind and its “immediate” relation to being, we would have ended up with a tendency to slip into both a dualism and a monism, according to Blondel’s infallible principle: “Every monism, both as a whole and in every part, is wedded to a dualism that it can never divorce.”77 An immediate identity between thought and being, if nothing more is said, is indistinguishable from mere thought on the one hand and mere being on the other. Beginning from within the event of its birth, we see that consciousness is already open from within in its relation to being, as something distinctly other, that is, “itself.” The historical “genealogy” of consciousness revealed its gift character and perhaps its gifting character. However, if we remain merely with the intersubjective “ellipse” within which consciousness springs, we will tend to lose the depth dimension of consciousness. The German word for consciousness is Bewußtsein: Balthasar insists that we cannot do justice to the reality unless we take it in both aspects of the word, not just “conscious” (bewußt), but “being-conscious” (Bewußtsein).78 The “rapprochement” of being and consciousness is possible, in the first place, because Being is fundamentally a metaphysical “light,”79 in which all beings can be seen, and therefore the light of consciousness is itself a participation in the more comprehensive light of Being. In order to get at the root sense of what Balthasar means by consciousness “participating” in Being, I will first discuss a brief section of GL 1 called “Christian Attunement,” which treats the mediating attunement of consciousness to Being,80 and I will connect points in this section with those in a later, complementary section on the “revelation of Being.”81 This former passage is one of the most crucial in the volume, because it helps to avoid several typical misunderstandings about Balthasar.82 Our consideration of the passages in GL

77. Blondel, “L’Illusion idéaliste,” 733: “Tout monisme, dans l’ensemble comme dans le détail, épouse un dualisme dont il ne divorce jamais.” 78. See TL 1:43–44. 79. See Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser, 197–98. 80. GL 1:241–57. 81. Ibid., 441–47. 82. Some of those misunderstandings are as follows: the idea that Balthasar is “subjectivist,” i.e., begins with subjectivity and cannot find his way back to any satisfying “realism”; that Balthasar bypasses metaphysics, dissolving philosophy proper into 122

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1 will in turn provide the context for appreciating the role of self-consciousness in TL 1, which I will elaborate briefly. The “attunement” (Einstimmung, which for a sentient being is manifest in an a priori Zustimmung)83 to Being is not a state but rather an act or event. And as an event, it is a “motion” of a sort but with a particular goal. Balthasar calls the attunement to being, which is man’s most original disposition toward the world, an “experience,” Erfahrung, a word he sets ringing in its full etymological resonance: it means “insight acquired by making a journey” (Einsicht durch Fahrt).84 Fahren, of course, means to travel, to drive, and thus to go out toward, moving from one place to another. The inseparable prefix er-, according to Hammer’s German Grammar, has two functions: both to indicate something that is acquired through an action, and the transformation that occurs through a process.85 Taken philosophically, which is how Balthasar interprets it here, erfahren indicates a movement of something that changes under way. In this respect, someone who experiences “gets somewhere,” that is, does not remain simply where he is or even simply who he was. It is therefore precisely the opposite of introspection or turning-in (Einfahrung) and “does not have the least thing in common with ‘feeling’ (in Schleiermacher’s sense) or with modern irrationality.”86 Experience is an internalizing, an insight, but only in the process of an outward movement. In this respect, the “act” or “experience” of attunement is simultaneously wholly subjective and wholly objective.

1. Wholly Subjective The attunement to Being is not the directing of one of man’s “faculties” toward the root of existence. Nor would it be adequate to say that it

theology; or the common misunderstanding of Balthasar’s “spirituality,” which claims that he focuses too directly on the “objectivity” of the Cross, as an “obliteration” of subjective experiences. In the section we will discuss, the subject matter is a fundamental experience of Being—which is both objective and subjective but with a priority of the objective, even if the objective requires the total engagement of the subjective for it to be objective—as an essential mediator of the relation to God, in both theology and spirituality. 83. Einstimmung means a “joining-in,” “an agreement,” “a tuning,” and even “a good or appropriate mood or disposition”; whereas Zustimmung means “consent” or “approval.” See GL 1:244. 84. Ibid., 228 (translation modified). For an outstanding reflection on the difference between fahren and erfahren, see Ulrich, Leben in der Einheit von Leben und Tod, 152–57. 85. A. E. Hammer, Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, 2nd ed., rev. by Martin Durrell (Lincolnwood, Ill: NTC Publishing Group, 1995), 496–97. 86. GL 1:229. The Birth of Consciousness

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represents the directing of all of man’s faculties at once, if this is understood as the sum of these individual faculties. A genuine whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and it is this genuine whole of man that is called upon by Being. Now, we have already in principle seen the whole brought into play in the child’s being-called. But we can specify the meaning of this whole further. Although it is the case that a whole, as a whole, transcends its parts, if it merely transcends its parts, and is not at the same time manifest within them, it will not be the concrete whole of a Gestalt but rather the “pseudo”-whole of an abstract principle. As we have seen in every case so far, a true universal whole, to the extent that it is a finite whole, cannot be “monolithic,” but must be in every case itself “polar”: specifically, if one pole is the transcendent unity, the other must “represent” that unity in concrete embodiment. So where, concretely, is this concrete “whole” in man? In chapter 5, I will address this question in greater depth, but it is already possible to point out some of the suggestions Balthasar makes in this context. On the one hand, he refers to “feeling,” which ought not be understood as a faculty “besides” or “beneath” the faculties of the intellect and will but is rather the concrete place where these faculties converge, and so it represents the unity of the whole.87 If the intellect and will correspond to the true and the good, respectively, and if, moreover, as Rousselot has shown with penetrating insight, the intellect and will cannot be properly understood as sequentially related to one another, coming one after the other, but rather each presupposing the other in a circular fashion, then the concrete “third,” “feeling,” corresponds to the integrating third, the beautiful.88 Balthasar describes the experience of beauty thus: Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful— the whole person quivers. He not only “finds” the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it. The more total this experience is, the less does a person seek and enjoy only the delight that comes through the senses or even through any act of his own; the less also does he reflect on his own states.

87. Schleiermacher’s sense of das Gefühl as “immediate,” lies as it were beneath these other faculties. 88. Pierre Rousselot’s two essays, published together in translation in the book The Eyes of Faith, trans. Joseph Donceel and Avery Dulles (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990) make the argument for the mutual dependence of intellect and will with precision and clarity. What is lacking in this argument, however, is a notion of the integrating “third.” To put it another way, what Rousselot lacks is an “aesthetic” dimension. I will return to this theme in chapter 5. 124

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Such a person has been taken up wholesale into the reality of the beautiful and is now fully subordinate to it, determined by it, animated by it.89 This experience of beauty, then, is clearly the ontological correlate to the interpersonal experience of the mother’s smile, and Balthasar treats it as such.90 Now, just as it was not a “part” of the child that responded to love but the child’s very being, so here too the “feeling” that responds to beauty is not to be understood as the irrational emotion we normally identify it with, even if it does in fact include a fundamental, “more-than-reason” dimension. Balthasar moreover says that it is the same reality intended in scripture by the terms heart or bowels (splanchna), namely, the seat of the person.91 Finally, in The Truth of the World, Balthasar referred to this mysterious center as the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft), which, as Kant already saw, somehow combines both senses and intellect, receptivity and spontaneity.92 The point, in all of this, is merely to insist that man’s openness to reality, his consent (empathy, or “feeling-with”), is prior in some sense to the deliberate exercise of a distinct faculty in any given discrete case, even as fundamental an exercise as the basic assent to Being.93 But this assertion is paradoxical, and we ought not to let the difficulty go unmentioned. How can an openness—insofar as it is a spiritual act or event and therefore must somehow involve freedom—be prior in any obvious way to a “deliberate” act of the spirit? How can the spirit act except in terms of one (or more) of its discrete operations? If we were to say, simply, that the “openness” came first in a sequential manner, that is, before the exercise of reason, then it would be a pure passivity, and it would be no different from Schleiermacher’s absolute feeling. On the other hand, if we were to make this openness merely a function of the exercise of one or other of our spiritual faculties, we would lose the wholeness of the person: we would fall into the dualism that necessarily afflicts a thinking that begins with spontaneity, as we saw in Fichte’s otherwise profound approach to the question of the unity of the spirit. We avoid the dilemma, contends Balthasar, by affirming both at once: “Such attunement to Being on the part of the feeling and experiencing subject is,

89. GL 1:247. 90. See LA, 45. 91. GL 1:243. 92. TL 1:162–64. See also 238–40. It is clear why Heidegger would focus on the “transcendental synthesis of the imagination” as the heart of Kant’s epistemology: see his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 93. GL 1:244. The Birth of Consciousness

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consequently, also prior to the distinction between active and passive experience: in the reciprocity which is founded on openness to reality there is contained both the receptivity to extraneous im-pression and the expressing of the self onto the extraneous.”94 The dilemma can be avoided, once again, only when we see that at the root of consciousness, we do not have an isolated center radiating outward its intentional “rays” but rather an event of reciprocity, that is, a gift that as such is both personal and ontological. The “prior” of its being “prior to the distinction between active and passive” is not an abstract “prior”—that is, separated from them and therefore neither active nor passive—but rather a concrete prior, which means it is both simultaneously. Given this fundamental reciprocity, we can deepen the sense of attunement, as an experience, not in the sense of being moved (passively) to a place that, once attained, then produces an insight (actively) but rather an active insight in the passive being-moved. The depth of the insight—the measure of the activity—is directly related to the “comprehensiveness” of the passivity (or better: receptivity). In this respect, Balthasar goes on to say that the receptive aspect must have a certain priority within this simultaneity.95 With regard to the difficulty we mentioned, then, to affirm the priority of the being-moved does not in its essence preclude the soul’s moving itself; the being-moved is simultaneous with this moving itself as its anterior condition. Thus, if we make this fundamental movement in some sense dualistically or “chronologically” prior to “conscious” participation, somewhat in the manner of Schleiermacher or Schelling, we would have a tendency to idealize the “subconscious,” which would in fact cast a threatening shadow over the (conscious) self. Balthasar, by contrast, sees the fundamental act as an asymmetrical reciprocity. This same understanding is what leads Aquinas to call this fundamental act, this attunement to being, a delectatio (enjoyment),96 and what leads Balthasar to characterize it as the “joy of Being.” Joy, indeed, is a mood (Stimmung) in which one is moved by something deeper than oneself, not thereby to be overwhelmed or oppressed by it, as for example in melancholy, but in such a way that in being so moved, one enjoys a heightened clarity of mind or consciousness. Now, because it represents a genuine reciprocity, we must read the expression “joy of Being” again simultaneously as an objective and subjective genitive: Being is what gives joy (“I have joy in Being”), but this 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 247–48. 96. Aquinas, ST 1–2ae, 15, 1 and ad 3. See Balthasar’s reference to this text, GL 1:244. 126

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joy is merely a share in the joy that Being itself “is.” Thus, joy of Being does not refer in the first place to the delight that accompanies the actualizing of any given natural faculty, but rather to the deepest heart of reality.97 And yet, since joy is never a monological act but always a unified manifold, we have to see that it is at the same time what characterizes the reciprocity at the root of consciousness. We will have grasped the meaning of Balthasar’s insight if we understand the affirmation: consciousness is essentially joy—in its very structure. If ek-stasis is the first name of freedom for Heidegger, joy is the first name of consciousness for Balthasar.98 In short, far from representing a “neutral,” objective capacity, consciousness, as attunement to Being, is essentially a participation in the joy of Being. Consciousness receives its form in its always already being moved toward Being, and is thus by its nature a positive inclination toward reality (inclinatio ad rem ipsam). Precisely because it is structurally “joy,” consciousness is in its first impulse objective and existential.

2. Wholly Objective To say that this basic attunement to Being is wholly objective means two things: First, the experience, though including the whole subject, does not reduce to subjectivity but rather has its first measure in the “object” itself. Second, this “object” is not merely the terminus of one or the other of the subject’s faculties, and to that extent determined by that faculty, but is the whole, is Being itself. It is the whole of Being that calls out to the whole of the subject: cor ad cor advocat (heart calls to heart). Let us take this second point first. The reason consciousness can be attuned to Being as a whole is that Being reveals itself thus, that is, wholly, an expression I will leave for a moment in ambiguity. We saw in the last chapter that the essence of any given being is revealed only in its action. This is true for beings, and it is true as well for Being as a whole: “considered in its origin, then, the disclosing of being is an action, an expression, a clearing, a bestowal of participation.”99 What it means in this case is that Being is not immediately

97. Ibid., 244, 246. 98. Balthasar, as we have seen, does not reject Heidegger’s notion of ek-stasis as the basic meaning of “subjectivity” (see, for example, ibid., 158). The key difference between these two thinkers is that while Heidegger connects ek-stasis with Angst, Balthasar sees it in the first place as related to joy. The detachment of Angst (detachment from self, from beings) is comprehended literally in the being-embraced by Being, so that self-less-ness, or nothingness in Heidegger’s understanding, is a crucial word for Balthasar, but never the last one. 99. TL 1:217. The Birth of Consciousness

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intuited as it is in itself, nor is it reflectively (mediately) inferred from what is immediately known.100 In other words, Being is not merely there as such, nor is it merely absent, but it is rather present “movingly”; it is present in movement, which we now see is the movement of gift as mediated through the call of the mother’s smile. It is only outside of this movement that one is forced to decide between presence and absence. Within this movement, by contrast, Being is revealed in its concealment, and vice versa.101 As we saw in the mother’s relationship to the child, the gift of her being is what allowed the space for the child’s own return gift. It is what makes every gesture say infinitely more than what it says. This same dynamic characterizes Being’s revelation. With it, we see that the “infinitely-more” of Being is present in the immediately knowable. Thus, to the extent that consciousness is attuned to Being, in the sense of being constituted in the positive inclinatio toward all that exists, it will not be “set,” first of all, by the “determinateness” of the immediately knowable; it will rather be the fundamentally open (indeterminate) movement responding to Being’s own self-movement. In other words, Being is in motion, and consciousness is in motion, and their movements do not have to be coordinated somehow to each other, but are different aspects of a single, fluid motion, like partners in a dance. This joint movement becomes a bridge, as it were, that connects the immediate manifestation with the ever-hidden depths. It is what makes consciousness an attunement to the center, rather than the periphery, of Being. In short, consciousness is founded on this totality, which is the fundamental content of the personal event of its constitution. Consciousness, thus conceived, is a predisposition for mystery. And mystery is the heart of Being that lets itself be seen in its particular manifestations, but only to a consciousness that is totally given over. But this totality, this “heart” of Being, cannot be opened by consciousness alone; it cannot be attained through the subject’s own isolated effort. A consciousness founded on the activity of self-positing, or on the force of the self’s striving—that is, the subject characterized as self-mover— would posit only a part of itself, a single faculty, whether it be intellect or will, and correspondingly it would grasp only a surface aspect of Being. 100. Balthasar makes this observation about God, but it can equally be said about Being: “This is why this primal attunement to him is not an intuition in the epistemological sense, nor is it the result of a purely logical inference from the finite to the infinite. The non-fixability of this primal experience is but the noetic reflection of the ontic indeterminateness of Being in its totality over against God.” GL 1:245. 101. This is the theme of the brief section “In the revelation of Being,” ibid., 441–47, and is treated in depth in TL 1, esp. 206–16. 128

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The joint movement between being and consciousness is thus not symmetrical but asymmetrical, not a self-moving of consciousness “connected” to a self-moving of Being but a single movement, which is the movement of Being carrying the self-moving consciousness. This leads us into the first point made above, namely, concerning the priority of the “objective pole” in the attunement to Being. The light of consciousness is an (active) participation in the light of Being. This means, as we saw, that the root of the unity of consciousness is its being rooted in Being: the threefold unity of giver, gift, and the capacity to receive in the mother’s smile is a (real) figure of consciousness enfolded within Being. At the heart of consciousness, therefore, its unity is “deposited” within Being. Consciousness does not have to fret over its own unity, and does not have to keep anxious watch over it, but in its essence has handed over its unity to the safekeeping of Being and so is always assured of it. In other words, the unity of consciousness does not depend on its being explicitly grasped by consciousness, because the unity has a deeper source. The subject, thus, does not in every moment need to be in alert, deliberate possession of himself, because he is already possessed; he does not have to hold onto his unity “with both hands,” because his unity is always already held for him. But this means that self-consciousness is a “being-led” by Being, that there is an irreducible “gap” within consciousness itself, a gap that, though uncloseable, can nevertheless be crossed insofar as consciousness allows itself to be carried over, to be “borne.” What seems like a strange leap in fact follows with the strictest logic from the matter itself: if consciousness does not have a “reciprocity” within itself, it will either fall into a monism, or a dualism, and in any event both. If, on the other hand, this reciprocity is a real reciprocity, consciousness will have within itself a transcendent otherness that it cannot by definition reach by itself (or else it would be an extension of sameness and not otherness), and so if this reciprocity is not to fracture once again into dualism, it can only be because consciousness is itself reached by the other. This entails, first, that the “light” of consciousness is not a continuous, unilateral ray but is equiprimordially discontinuous in itself.102 And it can be both continuous and discontinuous in itself, or both “light and darkness” in itself, and not just one or the other, because it rests secure within the greater

102. “Light” is an appropriate image for consciousness, since light itself is not “merely” continuous but is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, irreducibly both “particle” and “wave.” The many paradoxes that quantum mechanics has revealed at this fundamental level of reality seem to correspond nicely to the paradoxes revealed at the equally fundamental metaphysical level. The Birth of Consciousness

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light of Being. Second, it is precisely this simultaneous continuity and discontinuity in consciousness that allows it to “see more than it sees,” to see, in other words, the whole of Being in beings and, correspondingly, the wholeness of the forms of nature, rather than a mere multiplicity of sense data, mechanically produced and recorded. That which does not appear immediately “on the surface,” that is, in sense perception, does not have to be attributed to the (equally immediate) “projection” of consciousness’s own spontaneous ideas, but it can now rather be seen as the secret center of things, which consciousness cannot illuminate “by its own lights,” but into which it can nevertheless be led. As Balthasar puts it: “In order to ‘understand’ the forms of nature, the spirit must give up its own light and entrust itself to the loving intimations (Ahnungen) which only lead us with certainty when the intellect for a time renounces its argumentativeness.”103 It is crucial to see that this “giving up its own light” is not a violence; that is, it is not an act contrary to the nature of consciousness. It would only be such, we see, if we abstracted consciousness as a solitary thing in itself, and thus did not take into account the reciprocity that belongs essentially to it. Apart from consciousness’s being embedded in Being, we would have to decide: either continuous or discontinuous. When we begin concretely, on the other hand, we see that this “entrusting oneself to another,” and thus the self-renunciation it implies, is the most natural act that reason has. It is, to use Charles Péguy’s phrase, “the first movement of the heart.” This understanding is what leads Balthasar to make the astonishing claim that the “infused lumen fidei in [the human being], to whose illumination he submits, is not any more ‘heteronomous’ than the light of rational nature, which is innate in him: for even this light (as lumen intellectus agentis) is not properly speaking man’s own light, but rather his openness to the light of Being itself which illuminates him.”104 As this passage indicates, the “discontinuous leap” that faith represents with respect to knowledge is not something simply new, because knowledge itself already has a certain discontinuity at its core. In this respect, faith’s discontinuity with knowledge is not simply a “break with” knowledge but “fulfills on a higher level the structure of all human knowing.”105

103. GL 1:444. 104. GL 1:164–65. 105. Ibid., 446–47. See also GL 5:205, where Balthasar shows that this condemnation of the form of “worldly” reason from a higher standpoint (from the position of faith) is to identify it with its “fallen” form. 130

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The Unity of Consciousness It is at this point necessary to consider the nature of the unity of consciousness, as Balthasar understands it.

God, Being, and the Analogy of Consciousness We are now in a position to consider the relation of consciousness to Being and to God, as Balthasar presents it in The Truth of the World. I already mentioned that Balthasar had not yet arrived at his insight into the significance of “the mother’s smile” in 1947, when he wrote this philosophical treatise. Looking back at this text, one sees certain “foreshadowing” of this insight, particularly, for example, in one of the most profound sections of the book, on the meaning of “word” and the origin of language and the child’s capacity to speak.106 Nevertheless, a certain ambiguity persists in some of his formulations.107 There is an ambiguity there because Balthasar begins in this case with a fully formed consciousness, which he analyzes as the self-illumination of Being, or the identity of Being and thinking. In order to avoid the danger of transcendental solipsism that such an identification creates, Balthasar then opposes the infinite identity of Being and thinking in God to that in the finite mind, in order then to “make room” for the world of objects and for intersubjectivity.108 Although Balthasar follows this approach only with the appropriate qualifiers (for example, rejecting the possibility of an immediate intuition of God, which this approach would seem to imply),109 it lies much closer to the Geistmetaphysik approach he later criticizes,110 than the method he himself would eventually adopt. His more mature method begins not with the identity of thinking and Being, or self and other, in consciousness, but rather already with the interpersonal encounter; it opens up into an

106. TL 1:158–79. It is interesting to note how similar Balthasar’s own understanding of the “birth” of words from sensible images in the child’s growing into self-consciousness is to the understanding he eventually “takes over” some fifteen years later from Gustav Siewerth (see GL 1:393–99), whom he did not encounter until after he had written The Truth of the World in 1947. 107. The most obvious is in TL 1:72–73, when Balthasar says that the subject successively “grants” the unity of image, essence, and existence of the object “out of its own substance,” insofar as the only “matter” the subject receives from the object is a mass of “flat” images. This, however, is a notion Balthasar vehemently rejects in his more mature writings, as we have just seen. 108. See ibid., 43–55, esp. 51–55. 109. Ibid., 52. 110. See in particular Balthasar’s discussion of Descartes, GL 5:455–63. The Birth of Consciousness

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understanding of Being; and only then does it move to an explication of the whole’s implicit dependence on God.111 Since there is not enough space for an exploration of the gradual evolution of Balthasar’s notion of consciousness, these few remarks must suffice. That these early formulations and methods are ambiguous does not necessitate that they be read problematically, but means instead that they can be read as anticipations of Balthasar’s later understanding. I will therefore not focus on any differences for their own sake, but taking for granted that the later approach is Balthasar’s final one, I will therefore point out differences in his early approach only when they serve to illuminate his later approach. As we have seen, the basic relationship between Being and consciousness is relating the whole of consciousness (i.e., the whole of the knowing person) to the whole of Being. But this immediately raises the question: Are we to understand this relating of whole to whole as a perfect identity? In other words, if the whole subject grasps in essence the whole of Being, does this mean that there is nothing that lies outside of the subject anymore, since, as Aquinas says, the only thing outside of Being is nothing? On the one hand, it would seem that the answer would have to be yes, since, if the subject is going to be able to perceive any object at all, which means having the capacity to take its measure, it must always already possess the measure in itself. Thus, the subject’s self-consciousness is in fact the perfect identity of Being with itself, which is the meaning of Being as “light,” as Balthasar interprets it in TL 1.112 More specifically, if the subject does not have some form of identity, in the strong, numerical sense, with Being, it will never subsequently grasp Being, which means it will never grasp anything at all. Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, the nonsubsistence of Being means that whenever there “is” Being at all, there is the whole of Being; and so if consciousness is the self-illumination of Being, it must be the whole of Being that is illuminated. On the other hand, if the subject already has the whole of Being within itself, it would follow that the subject would simply deduce any given object from the light of its own self-consciousness, which is evidently not the case. The knower must await the object; he stands receptively before the object.113 What is more, though the knower encounters the whole of Being in any particular object, he can never encounter Being wholly: he encounters it totus sed non totaliter (as a whole but not in every respect). Now, the only way there 111. This is, for example, precisely the procedure Balthasar follows in TD 2:203–13. 112. TL 1:43–44. 113. Ibid., 44–45. 132

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can be a total union between two things that does not collapse on one side or the other into a (mere) identity is if there is a “third” that transcends both. Thus, Balthasar says, “Being is disclosed to it in self-consciousness but not without qualification. We have spoken of the opening and illumination [Lichtung] wherein the subject lays hold of itself and, in so doing, learns from the inside what being is. Yet this illumination sheds just enough light on being for the subject to realize that, while it does not grasp being in its totality, all being must nonetheless be lit up in itself.”114 The complete “lighting up of being in itself” is, of course, the divine Identity of Being and thinking, or Being and Essence. Balthasar makes several observations on the relationship between this Identity and the identity of Being with itself in self-consciousness. First of all, the fact that any instance of knowing is a participation in the light of Being means that at the core of any act of knowledge lies implicit knowledge of God.115 This means, further, that an analogy is established between the finite mind and the infinite mind through participation in the light of Being, which, as analogy, includes essentially both similarity and difference.116 And, finally, the irreducible analogy between the finite and the infinite mind means that what appeared to be the perfect identity between self and Being in self-consciousness, which one could express in terms of Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum,” itself is “split open” analogously: it is not in the first place a “possession” of Being but a “being-possessed,” which means that a “cogitor ergo sum” lies at the very root of the cogito.117 This splitting open of the identity in self-consciousness is not a minor point: it is not as if it merely adds a further aspect to what is nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, an identity. Rather, to the extent that it is the entry into the relation of analogy with the divine mind, it is the opening up of an absolute space between the finite subject and God, which is what allows in turn the relative space for all other objects in relation to the subject.

114. Ibid., 51. 115. Ibid., 52. Balthasar quotes the celebrated text from Aquinas, De ver., 22, 2: “omnia cognoscentia cognoscunt implicite Deum in quolibet cognito.” 116. Moreover, as we have already seen in Balthasar’s use of analogy, it is not the case that some things are the same, while other things are different. Rather, even difference is similar (and thus positive) while the similarity is always also imperfect (and thus negative). In the present case, Balthasar says that the finite mind’s not being in total possession of all truth but having to wait on, and thus depend on, an object for the actualization of its knowledge, has in fact a positive aspect in that it mirrors divine truth, which is a constant opening up to greater truth: see TL 1:53–54. 117. Ibid., 54. Balthasar uses the same expression in GL 1:451, and GL 5:461, where he attributes it originally to Franz Xaver von Baader. The Birth of Consciousness

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It becomes crucial, therefore, exactly how we understand the analogy, and what it means to have an “identity” of self and other in self-consciousness. Although he does not elaborate the point at any length, what Balthasar suggests in this section of The Truth of the World seems to be that the subject has a formal identity with Being in self-consciousness, but insofar as this form lacks content, the subject must wait for the object in order that this empty form might be filled.118 This way of formulating the analogy could be interpreted in a way similar to the understanding of qualitative or philosophical analogy (as opposed to quantitative or mathematical analogy) proposed by Kant, namely, an identity of the relationship between two pairs of terms, of which three are known, but which leaves the fourth undetermined in terms of its essence, that is, as it is in itself.119 This would, in fact, allow us to affirm both an identity and a difference; but, nevertheless, it leads to a far more serious set of problems. If analogy establishes a formal identity between Being and self-consciousness, and allows difference only in terms of content, the otherness of the other in consciousness would be merely juxtaposed to the unity of the other and the self, while this unity would be merely identical to the subject and just so far indistinguishable from him. We thus fall into a dialectic of Being and consciousness, rather than an analogy. Moreover, the formal identity of self-consciousness would at the same time be formally indistinguishable from the “infinite” identity of the divine mind, since it is formally perfect in itself and so cannot be transcended in any formal sense. In his later writings, Balthasar himself sharply criticized this way of interpreting the analogy of consciousness: “If [the formal identity of apperception, i.e., being and thinking] is to be understood, all thought-content must be incorporated into the form of ‘I think—I am,’ which is formally insurpassable and thus absolute (divine). . . . From the point of view of

118. Ibid., 51: “But the subject knows the form of being as such thanks to its selfconsciousness, in which it attains the measure of being and can apply it to the object.” 119. In a quantitative analogy, according to Kant, the identity of the relation between the two pairs of terms allows us to deduce the fourth (a:b = c:d, where d can be determined a priori from the information given). A qualitative analogy, by contrast, leaves the fourth term unknown in itself but nevertheless yields a rule for determining the relationship between the third and fourth terms, and this by formal identity with the relationship between the first pair of terms: thus, as clock is to clockmaker, so is world to God. This tells us “identically” that God is the maker responsible for the world’s teleology, but it tells us nothing about the nature of his making. See Kant, CPR, A 179–81 = B 222–24, and CJ, Ak 464, n. 64. See also Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Kants Werke in sechs Bände, vol. 7: Wörterbuch zum leichtern Gebrauch der Kantischen Schriften, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), 42. 134

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the unity of apperception or of the logical subject, there can be only one spirit, only one Lord.”120 What we should understand here is that if we begin abstractly with the relation between Being and consciousness, the tendency is inevitable either to deny any difference whatsoever (Hegel or Fichte), or to secure the possibility of difference by either deducing the perfect Other (Descartes) or projecting God (Kant), which in either case amounts logically to an extension of the subject.121 What we have in this case is an immediate “personal” relationship to God, which we take then as the ground for any secondary “objective” or mediated encounter. Balthasar refers to this position as the “pious theologisation of metaphysics,”122 which, in spite of its appearance of “religiosity,” in fact loses its relation to God because it loses its relation to the world: “this philosophy of spirit . . . lacks the decisive experience of reality: the shock of a head-on encounter with another ego, a dialogue between an I and a Thou which is radically open to its own vulnerable depths of being.”123 This “means however that for me Being, goodness and the Thou emerge only in relation to God as the ‘Other,’ and thus there is no way that leads to God via the being of the world and the human Thou.”124 In order, then, to avoid “collapsing” the relationship to God into the total immediacy of consciousness, we must begin with the “head-on” encounter with the Thou (mother’s smile), which reveals itself to be the opening of Being itself, and then we must seek the ground for this structure as a whole, not just in one of its (formal) parts, in God. As we saw in the last chapter, the divine identity is the ground of the world’s unity, but this unity is not directly (i.e., immediately) and dialectically related to any one aspect of the structure of created reality; rather, it is mediated as a comprehending whole by the irreducible fourfold difference. This is alone what allowed us to see unity as an unending interplay among the differences in the world. Now, we may take the same approach in the issue of consciousness. Rather than

120. GL 5:453. 121. We see this, for example, in a surprising passage Balthasar quotes from Kant, in which Kant denies the possibility of genuinely supernatural revelation because it could never be recognized as such: recognition requires an a priori criterion for judgment, and a priori means that it belongs as such to nature. Kant therefore concludes, “it sounds questionable, but it is in no way reprehensible to say that everyone makes his own God.” Ibid., 502. But if there is no room for transcendence in religion, there is also no room for it in epistemology. 122. Ibid., 481. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 461. The Birth of Consciousness

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identifying unity exclusively with any one aspect of consciousness, that is, merely with the abstract identity of the unity of apperception, we can see unity as shared among the irreducible differences, resting in the totality that comprehends each of them and all of them together.

The Unity of Consciousness and “Monophorism” There are two basic issues that lie under this heading, and though they are irreducibly different, they are essentially related. The first is the unity of apperception understood as the unity of self-consciousness, and the second is the unity of apperception understood as the unity of the object in the act of knowing. They are clearly related insofar as it is, even in Kant, the same unity of the self that grounds the possibility of the object’s unity. But contrary to Kant, it is likewise and perhaps more fundamentally the unity of the object that grounds the possibility of the subject’s unity. I will address the issue of self-consciousness first. Balthasar said in TL 1 that the difference in finite, created being is so radical, it cuts through the meaning of unity, so unity itself has a polarity that cannot be resolved in itself. We have seen that this is the case ontologically, but we have to see that the same principle holds epistemologically: the transcendental unity of apperception, because it is the unity of a finite mind, is inescapably polar. The self cannot “abstractly” grasp itself as a unity: on the basis of the arguments Aristotle mounted against the self-moving soul, we see that the soul cannot avoid displacing itself in its movement of reflection, and so its own unity cannot fail in every case to elude it. Nor can the self attain to unity within itself by complete motionlessness. In this case, consciousness would be a sheer monolithic nullity, exclusive of difference or relation. We might want to call it, with Schleiermacher, an “immediate consciousness,” but in fact it would not be consciousness at all, since consciousness by definition is an “awareness of . . .” and thus includes otherness as part of its basic structure. In this case, then, not only would otherness be lost, but so too would self, because self-consciousness requires at the very least the multiplicity implied in being a subject of consciousness. The only possibility left is for the subject to grasp itself concretely in the movement of being given to itself, which is identical to the movement of the subject’s giving itself to another. Or better, it is identical to the subject’s being “laid claim to” by another through the other’s gift of self. A remarkable new possibility opens up the moment we affirm this movement as the concrete event of the unity of consciousness: We no longer have to define that unity as an empty, purely logical form that needs in a second moment to be filled with content. Instead, we see 136

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the unity first of all and primarily as a full unity, concretely contained or manifest in the primal movement that is simultaneously both a knowing and an acting, both spiritual and physical. This concrete simultaneity has two immediate implications. The first comes to light when we interpret this “event” of unity in light of the unity of being in action we saw in the last chapter. We might, thus, understand the unity of apperception, not as a static principle but in a certain sense as an activity or an action achieved on the part of the subject (and on the part of Being itself). However, in contrast to Fichte’s notion of the “intellectual intuition,” which may seem to say the same thing, this unity is in fact a genuine unity: it gives the whole person as a totality, not merely the abstract action of positing, because it is the person moving himself in being moved. In other words, it is an “absolute,” not as an immediate first principle, but as a totality that is both mediated and immediate. It follows, moreover, that the logical, or formal, function of the unity of apperception is not abstracted and made absolute in itself as an a priori condition, but it is in the first place an aspect of the concrete unity of the person in action. Rather than being an abstract, and empty, principle that is self-contained and self-interpreted a priori, it is itself a participation in this more fundamental event, which means that even its formal (a priori) structurality is constituted empirically. Of course, this is not to “reduce” the unity of apperception to its a posteriori or empirical realization.125 It is rather to show that understood in its fundamental reality as gift, the “empirical” is already itself far more than mere a posteriori materiality. Also, what is taken to be a priori formality is not something the subject adds subsequently to purely material experience but rather both produces and receives inasmuch as the unity is given in the experience, and the experience is the subject’s active-receptive self-moving in being moved. The subject’s simultaneously producing and receiving (its own) unity leads us already into the second implication. If we take the unity of consciousness as contained in the concrete event of the subject’s being-called by the other, we see that unity is not in the first place transcendental but genuinely transcendent. It is not the purely nonempirical projection of the a priori structures of subjectivity as the ground for all possible experience,

125. Which is precisely what happens, one could argue, in Wittgenstein, who “reduces” the difference between “conscious” and “unconscious” to a distinction in grammar: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed.; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), sec. 149, 58–59. This reduction removes any dimension at all of “non-appearing” transcendence in the phenomenon of consciousness, and it subsequently identifies meaning exhaustively with physical manifestation. The Birth of Consciousness

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but it is always already, from the beginning and all the way into its core, “more” than the subject; it always already involves the subject in and with the other. The unity, then, is from the outset inclusive rather than exclusive of the other. We are now in a position to give a more thorough answer to a dilemma I raised in the preceding chapter concerning the unity of apperception in the act of knowing. The dilemma arose because of the following considerations: On the one hand, unity seems by nature to have a “from above,” or “transcendental” character, an insight we find expressed in profoundly different but related ways in Plotinus and in Kant. It has this character because where unity is not already given, it cannot be constructed. A multiplicity of fragments can be gathered together, but they have a unity; they form a unified and integrated whole, only if the oneness is transcendent of its parts. In this sense, to the extent that consciousness of the other is a unified experience, it would seem that the subject would always already have to possess a unity to “grant” to the multiplicity of its sense experience. Unity is in this respect always presupposed; it is the transcendental condition of possibility for any act of knowing. On the other hand, if it were an a priori aspect of the subject’s cognitional structure, it would not be a posteriori; that is, it would not belong to the object itself, but it would be imposed on the object wholly from without. In order to affirm an intrinsic unity of the object as the object’s own unity, it would seem that this unity could not be imposed by the subject on the object, but rather, conversely, be a unity that the object would impose on the subject. Unity would in this respect be always given wholly by the object. Yet, if this were the case, we would once again lose the possibility of the subject’s unified consciousness of the object. The dilemma is this: unity seems, on the one hand, to be an a priori condition of possibility, and an a posteriori given in experience. I will address the issue of the a priori and a posteriori aspects of consciousness as Balthasar interprets them later in the chapter, but we can see already that the only way to avoid the dilemma is to affirm both at once. If we start with either affirmation first, we simply foreclose the possibility of the other. Now, to help articulate the problem that occurs when we neglect either aspect of this paradox, we might use a term Blondel coined in a different context, namely, monophorism.126 The term designates the attempt to account for an event solely on the basis of a single one of its components. 126. See Maurice Blondel, “The Third ‘Testis’ Article,” trans. Peter Bernardi, Communio: International Catholic Review 26 (Winter 1999): 868 [Pseudonym: Testis, “La ‘Semaine Sociale’ de Bordeaux (troisième article),” Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne 138

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A monophoristic understanding of the unity of apperception would see the unity of the consciousness of an object either as given exclusively by the object or exclusively by the subject. But, it is important to see that we cannot overcome monophorism simply by adding the two contributions or components: that is, affirming that the subject accounts for “half” of the unity and the object the other half, because unity is always more than the sum of its parts. No, the only way to overcome monophorism, and the dualism it necessarily entails, is to affirm that the unity is an event that includes both subject and object; it involves the participation of the whole subject and the whole object in a unity that transcends both. And this is in fact the reason for the term event: if unity involves the “meeting” of subject and object, it cannot be a static principle but must rather “happen” or “come to be,” and it must do so as something that “dawns,” simultaneously from above and from below. In this respect, the unity is something that both subject and object share simultaneously. This means, then, that even the “formal” aspect of the subject’s self-consciousness is given in this event. Unity never exists as such in itself but is always the unity “of” something; it is always unity concretely embodied. Balthasar expresses this point thus: “There is no moment when subjectivity monadically and self-sufficiently rests in itself. Rather, subjectivity is a matter of finding oneself always already engaged in the world. The unity of the ego as subject is always also the ‘unity of apperception,’ which comes about in the act of synthetic judgment in the cognition of the object.”127 Thus, at every stage in the meaning of the unity of consciousness, we find that form is always a participation in a concrete whole: the unity of apperception in its logical sense is a participation in self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the joining of self and other in consciousness, and so we could say that self-consciousness is a participation in consciousness of the world, or simply consciousness tout court. Consciousness, in turn, is a participation in the union with an other, and the union of self and other is a participation in the fundamental unity of Being.

(December 1909): 244–78]. Mono-phorism, constructed from the Greek, means accounting for something wholly through the contribution of a single source. Blondel coined this term specifically to designate the two possible “heresies” in the nature-grace problem: either the immanentist approach, which accounts for the transformation of nature wholly from the side of nature alone, as a function of forces working inside nature, or the “extrinsicist” approach, which sees this transformation as being caused wholly “from without,” by the wholly extrinsic advent of grace. There is clearly an analogy between the issue Blondel faced and the epistemological problem we are now attempting to resolve. 127. TL 1:47. The Birth of Consciousness

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But we must note immediately that this progressive series does not represent a merely unilateral hierarchy. The Being that holds the comprehensive unity to support the “relative opposition” between beings in their encounter does not represent a “final” point of unity except in a certain respect, because Being, as we saw in the last chapter, is essentially nonsubsistent. In epistemological terms, we could say that Being, taken in itself, insofar as it is distinguished from its concrete actualizations, in a certain sense returns to the initial “light” of the transcendental unity of apperception: it is, as it were, the light in which all else is seen. But, whereas in God the self-transparency of Being is utter fullness, in the finite mind, the self-transparency of Being, which is the identity of Being and thinking in self-consciousness, threatens to wilt into an abstraction or a mere formality: a mere condition of possibility, if it is not seen within the series mentioned above of concrete participations. The point is this: the transcendental approach to consciousness moves in a single direction, toward ever more fundamental conditions of possibility; Balthasar’s approach, by contrast, affirms this movement but requires that it be complemented by a movement in precisely the opposite direction, toward ever more comprehensive manifestations of unity. Because of the irreducible difference that cuts through all the structures of created reality, including the transcendental unity of consciousness, transcendence is always twofold. It always means simultaneous transcendence in two directions, each mediating, or interpreting, the other. I will illustrate this principle with the most basic example. Balthasar explains in The Truth of the World that the original identity of Being and thinking (and thus in principle the other and self) is impotent unless it “passes through” a difference.128 Thus, he says, the self must undergo the experiment of dividing itself from itself for a moment, in order then to be reconciled to itself with a newly acquired knowledge of the meaning of unity. The point of this experiment, Balthasar explains, is “to apprehend its own identity experientially.”129 In other words, even identity itself, as formal as it may seem, cannot be grasped in itself except through an experience, that is, except as mediated (interpreted) to itself. In order for the spirit to be able to measure—to be conscious at all—it must come to understand the meaning of measure through the measuring of itself. This is the projection and confirmation, one might say, of the verbum mentis (mental word), which, because it brings together unity and difference, alone opens up the unity of self-consciousness to allow for an encounter with an other.

128. TL 1:164–66. 129. Ibid., 164. 140

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Balthasar goes on to say that my experience of my identity with myself (in the difference of the verbum mentis) is the condition of possibility for my being able to understand the identity of the other in the multiplicity and mediation of his expressions. Now, this point is already a step beyond the suggestion that Balthasar seemed to make earlier, namely, that the condition of possibility for all knowing is the (as-yet undifferentiated and apparently purely formal) identity of Being and thinking in consciousness. But he takes an even further step forward several pages later, where he says that the “inner word” is itself made possible only through being addressed from the outside by another, in essence because “a man cannot see his own face as all others behold it. Even if he looks in a mirror, he sees himself, not as he is, but as an inverse image of himself.”130 In this respect, the “self-evidence” of self-identity is not merely posited as an a priori but is in fact concretely interpreted to itself. What we see by virtue of the genesis of consciousness in the event of the mother’s smile is that the order of these stages as Balthasar presents them in TL 1 should be reversed. The result is one of the most remarkable insights to emerge from Balthasar’s new approach to consciousness: to say that consciousness, as donum doni, is born in the event of love expressed concretely in the mother’s show of love for her child, means that the unity of self-consciousness, and even the transcendental unity of apperception in its most bare, logical form, is not for any single instant given in itself as it is in itself except as from the beginning interpreted to itself in the original, concrete encounter.131 The mother’s smile does not make this unity, because in that case it would not be a unity (whole) at all but only a part of the mother. And yet she nevertheless (experientially) presents the meaning of this unity to the child, without which presentation the child could never be said in fact to be in possession of that unity. In other words, it is the

130. Ibid., 171. 131. Just as Balthasar’s approach to the constitution of consciousness in a certain sense brings together phenomenological and metaphysical approaches to being, so too does it join traditional metaphysical and hermeneutical approaches to truth: because the foundational presuppositions for meaning (paradigmatically the unity of apperception) are from the beginning interpreted to themselves as they are, in an “absolute” event, there is never any need, in principle, simply to oppose the interpretation of truth to its being accessible in itself. Jörg Disse seems to have missed this basic thrust in Balthasar’s thinking, when he suggests that Balthasar speaks too easily of “things in themselves,” when he should recall that we always see things in a manner determined according to perspectives: see Jörg-P. Disse, “Liebe und Erkenntnis: Zur Geistesmetaphysik Hans Urs von Balthasars,” Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift, 54, no. 3 (1999): 215–27; see esp. 223, n. 54. The Birth of Consciousness

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immediacy of the mother’s being, which is given “mediately” in her expression, that shows the child what unity is—and this means she reveals to him his own a priori unity of apperception. Balthasar wrote at the end of his life that “the infant comes to the knowledge not of a pure appearance, but of his mother in herself.”132 Thus, while the child learns that the smile is not identical to his mother, he learns at the same time that through it, she is giving him access to her self, her being. Through the “mediation” of the smile, the child sees the immediate union of his mother’s being. And this unity of the mother’s gift is itself, as we will see in chapter 4, conditioned by the unity of love with her husband. In the concrete expression of this unity that lies at the original ground of the child’s being and being-conscious, the child is given simultaneously both the a priori capacity to perceive unity, and the interpretation of its meaning. This, in turn, is eventually what allows the child to utter, and measure himself by: his own verbum mentis. Only because he has experienced the unity of the mother’s self with her expression will the child be able to understand his own unity with himself in self-consciousness. Finally, the most fundamental unity, the identity of being and thinking that lies at the innermost core of the transcendental unity of apperception, though presupposed, is “learned” for the first time in these concrete experiences. In every instance in the whole epistemological process, unity is simultaneously both given as an a priori presupposition and simultaneously interpreted to itself; it is both immediate and mediated. There are two further observations to make in regard to this understanding of the unity of self-consciousness. The first is an elaboration of what we just mentioned, namely, that the meaning of unity, even in its most abstract and formal sense, is never simply a finished matter. If, in principle, the inner “form” of unity is from the beginning opened to its being reflected, or interpreted, back to itself—if, in other words, the openness to further interpretation belongs to the essence of the unity of consciousness—then the very unity of consciousness is never something we ever have simply behind us: it is always also something we “have to look forward to,” because it is something we are never finished learning about. The unity of consciousness is more like the unity of a community of persons than like the unity of a geometric figure: when a new person is “added” to the community, the original unity (in principle) is not threatened or diminished but rather expanded, differentiated, and recast. So, too, the

132. Balthasar, “A Résumé of My Thought” [= RT], in Schindler, ed., Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, 3. 142

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further concrete experiences of unity are not mere “superfluous additions” to the unity of self-consciousness, which was always already complete in itself, but new reinterpretations. At the same time, however, the new reinterpretations are not merely replacements of the “old” ones: we are saved from this Hegelian understanding only if we root the whole development in the most fundamental experience in which the perfect whole was already given: the mother’s smile. Once we do so, we are enabled to affirm Hegel’s interpretation of the basic meaning of his dialectic but without drawing his own conclusions. Dialectic, Hegel says, is like a boy who learns a proverb and understands perfectly well what it means, that is, what the words say. After a hard life of suffering and toil in the world, he hears the same proverb again, and he sees that now he understands it for the first time. The unity of consciousness is in the same way both given and awaiting its final meaning. We may also compare this unity to Claudel’s description of the great “book” of creation, “the book that will have its meaning only when it is finished. Thus, through the art of the poet, an image in the last lines comes to awaken the idea that had fallen asleep in the first, to reanimate the motley, half-finished figures that were awaiting their call.”133 The point, in any event, is to see once again that the transcendence of created unity must transcend both vertically, into more comprehensive principles, and horizontally toward ever-greater concrete realizations. The unity of consciousness is thus both a unifying principle and a concrete totality; the totality of all things in the cosmos is not alien to it. I will return to this point at the end of the chapter. The second observation to make is a clarification of something that was mentioned earlier. Because every act of consciousness, whether perception or knowledge, rests in some respect on the identity of Being and thinking, then, as we said above, God—who is this identity—is implicit in all consciousness. Whereas beginning with an abstract identity in consciousness leads to a sort of dialectic between the finite and infinite mind that only in a second moment “makes contact” with the world, the analysis of the unity of consciousness such as we have just seen it shows us that the relationship to God, though in a deep sense more immediate than anything else, is nevertheless inaccessible except through the mediation of the world, because it is only through the concrete experience of the world that the unity is first constituted, which is the “place” in which analogy occurs.134

133. Paul Claudel, Le soulier de satin (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), 187–88. 134. For Balthasar’s specific discussions of the analogy between finite and infinite self-consciousness, see TL 1:227–44, 260–61. The Birth of Consciousness

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This means, then, that there is no single point of simple (formal) identity, combined with simple (material) difference, that falls inevitably into a dialectic, but rather identity arises only “complexly,” which means only in action: analogy is dramatic. As we saw with being, we now see with consciousness. Created identity, as analogous to the divine tri-unity, is always a “one” that multiplies itself. The endless dilemmas and problems that arise when this paradoxical structure of consciousness is not viewed in its totality can be seen in an essay by Manfred Frank, “Subjectivity and Individuality: Survey of a Problem.”135 Frank begins by enumerating the characteristics of consciousness that are presupposed in most contemporary accounts of the self. First, rejecting (with Sartre) Heidegger’s notion that “self-consciousness” is derivative of a more fundamental “understanding of Being,” since any understanding of being, in order to be an understanding, requires in turn a “consciousness” of that understanding, Frank asserts that self-consciousness must be original and be derived from nothing other than itself.136 Second, in order to avoid circularity, that is, presupposing the self that recognizes itself in its reflection, we have to affirm that self-consciousness is fundamentally prereflective, immediate, and prepropositional. Third, there is no relationality or any such “inner partition” in consciousness, and therefore there is no possibility of “referential failure.” Fourth, consciousness is “actuality” in the sense that there can be no “degrees” of consciousness; it is either in act or it is not. And, finally, related to its actuality, consciousness is essentially “spontaneous,” a term that Frank interprets thus in this context: “It means that the self owes all it is (not its existence but its essence) to itself; there is no receptivity or passivity of the originally self-conscious being.”137 This list of characteristics is stunning: it affirms, at every turn, precisely the opposite of what we have seen thus far in Balthasar’s understanding of consciousness. What is also remarkable is how much the contemporary debate, to the extent at least that it is accurately represented by Frank, is the legacy of the problems that arose in Kant and were left unresolved in the tide of philosophy that came after him. Now, given these basic presuppositions, which are so to speak the direct opposite of Balthasar’s own, Frank shows the recent attempts to account

135. Manfred Frank, “Subjectivity and Individuality: Survey of a Problem,” in Figuring the Self, 3–30. 136. This, and the next several characteristics, are all described in ibid., 5–7. 137. Ibid., 7. 144

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for the “self” and their various failures, which he says occur for the most part because nearly any sense of the self that contemporary philosophy offers at some point seems to depend on relation or multiplicity within its basic structure. I will mention only a few of the many positions he outlines, since my purpose is not to deal with any of them individually but merely to get a sense of the basic trend. Thus, there is the Kantian and neo-Kantian “egological” understanding, which Frank claims was held by Husserl and Bertrand Russell among others, which is inadequate because it takes for granted the possibility of “representational” self-reflection.138 Then, there are nonegological approaches that reject consciousness of the “I,” and yet still think of it as “consciousness of itself” in some manner or another, and therefore are still bound to a “representational” model. One of the more radical attempts to get beyond such a model is what Russell called “neutral monism,” namely the rejection of any notion at all of a substantial “self” and the positing instead of the mere relation among external events. Even this approach is problematic, however, Frank informs us, because it too concedes some form of relation as fundamental. In the end, Frank proposes the category of “individual” (rather than “person,” which he says is too closely bound up with the German Idealist notion of particularity, that is the self-limitation of absolute spirit, or the defining of self negatively against all that is nonself), as the way to resolve these various problems.139 This position incorporates Jacques Derrida’s approach, which differentiates identity through the interplay of signs, and yet it does not fall into the Derridean contradiction of an undifferentiated differentiation, because Frank’s position allows the continually transformed interpretation of signs through the self-conscious “motivated” activity of individuals. The strangeness of most of the positions that Frank lays out, and the strangeness of the swirling brew of active, windowless monads, which is what his own position seems to amount to, is necessitated only if we concede the list of characteristics that Frank presupposes. But we have seen that there is another way to understand the essence of consciousness: if we understand it in terms of gift, or more specifically, as donum doni, the radical receptivity of consciousness does not in any respect dampen its spontaneity, and so there is no reason to reject from the outset a consciousness of Being, which is at the same time a consciousness of self, and an intrinsic openness toward the other.

138. Ibid., 13. 139. Ibid., 21–26. The Birth of Consciousness

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Apriority: A Presuppositionless Philosophy? Der Geist braucht in sich eine Bühne, die leer ist und so groß, daß alles auf ihr erscheinen und gespielt werden kann.140 —Balthasar

The modern shift “to the subject,” in order thereby to ground philosophy in its most radically originary roots, is in a certain respect not modern at all, but in fact merely a new method to carry through what had always been one of the basic impulses in philosophy, namely, a love of the whole. The analysis of the fundamental act of consciousness is but the recapitulation of philosophy’s native effort to “appropriate” the most original beginning possible in order to be able to appropriate whatever follows from that beginning. The point, as Plato saw, is that the love of “the whole of” wisdom does not satisfy itself with mere appearances or opinions,141 but it seeks to see that which is so original it can only be something one “sees for oneself.”142 In this respect, philosophy is not philosophy if it remains, as it were, in second-order speech and does not enter into the originary experience. It is not philosophy if it never seeks to penetrate into presuppositions to touch their ground, but merely takes them all for granted. It is this philosophical passion that, later, led Husserl, with his new method, to revitalize or reanimate fundamental concepts in science that had “sedimented,” and to grasp them once again in their original evidence, thus making them truly “one’s own.”143 It is likewise the same passion that led Heidegger, following Husserl, to call for a Destruktion of tradition, through the method of Wiederholung, that is, retrieving ideas by reentering into them and repeating the insight that gave birth to them: the project of Destruktion “has no other concern than to retrieve metaphysics’ original experiences of Being in the breaking down of notions [Vorstellungen] that have grown familiar and empty.”144

140. The spirit must bear within itself a stage that is so broad and open that everything can appear and play itself out on it. 141. Plato, Rep., 505d–e. See also 475a–e: “won’t we say that the philosopher doesn’t desire one part of wisdom or another, but desires the whole thing?” 142. Ibid., 533a. 143. See Husserl, Husserls Werk, vol. 8: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 52, 72–73, 118, etc. 144. Heidegger, Zur Seinsfrage, 36: “Destruktion . . . kennt kein anderes Anliegen, als im Abbau geläufig und leer gewordener Vorstellungen die ursprünglichen Seinserfahrungen der Metaphysik zurückzugewinnen.” See also What Is Philosophy?, 73, and Being and Time, sec. 6. 146

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This drive for originality (not in the sense of “novelty” but “depth,” that is, entering into the origins) and totality is the greatness of philosophy, that which makes it one of the most human of all occupations. But it is this same drive that has led philosophy at various times in history to devolve into intolerable titanisms, and it is what has made it, most recently, in the guise of metaphysics, the object of suspicion. The reason for this suspicion is on the one hand the oppressive domination of a mathesis universale (absolute science), which Catherine Pickstock has traced from Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, and Raymond Lull to Descartes, showing the relation between this mathesis and a culture of death (“necrophilia”).145 On the other hand, this is the Promethean titanism that Balthasar has described in the soaring towers of German Idealism—the “absolute systems” of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—which spawned in their wake almost by necessity the equally absolute rejections in the form of the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx.146 Since that time, except for Husserl’s phenomenology, which also understood its goal to be an “absolute science,” no major thinker has attempted to grasp the whole in any systematic fashion. Instead, we find today a “systematic” distaste for absolute claims, systems, attaining to foundations or things in themselves. This is a distaste for anything other than perpetual rehearsals, postponements, recommencements, hesitations, deferrals, and displacements, a distaste that represents for the soul what the corresponding distaste for food represents for the body: a serious sign of ill health. Such a reaction may be justified psychologically by the horrors Europe has experienced in the last century as a result of “totalitarian” thinking, but it can be justified philosophically only if there is a necessary connection between a drive for originality and totality, and the destructive forms of mathesis or system thinking. It seems, however, that whether this connection in fact obtains depends in a fundamental way on the understanding of consciousness that is operative: the form of this basic beginning, this first relation between man and the world, will be to a large extent determinative of the shape of the final whole. Now, there are many complex issues related to this question, which we do not have the space to explore in the way they would demand. But there is also a fairly simple Gestalt lying at this question’s root, and the attempt to sketch its basic outline will form a fitting conclusion for this chapter and a nice beginning for the next.

145. Pickstock, After Writing, 47–74. 146. GL 5:546–96, 643–45. The Birth of Consciousness

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In essence, the whole turns on the sense of the “a priori” function of consciousness in epistemology (which could also be formulated in relation to premodern philosophy as the problem of “recollection” in Plato and Neoplatonism, or as the agent intellect in Aristotle and Scholasticism). If the a priori aspect of consciousness designated precisely that which is not received from another, then when this function is coupled with the understanding of the soul as “in a certain sense all things” (quodammodo omnia, a basically universal principle in philosophy, even if it is formulated differently by different authors), what results is a sense of the act of knowing scarcely distinguishable from the act of eating: that is, total assimilation. In this case, the attempt to appropriate the most original starting point, to begin as “presuppositionless” as possible in one’s philosophizing, would be identical with the constructing of a universal, titanic system. The desire to avoid system, or as is usually put in contemporary philosophy, the desire to overcome a metaphysics of presence, becomes therefore coextensive with the shrinking of consciousness’s role, or the shrinking of the soul’s desire to be all things. Balthasar, however, offers a clear alternative to this contemporary corrective: his new sense of consciousness allows us to recover the ancient “originality” of philosophy, and yet in a way that does not lead to titanic system-building. These final two subsections, accordingly, will explicate Balthasar’s sense of the a priori of consciousness, and then indicate the general implications for the role consciousness plays in philosophy.

“Thinking Ahead”: Recollection and Repetition Ever since Plato’s theory of recollection147—unless we wish to find this idea already in the eternal spermata of Anaxagoras, which do not come to be or pass away, and which are joined and divided primitively by the Nous,148 or even earlier in Parmenides’ eternal judgment: “Is!” which is the identity of Being and thinking149—the a priori aspect of knowledge has been a constant theme in philosophy. The issue concerns one of the deepest aporias of truth, namely, the paradox of not being able to “learn” something unless it is already in a certain way known. In his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard expresses a dissatisfaction with the “Socratic” answer to the question, inasmuch as recollection seems to “swallow up” time into the eternal.150 Indeed,

147. The basic texts in Plato are Meno 81d–98a; Phaedrus 247cff.; Phaedo 72e–77a. 148. Anaxagoras, in DK fragment B 4, 12, 17. 149. Parmenides, in DK fragment B 8, 5. 150. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 13. 148

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the sense of the a priori as that which is always already in possession of what it seeks, to such an extent that it can allow nothing to “come to” it (zukommt)—and so can allow no future (Zukunft) but only a dead past— amounts to what Nietzsche called the greatest possible poverty:151 being so rich, one is incapable of receiving, which is the essence of Midas’s curse. Kierkegaard thus proposes a “futural” form of the a priori, a “repetition,” which he understood as a “recollecting forward.” It is clear that this question is pertinent to the understanding of consciousness in its initial impulse, in its basic function in epistemology, and we have in fact already implicitly seen Balthasar’s answer. But because of its crucial importance for the question of truth, it will be good to make this answer more explicit. Doing so, then, will allow us to see some of the immediate implications of Balthasar’s “new approach” to consciousness in relation to the project of philosophy in general. I have shown that in order to ground an authentic analogy between divine and human intelligence, that analogy has to be mediated by Being, which in turn is mediated by concrete encounters with beings (paradigmatically, the original interpersonal relationship), not only materially but formally as well. This point could quickly become dualistic; that is, by “postponing” even formal identity between divine and human intelligence, it could seem to undermine all relation whatsoever. It is therefore important to complement this point by showing how in a certain sense the whole is always already given in advance, not just formally but materially as well. To get to the heart of the issue, we will in a moment cite a remarkable passage from Aquinas, which was to have such a decisive significance for Maréchal, and through him, Transcendental Thomism more generally. In order to grasp the passage, a few comments are needed to explain its terms and its reference. The passage concerns the role of the agent intellect in human knowing. According to Aquinas, the agent intellect is the power that makes it possible to grasp the intelligible first principles. The most fundamental of these, Maréchal explains, is “the principle, not only of quantitative being, but of being (être) as such”:152 in other words, what is given in the agent intellect is not only the formal conditions for grasping being, understood in a Kantian sense, but rather in some sense the whole of being, formally and materially. It is only by virtue of this whole given with the agent intellect that anything else can be known: “For in every man there is a certain principle of knowledge, namely, the light of the agent 151. See the “Nachtlied” from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, cited in TL 1:46. 152. Joseph Maréchal, A Maréchal Reader, trans. and ed. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 143. The Birth of Consciousness

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intellect, through which certain universal principles of all the sciences are naturally understood as soon as proposed to the intellect.”153 And because the agent intellect is an intrinsic aspect of the human mind itself, Aquinas in fact asserts, “in the light of the agent intellect, all knowledge (omnis scientia) is somehow originally inborn in us.”154 Now, everything here hangs on what sense we give the word somehow: quodammodo. However we interpret this word will be the way we answer what Balthasar called the “one, unique, fundamental question of all philosophy.” As we saw already in the introduction, “has the act of transcendence already found the transcendental object? Is it, as act, therefore one with its object or not? Is the light in which we accomplish the act of transcendence identical with the illumination of transcendence?”155 Given that the transcendent ground of knowing is not something that can be simply acquired a posteriori, which is a point nearly all philosophies agree on, the question becomes whether we must therefore make it simply an a priori precondition, as Kant does, which seems the only alternative, and is in fact asserted by nearly all modern rationalist philosophers. The question becomes urgent when we see the implications of this alternative, namely, that any particular act of knowledge cannot be in any genuine sense new, which means further that consciousness cannot be transcendent or even truly intentional. If a transcendental solipsism is not outright embraced by those who affirm this alternative, it is no less the logical outcome of this theoretical decision. Aquinas’s own position, however, is paradoxical. Here, then, is the decisive text: Regarding the undemonstrable first principle of knowledge (by which Aquinas and Aristotle mean, most immediately, the principle of noncontradiction, but which Maréchal takes in this context in its most general sense, as being [ens] itself), “the third one is that . . . it comes from without to someone who, as it were, possesses it by nature, as if it were known naturally, and not from any learning. For the first principles are known through the very light of the agent intellect.”156 The paradox lies

153. Aquinas, ST, 1, 79, 5 ad 3. Cited (quite freely translated) in Maréchal, Maréchal Reader, 142. 154. Aquinas, De ver., 10, 6 (“Et sic etiam in lumine intellectus agentis nobis est quodammodo omnis scientia originaliter indita”). Cited in Maréchal, 142. 155. GL 4:155–56. 156. Aquinas, In IV Metaph. Lect. 6, 599, cited in Maréchal, Maréchal Reader, 142. The passage from Aquinas runs: “Tertio conditio est, ut non acquiratur per demonstrationem, sed adveniat quasi per naturam habenti ipsum, quasi ut naturaliter cognoscatum, et non per acquisitionem. Ex ipso enim lumine naturali intellectus agentis prima principia fiunt cognita.” 150

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in the seemingly contradictory phrase “it comes from without to someone who, as it were, possesses it by nature”: “adveniat quasi per naturam habenti ipsum.” This basis for every cognitional act whatsoever is simultaneously both possessed and given from without, both from below and from above. But Maréchal, in his own interpretation of this passage, immediately lets slip the paradox and sees it merely “dynamically”: “this is the very formula of the virtual, dynamic a priori, as it becomes explicit, under the impact of the outside data in some objective knowledge.”157 For Maréchal, the dynamism reduces to an implicit a priori, which is then made explicit dynamically through contact with an outside object. Maréchal’s interpretation is as it were the grandfather of the foundational axiom in Rahner’s epistemology, the Vorgriff, or formal “pre-understanding,” of being (esse) as such, taken as the unlimited ground of all possibility.158 Although Rahner, like Maréchal, sees the agent intellect as dependent in some respect on sensible objects for its actualization, and thus takes the abstracting power of the agent intellect to be inseparable from the conversio ad phantasmata, he goes a step further and reads the conversio as an aspect of the spirit’s own structural conditions of possibility, so the spirit in essence “produces” sensibility in the mediation of itself to itself on the way to its supreme fulfillment in God. The paradoxical tension gets reduced to one of its arms: the quasi in Aquinas’s passage is lost, and the advenit (it comes from without) of the first principle becomes a moment, a function of the habens (possessing).159 157. Maréchal, Maréchal Reader. 158. See Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner,” 14–16. On the relationship between Balthasar and Transcendental Thomism, see Laurence Gadient. Gadient argues that what constitutes the fundamental difference is that for Balthasar, the very structure of freedom and therefore consciousness comes into being as a “being-called.” Thus, the relation to the other as other is “built in” to the structure of consciousness itself, not as a moment of its own makeup but as an inward opening to what is essentially other. 159. For a recent overview of some of the basic interpretations of Aquinas on precisely the problem we are addressing, namely, that of how the intellect initially reaches being, which is the first of all its conceptions and that by which it knows everything else, see Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1996), 170–85. Aertsen criticizes Maréchal primarily because for Aquinas, the knowledge of being is not a priori but based on the senses. He likewise insists, against Existential Thomism (Gilson, Fabro) that it is not acquired through judgment. His own position is that being is a conception produced in the intuitive act of simple apprehension. However, he does not offer much explanation and so ends up begging the question. How is the initial apprehension possible? Aertsen affirms merely that “the notion of being is immediately conceived at the moment when the intellect begins to act, for the intellect is directed by nature to” being (183). But this raises the question in turn, How can the intellect be “directed to” being if it is not already in some sense with being? The Birth of Consciousness

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What we have seen in Balthasar, by contrast, preserves us from having to reduce either aspect of the paradox. It can do so because, on the one hand, it sees consciousness itself as an “event” of Being. On the other hand, since this event is inseparable from its mediation through the total self-gift and total “laying-claim-to” of the mother’s smile, the being that “happens” is itself both generously and receptively “other-centered.” If the “being” that revealed itself were merely generous—merely offered itself as an object of desire (Plato)—it would be impossible to avoid reducing the analogy of being to a formalistic dialectic of identity, or in other words, measuring the contact between consciousness and being wholly by the subject’s capacities, or as the perfection of its desires. By contrast, if being reveals itself also as desiring, that is, as itself receptive to consciousness (which we recall was contained in the mother’s smile as a love revealing that the child himself is lovable, worthy of being loved), then the measure, both formally and materially, can be given jointly, as two irreducible aspects asymmetrically related in a single movement. This joint movement is the light of consciousness participating in the light of being. We saw something similar already in the notion of consciousness as attunement to being, which means that consciousness is simultaneously active and passive. It is so because the heart of the matter is a reciprocity, which at no moment is a one and then the other but is the simultaneous, asymmetrical, and circumincessive mutuality of the two.160 In other words, “separating” consciousness into distinct a priori and a posteriori aspects presupposes a monophoristic notion of consciousness, where that which is accounted for by one aspect is precisely not accounted for by the other, and vice versa. A reciprocal sense of consciousness, in distinction to this 160. This sense of the paradox of asymmetry in mutuality seems to be lacking in the essay by Lucy Gardner and David Moss, “Something Like Time, Something Like the Sexes—An Essay in Reception,” in Balthasar at the End of Modernity, 69–137. Although they are right to see a tension between asymmetry and simultaneity or mutuality, Gardner and Moss do not allow this tension to stand paradoxically; they read it instead as a basic contradiction lying at the heart of Balthasar’s thought. Indeed, it would be a mere contradiction if asymmetry had to mean in every case first one (principle or element) and only afterward the other, while mutuality had to mean that there is no room whatsoever for any sense of “first” or “second,” that is, no room for asymmetry of any sort. For example, they write: “First and second become times which are required to occur not only in the same time or timing, but at the same time—an impossibility” (101). This objection, in fact, touches the very heart of Balthasar’s insight. For his part, Balthasar sees the irreducible mutuality, where each is presupposed by the other and so each must come to be “at the same time,” not as a contradiction but ultimately the paradox of love that is coextensive with being. The difficulties that Gardner and Moss seek to provoke in Balthasar’s thought arise only when the mediation of the mystery of being is forgotten. 152

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approach, sees each aspect contributed simultaneously and jointly by both being and consciousness, albeit asymmetrically. The same things, then, are both a priori and a posteriori. Any insistence on accounting for each of these separately presupposes that each is, one might say, contained in itself and sufficiently so defined apart from its encounter with the other.161 Thus, what are given a posteriori are the a priori conditions for being’s reception, while the reception in turn is the spontaneous granting of being’s a posteriori objectivity.162 This strange intertwining of seemingly opposed aspects is possible only because the complex whole occurs in a single event, which is a principle that Siewerth also affirmed. According to Siewerth, “the apriority of the grasping of being is not only not contrary to the aposteriority of knowledge but in fact requires it.”163 And this is because the two are merely “moments or parts of a single event, or a single essential structure.”164 Furthermore, the whole is possible simultaneously only because the depth of the interpersonal encounter is an ontological depth, a depth that includes the whole fourfold difference I elaborated in the last chapter. This encounter is a dramatic involvement in the analogy of being. It is thus not the case that one joins what one already “immediately” has to what one does not yet have but must “mediately” receive; rather, the whole happens at once, such that “mediation mediates the non-mediate, and into

161. Such is, for example, clearly the assumption governing Jörg Disse’s observation, namely, that Balthasar’s allowing a kind of spontaneity into consciousness’s fundamentally receptive activity means in principle that we can still analyze consciousness into its a priori structures: see “Liebe und Erkenntnis,” 233, n. 47. This would be the case only if spontaneity is necessarily to be identified with Kantian spontaneity, an assumption that, of course, merely begs the question Balthasar is addressing. 162. Cornelio Fabro, “The Transcendentality of Ens-Esse and the Ground of Metaphysics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): 389–427, offers a profound presentation of the problem of the fundamental relationship between being and consciousness represented in the notio entis: How is it, he asks, that consciousness, as somehow other than being, comes into possession of that by which alone it comes into possession of anything, i.e., the medium for all thought? He answers that it cannot be sheer empty “act” (similar to Rahner’s Vorgriff), nor abstraction of content from sense experience, but must somehow be an ongoing experience that is both act and content. Fabro merely states the necessary conditions, and he leaves it as a problem for the future. It seems that Balthasar’s philosophy fills the conditions Fabro set in an exemplary manner. 163. Siewerth, Thomismus als Identitätsystem, cited in Cabada, 176, n. 3: “die Apriorität der Seinserfassung ist der Aposteriorität der Erkenntnis nicht nur nicht zuwider, sondern fordert sie sogar.” 164. Siewerth, Die Apriorität der menschlichen Erkenntnis nach Thomas von Aquin, cited in Cabada 176, n. 3: “Momente oder Teile eines Geschehens oder einer Wesensstruktur.” The Birth of Consciousness

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the non-mediate.”165 In other words, the potential tyranny of apriority is quelled in the same gesture we saw earlier, namely, that which does not affirm the immediate as given merely in itself, but rather given to itself in its being mediated or interpreted by another. Thus, if it is the case that the a priori dimension is not removed but understood as given in the event of being, then every event of consciousness will be accompanied by real anticipations, and we must see these anticipations therefore as coming from above. In other words, the novelty of a genuine revelation—a having one’s eyes opened and seeing something for the first time—will inevitably have a certain nostalgia attached to it. This is no psychological illusion but has a real metaphysical ground, the same ground, in fact, that accounts for the unity of the soul itself. In this respect, both Plato and Kierkegaard are right, and if we attend to our experience, especially in its most momentous and determinative instances— instances that are not heterogeneous to consciousness in general but are only where what always occurs comes most forcefully and directly to expression—we will see that things are just as Kierkegaard says: “[We can] really trust the poets’ tales, that, when a person catches sight of his beloved object for the first time, he believes he had already seen it long ago, that all love, like all knowledge, is recollection, and that even a single individual’s love has its prophets, its prefigurations, its myths, its old testaments.”166 To account for the “prefiguration” of the object of knowledge (and love), we do not have to have recourse to a myth of reincarnation, nor do we have to deny the real novelty of experience, or posit some “occasionalistic” sense of the constant intervention of providence.167 Rather, the “nostalgia” (the a priori aspect) and the newness and surprise

165. TD 2:391. In this passage, Balthasar is speaking specifically about the relation to God, which is mediated through the relation to our fellow human beings, but this is itself an echo of the same pattern in the experience of being. 166. Kierkegaard, Journal, cited in Ulrich, Leben in der Einheit von Leben und Tod, 174–75. 167. Such an approach, borrowed equally from Nicolas de Malebranche, Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, can be found in the first great critic of Kant, Salomon Maimon. In order to account for the possibility of knowledge, he introduced the notion of an infinite intelligence, the intellectus archetypus, as constantly operating within human intelligence. It is this divine intelligence that was responsible for constituting, not only the formal aspects of objects a priori but the material aspects of objects as well. On this theory in Maimon, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 293–95. This notion, which is as it were a transfigured resurrection of the intellectus agens and is not altogether different from the interpretation of it that Maréchal gives, is the direct link between Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the Absolute Subject of German Idealism, which is a conflation of the human and the divine minds. 154

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(the a posteriori aspect) are both due to the same source, namely, the event of being, as a gift both of the object to be known as well as the “presupposed” capacity to know it.

Quodammodo Omnia: The Soul as Stage As affirmed above, philosophy is essentially a drive to “appropriate” its beginnings, and this drive is ambiguous according to the meaning of appropriate, the meaning of which in turn depends on the essence of the consciousness of which the appropriation is the basic experience or fundamental act. This appropriation cannot avoid a tendency to become systemlike insofar as the fundamental act of consciousness is “apriority” understood as pure spontaneity. But if consciousness does not mean this most originally, then we do not have simply to reject the “modern turn to subjectivity.” In fact, precisely the opposite is the case. If the fundamental act of consciousness is not pure spontaneity but rather the total “other-centeredness” of moving in being moved, which I have alternately called inspiration, donum doni, and even a predisposition for mystery, then the best way to overcome a tendency toward subjectivism, solipsism, or system thinking, is precisely to enter more radically into the original experience of consciousness. I have been insisting all along on a concrete point of departure: part of the reason for this insistence is the notion that the transformation required in the basic dimensions of philosophy is not something that needs to be invented, or constructed in complex designs and formulas, but is in the first place simply given. The best approach is therefore not to avoid the appropriating of beginnings, as much recent philosophy seems to suggest, because the only alternative is in fact a kind of abstraction, which as we have constantly seen always ends up in dualism. The concrete method, then, is the method Balthasar follows. He embraces the modern movement into the originary experience of consciousness so radically that he transforms its fundamental ambiguities. But, in a sense, such a transformation is in fact merely the joining of a movement that is already under way. One of the “streams” of modern philosophy has been an attempt, as we have already seen in part, to recover the most comprehensive starting point possible, to begin with an ever more adequate concrete, “evident,” given. The significance of Balthasar’s starting point, then, will come to light with a particular clarity when viewed along the lines of this general trend. Whereas scholastic philosophy began with the most self-evident first principles as given, Descartes went a step further: he insisted on taking these, not merely as given and thus extrinsic to the self, coming from outside, but as wholly internalized, as appropriated. Thus, he takes as his The Birth of Consciousness

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starting point only what he can fully master: namely, that which is least doubtable because most emptied of content, the purely formal identity of being and thinking.168 While Kant attempted to put limits to the scope of this identity by positing the inaccessible Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself), postKantian philosophy in general, as we saw, radicalized Descartes’s principle in order eventually to include history within that identity. Husserl, then, marks a decisive new step. He does not begin with an abstract self that then generates history, like the Idealists, but begins already within history: that is, he expands the “given.” Thus, while Husserl praises Descartes’s basic impulse in wanting to grasp all knowledge from within, he criticizes him for thinking of consciousness, not as transcendental but as a “tag end” of the world169—that is, the last of the world’s objects—and failing to ground its proper transcendence—that is, the fact that the ego “precedes the being of the world.”170 Descartes’s understanding consciousness in this sense is indeed implied by his needing to separate the mind from its objects, as though it existed within the same empirical order as they. Husserl’s method, by contrast, aims as it were at a critique of the mind from within its intentional relation to the world, which means suspending the question of existence and attending to the flux of the mind’s phenomena, that is, the “stream of cogitationes.”171 Jean-Luc Marion attests to this shift in Husserl as the “basic phenomenological breakthrough,” which consists in essence in the recovery of the “unconditional primacy of the givenness of the phenomenon.”172 This is the key to Husserl’s call back “to the things themselves,” which is summed up in what Husserl himself refers to as the “principle of all principles,” namely, the commitment to accept “nothing that we cannot render essentially evident to consciousness itself in its pure immanence.”173 But this principle is fraught with a deep ambiguity: what may seem at first to be a return to the primacy of

168. “And in consequence, in subjectivity, vacuity and objectivity . . . coincide, for Descartes’ subject is only indubitable because it has been emptied of its contents by its definition as pure thought, and by being differentiated from its specific modes of existence.” Pickstock, After Writing, 71–72. 169. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 24. 170. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, 2nd printing (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 227–28. 171. See Cartesian Meditations, second meditation, 31–33. The second meditation describes this initial move. The following meditations, 3 through 5, are the process of “reconstructing” the world logically from the flux of phenomena. 172. Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 32. 173. Husserl, Ideas 1:136, cited in Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 49. 156

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the object, against the modern drift toward subjectivism, is, according to Marion, precisely the opposite. In the first place, Husserl makes “intuition” the “authority” for determining what counts as evident. Second, the measure for intuition itself is Erlebnis, a “living through” or “experiencing” in the sense of being tried or put to the test.174 The test, here, concerns the permanence of presence. And so, when Husserl says “Evidence is the Erlebnis of truth,” he means that the validity of the appearance of being is given by the extent to which it can be made permanently present to consciousness. Marion therefore concludes that far from genuinely opening to things in themselves, Husserl’s “unphenomenological” phenomenology merely reinstates the unquestioned sovereignty of subjectivity, which holds sway all the more decisively for its being so subtle: “consciousness thus radically determines phenomenality by imposing upon it the actuality of presence, the absoluteness of intuition, and the test of lived experience.”175 Now, the essence of Marion’s critique is that Husserl “imprisons” being insofar as he binds it to consciousness. The critique is legitimate, however, only when we concede that consciousness has the form of tyranny. There is no doubt that an ambiguity persists in Husserl’s understanding of consciousness. But, in order to clarify this ambiguity, it is not necessary to concede the sense of consciousness that Marion criticizes in Husserl. Instead, we can follow Marion’s own indication a bit further: the more direct response would be to expand the given. We see already that there is an evolution in the movement from Descartes to Husserl. Descartes, with his limited beginning, made mathesis his goal, a system of philosophical and scientific knowledge as complete within itself as a system of algebra or geometry,176 bound to the immediacy of the first principle. Now, if it is indeed the case that Husserl presents the ultimate ideal of his system as an “absolute science,” or a single, perfect, comprehensive intuition of the world (“göttliche Allerschauung”),177 nevertheless, at the heart of his system lies a primal “disinterestedness,” which is - We misunderstand this epoche- if we read it merely expressed in the epoche. as an intellectual tool, and fail to appreciate the profound ethos that, for - for him, is an ascetic act, Husserl, was inseparable from it. The epoche, a putting one’s own immediate interests in existing things out of play in

174. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 52. 175. Ibid., 54. 176. Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 91–94. 177. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 16. The Birth of Consciousness

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order to open receptively and serenely (“theoretically” = contemplatively) to the self-display of the whole. Husserl’s understanding of the epoche- in this sense is why he conceived the great idea of the absolute science not so much as world domination but as the liberation of the whole of humanity. Nevertheless, the ambiguity in his approach is undeniable. If we could play freely with history for a moment, we might take Blondel as the representative of the next step forward, which is a step once again more deeply into the beginning. We could imagine his criticism of Husserl on this point. What is most originally given, he might say, is not a purely intellectual, and thus two-dimensional, “stream” of images, but rather the will and its objects are given equiprimordially with those of the intellect.178 This is the case because the first and therefore the most “presuppositionless” starting point is the whole person, not just consciousness, engaged as a whole not only in thinking but in living. The original data, that is, the contents in consciousness that are most evidently given, are in this respect most basically not mere phenomenal images but threedimensional objects of personal interest. Thus, rather than working through a “critique” of reason or consciousness, Blondel performs a more fundamental “critique of life.”179 Blondel’s criticism of the “method of evidence,” which he claims fails to grasp the “middle term” that would render our most immediate intuitions intelligible, is directly related to his giving primacy to action over thought. The gap in intuition or evidence, according to Blondel, can be filled only if the intelligence is seen to be already in motion, that is, already having committed itself and crossed from one side to the other. In this case, the middle, connecting term is provided by the self-transcendence of spontaneous (willed) action. Thus, by inserting the intellect within the more comprehensive order of the will, he seeks to take the laurels away from science in order to make love the ultimate human act. It seems that this more comprehensive starting point, then, saves Blondel from the outset from the dangers of system thinking, because the basic impulse is not the closure of taking the other into one’s self, but the openness of contributing oneself in action for the sake of the whole.

178. To be sure, Husserl developed his philosophy somewhat in this direction with the idea of the Lebenswelt. 179. See the title of his first and most famous book: L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France, 1993). Clearly, Blondel intended to insert himself within the basic tradition of modern philosophy but only on what he saw as a more ample, and therefore adequate, basis. 158

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There are many people who wish to read Balthasar precisely in this sense.180 Although there is much in Blondel’s approach with which Balthasar would agree, it is not itself without problems.181 Specifically, though Blondel begins concretely with the whole person, this concrete person is taken as already formed, that is, as already in full possession of his intellect and will. Thus, coming to the analysis “too late,” Blondel finds these faculties already differentiated, and in this respect he must, like Husserl, order them logically. Thus, while Husserl gives primacy to theoretical intentionalities, Blondel privileges practical ones: but they are both abstract. The basic point, though, is that because Balthasar begins with a totality in the beginning—that is, simultaneously an objective totality and a subjective totality, with the primacy given to the object’s call—he does not have to choose between intellect and will. As we saw earlier in the essay “Movement toward God,” the beginning is a concrete whole that can only later, in the abstract, be distinguished according to its components. And thus, if we begin in the abstract, we begin with the components that we will never manage to reconstruct back into the whole. Now, the reason Balthasar’s beginning can be a totality is that it is fundamentally a moving in being moved. This character, then, determines every aspect of the whole, every aspect of the fundamental act, all the way through. Thus, if this beginning is an absolute, or a totality already given in advance, then the a priori is not one that belongs titanically to the subject but rather belongs to the joint subject-object whole, one condition of which is the subject’s 180. Jörg Disse and Pascal Ide both interpret Balthasar this way, but while Disse praises him for it, Ide is critical. In “Liebe und Erkenntnis,” Disse argues that Balthasar’s philosophy is the direct opposite of Indian or Greek thought, which make love a mere “moment” in knowledge: Balthasar makes knowledge a moment of love. In spite of the appeal of this proposed interpretation of Balthasar, it is ultimately dualistic and falls back into a Kantian moralism. As I have already pointed out, the influence of Kant shows up more than once in Disse’s interpretation. See, also, Pascal Ide’s worry that Balthasar gives ultimately too high a privilege to the good over the true and so seems not to accord the intellect the full weight it deserves, the weight it has found in the Thomistic tradition: Ide, Être et mystère, 157–59. 181. Without entering into the subtleties of the debate, I note that this is the basic point that separated Blondel and Rousselot: Rousselot contends that if intellect represents the receptivity of contemplation in distinction to the “generativity” of praxis and the will, the assertion that love (understood as the domain of the will) is man’s ultimate act denies man’s most fundamental receptivity. As Rousselot puts it with his usual touch of French wit, “Puisque c’est Dieu qui est notre Béatitude, et non pas nous la sienne, notre perfection consiste encore davantage à le recevoir qu’à nous donner,” “Métaphysique thomiste et critique de la connaissance,” Revue Néoscolastique de Philosophie 17 (November 1910): 502, n. 1. Rousselot sought, by contrast, basically to identify love and knowledge in an intuitive “intellectualism,” which, as we will see in chapter 5, raises its own difficulties. The Birth of Consciousness

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ek-static self-gift. This interpretation of apriority, then, causes a whole series of transformations in the basic concept of consciousness and its fundamental role in modern philosophy. First, the appropriating of the beginning is not a taking of what is given and absorbing it into the subject; rather, it is an appropriating, that is, a “making one’s own,” essentially in the (subjective-objective) movement of being born(e). In other words, appropriating thus means “belonging to,” or “adhering to.” It is an act of wholly entrusting oneself. Thus, appropriating is in a certain sense simultaneous with “expropriation.” The subject’s self-possession is inseparable from its primary self-expropriation, as it is given in the subject’s dependence on the object as other.182 The movement in which the subject internalizes a thing is the very same movement in which he gives himself, ek-statically, to the thing. The analogy is with marriage: a person makes another person “his own” by handing over his freedom to the person. (The full meaning of this assertion awaits development in chapter 4.) By the same token, the understanding of the soul as quodammodo omnia no longer has to be interpreted as a possessing of the whole of the cosmos within oneself, somewhat in the sense of Aris- noese - os - (thought thinking itself). Although there is no room totle’s noesis here to explore the issue, it seems to be the case that the only philosophies that have avoided such a sense of the soul in the act of knowing have been those that deny any intimacy at all, the nominalists and the positivists.183 But such a conception, which sees the subject-object relation in one direction only—that is, as the soul’s becoming the object by assimilation—is logically committed to an essentially self-centered notion of the subjectobject relation in consciousness (even if it is equally committed to a dissolution of the self). If we begin with the original paradox of the birth of consciousness, we see an opening to understand quodammodo omnia in the Pauline sense of “being all things for all people.” It is thus just as universal a docility or receptivity, but rather than being understood as that which seeks to take all things into oneself, it is now a disposition to put oneself at the service of all others, which is the expression of desire for the whole. It is a simultaneous receiving and giving in the single act of moving in being moved, that is, in the act of being born(e). One receives

182. See, for example, TL 1:256–57. 183. One of the only real exceptions comes right at the beginning: Plato’s sense of the ultimate human act, though not without ambiguities, is not so much a final possessing as a “begetting in the beautiful.” In other words, Plato overcomes the problem also in terms of fruitfulness, and he does so because of the radicality of his experience of the kalokagathon (beautiful and good). 160

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the whole cosmos by serving the whole cosmos, and the most fundamental way of serving the cosmos is receiving it, that is, enjoying it, and thus revealing to it that it is worthy of being loved. With this sense of con- untrammeled by its romansciousness, we thus recover the ancient eros, tic and modern degenerate forms: we now have a desire, a passion for the whole that wishes to understand itself as the instrument of the wholeness of the whole. Moreover, the concept of “presence” does not have to be “overcome” because it is no longer unquestionably identified with the absolute mastery by a tyrannical subjectivity. Similarly, the notion of “evidence” takes on a radically new character: “Evidence in the sense Balthasar uses the term is not a static ‘presence at hand,’ not an objectifying possession, but essentially a movement, an event: a deed.”184 Finally, the comprehensiveness of Balthasar’s starting point transforms the meaning of “presuppositionlessness” as an ideal in philosophy. In both Balthasar’s sense and that of modern philosophy generally, this ideal has meant that nothing is left “indifferently outside” the scope of the soul as an opaque “given,” without a vital relationship to the subject. In both, therefore, there is a call to “appropriate” the given and make it one’s own. However, while the only appropriation of the given in modern philosophy has been an immediate identification or assimilation, which we have seen is in turn a function of the abstract understanding of the essence of consciousness, Balthasar sees appropriation as a being expropriated in the most fundamental sense, as self-gift in response to self-gift. The abstractness of the starting point in modern philosophy has entailed an abstract sense of presuppositionlessness: thus, the openness to the whole in the beginning gets instrumentalized for the sake of possession, that is, systematization. If we begin, by contrast, with Balthasar’s sense of consciousness as a being born(e), presuppositionlessness means in the first place a readiness to be taken into the whole, a readiness that does not (abstractly) anticipate what will be asked of it; nor does it stake out in advance what it is capable of, that is, its self-imposed limits or conditions of possibility. Rather, it is an indifference that tries to equal the great indifference of Being itself. The initial presuppositionlessness, then, is not the hand that opens only so as to get a better grip; instead, it is a possessing whose intrinsic form is a “being-possessed.” It is for this reason, then, that Balthasar insists on the permanence 184. Gadient, “Wahrheit als Anruf der Freiheit,” 105: “Evidenz in dem von Balthasar gemeinten Sinn ist keine statische Zuhandenheit, kein objekthafter Besitz, sondern wesentlich eine Bewegung, ein Geschehen: eine Handlung.” Cf., Balthasar’s discussion of evidence in TL 1:259–62. The Birth of Consciousness

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of wonder,185 on the necessity of a vulnerability at the heart of the philosophical act, which is not to be shielded.186 Instead, the act is to remain open as long as the fourfold ontological difference itself remains open, and that means as long as there is a world. Consciousness, which possesses within itself a “gaping” openness, is “in a certain sense all things,” not as a “self”-contained whole that seeks to contain in addition all that it knows, but as the open space of a stage. Consciousness is the place that the soul expands amply and offers to the beings of the world in order that they may play themselves out therein, that is: in order that they may be true. This is the sense of consciousness, as being born(e), that is required for the truth that possesses a dramatic structure.

185. GL 5:646. 186. Ibid., 633. 162

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3

Truth as Gestalt Il fanciullo e l’averla S’innamorò un fanciullo d’un’averla. Vago del nuovo—interessate udiva di lei, dal cacciatore, meraviglie— quante promesse fece per averla! L’ebbe; e all’istante l’obliò. La trista, nella sua gabbia alla finestra appesa, piangeva sola e in silenzio, del cielo lontano irraggiungibile alla vista. Si ricordò di lei solo quel giorno che, per noia o malvagio animo, volle stringerla in pugno. La quasi rapace gli fece male e s’involò. Quel giorno, per quel male l’amò senza ritorno.

The boy and the shrike Wanting something new, a boy was stung with longing for a shrike—such fascinating wonders about her had reached the hunter’s ears— What promise was in store if she were won! He had, and just as soon forgot, her. By the window, caught in a cage, the saddened creature wept silently alone, and stared out at the distant and unattainable sky. He remembered her only on that day, when, spurred by curiosity or spite, he tried to clench her in his fist. Once a bird of prey, she wounded him and flew off. Only on that day, for that wound, did he give his love away. —Umberto Saba

Gestalt and Motion So far, we have seen that being has found its ontological unity only in action: not that the unity represents an “oasis” that lies in every moment just over 163

the horizon and withdraws with every approaching step, but rather being genuinely has its unity (rest), though only in concrete action (motion). Similarly, we found that the unity of consciousness, a necessary presupposition for its grasping of being, is found only in the self’s self-moving in being moved. Now, the phenomenon of truth, however it may further be specified, at some point involves the relation between being and consciousness, and therefore the relation between these two “movements,” such as I have described them. Already in the last chapter, I hinted that relating these two movements is not so much a matter of coordinating two separate activities, as seeing that these two “activities” are as it were members of a dance, that is, aspects of a single movement. The metaphor of the movement of a dance was deliberately chosen: it renders intuitive an important aspect of Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt, which, in its relation to the event of truth, will form the topic of this chapter. The phenomenon of motion is far more complex than we are accustomed to think. As Zeno—the fifth-century Eleatic philosopher with a taste for the paradoxes of part-whole or one-many relationships—has shown in a series of arguments, motion is in a certain sense logically impossible. His basic argument contends that the infinite divisibility of space means that an infinite number of distances must be traversed in a finite time, which is a contradiction.1 Aristotle’s response to Zeno’s paradoxes is essentially that the aporia arises only if we take each of the distances as an “actual,” separate part, or only when we assume each of the divisions to be a completed whole in itself. Once we do so, then we are forced to identify motion merely with the sum of these parts.2 As Aristotle shows why such a mere sum is not the proper way to understand motion, he reveals just what a paradox motion is: motion is in fact a whole greater than the sum of its parts. On the one hand, since it is not identical to the sum of its parts, motion is not a succession of static “states,” that is, a “resting in oneself” plus another “resting in oneself,” and so forth. If this were the case, we would have what Aristotle calls “intermittent motion” or, we might say, jagged, faltering, “graceless” motion. Genuine motion, by contrast, involves a transition into a radically new order; there is so to speak a discontinuous leap from stasis to motion, insofar as this is no difference merely of degree. Motion, thus, represents a real “going beyond oneself,” a genuine kind of self-expropriation. As Claudel puts it, motion is of its essence an abandonment of place, a radical break with static position.3 1. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 269–76. 2. Aristotle, Physics, 8.8.263a4–264a6. 164

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Motion must be conceived in this way if we are to avoid Zeno’s paradoxes. If motion is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, if it is more than a mere succession of states, then this “more” cannot be attained gradually, through the multiplication of static moments; rather, this more can be reached only through a decisive “plunge” into it. However, on the other hand, it is precisely the radicality or decisiveness of this “leap” that ensures the “smoothness” of the motion; or, to put it another way, it is the very discontinuity that gives rise to the continuity. In contrast to the halting, pseudomotion of that which holds onto itself at every step and keeps constantly looking back, this decisive leap is grace; it is gracefulness itself; it is a dance. Thus, in light of this elaboration of the paradox of motion, we could say that the continuity of being “arrives” in the motion entailed by its inner difference, just as the “continuity” of consciousness arrives, as we saw, in its being “borne” by being. The two form a single movement, simultaneously from below and from above, because it is a single comprehending whole. This single whole, which is “greater” than “mere” being, greater than mere consciousness, and greater than the sum of both, is truth.4 Just like a dance, this single whole is both dependent on its members, and yet it is not deducible from either one or even from both together. The previous two chapters dealt with each aspect in itself, and at the same time, each was left “open-ended,” intrinsically pointing to the other for completion. The completion, however, inasmuch as it is a real whole that includes both, is itself a new event, with its own distinct moments and characteristics. Early in The Truth of the World, Balthasar makes a similar observation: “We have until now been considering the two poles of knowledge separately, looking at their equipment and readiness for the act of cognition. Such an inquiry resembles an investigation of the masculine and feminine that attends mainly to the functions and inclinations that predispose them for their union. The union itself is a new, third thing in which the purpose of these inclinations is truly unveiled for the first time.”5

3. Paul Claudel, L’art poétique, in Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967), 150–59. 4. The affirmation that truth is somehow “more” than being is paradoxical, and it cannot be made without qualification, since that which is more than being—i.e., extra being and thus outside of being—is precisely nothing. I will address this issue directly, but not until chapter 5. 5. TL 1:61. The two poles mentioned in this text are, more specifically, “subject” and “object,” and their union, the act of knowledge: we have been speaking for the most part more generally of consciousness and being, and will focus primarily not on knowledge but on truth, which of course involves knowledge in some respect. Truth as Gestalt

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The union itself is a third: this simple point, if we understand it properly, in fact contains in a nutshell the whole of Balthasar’s contribution to the question of truth. As we have seen in the introduction, “shortcomings” inevitably arise whenever an aspect of the phenomenon of truth is neglected, whenever the scope of the phenomenon is reduced, or whenever one element of a process or event is improperly made to stand for the whole. At a number of points in the analyses thus far, we have come up against what we could call an internal crisis—that is, a “crisis” in the sense of a decisive dilemma, requiring a decision; and “internal” in the sense of arising from within the problem itself. Specifically, the problem has repeatedly been the need to account for a reciprocal but asymmetrical relation of two things, with each in some sense presupposing the other. In every case, we found we could not account for the relationship on the basis of one or the other taken merely in isolation, but we had to find a “third,” which, as “really” distinct from the other two, provided a ground simultaneously for their unity and for their difference. This “method” is one of the fundamental characteristics of Balthasar’s thought, and it is expressed most precisely in his use of the notion of Gestalt. This notion is, for Balthasar, the fundamental form of being and the ultimate vessel of meaning. We might compare its role in his thought to the role eidos/idea plays for Plato, morphe- for Aristotle, forma for Thomas, Begriff (concept) for Hegel, kategoriale Intuition for Husserl, or Ereignis for Heidegger. In this chapter, I will first elaborate some of the essential characteristics of “Gestalt.” I will then use the notion as a key to understanding each of the various stages in the event of truth: First, corresponding to what the scholastics referred to as the first act of the mind, simple apprehension or concept formation, I will look at the more comprehensive Gestalt of the object’s appearance or disclosure, along with its subjective correlate (which we will identify with the conversio ad phantasmata). Second, corresponding to what the scholastics called the second act, judgment, I will look at the Gestalt formed in the union of the subject and object, as judgment and as knowledge. Finally, in relation to the third act, which is the connecting of various judgments in reasoning, I will show how, for Balthasar, truth proper occurs primarily in the third step, which is as it were the fruit of the union: on the one hand, there is the knowledge that is, as Aquinas says, the fruit of truth;6 on the other hand, there is also the truth that is, as it were, the fruit of knowledge.

6. Aquinas, De ver., 1, 1. See Pieper, Wahrheit der Dinge, 72. 166

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The question that forms the horizon for this chapter is, Where is the locus, or the home, of truth? Aristotle claimed that truth occurs in the judging mind,7 which Aquinas later specified further in the affirmation that the “motion” of truth terminates in the soul of the knower. Balthasar does not deny these affirmations, as we will see, and yet he does not end with them. For Balthasar, the final “place” of truth is in the Gestalt that transcends and comprehends both the knower and the thing known, and for that reason resists being reduced to either. As we will see, this understanding entails a new sense of logic in relation to being as well as a new sense of objectivity; moreover, it has vast cultural implications, of which only a few will receive mention at the end of the chapter.

Characteristics of the Gestalt When I introduced the term Gestalt in the introduction and sketched out some of its features, the primary aim was to show its intrinsic relation to the notion of drama. We saw that Gestalt is, in its most luminous instances, necessarily dramatic insofar as it represents the “holding together” of tensions, and it is the holding together of tensions precisely because it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The German word Gestalt belongs to the large family of terms formed by the addition of the prefix Ge-, signifying a “collectivity” or series of actions taken together at once as a totality.8 In other words, it is a whole generated from a collection of parts. Now, it is possible to argue, on the basis of what we have seen many times, that any whole that is indeed greater than the sum of its parts necessarily involves tension. Things can be in tension in relation to each other only when they are not essentially indifferent to each other, which means philosophically that each must require the other in some respect in order to be what it itself in fact is. On the other hand, tension would immediately volatilize if this being in need of the other amounted to the reduction of the other to oneself, or in other words, if the requirement of the other to be oneself slipped into an inclusion of the other as simply a part of oneself. But this tension, this reciprocal “needing each other” of irreducible parts cannot be sustained if we have only the two parts. Instead, it can be sustained only if the two parts are embraced and included within something

7. Aristotle, Meta., 6.4. 8. Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, 491. In addition to the use of Ge- in the formation of nouns as described here, it seems that the formation of the second participle of the verb, which represents the completion of an extended action taken altogether as a whole, may be related. Truth as Gestalt

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that is more than they are, something that is other than merely the one plus the other one. Thus, however it may be conceived, parts that are in tension with each other are necessarily members of a greater whole, and conversely, a whole that is truly such involves parts that are not indifferent to each other but are rather integrated in a permanent tension. This, then, is the meaning of Gestalt, and it is no accident that the notion takes its origins in the organic phenomena that Goethe studied.9 An organic whole is the tension of its parts; when it loses this tension, it is dead. “Vivisection” is an oxymoron, which reveals its inner contradiction in the fact that the reality it designates, like certain purely synthetic elements, is necessarily “short-lived.”10 It is also no accident that the concept was “excavated” by Ehrenfels in his contemplation of melodies, which represent an artistic form that has tension for the same reason that it is a whole. This line of thinking is what led us to see an essential connection with drama, which is perhaps the supreme instance of tension, inasmuch as the whole that it represents gathers together the utter irreducibility of individual freedoms. As Aristotle said, a good drama has both a surprise or reversal (peripeteia), but one that emerges almost as if by necessity from the elements of the plot.11 Drama, thus, also represents the simultaneity of discontinuity (surprise) and continuity (a certain necessity derived from the parts). In a sense, the notion of Gestalt has already been operating in our approach to the fourfold difference, the “moving idea” of being, and the birth of consciousness. Each of these is, indeed, a constellation, a single Gestalt, generated by the interaction of parts in tension. I will now make this form explicit in relation to the question of truth; but to do so effectively, I will first draw out certain additional characteristics lying within this fundamental concept. According to Balthasar, a Gestalt is always concrete.12 This is, of course, obvious when “concrete” means the gathering together of various elements

9. In his elaboration of Gestalt, Waldstein explains how Goethe contrasted the organic Gestalt in his morphology with the contemporary mechanistic view (found in Newton and championed by Kant), because in the organic Gestalt the principle of unity is interior: see Waldstein, “Expression and Form,” 81. 10. It is precisely this necessarily “organic” derivation of the notion of Gestalt that leads Balthasar to prefer the Naturphilosophen of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the “metaphysics of spirit,” which eventually won over the West: “This concept, taken over from Plato and Aristotle . . . stood in the midpoint of medieval ontology . . . and likewise in the midpoint of the teaching about nature in Herder (against Kant!) and Goethe.” GL 5:29–30. Likewise, this is also ultimately the reason Balthasar uses as a measuring stick to judge any thought system’s capacity to appreciate the objective freedom of nonhuman forms. 11. Aristotle, Poetics, 10. 12. GL 4:28. 168

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into a whole: indeed, the term concrete is itself of organic origin; it designates a “growing together” of parts. But this has two implications that are not so obvious. On the one hand, as we have already seen, a Gestalt is temporal; it is always necessarily in time.13 Temporality belongs to Gestalt because relation, as such, has to “happen”; relation is always a relating. I said above that tension is lost when the “other” to the self is defined as part of the self on the basis of the self’s dependence on the other. Indeed, such a reduction is inevitable the moment we remove the “self” from the motion of its relating to the other. As a motion, then, with motion given to mean a self-transcendence, a being-beyond that is neither simply other than self nor simply part of self, relation contains an inner tension: a simultaneity of being self and being other. The moment we take relation statically or abstractly, that is, outside of this dynamic movement, the tension collapses. It is as if we froze the motion at a particular moment in a snapshot: at this moment, the other is “caught” inside the self or “left” outside the self; it is forced to decide between the one or the other. Since motion is inseparably related to time, and a necessary part of the meaning of the concrete whole, then there can be no concrete whole—no Gestalt—outside of time. On the other hand, Balthasar insists that a Gestalt is necessarily and in every case physical, accessible to the senses, even if it is never simply reducible to the senses.14 This point will be especially important for us later in the chapter. According to Balthasar’s usage, Gestalt is in the first place an aesthetic - sense pernotion, understood both in its etymological sense (aisthesis, ception) and in its connotation as related to art and beauty.15 What connects Gestalt to the senses is its revelatory character: it is not just a form (which can be abstracted and grasped by the intelligence alone, apart from the senses), but a form that, when perceived, reveals something that comes from “below the surface.” But, as Michael Waldstein has shown, it is precisely this movement of revelation that connects beauty with the grasping of truth as manifestation.16 I will try to develop this connection over 13. Ibid., 33. 14. Ibid., 28. 15. The early use of the term aesthetic in its modern connotation retained a connection to the Greek term: in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s aesthetics (1750/58), the word is used to designate a kind of intellectual perception distinct from strict cognition, which Baumgarten related to the apprehension of beauty. We find a similar use in Johann Georg Hamann (“Aesthetica in nuce”; though in Hamann the aesthetic is directly connected with the religious act: see Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles [= GL 3], trans. Andrew Louth et al. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986], 241); and Kant’s transcendental aesthetic concerns the a priori structures of intuition. 16. Waldstein, “Expression and Form,” 35–36. Truth as Gestalt

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the course of this chapter, in particular, the reason this “movement” aspect of Gestalt ties it necessarily to the senses. What we ought to note for now is that Balthasar’s founding epistemology on Gestalt gives the senses an unusual importance in thinking (and not just an importance for thinking). A Gestalt, precisely because it is a whole, is essentially related to the senses. It is physical for the same reason that it is temporal, namely, because a true whole cannot but be concrete. In the second place, though a Gestalt is physical and temporal, it is not reducible to sense experience, again for precisely the same reason it is accessible to the senses: that is, because it is a concrete whole. As a whole that is always more than its parts, every Gestalt, Balthasar explains, has a “transcendent center,” “which is the midpoint of the concept of form (Gestalt).”17 But the transcendence of this center does not, for Balthasar, stand in any opposition to the immanence of the center in the parts; its “supravisibility” does not simply run counter to its visibility. Rather, the two are directly related: “the transcendence increases along with the immanence.”18 In order to understand the paradox implied in this direct relation between transcendence and immanence, it is helpful to consider Waldstein’s illuminating discussion of the meaning of Gestalt. In his study of Balthasar’s concept, Waldstein draws particular attention to the transcendent aspect of Gestalt. Following Ehrenfels, Waldstein explains, Balthasar “hierarchizes” Gestalten according to their “quality” or “level of purity.” Quality or purity, Waldstein continues, is determined according to the complexity of the form, that is, according to the extent that it can bring diversity to unity.19 The more comprehensive the principle of unity in a Gestalt, the greater the complexity of the form, and therefore the higher the quality. To illustrate, Waldstein compares the form of a rose with that of a sand heap: the “parts” of a sand heap have little inner relation to each other, while the rose has a clear harmony, which is due to its principle of unity. Thus, the Gestalt of the rose has a “higher” purity. The key, once again, is the comprehensiveness of the unity, the fact that it leaves no part out of its unity, and thus allows nothing to be superfluous. Waldstein thus lists the terms that Balthasar uses at various points to designate the perfection of Gestalt: depth, height, and light.20 Depth describes the extent of the transcendence of the principle of unity, height is the dominion of the principle over its parts, and light is the convergence 17. 18. 19. 20. 170

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of these two. Once he has shown the function of Gestalt as a principle of unity, Waldstein goes on to indicate its close relation to the Thomistic notion of forma. The basis for the comparison, according to Waldstein, is that forma plays the role of the principle of unity in any given thing. Indeed, Aquinas even says that the “nobility” of a form is measured by its ability to dominate matter,21 which is echoed in Waldstein’s explanation of the term height. While this analysis of the notion of Gestalt is helpful in clarifying the meaning of unity it implies, it seems that Waldstein emphasizes one aspect of the paradox, namely, the transcendent center, to the neglect of the other aspect, namely, the immanence of that center in its parts, and indeed its reciprocal need for its parts. Thus, while Waldstein “ranks” the quality of a Gestalt on the basis of the ability of its transcendent unity to dominate the diversity of its parts, it is equally important to see that the level of quality is given at the same time by the unity’s having such a diversity to comprehend. These two aspects do not reduce to the same; rather, they are intrinsically related but irreducible to one another, and for this reason, it is inadequate to emphasize one without the other.22 Thus, it is not the case that the greater the unity a form has, the more it excludes diversity. Rather, the greater its unity, the more the form includes diversity. The key, as Waldstein himself often says, is the complexity, which affirms two irreducible “wonders”: both that such a diversity is so perfectly unified and that such a unity is so richly differentiated. The quality of a form, in other words, is manifest not only in the fact that none of its parts is left out of that unity, but also in the fact that the parts enjoy a certain freedom in their difference. The rose is a higher Gestalt than a heap of sand, not only because it has a greater unity but also because it has more difference than the sand heap (which is, after all, in comparison merely the endless repetition of similar grains). Reviewing the terms that Waldstein lists, from this perspective, we would have to say that depth and height refer both to the perfection of unity in its transcendence to its parts and also to the perfection of the unity in its immanence to its parts. The light of the Gestalt, then, is the convergence of the whole, the richness of the unity and the harmony of the diversity. Waldstein is able to connect Balthasar’s and Aquinas’s notion of form so easily because he

21. See ibid., 86. 22. The fact that I take this intrinsic relation of irreducible aspects to be central to the meaning of Gestalt, while Waldstein emphasizes just one of the aspects, explains the reason the word tension appears so often in the present work, while it does not appear in Waldstein’s otherwise comprehensive study of the notion. Truth as Gestalt

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reduces the meaning of Gestalt to its transcendent center. However, for Balthasar, a Gestalt is itself a whole, which is distinct from a principle of unity, even if it includes such a principle as one of its essential elements; a Gestalt is not only unity but also a diversity, or, to put it succinctly, it is a unity-in-diversity and diversity-in-unity. Even if these two aspects are not symmetrically related, they are nonetheless both equally essential to the meaning of Gestalt. In this respect, if we were to compare Balthasar’s and Aquinas’s terminology, Gestalt would be more directly related, not to form alone but to the whole composite essence taken concretely in its participation in esse. In fact, it might be most appropriate to see Gestalt as the Thomistic composite, read along the lines of the Platonic eidos (as the transcending unity that gives a thing its physical “look”), and even more - as the living, organic whole. specifically of the Aristotelian morphe, Balthasar affirms that the “light” that radiates from any and every organic whole is simultaneously its own light and that of being in general: “The light which shines forth from the form and reveals it to the understanding is . . . inseparably light of the form itself (Scholasticism speaks therefore of splendor formae) and light of being as a whole, in which the form is immersed, so that it may have a unitary form.”23 In this context, Balthasar merely affirms this principle without explanation—he only makes reference to Goethe’s inability to think of any individual form without thinking of the infinite whole in which it participates—but the end of the passage I just cited yields the essential clue. If it is the case that the Gestalt has a unity only in dependence on its diversity, inasmuch as it is a unity of diversity, and it is also the case that this diversity is likewise dependent on the unity, then the whole together, the unity-in-diversity of the Gestalt, requires a transcending ground, namely, being itself. It follows, then, that the Gestalt of its own nature opens up beyond itself to being, but it does so only when we see it in terms of its inner movement, that is, in its inner reciprocal tension. In this tension, the Gestalt becomes transparent; it becomes simultaneously more itself and more a sign of the whole. In other words, the more it shows itself to be a part of a larger whole, the more it becomes itself a distinct whole. This is, in essence, the insight behind the title Das Ganze im Fragment, the whole in the part, which we have mentioned as in a certain sense the definition of Gestalt. The entire movement taken together, once we connect it with the reciprocal dependence of the actus essendi on various beings, becomes for Balthasar the basis for seeing the world as a whole as pointing by its very

23. GL 4:31. 172

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being (or better: by its very being-in-action) to God.24 We thus approach the definition of Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt that Bauer proposes: “Gestalt indicates a totality, which acquires an essential independence and indissolubility in the midst of surrounding influences, and which, through its participation in the infinity of the actus assendi (Goethe), is simultaneously a transcending reference to being as a whole and (to speak with [Nicolaus] Cusanus) a ‘compact’ presentation of the Absolute.”25 Moreover, on the basis of this transparence of the Gestalt, which is what constitutes the Gestalt as Gestalt, it is useful to say a further word about Balthasar’s notion in comparison to other traditional notions of form. Now, while both Neoplatonism and Aquinas affirm the fact that a form cannot be actually constituted as such without participating in a higher infinity (of the Good or of the actuality of esse), both traditions identify form with finitude. As Aquinas puts it, an act remains infinite in its own order unless it is received. In the constitution of created being, then, form is essentially taken to be the (finite) limitation of (infinite) act.26 For Plotinus, in a similar fashion, the finitude of form is related essentially to its intelligibility. The Good, since it is infinite, is for that reason unintelligible in itself. The intelligibility of created things, by contrast, is due precisely to their being a finite determination, a specification, of the Good beyond being.27 Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt, then, differs in a profoundly significant sense from the Thomistic and Neoplatonic notion of form precisely by the fact that it is not simply finite, but is rather the mysterious

24. In particular, as Waldstein goes on to show, it is the basis for Balthasar’s rejection of the either-or of describing God’s relation to the creature in terms of immediate expression or mediate inference. For Balthasar, the relation is simultaneously mediated and immediate. 25. Bauer, “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 298: “Die Gestalt meint eine Ganzheit, der neben Umweltbedingtheit wesentlich und Unauflösbarkeit eignet und die durch Teilhabe an der Unendlichkeit des actus essendi (Goethe) zugleich transzendierender Verweis auf das Sein im ganzen und (mit Cusanus) ‘kontrakte’ Darstellung des Absoluten ist.” 26. See Norris Clarke, “The Limitation of Act by Potency in St. Thomas: Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism,” in Explorations in Metaphysics, 65–88. 27. There is, of course, an ambiguity in the Platonic/Neoplatonic tradition on this point. Eric Perl shows that the infinity of the Good is, in Plato, not simply beyond the finite form but also within it, to the extent that this inner distance (between the finite form and the infinite Good) is what constitutes form as image: “The distance, within the image itself and constituting it as image, between image and archetype is precisely the space of thought, and because this distance can never be overcome, thought can never stop moving.” E. Perl, “The Living Image: Form and the Erotic Intellect in Plato,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 191–204, here: 196. Truth as Gestalt

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“intersection” of finitude and infinity.28 As we will see over the course of this chapter, it is the distinguishing mark of a Gestalt to be the coming to light of a certain infinity. In other words, the transcendence of the light mentioned above, or the transcendence of the Gestalt’s principle of unity— or again, as Balthasar will describe it, the mysterious “more” that lies in any genuine phenomenon of a whole—is not just something that lies beyond the Gestalt (which is an aspect that Plotinus, Aquinas, and Balthasar would all affirm); it is just as much a constitutive part of the very immanent meaning of Gestalt. Although there are certain openings to this way of interpreting reality in Aquinas and in Neoplatonism (perhaps especially in Dionysius the Areopagite), it is possible to say that one of Balthasar’s greatest contributions to philosophical thinking is that he makes explicit the relative infinity of any concrete whole. Some of the import of this contribution will unfold here, specifically in relation to the question of truth. Finally, before turning directly to the question of truth, it will be useful to highlight the simultaneous “continuity” and “discontinuity” of Gestalt, which will in fact characterize every one of its moments. This simultaneity is, of course, related to the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of Gestalt’s center of unity. It is important to see that these two aspects are not meant to be balanced against each other in some fashion, since such a manner of relating them sees them already as separate, sees them therefore too dualistically. Instead, it is helpful to consider once again our original reflection on the paradox of motion. The phenomenon of motion itself is, properly conceived, a Gestalt, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a fact that becomes particularly apparent in the graceful movements of a deer, in the artful gestures of a talented actor, or the agility of an athlete. What we see in these cases is that the discontinuity, the ek-static entry into a new order, is continuous precisely in proportion to the radicality of the resolution to move, the comprehensiveness of the mover’s “throwing himself” into motion. There is something analogous in every instance of a Gestalt. As Balthasar points out in his monograph on Pascal, mathematics reveals a truth that is valid metaphysically as well, namely, that the difference between two orders or two dimensions is unbridgeable from below. There is no way, for example, to get from a point to a line, or even from very many points to a line.29 Indeed, one could say there is in fact an infinite difference between the two, because even the infinitely successive additions of points

28. See Balthasar’s discussion of the “immanent transcendence” of the Gestalt in the phenomenon of significance, TL 1:138–44, which I will elaborate below. 29. GL 3:199. 174

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will not mathematically speaking constitute a line. But this is the case every time there is an instance of a genuine whole, or a Gestalt. It is precisely this insight that Plato had in mind when he refused to allow a “one” and a “one” to become “two” merely by being close together, or merely through addition.30 For Plato, the number “two” represents a kind of totality, a whole, and so is greater than the sum of its parts. There must therefore be a leap from the one to the other; the whole must arrive from above. One could say that even the difference between two numbers is not a mere difference of quantity, as we generally understand the term. Balthasar goes on to say with respect to Pascal’s problem, that in spite of the discontinuity the two orders are not simply “disconnected.” In a sense, merely to disconnect them, because it implies a dualism, paradoxically establishes a false continuity: it brings them into the same order in order to be able to oppose them. The only way to avoid this problem, then, is to see that the continuity is given as it were from the other side of the leap: “The solution can only be found from a point of view that looks from above downward. For in fact, the line presupposes the point; the number, zero; space, the surface: the approximation unobtainable from below has already been taken for granted from above.”31 But this means that the “leap” is not the insanity of the salto mortale, such as, for example, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi conceived it; instead, it receives a continuity in its discontinuity. Discontinuity alone would be a dualism and therefore not a real discontinuity, while continuity alone would not be continuous: rather, it would be the “intermittent motion” that Aristotle described. In terms of the Gestalt, we have to see that the immanence, the presence to the senses of the whole, is at one with the “plunging” beyond the senses to the hidden center. Too often in our thinking, we stutter, finding ourselves at a loss about how to get from one point to another. The solution in many cases is that the possibility is given at the same time as the actuality, and the only way to make the move is to make the move. The wholeness of the Gestalt is such only because it is in motion, and it will be apprehended only if we enter into and follow the movement that is proper to it.

Gestalt as Epiphany and Conversio The concreteness of the guiding notion of Gestalt leads us to treat the basic principles of epistemology within a concrete context. Whereas, for Thomism, the first act of the mind is concept formation, for Balthasar, the first act

30. Plato, Phaedo, 96e–97b. 31. GL 3:199. Truth as Gestalt

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of the mind occurs only in relation to the first act of the concrete being that stands before the mind. In other words, the “first act” in epistemology is not something simply that the subject does, but it is already a joint event between subject and object. Thus, Balthasar begins his epistemology with an entry into the revelatory character of everything that exists. Balthasar elaborates this character as an interpretation of the convertibility of being and truth. If truth, as a-letheia means essentially unhiddenness—the act of unveiling, or making what was hidden, appear—and if all being is true, then all being, as being, will be engaged in at least this most rudimentary activity. The interpretation of aletheia as disclosure, of course, immediately recalls Heidegger. As Paul Gilbert has pointed out, The Truth of the World, which is where Balthasar elaborates this notion at greatest length, appeared three years after Heidegger’s famous conference on the essence of truth and the commentary on al etheia in Heraclei32 tus. It is inconceivable that Balthasar was not aware of Heidegger’s development of this notion. Nevertheless, as Gilbert continues, there are decisive differences between Balthasar’s understanding and Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenon of disclosure. Gilbert highlights in particular the different ways the two thinkers interpreted the ontological difference, but we can see the difference between them already in their respective interpretations of aletheia itself. Although it would be too much of a digression at this point to work out the difference with any thoroughness, it is worth mentioning that Balthasar owes his own understanding at least as much to Bonaventure (expressio-manifestatio), which Balthasar has shown to be a more fundamental name for truth in Bonaventure’s thinking than adequatio, “correctness”),33 Hegel (the dialectic of manifestation and “going-to-ground”), Schelling and Friedrich von Schiller (form as the manifestation of the infinite or of freedom), and Goethe (the “holy open mystery”), as to Heidegger—but perhaps more than all of these, to Dionysius the Areopagite. This latter’s use of the notion “symbol,” in the Celestial Hierarchy and Letter IX—and the verb proballein to characterize being’s symbolic self-expression, a verb that designates both a giving or setting forth, and a hiding or shielding 34—is particularly close to 32. Paul Gilbert, “L’articulation des transcendantaux selon Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Revue Thomiste 86 (1986): 623–24. 33. GL 2:345. 34. See Dionysius the Areopagite, Letter IX to Titus, 1 and 2. Dionysius puns on the term proballein several times in this letter, and he also explains his understanding of symbol as that wherein the “unspeakable is intertwined with the speakable.” In this sense, the Areopagite’s sense of symbol is closely related to Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt as the intersection of truth and mystery. 176

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Balthasar’s own sense of the phenomenon of truth, though quite different from Heidegger’s. So, in spite of the similarities between Heidegger’s and Balthasar’s use of the notion of aletheia, it would be shortsighted to suggest that Balthasar had simply mechanically taken the notion over from the older philosopher. The key to the difference, as we saw in the introduction, is the way in which each associates the notions of truth and mystery. For Balthasar, the association implies both a positive sense of mystery and an open sense of truth. Although “mystery” plays a limited role in Heidegger’s thought, it lies at the center of Balthasar’s, to such an extent that Ide could claim that no one has worked out the implications of the phenomenon of mystery more than Balthasar.35 In this section, I will present the phenomenon of the mysterious unveiling of being as it is found in the section of TL 1, Das Bedeutende (The signifier).36 Being meaningful is, one could say, the mode of the object’s being-in-the-world. As Balthasar repeats almost like a refrain throughout The Truth of the World, there is an inescapable duality in the single notion of a-letheia. That being appears means both that being appears and that being appears. There is no access to being at all except insofar as it manifests itself, and at the same time, what one grasps in the manifestation is not mere appearance but rather being. Appearance and being can neither be separated from each other, nor can they ever be simply identified. If we are going to talk about the truth of being, then, we cannot identify it (falsely metaphysically) with being, nor (falsely phenomenologically) with appearance but somehow simultaneously with both: Truth does not lie in the appearances as such, for we can interpret them meaningfully only when we locate their point of reference behind them. Yet neither does the truth lie behind the appearances, for the pure background does not appear; it is what is not unveiled. Truth can be found only in the floating middle (nur in einer schwebenden Mitte) between the appearance and the thing that appears. It is only in the relation between these two things that the empty mystery becomes a full, perennially self-replenishing mystery.37

35. Ide, Être et mystère, 114. After mentioning other thinkers for whom the concept of mystery was important, Ide writes: “Il demeure que Balthasar est le premier à tenter de rendre compte avec autant de rigueur de la réalité mystérieuse de l’être. Son originalité a été d’expliciter le mystère de l’être en la fondant sur une ontologie de l’enveloppement et du dévoilement.” 36. TL 1:138–58. 37. Ibid., 138 (emphasis mine). Truth as Gestalt

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In this passage, and in this section as a whole, we witness a momentous evolution in Balthasar’s thought. A complex phenomenon, an irreducible polarity, can resist falling apart dualistically only by being grounded in a “third”: Balthasar makes reference to this third in relation to the phenomenon of truth as the “floating middle,” which is neither the one alone nor the other alone. In just a couple of pages, he connects this total phenomenon, almost incidentally, with the term Gestalt, which is one of the rare times a form of the word is used in this early book.38 We say that this is “momentous,” not only because of the importance the word will have for Balthasar later, but also for the key it provides in understanding Balthasar’s unique approach to the question of truth. As we see in this passage, it is precisely what accounts for the “mystery” of being. Moreover, it is this sense of Gestalt as the “third” that allows us to have a metaphysics that does not degenerate into a “metaphysics of presence” and a phenomenology that avoids falling into phenomenalism. And it is also the notion that leads us most directly into the indispensable insight that being’s self-expression is a genuinely creative event;39 that is, it is already a kind of fruitfulness. In order to grasp the meaning and significance of this schwebende Mitte (floating middle), we will eventually have to see how it is an event that occurs jointly between a subject and object. To see how that is the case, we will first have to clarify the two objective movements of which it is the center. Then, we will see how these two movements correspond to two movements in the subject. In order to avoid allowing these to collapse into a dualism, we will see that each of the two movements converges into a concrete center for each, and then how this center itself requires completion in the order of judgment. It is important to keep in mind from the outset, so that we do not create problems later, that all these various movements I will now discuss are not “separate” events in themselves, but rather irreducible aspects of the same event. This will become clearer as we proceed.

38. Ibid., 140. The sentence runs as follows: “Die Ausdruckssprache wendet sich nicht primär an das begriffliche Denken, sondern an das verstehende, das gestaltlesende Denken.” There are a number of places where Balthasar uses the term Gestalt or some form of it (see, for example, in the original German text, 95, 110, 129, 166, 185, 192, 202, 230, 271). However, in none of these places is the word used as a technical term, playing the function it later comes to play in Balthasar’s thought. The closest, apart from the passage we have just cited, is perhaps p. 192, where Balthasar speaks of the dialogical word as a Gestalt constituted in speech and answer: here we see a whole made up of, but transcending, relatively free parts. 39. Ibid., 140. 178

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The Appearing Object We will start, then, with the two movements of the object, the external expression of the essence and then the inner “falling away” of the image. The first “movement” is the “outward” movement of the being or essence appearing, the ground expressing itself in an outward image. If we were capable at all of imagining being as simply something “in itself” that did not appear at all, it would be a completely vacuous “depth.”40 It would be utterly insignificant, since something can be significant, that is, can give a meaningful sign, only by communicating. Being can be something (initself) only by being simultaneously for itself and others. If being is always more than what it communicates, it is nonetheless the case that being does not stand in detachment from its expression: “It would be an error to interpret this movement in being as if only some exterior element moved, whereas the inner core—what is expressed—remained rigidly immobile in the background.”41 To say that being communicated something other than its own inner self would be to posit the appearance as somehow lying next to being, as things of the same order. But this would undermine altogether the phenomenon of manifestation, inasmuch as manifestation is the manifestation of something. If manifestation happens at all, then the only way to avoid an infinite regress is to say at some point that what is manifest is in fact being itself, ontologically and even noumenally. It is for this reason, Balthasar says, that the world of images is so rich and full. Indeed, one of the main reasons being is always a value (and not just a fact) is that every image, anything perceived, has at its root a self-gift, a certain kenosis, or as Balthasar puts it, a renunciation, which accounts for the meaningfulness of the appearance, a sign of inner depth: “the surface is, so to say, loaded with the whole sense contained in this depth, yet it does not come apart at the seams.”42 Balthasar goes on to say that because the world of images is a world full of being, the life of the senses is a deep life; it presents the subject with continual reasons to remain there. However, this life of the “aesthete” already has within itself the logic of disillusion, to the extent that this first movement of being remains incomplete and threatens quickly to wilt if not complemented by the “second” movement, the perishing or “dying away” of the image. In order to express the depth, and indeed the drama, of this second movement, namely, the image’s referring beyond itself to being, Balthasar

40. Ibid., 148. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 139. Truth as Gestalt

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uses Hegel’s suggestive term Zu-Grunde-Gehen, which means both perishing and, literally, “going (back) to the ground.”43 On the one hand, the term sets into relief the fact that the image, as appearance, has no substance in itself, but has whatever it has at all only as received from the appearing ground. In Thomistic terms, the accident, that is, image, is defined precisely as that which does not exist by virtue of itself but by virtue of something else, namely, the substance in which it inheres.44 On the other hand, the “drama” arises from the fact that the reference beyond itself is not something that the ground does, but rather something that lies within the appearance itself. In this respect, there is something like a self-renunciation on the part of the image, which echoes, as it were, being’s original self-renunciation in its externalization. But Balthasar is quick to draw attention to the paradoxical character of this act. It is not as if the image draws aside in order to allow an “immediate” glimpse of the “bare” essence or ground in itself. Rather, the image remains in every case the mediator. It maintains its essential role; “it is simply that the function of the image has changed.”45 As Balthasar puts it, the image’s new role is to confess its own unreality. It plays its essential role in showing itself to be superfluous. It is the being of the image to be both full and insubstantial, which means that, in fact, the outward movement of the essence into the image is the same as the image’s falling away into the essence. Balthasar connects this “self-renunciation” on the part of the image with the renunciation on the part of the knower, which consists in turning away from the rich world of the senses to the “dry” unity of the concept, that is, the move to abstraction or concept formation.46 There are a couple of things to notice about this connection. First of all, it is interesting to consider that insofar as the image can play its dual role of being the appearance of being only in its being interpreted or read as such, we are able to say that the “self-renunciation” of the image in its falling away into the essence is not something it does “alone,” but rather it is helped in this achievement through a corresponding renunciation on the part of the subject. The point is merely to show that what is in one respect a “moral” act on the part of the human knower—the detachment from the immediacy of sense experience in order to have a clear eye for the depths—is at the same time an “ontological” act on the part of the object. At the same

43. Ibid., 146. 44. See, for example, Aquinas, De principiis naturae, c. 1, 339: “Subiectum enim dat esse accidenti, scilicet existendi quia accidens non habet esse nisi per subiectum.” 45. TL 1:146. 46. Ibid., 150. 180

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time, it is not the case that being is completely passive, a static mass lying before a purely spontaneous mind, which completely on its own operates both the distinction and the union of being and appearances. Rather, the mind receives the “positive” appearance of the thing through the senses, and, second, even the movement of the essence’s appearing “through” the image as the “more” within the image is not a purely spontaneous act of the intelligence; to say so would contradict the essence of consciousness as we saw it in the last chapter. It would, therefore, be best to see this movement “out” of the essence, as well as the reciprocal “perishing” of the image as something “decided” in tandem by both the subject and the object. Now, Balthasar has spoken about the two distinct movements in the object that make up the single event of its epiphany, or self-manifestation, and then has suggested that these two movements are not merely objective but occur jointly between the object and the subject. How, then, does he characterize the corresponding subjective movements? If the object begins “inside,” from the essence, moves outward into the appearance, and then resolves itself back into the essence from the externality of appearances, the subject follows the opposite path. As Balthasar characterizes it in this context, the subject begins “outside”; his first movement is thus the “reflective” “turning inward” of abstraction. After this “suspended” movement inward, the subject then resolves himself back in the senses in the movement Aquinas calls the “turning back to sensible images,” conversio ad phantasmata.47 But this raises a difficult problem: how can we speak of a joint movement between subject and object if they go in opposite directions? Balthasar himself puts the question thus: Now, at first sight it might seem that the phases of this process move in opposite directions in the object and in the subject. In the object, the first thing was egress into the appearance, and only then did the appearance return into the essence. The subject, on the contrary, first abstracts from the appearance, thereby forming the concept; only in a second moment does it bend the concept back upon sensory intuition and verify it therein.48 The problem, in other words, is that the object’s movement “ends” in the nonappearing ground (i.e., it resolves itself in the essence), while the subject’s movement “ends” in the realm of appearances (i.e., the subject’s movement is resolved in the conversio). Moreover, the object’s first movement is

47. TL 1:151. 48. Ibid. Truth as Gestalt

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into the realm of appearances, while the subject’s first movement is the reflective, inward movement into the realm of concepts. How can we prevent these opposite movements from fracturing into a simple dualism? One way of resolving this dilemma would be to deny that the movements need to be coordinated. However, in that case, we lose a genuine reciprocity between subject and object in truth’s coming to be, and this means that we will eventually face the difficulties of both monism and dualism. Another way to resolve the dilemma—the way Balthasar chooses in this particular context—is to deny the “sequentiality” of the movements and to insist, by contrast, that the whole series of movements occurs simultaneously: But looked at more thoroughly, these two phases coincide. In the object, there is no appearance that is not immediately an appearance of the essence. There is no appearance, therefore, that does not just as immediately step back before the essence, inasmuch as its very substance is to be inessential and, as such, to manifest the substance of the essence. And in knowledge the event of abstraction from the senses coincides even more clearly with the intellect’s conversion to the senses. The very act of abstraction in which the spontaneous power of the intellect (intellectus agens) turns to the sensory material in order to illuminate it with its light and to elevate it into its sphere is simultaneously the act in which the intellect inclines to the sensible in order to fill, and to find filled, its own empty unity in the latter’s multiplicity.49 The only way, in other words, to avoid seeing a contradiction in the correlative movements in the subject and object is thus to refuse to accept a difference between the aspects of the movements on either side. Thus, the “egression” of the image from the essence is the same thing as the image’s fading back into the essence, while the subject’s abstraction and conversio are likewise identical movements. If they all happen simultaneously, then there is no contradiction. Although it is true that the simultaneity of the various movements would remove the difficulty, the simultaneity itself requires some justification, which Balthasar does not offer in this context. Without a justification, however, a certain difficulty persists. If the problem of the apparently oppositional directions of the movements can be resolved only by denying in some respect their difference, it would seem to endanger the positive value of

49. Ibid., 151–52. 182

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that difference in the moments of the process itself. In other words, it would seem to undermine the positive contributions those differences make to truth itself. We have seen, for example, why it is crucial to avoid merely identifying image and essence. To give a full response to this difficulty, then, we can once again make use of the notions Balthasar develops later in order to bring to light certain elements lying already here in TL 1. Basically, once we find a “third” in which each of the two movements are both united and distinguished, we can affirm a simultaneity without endangering difference. My procedure for the remainder of this section, then, will be to show how the mutual dependence of the two movements in the object calls for a “third,” namely, the Gestalt, and then to show how understanding Gestalt in the light of this mutual dependence reveals further depths of its meaning. Then, we will see how the conversio ad phantasmata is, for the subject, itself a “third,” as that which both unites and distinguishes the moments of perception and abstraction. This will allow us to understand that the object is not resolved inside, nor is the subject resolved outside, but both are resolved in a whole that is simultaneously outside and inside. We must first grasp the fundamental polarity of the object. First, the essence is in a certain sense bound to its external image. Balthasar points to the ambiguity of this being bound, in that it represents the ontological potency of the essence, which can exist more than it exists: it can externalize its own self in the image. Yet, at the same time, it expresses the impotence of the essence, which is nothing without the image and which thus stands necessarily under the “law of a necessary self-revelation” (Gesetz des Sich-offenbaren-müssens).50 In this respect, the essence logically presupposes the image; it cannot be what it itself is without the image. However, and perhaps more obviously, the image is dependent on the essence. It likewise logically presupposes the essence since what it is, after all, is nothing but the externalization of the essence. Thus, the essence and the image stand in a relation of reciprocal causality. Although it is not symmetrical, because the essence can be the ground of the image in a way that the image can never be the ground of the essence, it is nevertheless a relationship of mutual dependence.51 Now, there is perhaps no one who has 50. Ibid., 149. 51. Waldstein compares the reciprocal causality of essence and image, or, as he puts it, ground and medium, in the phenomenon of Gestalt to Rousselot’s elaboration of the reciprocal causality between intellect and will in The Eyes of Faith: see “Expression and Form,” 97. However, Rousselot lacks the crucial “middle term”; we will see the significance of this middle term immediately in our discussion here, and then we will return to it explicitly in relation to Rousselot in chapter 5. Truth as Gestalt

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penetrated this insight more directly than Hegel; one might say that the “emptiness” of the essence without the image and the image’s need to be negated in order for the essence to “show through” and thus in the end leave a third “concrete” term, composed from two abstractions, is the very structure of the dialectic. But the logical necessity that controls all freedom in Hegel’s system comes from a single source: namely, he begins with abstraction and only ends with the concrete. In this case, it means beginning with an “unfulfilled” essence and deducing from this need the being of the image, a being that must eventually reduce back to its origin because it was deduced therefrom. This problem can be avoided only if we begin, not with the one or the other first and then pass to its correlate, but, rather, with the complete whole, right from the outset. We can do so, however, only if we have a “third” that is distinct from the other two. This third is given in the schwebende Mitte, which I proposed to interpret as a Gestalt. To begin already from the Gestalt means that though in abstraction the essence would be empty without the image, and the image in abstraction would be made autonomous and thus mistaken for the essence itself, there is never a moment when an essence exists unfulfilled or an image is not transparent to its ground. The Gestalt, in other words, is the whole at once; it is the outward expression of the inward ground, taken all at once, as a single, luminous appearance of the whole object. Because the Gestalt is distinct from the ground in itself or the appearance in itself, it can in a second moment be analyzed into these irreducibly different parts, particularly because its transcendence of both frees each from the need simply to become the other.52 But this is precisely what in turn allows them to be so completely one, and it is what gives the primal phenomenon of signification its wholeness: “The object acquires significance as soon as it begins to give an interpretation of itself through its appearances. The agent of this interpretation is the object’s non-appearing essence; the means of its interpretation is its appearance, which is to say, the world

52. In the discussion of Waldstein’s treatment of Gestalt, I explained how the Gestalt is distinct from the “ground” or the inner principle of unity (which is what makes it likewise different from Thomas’s notion of forma). But it is equally important not to fall into the opposite, and perhaps more obvious, temptation of identifying Gestalt with the appearance of the object, which becomes a particularly strong temptation once we affirm that the appearance is always an appearance of the whole. In E, 48, Balthasar speaks at length of the difference between Gestalt and image (outward appearance). To use Husserl’s language, we could say that a Gestalt is a whole of which the image, like the essence or principle of unity, is an essential moment. 184

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of images. But it is the whole that is significant, and the whole is selfexpositing being.”53 There are two further points to make about the appearance of the object as Gestalt that emerge once we see it as a whole comprised of mutually dependent moments. These two points are closely related. The first is, in the light of what we have just seen in relation to the Gestalt, to draw out the implication of the comment Balthasar makes early in this section, namely: “The image is therefore an original expression. It is a creation, not an imitation.”54 The adjective Balthasar uses here is ursprünglich, meaning “original” because arising from the depths, which themselves are not a static point but a living spring. What does this mean? We can understand it when we consider what the denial of this claim would mean. The manifestation of the essence in its appearance would be “uncreative” if the being of the essence were already complete in itself, such that the appearance could not of itself contribute anything to the being of the essence (since this would require somehow its ontological “coming before” the essence), but could only follow after the essence, that is, mechanically duplicate it. But this raises simultaneously the problem of monism and dualism: monism because, as mere reduplication, the appearance would be wholly reducible back to the essence, and dualism because the “re”-duplication would mean that another “essence” was produced, existing alongside the first. In order to avoid both the monism and the dualism, we have to return to what was just said about reciprocal causality: this means that the appearance, even in its coming after the essence, must also in some respect come before it, which means it must in some sense give rise to the essence, or, perhaps better, be the indispensable means by which the essence gives rise to itself. The possibility for this reciprocity, as we just saw, is given in the Gestalt. But the full ontological implication of this phenomenon requires the metaphysics I laid out in the first chapter: it is not the case that a being exists in itself and then communicates itself, but there is a sense in which a being comes into existence only in communicating itself. But what we affirmed as a basic principle in metaphysics can now be further spelled out as it were phenomenologically. The genuine creativity of the Gestalt is not a mere abstract principle; rather, we can see the Gestalt itself as a fruit and a fruitfulness, indeed, because what lies at its root is something genuinely analogous to mutual self-gift:

53. Ibid., 139. 54. Ibid., 140. Truth as Gestalt

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This truth [the truth of the Gestalt] has the precise form of a reciprocal surrender between essence and image, ground and appearance. In this mutual surrender, the essence con-descends to enter into the appearance and to display itself publicly in the world of images, whereas the appearance wants to be nothing other than a function of the essence’s revelation. A mysterious movement thus shows its presence in the heart of being. We cannot describe this movement either monistically or dualistically, but we can say that the structure of truth rests on it as its deepest foundation.55 The Gestalt, in other words, is a “creation,” that is, a “more,” precisely because it is the coming together of two principles, under precise circumstances: first, they are irreducible to each other; second, they are reciprocally dependent on each other; and, third, their interaction is characterized in terms of the compound term self-renunciation, both aspects of which need to be grasped distinctly. It is a “renunciation” because it is the “decision” (and we say decision analogously because each is irreducible to the other and therefore in an analogous sense free with respect to the other) of each not to be separate from the other but to find itself only therein. It is a “self” because in no case is it merely a part that is at stake but always the whole; it is not part of the essence that is expressed in the image, or part of the image that is related to the essence, but the whole of the one related asymmetrically to the whole of the other. What seems like “mere metaphor” in Balthasar’s usage is in fact a precise expression of the logic of the relationship of mutual dependence coupled with irreducibility. And, reciprocally, as we will see more fully in the next chapter, the human act of self-renunciation is itself not a mere moral phenomenon, but is likewise the expression of a logical or metaphysical relationship.56 The upshot of this reflection is that what we take to be the most common and even banal of events, the mere appearance of beings or even the mere having of any property at all, is already a creative event, which occurs in every case at the cost of what is analogous to the total gift of self. The second observation about the appearance of the object as Gestalt concerns the concrete fullness that emerges from this mutual self-gift that lies at the heart of the phenomenon of significance. What exactly is the nature of this fruitfulness? The most perfect instance of this fruitfulness is when the appearance or form completely coincides with the essence

55. Ibid., 150. 56. This is not to reduce morality to logic in a Hegelian sense. It is rather an attempt to see the unity of both, which is the condition for their diversity. 186

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of meaning in an indissoluble totality, which then takes on a life of its own: “It is as if, at the moment when the two finite magnitudes of meaning [Sinn] and image [Bild] coincided, the work became infinite—a symbol [Sinnbild] that from now on transcends the sum of its parts.”57 Although Balthasar does not use the word here, we recognize that this is exactly the definition of Gestalt as Balthasar later understands the term. What he says here provides the fundamental reason for the characteristic of Gestalt that we mentioned briefly at the beginning of the chapter without elaborating, namely, its infinity. In what sense is it the nature of a Gestalt—any Gestalt, precisely to the extent that it is a Gestalt—to be infinite? In this context, Balthasar offers the example of a masterful work of art, the opera Don Giovanni or any of Mozart’s symphonies. What exactly does the work of art mean? Once one has listened often enough to a symphony to the point of truly grasping it, one sees at just that moment how difficult it would be to formulate the meaning adequately in discursive concepts. The difficulty does not arise because there is something held back from expression, something lacking in clarity, or hidden behind what is actually given to intuition. Instead, the difficulty arises for precisely the opposite reason: because the work leaves none of its elements behind as superfluous, either externally or internally. The meaning is so completely and perfectly expressed that the surfaces “brim over” with meaning; they become literally radiant with “overfullness.” There is so much “there” that one could talk endlessly about its meaning without ever exhausting it.58 It is, by contrast, the failed work of art that allows itself to be so easily explained. Why? Because, insofar as the form and content do not require each other, insofar as they can be artificially disjoined just as they were artificially connected, the content can be repeated in abstraction, in concepts, that is, in the absence of the phenomenon itself. Now, it is important to see that what is true in art is analogously true universally for each and every expression of being. This infinity belongs to every Gestalt as such precisely because it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We have already seen why a Gestalt must necessarily be concrete, that is, temporal and in some sense accessible to the senses. We 57. Ibid., 141. 58. This point brings us immediately back to an observation made in a note in chapter 1, about the mutual illumination of person and being in metaphysics, which I suggested could be compared to a similar phenomenon in art. We now have a word for the phenomenon: the fourfold difference, just like the intersection of the horizontal line of existence and the vertical line of essence in the section on the “moving idea,” is ultimately a Gestalt. Everything that is said in this chapter provides a context for the material in that first chapter. Truth as Gestalt

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now see that it must also possess an inseparability of form from content: it requires an “unreserved” surrender on the part of the essence and the image so that they may seamlessly coincide. Indeed, they coincide all the more “seamlessly” the more complete their mutual self-surrender. Since this convergence is a new “third,” and therefore transcends each of the parts that are able to be “captured” in isolation—in other words that are finite—it itself is essentially infinite. Or, more adequately, the Gestalt is essentially the complex conjunction of finitude and infinity. It represents, as it were, the joining of the two ends of a line into a circle, or the mutual reflection of two mirrors, which not only can give the impression of infinite space, but can also amplify a single ray of light into a powerful laser beam. This affirmation—that the joining of two reciprocally causal principles forms a third that infinitely transcends them—is the heart of Balthasar’s insight that truth is mystery, and that mystery, properly conceived, is truth, and that the whole phenomenon in its initial form deserves the name “beauty.” The appearance of an object, thus understood, is an irreplaceable event, which radiates a light greater than its own.59

The Imagination as the Center of the Subject At this point, however, I have discussed only the “objective” side of the issue; before concluding this section, we need to see what corresponds on the subjective side to the object’s appearing Gestalt. Now, Balthasar himself says far less on this topic. When he lays out the example of Mozart’s symphony, he contrasts “conceptual thinking” (das begriffliche Denken) with the “comprehending thinking that can read Gestalten” (das verstehende, gestaltenlesende Denken). And later, as we already saw, he mentions the two basic “epistemological” movements in the subject in relation to the movements of the object’s self-expression, specifically, the movement of abstraction, and then the “resolution” of the concept back into the image: the conversio ad phantasmata. Moreover, in the Epilog, as we mentioned in the last chapter, Balthasar points to the “transcendental unity of apperception” as the only thing capable of grasping a Gestalt.60 What are we to make of all of this? Is there a way to bring these various points to a unity? Is there a corresponding “third” in the subjective aspect of epistemology? 59. See ibid., 141–42, where Balthasar explicitly connects this sense of truth with beauty, and 206–25, where he elaborates it explicitly as mystery. I will elaborate the meaning of beauty in terms of reciprocal causality in chapter 5. 60. E, 48. 188

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There will be more to say to this question in the next chapter, but for now we might offer a somewhat “speculative” proposal. It seems that in his exposition in The Truth of the World of the subject’s basic epistemological moments, Balthasar failed to give attention to the very first: the act of knowledge does not begin with abstraction but rather with perception, the sensible grasping of the object’s outward appearance or, to put it Thomistically, the grasping of the object through its accidents, in that wherein it is primus quoad nos (first in relation to us). Thus, rather than “coordinating” the object’s self-expression with the subject’s act of abstracting, it seems more natural to coordinate it with intuition. The “falling away” of the image into the essence, the accidents into the substance, would likewise seem to correspond best to abstraction, to the agent intellect’s illumination of the universal within the sensible particular. We saw that these two moments came together in the object’s Gestalt; it seems that there is an obvious candidate for a corresponding act on the part of the subject: the conversio ad phantasmata.61 It is not as if the conversio represented only a partial aspect of knowing, similar to the particularity of the image when it is taken separately from the essence; in other words, it is not as if the conversio represented the “particularity” of knowledge in contrast to the universality of the concept. Indeed, if we could abstract the process into its parts for a moment, even though it always occurs as a single, continuous whole, it is more accurate to say that the initial sensible intuition provides this contrast with the concept. The conversio ad phantasmata, on the other hand, is precisely where the sensible intuition (the particular) and the abstract concept (universal) are joined together in a single whole. In this respect, the conversio corresponds exactly to the Gestalt. Moreover, since it represents a third, distinct from and standing over above the other two movements, it is what allows them to be irreducibly different from each other and at the same time what allows them to be identical, that is, to occur simultaneously in their mutual dependence on each other. Thus, we can return to the passage cited above about the spontaneous act of the intellect that illuminates and elevates the sensory material being the same as the act in which this empty unity is sensuously filled, and affirm that such is possible only because that act is distinct from the two, as their very convergence: it is the conversio ad phantasmata.

61. Consider, in this regard, Prufer’s argument that conversio does not come simply “after” reflexio (the movement inward, which is related to abstraction) but in some sense is precisely what enables it: “Die reflexio wird durch die conversio vermittelt,” “Sein und Wort,” 81. Truth as Gestalt

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It would seem to do justice to Balthasar’s own analysis of the phenomenon of being’s self-expression, then, to connect the intellect’s conversio with what he names gestaltenlesenden Denken. At the same time, it places the unity or the whole, not simply within the mind’s immediate identity with being but in the mediated immediacy of a joint event that occurs between the subject and object. Such an event, in fact, was precisely the direction in which we sought the fundamental meaning of the transcendental unity of apperception in the last chapter. There we saw that unity must transcend simultaneously in two directions, vertically and horizontally. At the beginning of this chapter, we saw that Gestalt had a similar inner polarity: its own light is at the same time the transcendent light of being. Balthasar characterizes conversio in similar terms in the Epilog.62 In the passage from the Epilog, he says that conversio radiates with its own light and that of the (transcendent) intellectus agens. If we connect intellectus agens with the transcendent unity of apperception, we thus discover an inner vertical-horizontal polarity in the conversio, which corresponds precisely to that of the Gestalt, and thus makes the conversio its perfect subjective correlate. This connection between conversio and the unity of apperception, in turn, illuminates the full meaning of conversio, and opens up new possibilities for further connections. More precisely, it sets into a new relief the imagination’s role in uniting the universal and the particular in the act of knowing, and, second, it allows us to see why it is precisely that role played by the imagination that accounts for the strange duality of the imagination that has always been an enigma in the tradition: its “pure” receptivity as sensorium, and its “pure” spontaneity as the source of creative power. There are three implications to be drawn from this role. First, the reciprocal union of essence and image gives birth to the infinite meaningfulness of the Gestalt, which, insofar as it both expresses and transcends the object, lies at the base of the subject’s ability not only to grasp it in its singular appearance, but simultaneously to “read” the “more” of the essence from its meaning-laden surface, that is, to grasp the universal essence in the particular manifestation. Balthasar insists on the inability to account for this more simply on the basis of the subject’s spontaneity in a Kantian sense.63 Instead, he says, we must see that the “surface” of the object is itself the appearance of the nonappearing ground, and so, even if the subject’s participation in the manifestation of the object’s universal essence is 62. E, 47–49. 63. TL 1:153. Balthasar here alludes to, and rejects as inadequate, the notion that the universality of concepts is due to the subject’s a priori system of categories. 190

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absolutely indispensable, it does not mean that the subject himself merely produces that manifestation. Rather, he simultaneously produces and receives it, in the conversio ad phantasmata, which is a single, simultaneously receptive, and spontaneous act. But this means, moreover, that the knowledge of the universal is not simply detached from knowledge of the singular. It would be better, in fact, to say that the universal and the singular are two irreducible aspects of a thing. They cannot, as it were, be thematized both at the same time; nevertheless, the acts that “constitute” them have their roots in the single act that “takes in” the object as a whole, namely, the imaginative act that reads the Gestalt. Second, this view of the imagination’s epistemological significance sets into relief elements that already exist in traditional approaches. It is only a crude interpretation of Saint Thomas that limits him to the affirmation that knowledge is always of universals alone. In fact, in De veritate, 2, 6, he affirms both that singulars are known indirectly and that universal forms or concepts are not the objects of knowledge, but the medium of knowledge. Thus, he concludes: “inasmuch as our intellect, through the likeness which it receives from the phantasm, turns back upon the phantasm from which it abstracts the species, the phantasm being a particular likeness, our intellect gets some kind of knowledge of the singular because of its dynamic union with the imagination.”64 It is the act of the imagination, the conversio, as the “dynamic union” of the intellect with the senses, that comes upon the unity of the universal and particular. This interpretation accords with a statement made by Aristotle (which has generally received little attention in accounts of his epistemology), in which he identifies actual knowledge with the particular and potential knowledge with the universal: the universal, he says, is known “per accidens” (symbebekos) in the actual grasping of a “this.”65 Finally, I merely mention here what will receive more attention later and in the next chapter, that because the conversio ad phantasmata is a union of irreducible principles, intuition and understanding, it, like all other similar unions, will necessarily be a “more” or a fruitfulness that transcends the two. The fruitfulness of the imagination, as we will see, is what bears not only all artistic creativity but in a certain sense all language, work, and action. Moreover, we will see in the next chapter how it is essentially connected to the very center of the person—the human heart—and how it thus forms the “seat” of fundamental decision and the “stage” of dramatic

64. Aquinas, De ver., 2, 6. 65. Aristotle, Meta., 13.10.1087a10–25. Truth as Gestalt

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engagement. That all these strands find themselves woven together in a single “operation” (a fact I do no more than assert at this point), then, means that things such as work and language, usually taken to be wholly unrelated and even opposed activities—opposed not only to each other but to man’s first fundamentally receptive relation to the “objective” world— are all as it were brothers and sisters of the same parents.

Gestalt as Unifying Knowledge Capit, si capitur.66 —Augustine

The “first stage” of truth, as we have seen it, is the resolution of both the subject and the object in wholes that represent simultaneously the unity and distinction of interiority and exteriority. However, it is not the case that this “stage” comes to completion and that only then do we pass to the second stage. If such were the case, we would have two “wholes,” the object’s Gestalt and the subject’s conversio, being formally complete in themselves, and we would then in a second moment try to bring them together. This approach is problematic precisely because they will never be brought together. Instead, we must see that the initial appearance of the object—inasmuch as it is a complex whole—has a certain dependence on the subject’s articulate grasping of it, which, as articulate, requires a certain free involvement of the subject. At the same time, though, the subject’s conversio, as itself an articulate whole, likewise has a certain dependence on the object: it is, after all, a conversio, a turning back to the “objective” images. Thus, this reciprocal dependence reveals the need for a more complex act in which they are both integrated in their distinction. In this section, we will first elaborate that act as judgment. The first stage of the object’s appearance—simple apprehension—is not complete in itself, but only in this second stage. However, we will see that judgment itself has a reciprocal dependence on the appearance of the object in its articulateness. In this way, we will be led to seek the unity of these differences, first, in the union of subject and object in the Gestalt of knowledge and truth, and then more comprehensively in the following section in the further Gestalten understood as the fruit of that union. Now, both Aquinas and Aristotle affirm that truth proper does not reach formal completion until the second act, judgment, which they both

66. One grasps in being grasped. 192

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define as the intellect’s act of composing and dividing.67 It is in this act, Aquinas emphasizes, that existence is reached.68 There are two interesting points to consider here, in light of our discussion so far. First, we notice the connection between “composing and dividing” (i.e., the relating of parts to each other) and the attainment of existence. There is, in this, an epistemological confirmation of the characteristic of Gestalt that we saw at the beginning, namely, that a genuine whole has to be concrete, meaning both concrete and real. Aristotle specifies that the parts that are composed or divided are not related successively to each other, but have a certain “all at once” unity.69 Since such a unity, as we have seen, represents a “new” order that is not simply derived from the parts as their mere sum, then such a unity can be had only in a certain transcendence. In other words, there must be a spontaneity on the part of the judging subject. This brings us to the second point, namely, that judgment is essentially a free act. But it also shows us in principle how to characterize this freedom in the subject’s act of judgment: because it is the forming of a “transcendent” unity, it is freedom as the spontaneity of the subject and just for that reason is the point at which the subject goes beyond himself, entering the reality of the object. Aquinas, in fact, says that judgment is where truth proper occurs both because it is in judgment that the intellect possesses something that is proper to it—that is, the moment in which it “comes into its own,” the moment it is free—and also because it is in judgment where the intellect most directly joins its object.70 Judgment is therefore free because it attains existence, that is, it reaches beyond itself to a concrete whole; and it attains existence because it is free, that is, it is a spontaneous or ek-static act. The key, at every point, as we will see over the course of unfolding this section, is that the union implied in this relation between subject and object, as a Gestalt, has an indissoluble character of transcendence. It is because of this “immanent infinity” that logical judgment is inseparable from an element of personal decision, inasmuch as the subject cannot “reach” the transcendent nature of the Gestalt without in some sense committing himself. At the same time, it is what makes this union of subject and object simultaneously a grasping and a being-grasped, which is the only way to

67. Aristotle, Meta., 6.4; Aquinas, De ver., 1, 3. 68. On the connection between judgment and existence, see the above cited article in Aquinas, as well as Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 190–215, and Kenneth Schmitz, “Enriching the Copula,” Review of Metaphysics 27 (1974): 492–512. 69. Aristotle, Meta., 6.4.1027b23–25. 70. Aquinas, De ver., 1, 3, ad 1. Truth as Gestalt

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preserve both a unity and a difference in the relation. Finally, because judgment concerns an object that remains to the end “more” than the judger, and thus involves personal decision, action, and being grasped, the event of judgment itself can find completion only through itself being measured by the ever-greater truth of the whole. There is no genuine judgment that is not simultaneously a being-judged.

Judgment The reason the object’s appearance (simple apprehension) precedes in some sense the subject’s free act of judgment is that judgment does not occur in a vacuum. We saw in the last chapter that consciousness is awakened to itself in its being carried above itself to another. This structure is recapitulated in all knowing. The freedom in the act of judging has, therefore, a reciprocity “built into” it. In other words, it is the “transcendent” Gestalt of the object’s appearing that inspires the subject’s transcendent act of freedom toward it. I will thus, in this section, approach the meaning of judgment through a consideration of Balthasar’s aesthetics as he lays it out in GL 1, in terms of the dynamic of vision and rapture. Let us take the term vision, in what follows, to stand for the whole dynamic we saw played out in simple apprehension, the object’s appearance; and let us take rapture to be the form of the subject’s spontaneous act of freedom. In the relation between vision and rapture, we will see how simple apprehension occurs only in an inspired and free movement toward what is apprehended. We will therefore locate the act of judgment in this movement, as its “crystallization.” “Only that which has form can snatch one up into a state of rapture. Only through form can the lightning-bolt of eternal beauty flash.”71 A fundamental principle of Balthasar’s aesthetics is that vision (Erblickung) and rapture (Entzückung), a being-carried-away or transported to ek-stasis, are inseparable from each other.72 But this principle should not surprise us, since it is a version of a principle we have already seen, namely, that unity always means transformation. In order to be united to the object in vision, the subject must be transformed or brought outside of himself. It is crucial that we understand this not only as an aesthetic principle, but as a law of epistemology as well. Indeed, it follows strictly from what we have just seen. An object can be grasped only if it is given, only if it appears.

71. GL 1:32. 72. Ibid., 125–27. 194

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The phenomenon of appearance will be falsified in an essential respect if it is not seen as a unity-in-difference, or Gestalt. And a Gestalt is by its nature a relative infinity, that is, a transcendent whole. The question we must now answer is why this transcendent whole necessarily “enraptures” in its being seen. Why are vision and rapture simultaneous? According to Balthasar, this simultaneity is due to the inseparable and irreducible duality in every Gestalt: it is the (finite/determinate) appearance of a nonappearing (infinite) depth, or to use Aquinas’s aesthetic terminology, it is both species (or forma) and lumen (or splendor).73 Now, it is precisely the character of lumen that it cannot be comprehended, as illustrated in the story of the boy who sought to snatch light for himself but upon peering into his tight grasp saw that he had embraced only darkness. It is precisely the character of infinity, transcendence, or unity (which are in a certain sense all synonymous) that they cannot be circumscribed.74 Light is therefore “had” only inasmuch as one allows oneself to be illuminated; infinity is “had” only inasmuch as one allows oneself to be carried beyond one’s limits—and again, it must be a being-carried, because one cannot “grab” the infinite for oneself, one cannot break out of one’s limits by oneself, since what is limited is precisely . . . limited.75 Now, if we were to isolate this rapture from vision as a separate event in itself, the subject’s transcendence would degenerate into a crude violence. The “transcendence” of the act, that is, the subject’s being brought beyond himself, would become the mere negation or annihilation of the subject; the nongrasping of the light would become mere blindness. But here there arises a great temptation. The “radicality” of this blindness can easily be mistaken for the “totalizing” of transcendence and therefore transcendence in its most perfect form; any suggestion that this is to be avoided is thus interpreted as compromising or balancing the transcendence with immanence. It is therefore important to see that this “extreme” form of

73. Ibid., 118. 74. In his discussion of Balthasar’s sense of the “mystery” character of truth, Jörg Splett elaborates further Balthasar’s image of truth as a great sea. In order to be, “capable” of water, he asks, do we have to say that the person can exhaustively and comprehensively grasp it? “Statt die Wasser auszuschöpfen, hätte man schlicht in ihnen zu schwimmen!” Splett, “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit,” 420. The point is the same as the one I am trying to make: to “comprehend” something greater than oneself, one has to place oneself in it rather than the reverse. To “internalize” it, you must immerse yourself wholly within. 75. We might think of Wittgenstein’s humorous illustration of the man who “gives himself” money by passing it from his right hand to his left. The man who tries to liberate himself from his own limits becomes free to precisely the same extent that the man Wittgenstein here describes becomes rich. Truth as Gestalt

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transcendence in actual fact ceases to be transcendence. If the “ungraspableness” is not mediated through some real grasp, then it cannot avoid becoming simply immediate, which, as immediate, is perfectly indistinguishable from the subject himself. One of the clearest examples of this “pseudo”-transcendence is Kant’s notion of the sublime, which he says is an epiphany of such overwhelming power it can only have come . . . from the subject himself (!).76 But, since the immediacy depends on mediation, it is therefore not the case that rapture happens “first,” and only then “vision.” Rather, just as light is seen as mere darkness unless it has an object to illuminate, so too the rapture must be mediated by a definite grasp, a clear vision. An illustration of the simultaneity of vision and rapture: It is as if, just when the subject opened himself up to take the object, he himself were taken and carried further than he anticipated, even while, at the same time, he could not be moved unless he opened himself up to take the object. At the same time, it cannot be the case that the “vision” comes first and that the “rapture” comes only in a second moment. After all, the vision is only vision if it is part of a Gestalt, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Such a whole, since it is genuinely transcendent, cannot be seen by a “static” subject. Lying as a “beyond” within the object, the object’s wholeness can be perceived only by a subject who is himself already “beyond”: “Only when the depths are understood along with it does the surface become interpretable.”77 Thus, it is both true that there is no vision without rapture, and no rapture without vision: and they are both due to the single fact that a Gestalt is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Since it is a whole of parts, it must be grasped, and since it is a whole of parts, it can be grasped only “transcendent-ly” (not merely transcendentally). Although the two are simultaneous and reciprocally dependent, they are not for all of that symmetrical: the whole comprehends the parts in a way that the parts can never comprehend the whole, either individually or all together. We are thus led back to an initial formulation concerning the paradox of a Gestalt, namely, that it forms a continuity only in a prior and simultaneous discontinuity; the vision and the rapture are simultaneous, even if the rapture has a relative priority. To repeat: it has this priority only within a reciprocal dependence. The rapture/vision duality immediately implies a second indissoluble duality, namely, that between claim and decision. The appearance of the

76. I refer once again to Kant, CJ, Ak 256. 77. TL 1:159. 196

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object, that is, its show of truth, makes a claim on the subject, and it so does not leave the subject in indifference before it but calls for a decision, precisely because the appearance is a movement, a “gesturing” in the subject’s regard as if for his benefit. Balthasar cites the conclusion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which describes the Gestalt of the statue, radiating from an unseen center, and ends with the words: “There is no place where it does not see you. You must change your life.”78 In The Truth of the World, Balthasar repeats over and over that “the truth is in motion, it presses upon the mind and calls the conscience to decision.”79 For the subject to be free (i.e., to make a decision), the object must call (i.e., make a claim on) the subject, while at the same time, the claim must include and not circumvent that freedom. Insofar as the subject is free, he cannot be moved against his will, because in that case only a part of him will be moved: When Zeno, the eventual founder of Stoicism, left his first teacher, Crates, to study with Stilpo, Crates dragged him back by the coat. Zeno replied: “Crates, the sophisticated way to get a hold on a philosopher is by the ears. So persuade me and drag me away by them; but if you use force on me, my body will be with you and my soul with Stilpo.”80 To be moved wholly, the subject must move freely in his being moved. Before elaborating the essence of the freedom that is called into play, it is appropriate first to answer the question why the object needs to lay claim to the whole subject in order for the subject to be able to see the Gestalt. Given that the Gestalt is transcendent to the extent that it is a whole at all, and given that a transcendent whole can be grasped only in transcendence, the question, in fact, amounts to the question of whether it is possible to transcend without transcending as a whole, or in other words, whether it is possible partially to transcend. Putting the question thus is almost a reductio ad absurdum. We need only return our attention to what I have already shown, namely, that whole and transcendent are mutually implicative terms and that the movement of transcendence, which is a movement from part to whole, cannot happen gradually but necessarily - since it is the passage over has the character of an “all at once” (exaiphnes), a chasm that is irreducible and therefore in a certain respect infinite. But “all at once” is an adverbial form of the notion “whole”; thus, since

78. GL 1:23. 79. TL 1:145. 80. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Stoics, 7.24, cited in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988), 74. Truth as Gestalt

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the method must be adequate to the subject, a whole can be attained only wholly, that is, by a whole (which does not necessarily mean in every respect). If the subject is to grasp the object at all, then, the whole subject must be involved. And if the whole subject is involved, it means his freedom cannot be left behind. This becomes especially clear when we take freedom to mean, not just the liberum arbitrium (freedom to choose) but the center of the subject’s being, his interiority or inward heart. In this case, man’s freedom is the whole of man. In order to avoid possible misunderstandings, it is worthwhile, before we continue, to point out what this means specifically in the present context. The argument is that the whole subject is involved every time a genuine whole (Gestalt) is grasped, which means in every single act of perception whatsoever, since, as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, among others, all agree, every act of perception at some point involves transcendent ( a priori) unity. Balthasar has described perceiving a Gestalt in terms of vision and rapture, which means that such vision and rapture are involved in every single act of perception. We should recognize that this affirmation is no different, in essence, from the Thomistic principle that it is not sense that perceives, but the (whole) man who perceives through the senses.81 The point, which is important as a context for what will follow, is that every act, insofar as it is an act of the whole subject, will involve something analogous to rapture, and what is clearest in the most direct cases (experience of the sublime) is nonetheless subtly operative in the most common instances of perception, just as we saw to be the case in relation to consciousness. What, then, is the nature of the freedom involved when the subject is snatched up into the object? Balthasar takes pains to distinguish between fundamental freedom (voluntas ut natura) and freedom of choice (voluntas elicita). Whereas the latter refers to individual, deliberate acts of the will, the former indicates a distinct “function” of the will as the subject’s basic predisposition to openness.82 Even if this aspect is distinct from deliberate acts of the will, it is still an aspect of the subject’s freedom. It is not separate from the deliberate use of freedom, but distinct as its transcending and therefore always accompanying anterior condition. We have seen this already in the phenomenon of the mother’s smile, as the “being-moved,” which was not external to, but rather intrinsic to, the 81. I refer once again (see chapter 2) to de Finance’s observation, Cogito Cartésien, 44: “What senses, what wills, and what thinks, is not sense, will, or intellect: it is the concrete person.” 82. TL 1:110–12. 198

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self-moving of consciousness. This I interpreted, then, ontologically as a fundamental attunement to being, which was transcendent to, but not simply chronologically prior to, any particular act of attention. Here, we can include this basic (pre-)disposition of openness, which defines the ground of the subject’s freedom, as belonging in a certain way already to the object’s relation to the subject, “before” the object is “deliberately” appropriated by the subject. In other words, this voluntas ut natura, as the always already being open to the other, as the “willingness” that precedes and accompanies any willing, is part of the meaning of the rapture, just as the voluntas elicita, then, is part of the meaning of the vision. These two dimensions of the freedom stand in a relationship similar to that of the other two notions we just discussed. If we grant this correlation, then we can understand the claim that the object makes on the subject, which is the nature of its inspiring rapture in the subject, as a necessary part of the subject’s freedom, understood as the voluntas ut natura. It is, as it were, just the flip side of the coin. The “determinate” aspect of grasping the Gestalt, then, would find its correlate in the subject’s specific, deliberate use of freedom. It follows, then, that the object’s claim upon the subject is an intrinsic precondition, not only in general for the subject’s free openness (Erschlossenheit: Heidegger) but in fact for the particular use of freedom in the grasping of the object, even if, conversely and asymmetrically, the subject’s use of freedom is intrinsic to the object’s actually making a claim: an object can make no claim upon a subject who is simply closed. The purpose of this affirmation is twofold. In the first place, it shows that though Balthasar does not deny a certain relative priority of the intellect over the will (a point so important to Pieper),83 he nevertheless insists that “the concept of will is an integral part of the concept of knowledge,”84 and that there is never any act of the intellect that does not always already involve the will, not only in the sense of the particular will to know a particular thing but in the more general sense of the general openness toward the whole in which all particular intellection takes place. Indeed, the way he describes this aspect of freedom prompts us to infer that this freedom is an essential aspect of the light of the “agent intellect,”85 an inference that accords well with what we saw in the last chapter, concerning the participation in the light of being as an “impulse” that is both a knowing and an acting (willing). But it also accords with common sense: it is impossible to imagine an “openness” that does not include at the same time 83. Josef Pieper, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1949), 17–19. 84. TL 1:112. 85. Ibid., 111. Truth as Gestalt

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intelligence and will; the light of the agent intellect must be just such a comprehensive act.86 But this implies a moral dimension intrinsic to the activity of the intelligence, or more specifically, the manifestation of truth.87 To say this does not require “collapsing” the order of the intelligence into the order of the will, nor making an aspect of the truth dependent not on intelligence but only on will and therefore “arbitrary.” I will sharpen the meaning of this claim shortly, but for the moment I merely affirm an implication that is endlessly significant for Balthasar’s understanding of truth: that the “moral” dimension of existence, life in the light of the good, is not something simply separate from or indifferent to the meaning of truth as truth, but rather is a life played out “inside” truth. The second purpose of this affirmation is to reveal the form of the subject’s freedom involved in the knowing of truth. The fundamental openness of the subject, which characterizes his voluntas ut natura, is not the “neutral” openness of an indifferent tabula rasa, happy to receive whatever it might be, indiscriminate scribbling as much as nothing at all. Rather, it has the form of the presuppositionlessness we spoke of at the end of the last chapter, which is neither a neutral, stupid “gaping,” nor a negative, skeptical distance, but a positive inclinatio ad rem, which finds itself always already under way and which participates in this movement primarily through the removal of obstruction. We thus see, in part, why the intrinsic involvement of freedom in the truth relation does not

86. We therefore see that there is much in Heidegger’s identification of truth and freedom (see “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, 117–41) that Balthasar would agree with, even if he would understand the form of this freedom in a much different sense than Heidegger does. For Heidegger, the unconcealment (Entdecktheit) of things is grounded in the disclosedness, or freedom (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein. However, Heidegger falsely radicalizes this transcendence. We might say that he has all the rapture and no vision, and this rapture cannot avoid, in its supraobjectivity, from degenerating into subjectivism. Balthasar would therefore accept Pieper’s criticism of Heidegger on this point: see Josef Pieper, “Heideggers Wahrheitsbegriff,” in Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 3: Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff, ed. Berthold Wald (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995), 186–98. Pieper claims that Heidegger recovers certain fundamental aspects of the medieval understanding of truth, only to fall back more definitively into the modern understanding (represented by Scotus and Descartes), which affirms that “voluntas est superior intellectu.” Thus, Heidegger loses any real transcendence and collapses truth into a subjective immanentism. Balthasar differs from Pieper, however, in that he can affirm a relative priority of the will, which, far from collapsing into subjectivism, in fact is necessary to prevent the collapse. I will make this argument in chapter 5. 87. Bauer highlights the “ethical” aspect of truth that arises in Balthasar’s philosophy once we see the intrinsic role that freedom plays: “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 294–95. It is crucial to keep in mind, as Bauer insists, that this freedom concerns not only the subject, but in a genuinely analogous sense the object as well. 200

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mean “whimsicality” or “arbitrariness”—or that the truth is no longer “objective”—freedom is always already objective; it is always already structurally called toward the object. Its fundamental form is the rapture, in which the object “claims” the subject for itself. In this respect, the subject’s freedom toward the object in its truth is experienced in the first place not as a tyrannical sovereignty, the absence of restraints that would keep him from doing what he will, but as the urgent call to decision. The urgency of the decision may remain for the most part unnoticed in the smaller acts of perception, but it is present every time there is a question of unity (i.e., in every act of intuition or cognition whatsoever); it increases in proportion as the complexity, or the unity and the difference, of the Gestalt increases, and, moreover, it is even in the smaller acts not unrelated to the fundamental decision that the knowing subject will make over the course of his life. In other words, the great decisions illuminate all the smaller ones, for the better or for the worse—I will return to elaborate this point in the next chapter. The essence of the decision the subject is called to make with respect to the truth of the object is judgment. In other words, the subject, in rapture, is called to exercise freedom in the specific form of taking hold of what is given, which is precisely the same act as the subject’s committing himself over to the object. Judgment, thus understood, is simultaneously an act of appropriation and an act of expropriation. Just as the rapture is not possible without being simultaneous with the vision, so too the freedom of the subject’s responsive opening to the object is not possible without the conceptual grasp of the object. As we have seen, Aquinas’s (and Aristotle’s) definition of judgment is the intellect’s act of composing or dividing, the affirmation of what is, and the denying of what is not.88 In the second section of the final chapter of The Truth of the World, Balthasar sketches the lineaments of a theory of judgment in light of the understanding of truth he had been developing in the rest of the book.89 On the basis of the finitude of both the subject and the object of knowledge, Balthasar shows that judgment or cognition is always itself finite, which means it is always caught in a tension between irreducible poles. (We recall that finitude, for Balthasar, is not simply the dialectical opposite of infinity, but is analogous and therefore intrinsically related to it.) The poles Balthasar discusses here are analysis and synthesis in judgment, the subject and object in cognition, and essence

88. Aquinas, De ver., 1, 3. 89. TL 1:244–54. Truth as Gestalt

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and existence in knowledge.90 We have to see how all these polarities necessarily imply each other in the phenomenon of truth; I will deal with the first two polarities here, and will address the third in the next subsection, “Knowledge as a Life-Giving Exchange.” In the last section, we saw that the appearance of the object as a Gestalt was not possible except as occurring in conjunction with a corresponding total act on the part of the subject, which we called the conversio. This conversio, however, when we see it as a function of the subject’s act of freedom, has the specific form of judgment. This is the case because the subject cannot intellectually take hold of an object without articulating it; the whole that the subject returns to (conversio) after abstraction is an articulated whole. Because the judgment is the act of articulating, through composition or disjunction, the relation of parts to each other within a single whole, we see that it is not something that comes merely after concept formation, but is an intrinsic part of the coming-to-be of the concept. As Gilson has observed, “there are no concepts without judgments, nor any judgments without concepts. Not even the simple apprehension of being can be without a judgment.”91 Thus, in order to understand the role of the act of judgment, we have to see it as part of the whole in which the object offers itself in the expression of its inner being, a gesture that enraptures the subject and calls him to seize it. The whole, we have said many times, is a single movement made up of many parts. The Gestalt of the object, as we saw, is a whole made up of both the essence and its appearance. The full grasping of the Gestalt, then, will likewise be a whole made up of corresponding parts, namely, a subject (essence) and a predicate (appearance). Just as in the Gestalt, so too in the formulated judgment, the subject and the predicate are irreducible to each other in spite of their unity in the judgment. This means that they will represent a polar tension between two unities, the unity of the subject, which is given in analysis, and the unity of the predicate, which is given in synthesis: Although knowledge strives by its very essence to attain unity, it can seek unity only in two contrary directions. On the one hand, it seeks unity in the direction of the subject of the judgment. Proceeding analytically, knowledge breaks down and sifts in the attempt to fathom the original, indivisible unity of the existent subject, the individuum

90. In fact, Balthasar includes in his characterization the impersonal-personal polarities and facticity-necessity polarities, which we will not treat. 91. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), 209. 202

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ineffabile. On the other hand, knowledge seeks this same unity, with equal immediacy, in the direction of the predicate of the judgment. Operating synthetically, it attempts to categorize the atomic individuals under more and more encompassing unities and thereby to achieve a unity of being and meaning for the whole in its universality.92 Now, Balthasar says that if either of these two “opposite” directions of thought were severed and isolated from the other, it would dissolve into an endless series, a bad infinity, which is just for that reason empty. On the one hand, the delimitation of the particularity of the subject through progressively sharp distinctions can continue into the infinitesimal, which loses in significance what it gains in precision. On the other hand, in synthetic judgment, the subject can be subsumed into ever more general universal predicates, which likewise lose in significance what they gain in breadth. To be “saved” from either abyss, the whole requires the “creative” act of the subject. Balthasar’s use of the world creative (schöpferische) reveals the fact that the act that brings together subject and predicate, and in general holds the tension between analytical and synthetic knowledge, does not simply add together parts but requires the contribution of something more than either or both together. What exactly is this “more”? It is important to realize that the answer to this question in fact implicates the possibility of the object’s appearing as a Gestalt at all, inasmuch as the Gestalt is simultaneously its essence (subject) and its image (predicate) distinguished and yet combined within a unity. Let us say at first that this “more” emerges out of the subject’s freedom; that, when presented with the two distinct terms, subject (essence) and predicate (image), the subject, in a creative or spontaneous act, brings the two together in a single proposition. So far, we are simply reiterating a conventional version of Thomistic epistemology, which in fact has its echo in most post-Kantian epistemologies. The decisive turn in Balthasar’s understanding occurs within this basic affirmation of the role of freedom in bringing about unity. If we recall that the subject’s freedom is not something he possesses simply before his involvement with the object, but rather is given to him in the same gesture in which he gives himself to the object, and is to that extent simultaneous with the object’s claim on the subject, then to say that judgment, the unifying of the Gestalt, is a free act by the subject does not exclude its being compelled by the object, its being a joint act of the object. In fact, the two relate directly, such that the subject’s freedom increases in tandem with the object’s claim. To deny this 92. TL 1:248. Truth as Gestalt

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would require somehow finding an opposition between the object’s drawing the subject outside of himself, and the subject’s being outside of himself, that is, “transcending” himself or being free. But we can proceed a step further. It may appear at first that the object’s calling the subject to the decision of judgment is essential to that judgment itself only as that which provides the (objective) occasion for what is exclusively a subjective act. In this case, it would follow that though initiated in some respect by the object, the act itself comes to completion—since completion means the perfection of being joined in a unity—within the subject’s judgment, within, in other words, the intellectual process that connects what are in themselves separate “pieces,” that is, the subject and the predicate. We should note, moreover, how such an understanding necessarily separates unity and sensibility: What is given to the senses is what comes from the object, and is therefore what does not yet have unity but rather seeks it from the subject. Conversely, then, unity is what the subject brings precisely from outside the senses. To affirm this, however, would require just the abstract sense of the unity of apperception that was criticized in the last chapter. What we saw there was that the very form of unity is simultaneously immediate and mediated; that unity, as such, is objectively mediated to the spontaneous power of the mind; and, moreover, that as such it does not exclude but rather necessarily includes both the whole subject (will and senses) and the whole object (with its outward appearance). But, if judgment—as composition and division—is the gathering of “parts” into a unity, and thus comes to completion where that unity is most perfectly found, it follows that the judgment does not end in the knower alone any more than it ends in the object alone. Rather, it ends in a whole created mutually between them. Thus, the fact that judgment is necessarily caught formally in the tension between analysis and synthesis leads to the fact that it is likewise materially caught in a tension between subject and object: “Because human thought oscillates in its very structure between the unity of the subject and of the predicate, the content of cognition also remains suspended halfway between the object and the subject of knowledge.”93 Balthasar’s point in this quotation, among other things, is to show that what the subject knows in cognition—the content (Inhalt)—is both the subject himself and the object, and he connects this affirmation causally with the fact that the structure of judgment is a tension between analysis and synthesis. We can see directly why a causal relation obtains: the structure of judgment is a

93. Ibid. 204

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polar tension because it involves a union of irreducible parts. Therefore, inasmuch as this union cannot be derived from the parts themselves, simply or jointly, it must be found in a “third” that is distinct from the two. But, because this third is the union of these parts, it must be simultaneously from below and from above, simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, with a certain relative priority of the discontinuity. It follows that this third must come from beyond the object, but in a way that includes the spontaneous import of the object: and so we return to judgment understood as the subject’s freedom, which is always already objective, that is, determined and given direction by the object. Judgment is therefore an event that occurs, “suspended half-way,” between the subject and the object, and for that reason is a revelation of both simultaneously. The unity-in-discontinuity of the judgment is shared by both. It is not the case that the object provides the diverse content while the subject provides the unifying (empty) form; rather, both form and content are a reciprocal event that requires the asymmetrical contribution of both the subject and object. We could, in fact, formulate this another way. If judgment is the act that most properly belongs to the subject’s freedom, it nevertheless cannot occur, as we saw, except through concept formation, which is the act wherein the object, as the self-showing whole, has a certain priority. At the same time, concept formation itself does not occur except in judgment. The two acts are distinct, and yet nevertheless they require each other. How can we understand their reciprocal dependence? We cannot resolve this problem by making judgment ultimately a function of concepts, which is basically what Hegel tries to do;94 nor can we resolve it by making all concepts merely a function of judgments, which, according to Gilson, is what Brentano tries to do.95 In order to avoid falling from one reduction to the other, we need to see that they both occur simultaneously in a single, distinct act. Thus, while we saw that the unity of the object is the movement of its self-expositing taken at once as a single whole, and the unity of the subject is this freedom understood as the “realization” of the unity of apperception in the conversio ad phantasmata, we now have to see that these two wholes are themselves “parts” belonging to a greater whole: “The existing object’s will to disclose itself and the subject’s will to open itself in receptive listening are but two forms of a single selfgift that manifests itself in these two modes.”96 We might call this single 94. “The copula ‘is’ [i.e., the judgment] flows from the nature of the concept.” Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, 244. 95. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 194–95. 96. TL 1:111. Truth as Gestalt

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self-gift the act of knowledge proper. As a distinct whole formed from irreducible parts, it is properly speaking itself a Gestalt, and it possesses all the peculiar characteristics that belongs to a Gestalt, as we have seen them. In order to grasp the various dimensions of the new Gestalt, we will first consider why the concept of knowledge as Gestalt is the only way to understand knowledge as a mutual and nonreductive self-gift, because it is the only way to understand a complete mutuality that at the same time requires a difference. I will enumerate in the next subsection some of the specific qualities of this Gestalt along with their implications, before exploring how this mutual self-gift, like all such, is essentially fruitful.

Knowledge as a Life-Giving Exchange - 97 was predicated on his seeing the Plato’s identification of reason with eros intelligible reality of things as the same as their goodness, that is, their being a value.98 Aristotle echoes this view in his assertion that the objects of desire and the objects of thought are essentially the same.99 This relating of knowing to love has found expression in many of the great thinkers of the tradition, because of a recognition that, as Aimé Forest put it, “the problem of love, like the problem of knowledge, is in a certain sense the problem of the ‘other.’ ”100 On the one hand, knowledge (like love) cannot be knowledge without union. If the act of knowing is not at some point perfectly identical with the object known, there will be an infinite regress, which undermines the very possibility of knowledge, since knowledge has to be not knowledge of “something like the object,” or even “something very similar” to it, but knowledge of the very object itself. Thus, the desire for knowledge is fundamentally a desire for union: “La pensée est exigence d’intimité,”101 which Plato says knows no rest until it rests wholly in its object. On the other hand, this intimacy cannot be complete identity or immanence in the sense of removing any difference: just as there can be no genuine transcendence without immanence, so too there can be no genuine immanence without transcendence, since immanence

97. See, for example, The Rep., 490a-b, 611e. 98. Ibid., 508d–509b. Perl gives a detailed presentation of this theme in Plato in “The Living Image.” 99. Aristotle, Meta., 12.1072a25–26. 100. Forest, La structure métaphysique du concret, 301: “Le problème de l’amour, comme celui de la connaissance, est d’une certaine façon le problème de l’autre.’” 101. De Finance, Être et agir, 328. 206

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is always of one thing to another, which requires at the least the transcendence of otherness. Pure immanence, or pure immediacy, is, in fact, static self-sameness and not union at all. I mentioned before that this insight into the problem of knowledge has led certain Thomists in the last century to posit a dynamic theory of knowing, which affirms an intimacy in knowledge, but one that must be striven for, that is, one that requires the subject to go beyond himself to attain it. We can now review this approach in this new context. Rousselot, for example, while celebrating the Kantian insight that all cognition requires the synthetic activity of the subject, which is simultaneously the spontaneous granting of unity to the object and the subject’s grasping of self in self-consciousness,102 attempts to give this insight a more radically objective grounding by locating the act of synthesis within the soul’s constitutive desire for being, which is at the same time a desire for self and a desire for God.103 Rousselot’s approach is particularly helpful because it represents a clear difference from Balthasar’s approach, but in a way that brings out a surprising new insight. There are three basic ways that Rousselot differs from what we have thus far seen in Balthasar, and these three are all necessarily connected. First of all, Rousselot associates the structural or formal aspect of the object’s intelligibility with a sort of opaque and lifeless finitude in itself, such that, taken in itself, the object represents a mere “cold consistency.”104 While Rousselot can speak of the object’s unity only as something lifeless, Balthasar is able to see that the object itself, as a radiant Gestalt, is already, in its formal intelligibility, brimming with life. The object itself already has a certain luminosity. Second, and therefore, if, for Rousselot, the “life” and “lucidity” that are related to infinity are thus to be brought to the act of knowledge in order to make it actually such, they can only come from the subject alone—in this case, from the subject’s striving. We saw above that Balthasar takes the opposite position: the “synthesizing” of the object of knowledge into an intelligible unity is, for Balthasar,

102. Rousselot, “Amour spirituel,” 238. Rousselot assumes the possibility of an intuitive grasp of self in Kant’s thinking, an assumption I showed in the last chapter to be less than self-evident. 103. Ibid., 236. Here, Rousselot affirms that intellection becomes increasingly intuitive the more it coincides with the love of being, and he thus concludes that the striving of the soul to attain being is what actualizes the soul and what illuminates the object. The total actuality of the soul, the total grasping of being, is perfect union with God: “Ce qui éclaire l’objet, c’est l’effort de l’âme qui veut passer en acte. Mais quel est le sens de cet effort, quel appétit l’actionne, sinon l’amour de soi-même et de Dieu?” (238). 104. Ibid., 240. Truth as Gestalt

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an act shared in reciprocal dependence between the subject and the object. Finally, Rousselot grounds the objectivity of knowledge most radically in the subject’s desire. Although this would seem to be in a certain respect primarily subjective, Rousselot would point to the dependence on the other that is “built into” the structure of desire, and then point to the fact that this particular desire is the desire of self only if it is the desire of the infinite Other, God. Rousselot’s understanding as he here expresses it, however, implies precisely the logic of the relationship of formal immediacy between the soul and God that Balthasar criticizes under the name “metaphysics of spirit”: bypassing the mediation of the world, it cannot avoid falling in the end into an abstract formalism. In contrast to Rousselot’s grounding objectivity in desire, Balthasar grounds objectivity in the mutual gift that makes up the Gestalt. What does this mean in comparison with Rousselot’s affirmation? The answer to this question is where we see the surprise. Our first inclination would be to contrast Rousselot’s sense of desire (amour = amor - which seems to be primarily self-seeking, with something more = eros), predominantly selfless, a more generous and generative (spontaneous) love on the part of Balthasar’s epistemology. However, we have seen that Balthasar describes the “subjective” aspect of the mutual self-gift in the Gestalt as the subject’s being “enraptured” by the object. What is more, in his elaboration of the meaning of rapture, Balthasar explicitly con- which he says is more appropriate in this nects it with amor and eros, context than caritas or agape.- 105 Before being spontaneous or generous, this act is receptive or a kind of desire; or better: the two form a single whole in the one act of self-moving in being moved. It thus follows that the most basic difference between Rousselot and Balthasar is the fact that this movement is not merely or even primarily a subjective movement, but rather a movement that occurs reciprocally between the subject and the object; it is, we have said, a mutual gift of self. Now, given that the subject’s gift is simultaneously spontaneous and receptive, or a gift of self as desire, to say that it is mutual means that we have to understand the object’s act of manifesting itself as, in some analogous sense, an act of the object’s desire. Desire is, as it were, an expression of ontological dependence, or, in other terms, the need one thing has for another in order to have being. Manifestation is an act of desire precisely to the extent that it is a necessary means to exist. This affirmation returns us to the dynamic of appearance or communication that we saw in the

105. GL 1:121–22. 208

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first chapter. There, we said that self-communication is an act intrinsic to the reception of being.106 We are now in a position to carry this affirmation further. To say that communication is intrinsic to the reception of being is the crucial metaphysical reason for Balthasar’s assertion that the outward appearance of a thing concerns not just its outward appearance, as if this were some sort of detachable part, but also its inner reality. This can be the case only if the being has, so to speak, something to gain in this action, only if in this act of appearing, its being is at stake: it is, thus, in Balthasar’s thinking, not only Dasein for whom being is an issue. In other words, image will never be able to be anything more than semblance precisely to the extent that the object’s self-manifestation is not an act of ontological desire. But once we thus understand desire ontologically, the whole direction once again shifts. If receptive desire is the act whereby the object “reaches out” to receive the existence that is not identical to its essence, then this “receptive” act is in fact identical to the object’s spontaneous self-transcendence. The gift of existence that the object opens itself to receive is the gift of being given. It is precisely the identity of the two, the receptivity and the spontaneity, that allows us to interpret the object in terms of a Gestalt, a whole that is indeed positive, a “third,” a “more” with respect to its parts. Balthasar describes this convergence thus: “A being has meaning only if it has being-for-itself, but this being-for-itself is meaningful only if it possesses the movement of communication. What is more, being-for-oneself and communication are one and the same thing; together they constitute the one, indivisible illumination of being. But this implies that the meaning of being consists in love, and that, in consequence, knowledge can be explained only by and for love.”107 This same identity leads us to understand that the ontological desire that moves the object beyond itself toward the other, the subject, is its positive, spontaneous gift of self. We might best use the word love in this context, since the term holds both desire and generosity within itself without distinction. In any event, the point is to understand that it is this love alone that accounts for an object’s intelligibility. And because the subject’s spontaneity is not merely correlated to a bare receptivity on the part of the object, but is rather in identically the same act at the same time receptive to what 106. This discovery of self in the creative movement toward the other is an echo of the original self-donation of Being in the constitution of beings, which Paul Gilbert describes thus: “Balthasar interprète profondément l’adage selon lequel il est bon pour l’être de se communiquer. L’être accède à soi en cette communication qu’il effectue de soi dans l’étant. Il accède à son essence en constituant les étants; ceux-ci ont tout le prix de ce qu’il y communique activement.” Gilbert, “L’articulation des transcendantaux,” 622. 107. TL 1:111. Truth as Gestalt

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we have just seen is the object’s spontaneity, then this same act “adds” something to the subject as well. Indeed, it is only because the subject “also” finds himself in the act of transcending himself toward the object in knowledge that the subject in fact transcends himself, and that what is given in the act of knowing to the object is the subject’s patient, receptive being. Knowing, in its deepest sense, is not a mere gratuitous lending of (always distracted) attention, or the “mindless” registration of mindless facts, but an act that requires and fulfills the very being of both the subject and the object. Pierre Rousselot, and the whole tradition that gets refracted through him, is therefore right to understand that goodness and intelligibility have identically the same source, but only half-right to interpret that goodness merely in “negative,” “ascending” terms, as representing an object of the subject’s appetition. In contrast to this interpretation, we must understand that this goodness, though not excluding but in fact necessarily including a reference to the subject, is defined first of all in terms of its own “desirous” and “generous” self-communicability. The objectivity of knowledge has its roots, therefore, not in the subject’s desire but in the object’s desirability, or, better yet, in both the object’s and the subject’s desire and desirability, held together in the Gestalt that comprehends both at once. The complexity of the act of the object’s being-intelligible, precisely in its simplicity, makes the whole inner life of the event of knowledge a rich and multifaceted world. It opens up far more dimensions—in many different directions—than we can attend to at this point, so I will try to focus only on one of its deepest aspects. Like the oracles’ utterances in Greek tragedy which are affirmed and fulfilled, but with a “higher” meaning that completely overturns expectations and thereby gives rise to a new order, Balthasar’s reinterpretation of the Platonic identification of goodness and intelligibility brings about a fundamentally new sense of truth.108 Truth

108. In fact, what is at issue here is not only the Platonic approach, which may seem like a narrow stream in the vast tradition of philosophy amidst the variety of approaches available today. Rather, the comparison is intended much more generally. We can appreciate the scope of this point when we see that “intentionality” of the intellect, both as scholastic philosophy and modern phenomenology understand it, is not unrelated to the Platonic approach. The term carries implicitly the notion of a “striving” (being in tension toward), which was perhaps felt more explicitly in scholasticism than in phenomenology. But, in any event, the affinity of the approaches is most clearly - is the idenseen in the fact that the “end” of intentionality, just like that of Platonic eros, tity of the intellect with its object. Heidegger alludes to the same dynamic, which he finds contained in the modern use of the more general term repraesentatio: “representation . . . is defined as the perceptive self-arrogation (to the self as ego) of what appears.” Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 82. 210

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is the adequatio intellectus et rei, the joining of the mind and the thing known. The identification of goodness and intelligibility brings out particularly clearly the “unitive” dimension of this act, the fact that in actual knowledge, the mind becomes its objects: “connaître, c’est devenir un autre.”109 From the perspective that would understand goodness primarily in terms of appetibility, it would follow that the object is genuinely understood only in the moment in which it is desired.110 There is much truth to this suggestion, and Rousselot in particular has said many profound things in this regard. But if the object itself, and its very goodness, is objectively more than its appetibility—if it is good in a positive sense, in the sense of being the introduction of something more, the irruption of something new, and the “event” of something that cannot be accounted for in terms of the subject’s capacities, intentions, or needs—then the most basic knowledge of the object is not in the first place an assimilation of the object to the subject, but the subject’s (spontaneous/receptive) identifying himself with the object. The object, from this perspective, is most genuinely understood not merely when the subject desires it, but also and more fundamentally when the subject enters into the object and desires along with it. This is the case because the subject’s identity with its object in knowing does not eliminate the object in its otherness. Rather, there is a real identity, but it remains reciprocal, and thus the difference is not removed. The only way to understand this mysterious occurrence is to see it as an event in which the subject, having in some way “become” the object as Aquinas (and the Neoplatonic tradition) says, stands in the object’s place, but primarily as a gift to the object, that is, in the first place as a “promotion” of the object, a raising up of the object. In other words, the subject enters into the object in order to help bring the object to be what it otherwise could not be merely on its own. Just as the mother smiles upon the child, showers upon him the gift of her being and being for him, so that the child might be welcomed into a free space and that he might then learn to smile himself, and so return freedom for freedom, and just as the light of being in its difference can cross the gap between self and other in order to make possible the self-possessed

109. Sertillanges, St. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: 1910), vol. 2, 105, cited in Pieper, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute, 36. See also ibid., 29–35. Compare Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles [= SCG], 2, 59: “Intellectus in actu et intellectum in actu sunt unum”; and Quaestiones quodlibetales, ed. Raymond M. Spiazzi, 8th ed. (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1949), 7, 2: “Intellectus secundum actum est omnino, id est perfecte, res intellecta.” 110. We could compare this to Husserl’s contrasting authentic intentionality (filled intuition) with the knowledge of “sedimented” objects; or with Aristotle’s notion of “actual” knowledge of a “this” in contrast to universal knowledge, which is in a certain sense merely “potential.” Truth as Gestalt

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light of consciousness, so too the spontaneity of the subject’s act of knowing has the form of liberating the object to be what it really is. The mysterious exchange that happens at the heart of knowledge—and it is a “substitution” or an “exchange” inasmuch as it is truly a mutual self-gift—is a mystery of life-giving substitution.111 We must attend to all parts of the assertion that knowledge is a life-giving exchange: “life,” because it involves in every respect the increase of “organic” tensions that result from things being irreducibly different and yet intrinsically related; “giving” because it occurs in the multifaceted event of spontaneous receptivity encountering receptive spontaneity; and “exchange” because exchange is the only way to avoid both a reductive unity and a dualistic difference. Again, what might seem at first an exaggeration follows in fact rigorously from the matter itself. A denial of this exchange would require at some point eliminating the identity between object and subject, in which case there is no knowledge, or eliminating the difference, in which case the object ceases to be an object and becomes instead an extension of the subject. Or else it requires the claim that it is not the very being of the object that is at stake in knowledge; and then we have to ask: What else could it be? Or else the claim that it is not the very being of the subject involved in knowledge; again, we have to ask: Is it a “part” of the subject that knows? We wish to say, in general, that “something actually happens” in the event of knowledge; and if something really happens, it means that “things” cannot be the same afterward as they were beforehand. And yet, at the same time, knowledge ceases to be knowledge, it becomes the ghostly “opinion,” to use Plato’s terminology, the moment it is detached from an “objective” ground, the moment it ceases to be of the object “as it really and truly is.” Jacques Maritain, following this line of thinking, insists that the foundational principle in any epistemology that would want to call itself “realistic” has to be that if the object is at all changed in the act of knowing, then what is known is no longer the object.112 It seems the only way out of this dilemma is to see knowledge as an ontological exchange; to insist that the reason knowledge is “objective” even in its movement and in its requiring the total and even imaginative involvement of the subject is not because it changes so little but because it changes so

111. Ferdinand Ulrich elaborates the notion of knowledge as liberating substitution at great length and great depth in a discussion of the difference between kennen and erkennen, in “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe: Ein Fragment,” pt. I, in Leben in der Einheit, 147–99. 112. Jacques Maritain, Distinguish to Unite, or: The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald Phelan, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 86–87. 212

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much in knowledge, because it becomes what it is only through the knowing. The objectivity of the object is thus not “pitted” against the subjectivity of the subject, but is as it were already inclusive of that subjectivity. But this is not possible unless subjectivity is likewise always already object centered, as we have seen, and this means likewise that it is not a matter of indifference to the subject whether it is with the object (or in the object, or even simply is the object) but is a matter of “ontological concern.” Augustine once said: “I know that I can only know if I am alive, and I know this all the more certainly in that I become more alive in knowing.”113 We can affirm the objectivity of knowing and still see it as a genuine and novel event only if we see that knowledge is a vital exchange. Balthasar elaborates an aspect of this creative aspect of knowledge in TL 1, where he describes the knower’s gaze upon the object as simultaneously objective and idealizing. Insofar as being is understood as love, that is, as interiority and self-disclosure, the truth of the object cannot simply be equated with the object grasped in itself apart from its relation to a subject, whether this be taken in the sense of a thing’s facticity or in the sense of an abstract essence. Rather, truth must be seen as the object brought to itself through the activity of the subject. The object “knows or guesses” that it possesses possibilities that lie beyond what it presently is, but also that it is powerless to bring these possibilities to fruition on its own. “In order to develop [these possibilities],” Balthasar explains, “it needs someone who believes in them—no, who sees them as already existing in their state of hiddenness, objectively, yet visible only to one who holds that they can be realized, to one, in other words, who believes and loves.”114 The object, thus, exists within a tension between the actual and the ideal, between what it is and what it is meant to be. This tension is heightened by the fact that the ideal is not an external image lying outside of the object’s reality, and, in this sense, an artificial image to which the object is asked to conform, but is rather more real than the object’s actual existence inasmuch as the object cannot be what it is unless it meets this ideal. However, if the ideal image is not (yet) what exists, nor is it simply external to what exists, then where can it in fact be? Balthasar’s answer to this question is subtle but crucial: he says both that “the actual place of these ideal images is the personal love of another being,”115 and also that “the ideal picture [of a thing known] . . . is as much subjective as it is objective.”116 113. 114. 115. 116.

Cited in GL 2:107. TL 1:114. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 115. Truth as Gestalt

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Approached from the perspective of the intellect abstracted from the will, and thus from love, the problem of locating the ideal image would be all but insoluble, since, beginning thus apart from the subject-object unity, we could understand the activity of the subject only as a mere addition to the object, and vice versa. If we begin, by contrast, with the unity of subject and object, we are able to affirm the subjectivity and objectivity of the ideal image simultaneously. “The lover,” Balthasar continues, “will always consider the image he sees to be something objective.”117 He sees the object’s possibilities as lying within the object itself and knows that he has not fabricated them; the lover will never see the realization of the ideal as the fruit of his own labor but as that of the object’s. Likewise, the object knows that it receives the strength to realize its being only from the subject’s confidence; if the object has come to be what it is, it owes everything to the subject. The “place” of this realization is the being of the subject as freedom, but it is only freedom because it has put itself wholly at the service of the object, that is, because it is objective. Thus, this act of knowledge is creative because it is objective, and it is objective because it is creative. If at this point we recall that the subject likewise comes to be what he is only through the act of knowing,118 then we see we have once again arrived at a reciprocal causality and a mutual dependence. The object can be what it is only through the subject, and the subject can be what he is (in a different sense) only through the object. Rather than interpreting this mutuality as an oscillating dialectic, we can of course refer once again to the single gift of self, the single Gestalt that is formed out of these two irreducible parts. Acknowledging the Gestalt character of this union has further implications. We have said that a Gestalt has a center distinct from both of its parts, and that this is a transcendent “third.” We have also said that this third is itself always polar; in other words, this center of unity must itself somehow be realized in a concrete manifestation. This latter point will be the focus of the next section. Here, we must see the significance of the transcendence of the Gestalt, or its distinction from its parts. If truth, that which represents the union of the subject and object, is distinct from both, that is, if it is its own distinct Gestalt, then it is precisely

117. Ibid. 118. I merely assert this principle, since there has been enough said on related points to give it sense, and in any event few people would take issue with it. No one has given a more profound explanation of this principle than Rousselot in his book The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, trans. James O’Mahony (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), particularly the first part. 214

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this that allows the subject and object to be strictly identical with each other, and yet is also at the same time what allows them to remain not only different from one another but in a genuine sense infinitely distinct from each other, to the extent that the difference is irreducible. It is not compromised by the identity, or even in any sense approximated through identity, but it makes identity possible. Here we reach the center axis of the structure of truth in Balthasar’s understanding, that about which the rest turns. Most approaches to the problem of truth see it as a relationship between two things or aspects, or principles, and they attempt to negotiate the problem accordingly. But as we have continually seen, a duality, a relation between merely two principles, will always alternate between a dualism and a monism, unless some “third” arises in which the two distinct principles can be wholly united. If we begin with the subject’s capacities or inner experiences, and try to go from there to the object, we will inevitably make the object a function of the subject, which is what Balthasar criticizes in The Truth of the World as “critical philosophy.” If we begin merely with the object and then only incidentally relate the subject in his subjectivity, we will inevitably make all subjective contribution an intrusion on the object’s identity. We will fall into what Balthasar criticizes as “naive realism,” which trivializes and is even forced to deny the “constituting” function of subjectivity or to deny any sense that the subject is at all necessary to the coming to be of knowledge, or contributes anything at all to it.119 If we begin with the whole, we have both in their integrity. The Gestalt is a “third” that stands between the subject and object, as a single reality that accounts for both their unity and their difference. It thus establishes a distance between them. But, far from obstructing their union, it is just what makes union possible. Nietzsche can help to illuminate what is at stake in this sense of Gestalt. Some of Nietzsche’s most profound texts lament the loss of what he calls the “pathos of distance,” which he sees as a cultural problem founded in an epistemological problem. He points to the “foreshortening” of the reality that is known and of the soul that knows, which results from the loss of the pathos of distance.120 In fact, his attack on truth is motivated in part by his desire to preserve against this loss, since, with admittedly more

119. In TL 1:65–67, Balthasar explains his criticism of both critical philosophy and naive realism. It is interesting to note that these are not two different problems but two sides of the same problem, namely, the failure to see that subject and object are intrinsically, but nonreductively, related to each other from the beginning. 120. See Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 619. Truth as Gestalt

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than a little support from the conventional interpretation of traditional epistemologies, he associates truth with the reduction of the object to the subject.121 However, what Nietzsche does not sufficiently account for is that the irrationality arising from the destruction of truth also entails the loss of a pathos of distance: the Gestalt distinguishes subject and object by mediating (between) them, where “mediation” means nonimmediacy but at the same time communication, so the more perfect the mediation is, the more completely “in” each other the two principles that are mediated become. The Gestalt, as it were, creates space between the subject and the object so that they have room to communicate with each other, even as the intimacy in a sense gives rise to further respect (distance). Two people must stand apart from each other in order to be able (comfortably) to exchange a bow, in order, that is, to communicate a greeting as a real gift. The most fundamental principle for Przywara in his development of the idea of the analogia entis is the notion he draws from Augustine, namely, the simultaneity of a fearful love and a loving fear;122 we can see immediately how the notion of Gestalt is fundamental to this simultaneity. In short, on the basis of the notion of Gestalt, we can see that it is precisely the distance within truth that allows both the subject and the object fully to extend themselves in order that each can be what it integrally is, there where truth happens, without needing to be compromised, or diminished in order to fit the intelligible and intellecting mold. This distance within the unity of truth has implications both for the subject and the object. First, the difference within the Gestalt is what allows us to see the object’s truth as a movement and not just a “dead” fact that is either merely about the object or is the object itself. Movement requires space, and if movement is the only thing that allows us to grasp being in its manifestation without reducing it to that manifestation, then the space is necessary for us to see any object as a whole. It is necessary 121. See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 496, where he quotes Balzac’s phrase “comprendre, c’est égaler,” translated freely: “to understand is to flatten.” See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), sec. 192, 104–5, and especially The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), sec. 355, 300–302, where he discusses the reduction of the world to the (harmless) idea: “Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers, have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge?” 122. See the outstanding essay by Erich Przywara, “St. Augustine and the Modern World,” 251–86, esp. 277–81. Przywara uses this principle, which he sees as originating in Augustine and in a sense finding its fulfillment in Pascal and in particular Newman, to judge modern philosophy. 216

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for seeing the object as a whole because it is only within such a differencein-unity that the full fourfold difference is permitted to open up, with all of the implications it entails for each of the relations that constituted it: the relation between the object as a being and Being in general; between the object and the knower; and between the whole and God, as well as all of the various interrelations of these relations. Moreover, once we have included, by virtue of the difference opened up within the Gestalt, the movement of the act of manifestation as intrinsic to the meaning or the truth of an object, rather than being incidental to it, or something that occurs next to what the thing really is, then we have opened up the possibility of seeing the action of the object as intrinsic to its truth. Here, I must refer again to chapter 1, where we saw action as the way created beings participate in their idea. The spontaneity of a thing in its manifestation, which is its desire for being, is in fact part of the more obvious spontaneity of the being’s realizing itself concretely (as an entelecheia) in action. This action is not simply the “putting into play” of a being’s meaning, but an essential way in which a being receives its idea. The whole history in which a being strives—and fails, and succeeds—to be what it really is, is patiently and comprehensively embraced within its truth, as an indispensable part thereof. And the being has room for the spontaneity in which it unfolds itself only in truth as a mystery of exchange, a liberating unity within difference. At the same time, in relation to the subject, truth as Gestalt is what prevents us from reducing the transcendental unity of apperception to an abstract “point” of identity, which would not know how to integrate itself within the whole. The unity of apperception, we have seen, is not an abstract point but rather itself a concrete whole. As a whole—like any whole—it cannot be such without movement. We saw in the last chapter that this unity cannot become even a formal unity without participating in even more comprehensive wholes, and we saw earlier in this chapter that it is, specifically, related to the imaginative conversio ad phantasmata. Like any being, the subject can be a whole only in its action, only when it, so to speak, has a goal greater than itself to strive for. The unity of apperception is as it were constituted in this striving; it is the particular form this truth—that ontological unity is acquired only through action—takes in relation to the intellect. We therefore open up in principle the whole history of the subject as involved in its capacity to grasp an object in a Gestalt, a history the decisive contours of which we will leave for the next chapter. Thus, Gestalt as mediated immediacy, insofar as it maintains a distance between its parts, makes the striving intrinsic to the possession of the other, the being-grasped intrinsic to the grasping. It is what allows a detachment Truth as Gestalt

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in the passion, the freedom that Kant affirmed as disinterestedness or “purposiveness without a purpose” not as a “noncommittal” floating in the air, but as a necessary dimension of a true having, a true intercourse with the object. What Balthasar says about a great work of art in fact applies to any instance of a genuine Gestalt: “The more a great work of art is known and grasped, the more concretely are we dazzled by its ‘ungraspable’ genius. We never outgrow something which we acknowledge to stand above us by its very nature.”123 In other words, the “infinity” of striving—which is essential for the wholeness of the knower and which is therefore essential for the actuality of the unity of apperception—is not opposed to any particular object understood as merely finite, which would force the striving to take the form of a need to get beyond its objects and the form of impatience to be done with them. Rather, it is already a response to the inner infinity of the object itself, and so it expresses itself in just the opposite sense as a desire to remain with the object and, indeed, to “serve” it in some respect. In The Truth of the World, Balthasar discusses the relationship between seeking and finding,124 and later he raises the relationship between the desire to see and the willingness to let things remain veiled.125 The response in both cases is that the relationship becomes problematic only when we set the two aspects in opposition to each other, and that we are saved from doing so if we see these apparently opposed aspects as sharing in and therefore “co-constituting” a single whole. Thus, with regard to the first, Balthasar concludes: “the dilemma that Lessing posed between definitive finding and eternal seeking is resolved in a necessary unity of both aspects of knowledge in one and the same act of grasping truth.”126 In his book on Aquinas’s epistemology, Rousselot, in reference to a text from Aquinas, identifies intellection with rest and contrasts it with the appetitive power, which is a motion, because intellection relates to an immanent object and the appetitive power to one that remains external. The text is as follows: “The operation of the apprehensive power is completed in the very fact that the thing apprehended is in the one that apprehends: while the operation of the appetitive power is completed in the fact that he who desires is borne towards the thing desirable. Therefore the operation of the apprehensive power is likened to rest: whereas the operation of the appetitive power is rather likened to movement.”127

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 218

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GL 1:186. TL 1:200–202. Ibid., 262–64. Ibid., 202. Aquinas, ST, 1:81, ad 1. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Rousselot admits that, at least in principle, the act of knowing would not ultimately come to a rest if the object known remained somehow greater than the knower.128 But that is precisely the point: once we understand knowledge in terms of a transcendent Gestalt, which remains essentially and forever irreducible to the knower alone, then the object, indeed, in principle any object at all, will always remain in some respect “greater” than the subject. This is why the will, and the appetitive power, is always necessarily included in knowing; it is why the object always remains interesting (“We never outgrow something which we acknowledge to stand above us by its very nature”);129 and it is why the object, even in being known— in fact because it is known, once we understand knowledge as a life-giving exchange—will never cease to be a mystery to the one who has eyes to see, even an object so insignificant as a fly.130 Similarly, just as truth (as “unhiddenness”) and mystery (as “hiddenness” or Veborgenheit) are essential aspects of the same phenomenon, namely, the Gestalt, the will to see and the will to keep veiled are in fact, considered profoundly, one and the same will. In this respect, the phenomenon does not need to be saved by obscuring an aspect of reality from vision or by blurring lines (and thus making reality in some sense irrational), but by embracing the full paradox of the Gestalt in learning to see it properly. This means, Balthasar insists, that desire for possession is unproblematic in itself. It does not even become problematic when it becomes a desire for possession of the whole without remainder. Rather, whether intellectual desire becomes problematic depends on the manner of desiring, and not on its scope.131 Desire is proper when it desires the whole as it gives itself, not in the first place merely as desire itself wants to take it, which means that proper desire is the desire to possess in being possessed, within

128. See Rousselot, Intellectualism of St. Thomas, 56–60. He points to God as an example. However, rather than concede this possibility—which would have caused a revolution in his epistemology—Rousselot argues that it is not so when the comprehending whole wills for the knower to be happy, i.e., at rest: “hence, the perfection desired by God for man is identically man’s beatitude” (59). What he did concede, nevertheless (in n. 84), is that in the transitory state on earth, the will retains a certain priority. 129. GL 1:186. 130. “Our knowledge is so weak, no philosopher will ever be able exhaustively to grasp the nature of a single fly.” Aquinas, In symbolum apostolorum, 1, in Opuscula theologica, 2 vols., ed. Raymond A. Verardo and Raymond M. Piazzi (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1954). But we have come to see, when knowledge is understood in terms of Gestalt as a life-giving exchange, this inexhaustible mystery is not due to the weakness of knowledge. Rather, it is the glory of knowledge; it is knowledge at its best. 131. TL 1:263. Truth as Gestalt

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the Gestalt. There is, in this respect, a certain ascesis that is not contrary to desire but precisely an essential part of it. As we have seen many times, desire, once we root it deeply enough, is in fact the same thing as the gift of self. This question of seeing or letting remained veiled once again provides a point of comparison between Balthasar and Aquinas. For Aquinas, in relations in the natural order, the highest mode of relating is a complete possession, which is best attained in knowledge inasmuch as no materiality remains to mediate: “The noblest way of possessing or having a thing is to possess it in a non-material manner, yet formally, which is the definition of knowledge.”132 For Balthasar, by contrast, the noblest way of possessing another is precisely through the mediation of a “third” (the Gestalt), which is what allows there to be no difference ultimately between veiling (mediation/mystery) and unveiling (immediacy/truth).133 Moreover, as we will see in the next section, this relation is in fact perfected when the mediation is material. Now, though Gestalt is the mediation of immediacy, it is also the mediation of immediacy; we will have missed the paradox to the extent that we fail to see that the difference inherent in the Gestalt is just what brings the subject and object together. There is no union without immediate union; there is no knowledge that does not involve at some point strict, numerical identity. This fact has been one of the “trickiest” elements in the problem of epistemology, insofar as this condition of possibility seems necessarily reductive. The coming together of things, precisely to the extent that it is immediate, that is, nonmediated, without a distinct middle, would seem necessarily by definition to preclude their remaining apart. The question from this one-sided perspective becomes merely where this identity subsists: Are the subject and object identical in consciousness, or in the mere objective fact, or in the “nihilating” (nichten) of Being? A reduction to pure immediacy wants to affirm both an objective and a subjective identity, and it can do so only dialectically. The

132. Aquinas, Super librum de causis expositio, ed. M. R. Cathala and Raymond M. Spiazzi (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1950), 1, 18. 133. Balthasar expresses this most noble way of relating in an extraordinary and dramatic manner in an aphorism describing relation to God: “Amor and Psyche. A young woman falls in love with an unknown man and for years does not cease longing for him. One dark night he comes and unites himself to her. ‘May I look upon you?’ ‘Our son will be the mirror in which you will see me.’ And what if this invisible nocturnal lover should be a god—should be God himself?” (GW, 65). The essence of the present chapter is to see that what he says there about relation to God can be said analogously about relation to all things in truth. 220

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result is Hegel’s notion of the final concrete identity of identity and difference, which is the reduction of all things (albeit in their difference) to the Absolute Subject. The “abiding” difference that Hegel affirms is the final illusion: it is not a real but rather a conceptual difference, because the difference is embraced wholly within the identity, in such a way that it cannot make a reciprocal claim on that identity; and thus the object cannot make a reciprocal claim on the (absolute) subject. Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt allows us to embrace the necessity of identity but with a more comprehensive context that includes the object and subject in their reciprocal difference—not only the difference of the subject from the object but also the difference of the object from the subject—which is the only genuine difference. (If A is different from B without B also being different from A, then B will reduce exhaustively back to A; this is the essential problem of the dialectic.) For Balthasar, the subject and object are perfectly identical in the singularity of the Gestalt, which is, itself, neither the subject nor the object. It is some third, separately existing thing. The separate existence, the distinct substantial unity, of the Gestalt is the crucial step; I will explain what this means in the next section. But, for the moment assuming this completed whole, we can see that it is what frees the subject and object from each other so that they may perfectly coincide. The subject and object can thus be identical with each other, not in the subject alone, nor in the object alone, but in the Gestalt. Thus, it is not in the subject or object that the circle of their union closes, but in that which is greater than they. The Gestalt, in this respect, fulfills the criteria of perfect, numerical identity, to the extent that it actualizes the relation between the two within its own substantial unity, and yet at the same time it prevents this perfect identity from falling exhaustively into the grasp of either the subject or object as wholly circumscribed by the one or the other. Each, then, while working in conjunction with the other to give rise to the immediate identity in both form and content, enjoys the fruit of that work, shares in the identity, not by mere possession but by participation, which we have seen means just the spontaneous/receptive striving in action we spoke about above. The paradox thus gets multiplied: if the Gestalt is a kind of intersection of the finite and the infinite, and a whole that is immanent to its parts precisely because it transcends them, then we are once again kept from merely juxtaposing externally related aspects. It is not the case that the “infinity” of the Gestalt is the immediacy between parts, while the finitude is the mediation. Instead, the infinity is the “place” where the subject and object, no longer distinguished from each other Truth as Gestalt

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(in-finite, un-defined = not set apart or distinguished), are joined through the mediation of the finitude or determinateness that separates them, and, at the very same time, the infinity is the transcendence, the “evermore” that keeps each of them permanently different from each other even within the immediacy of the “finite” union in vision. Balthasar’s conclusion following this logic reveals just how far he ultimately stands from Hegel’s dialectic, which is summed up in the identity of identity and difference: the final unity, for Balthasar, is a union of the self and the other in the self in union with the union of the self and the other in the other.134 And this unity of the two unities is the unity of the transcendent third. In other words, this unity represents precisely the unity of the Gestalt. Before we turn in the next section to see what the Gestalt is, concretely speaking, there are two further observations to make. The first concerns the possibility of the Gestalt, such as we have described it in the encounter between the subject and object. Up until this point, we have merely taken the possibility for granted. But we have to ask, what justifies the unity of the Gestalt? As we have already seen, if we begin with separate parts, we can never escape either a dualism or a monism. Yet, in the case of truth, which is the encounter between a subject and object, we seem to want to say that the Gestalt emerges from this encounter and is therefore a posteriori. But unity cannot be “made” unless it is already given beforehand. So, where is this unity? As we saw in chapter 2, the possibility of this unity in difference of beings that communicate with each other is given only in the “medium” in which they are always already united, in the act of being. Thus, if we recall what we said about a priori–a posteriori at the end of the last chapter, we can see that even if the encounter is an event, and therefore something that happens in some respect a posteriori, this does not preclude it from being a genuinely ontological event, in which case, the (a priori) presuppositions lying beyond the distinction between “before” and “after,” can be said to “arrive” precisely in their encounter. At the same time, being, as esse, is not related to the particularity of the encounter merely as the enabling horizon or an abstract, “transcendental” condition of possibility. Created esse, we

134. Such is how Balthasar describes the unity of God and the world at the end of the section on metaphysics in the Epilog: “Dies wird dann Grund und Ziel dieses göttlichen Welt-Unternehmens klarlegen: in seiner Freiheit zu erweisen, daß, wie er in sich selbst mit den Andern eins sein kann, er es ebenso vermag, außer sich selbst mit den Andern eins zu werden.” E, 66. The point is that this divine unity is the ground, and thus analogously the shape, for all created unity. 222

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recall, is nonsubsistent and thus in some reciprocal sense dependent on precisely that which it makes possible. The “possibility” for the union of truth that it offers is thus not a “general” possibility floating in (logical?) space (which always means merely “in thought”); it is an actualized possibility, a possibility that “shows” itself in its concrete realization.135 We could thus call the Gestalt the concrete manifestation of the unity of being; it is, one could say, a direct expression of being as ens communis, that is, not the being that belongs to this or that essence, but the being in which we all participate. In this respect, the Gestalt, inasmuch as it is the unity of irreducibly diverse beings, becomes a privileged place where the ontological dimension of truth comes into view. Integrating a point made previously about the room Gestalt gives to striving, Balthasar sums up the relation between Gestalt and being thus: “Only the apprehension of an expressive form (einer Ausdrucksgestalt) in the thing can give it that depth-dimension between its ground and its manifestation which, as the real locus of beauty, now also opens up the ontological locus of the truth of being, and frees the striver, allowing him to achieve the spiritual distance that makes a beauty rich in form desirable in its being-in-itself (and not only in its being-for-me), and only thus worth striving after.”136 In the beautiful Gestalt, then, Balthasar connects the striving (which is simultaneously a gift of self) with the detachment related to the second distinction in the fourfold difference, namely, the contemplative distance that is able to see the sovereignty of Being over its particular instances. The fact that this detachment is the same as the striving means that there is no opposition between the contemplative and active life, but they are both one in the apprehension of the Gestalt as an ontological event. We can thus characterize the Gestalt as the coming to light of a transcendent unity, according to the diagram that shows the irreducible difference in unity of the whole:

135. In his critique of truth as adequatio, as the “coordinating” of a subject and object (see Zur Seinsfrage, 28, and “On the Essence of Truth”), Heidegger neglects the fact that the truth of Being (“die Wahrheit des Seyns”) has a certain dependence on the “truth of correctness.” Although there is a gradual recognition in Heidegger of a “dependence” of Being on Dasein, he does not see that man himself has a reciprocal dependence not only on Being but on concrete beings, and so Being itself is dependent on man’s dependence on beings. See Balthasar’s allusion to this problem in Heidegger, GL 5:619, 621. 136. GL 1:152. Truth as Gestalt

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Figure 3.

Finally, one last word about judgment in light of this figure. The subject’s free act of grasping the object in its articulate complexity, which is necessary for the completion of truth, is as we saw not an arbitrary gesture occurring in a neutral vacuum; it is an act reciprocally dependent on the subject’s being laid claim to in the first act of perception. This whole is thus a grasping in being grasped, which is the crystallization of a determinate whole in a light that both illuminates and transcends it. This light is the light of the Gestalt, but it is also the light of being, and ultimately it is the divine light itself. The mutual dependence of the various aspects opens up once again to the complex unity of the whole within God himself. But this means that the integrity of the act of judgment, precisely because it occurs only within the first act of the object’s claiming the subject, can be had only within this greater whole. It follows that judgment itself is not ultimate but that it itself is judged. One cannot judge without being judged: “Of course, it belongs to the essence of human intelligence to pronounce a judgment [richten] over things, as he judges [urteilend] this truth (as intellectus dividens et componens); and he should carry this judgment out in transmission of God’s judging power. But he must bear in mind that this entire judgment is provisional and thus includes within its inner form the handing over of judgment to God.”137 It is crucial to see that this handing over of judgment is not something that happens “after” judgment, but is the “inner form” of judgment as Balthasar says. We could say, in fact, that the most telling sign that the depth and breadth of the full phenomenon of truth is grasped is a sense of being judged that is opened up from within the structure of judgment. 137. TL 1:271. See also CathPhil, 164, where Balthasar makes precisely the same point. 224

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The connection between judgment and being judged passes through action, inasmuch as it is the recognition of the “remaining greater” of the object within the act of grasping it. To the extent that action is involved in knowing, which means to the extent that knowledge is not an abstract capacity assimilating an abstract object, but a real whole going out to meet a real whole, the act of knowing will be judged, and this being-judged will be intrinsic to its completion as an act of knowing. For, genuine knowing must be seen as necessarily involved in action, and genuine action, since it is a matter of truth, always entails judgment. Action without being judged is action without decision and, moreover, without a decision that is compelled precisely through the participation in an order that both transcends and requires the one who is to decide. To put it another way, this sense of being judged in judging represents such an effective sign of an adequate epistemology because it occurs only when one grasps that the completion of the free act of judgment does not end merely in the judging self, but in a whole that embraces even the judger, and in this respect embraces his own measure with one that is more ultimate. The ultimate whole, and thus the ultimate judge, is the divine truth itself, but this judgment is mediated through the relative comprehending wholes: Most immediately, the judger is judged by the object he judges precisely for the same reason that his grasping of the object is at once a being-grasped by it, namely, because it transcends him. Then, intrinsic to the personal and free act of judging is a being-judged by the greater community and in a sense a being-judged already by the light of being. To the extent that a sense of this being-judged is lacking, we are dealing with a reductionist understanding of truth. As soon as we raise this standard as a measure for the comprehensiveness of the grasp of truth, we see that one of the thinkers that most clearly anticipated this insight is Plato. The myths of judgment that arise in his dialogues—for example, in the Phaedrus,138 and perhaps even more directly in the Republic139—are not didactic stories pegged onto otherwise philosophical discussions. Such a suggestion not only insults Plato’s artistry, but it forgets that the Good and the True have a certain identity for Plato and that the very grasping of the reality of a thing has an inescapably “moral” dimension. The recovery of a nonreductionist sense of truth, a notion of truth that is genuinely ontological and gets us beyond the “identitarian” sense of truth described in the introduction, requires a refusal to separate the structures of epistemology from an engagement with, and a

138. Plato, Phaedrus, 248b–249c. 139. Plato, Rep., X, 614b–621d. Truth as Gestalt

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compelling being engaged by, the meaning of the whole. Such a recovery, moreover, is a return to the structure of truth as drama, insofar as it means the engagement of the whole knower, body and soul, with and for the whole, which is in the end brought under a final judgment.140

Truth as Fruitfulness Intellectual knowledge conceives existence, but the fruit of its conception is not the representation of some essence; it is an act which answers an act. —Etienne Gilson Love without knowledge is as darkness to the wise soul. Knowledge without its fruition she likens to the pains of hell. —Mechthild of Magdeburg

We return to the question, Where does truth find its completion? Where is its terminus ad quem? The perspective that would wish to assert that truth reaches its final destination, as it were, in judgment must interpret judgment as the free act in which the subject takes the object (formally) to itself. This assertion already gets thwarted the moment we see that judgment itself has a certain dependence on the object’s appearance. If we follow the logic of this dependence with consistency, we see that it entails a mutual dependence of subject and object in knowledge, a mutual dependence that can occur only within a mutually comprehending whole. This whole, the Gestalt, as we will see, possesses its own objectivity as a distinct “third.” The point of this final section will be to show that the most adequate way to understand this Gestalt is as the fruit of the union between subject and object. I will then address the paradigmatic form of this Gestalt, namely, language, and see how this paradigm implies more generally an organic

140. Balthasar discusses the essential connection between drama and judgment in TD 1:451–65 (incidentally, Quash’s essay on drama in Balthasar makes no mention of judgment). Remarkably, Plato himself already makes this connection. In the myth of judgment in the Republic, Plato relates the story of Er—who is one of the only humans who descended to the dead and returned, and so is the only person who has witnessed the judgment of the whole from the divine perspective—in phrases deliberately chosen to evoke the image of a play: “Er said that the way in which the souls choose their lives was a sight worth seeing, since it was pitiful, funny, and surprising to watch.” Republic, X, 620a. The idea of the “world stage” metaphor, i.e., the image of human life as a drama played out before the gods, is one of the foundation stones of Balthasar’s theodramatic theory: see TD 1:135–257. I will discuss aspects of this in the next chapter. 226

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relation between “ideality” and “reality,” such that the figures of logic require concrete embodiment, while the structures of space and time, far from being “inert” preconditions for activity, are already active participations in ideality. Then, I will show how the understanding of language as Gestalt opens up an analogy to other forms of productive work, culture, and ultimately community. The relation of language to Gestalt as the transcendent fruit of union explains both the strange autonomy of language as not opposed to but rather the indispensable precondition for “immediate” relation to reality, to being. Moreover, once we see that the “physical” objectivity of language is no obstacle to the mind’s knowledge of the world but in fact the place wherein knowledge, and even truth, occurs, we are freed, as it were, to see all formations of concrete wholes (any aspect of work or culture, and indeed any “building” of community) as analogous ways of knowing. Truth thus achieves a new objectivity, an objectivity related to spherically curved space rather than geometric (abstract) lines; truth in short becomes three-, and even four-dimensional. These themes, of course, have a richness that outreaches by far the space we can allot to them in this context, and so we will have to content ourselves merely with indicating a few general principles. These general principles, in fact, open up of their own accord when we realize, with Balthasar, that “fruitfulness is . . . not only the law of organic life, but . . . also the law of spiritual/intellectual [geistigen] life.”141 The notion of Gestalt as fruitfulness, then, brings to light the unity between objectiv- and praxis; it ity and subjectivity, immediacy and mediation, and theoria reveals that the best place to grasp the meaning of truth and the life of the mind is where it is organically imaged in natural fruitfulness: “there, where everything concerning the spiritual/intellectual relation between an I and a Thou can find fulfillment only in an objective-third (as Hegel constantly insisted), or where true paideia (according to Plato) is a ‘begetting in the beautiful’ and therefore the production of a fruit.”142

Fruit as Reality (Res) In order to understand Gestalt as a fruit, we must first see why it has to be not only concrete but literally physical, why it has to have its own “separate”

141. TL 2:57: “Fruchtbarkeit ist . . . nicht nur das Gesetz des Organischen, sondern . . . auch des geistigen Lebens.” 142. Ibid.: “dort, wo alles geisthafte Ich-Du sich nur in einem Objektiv-Dritten erfüllen kann (was Hegel immerfort betont), oder wo echte Paideia (nach Platon) ein ‘Zeugen im Schönen’ und damit die Erzeugung einer Frucht ist.” Truth as Gestalt

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existence. First, I refer to what was said at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that a Gestalt must be concrete precisely to the extent that it is a real whole, and that in order to be concrete, a Gestalt must “take up” time and space and be accessible to the senses. This point can be specified further in the present context. In order for there to be truth at all, in order for a subject to be united to an object without reducing the object to himself or himself to the object, there must be a distinct “third” mediating between them in which they are joined. But they can truly be joined only where they are numerically one. It follows that that in which they are joined must be itself numerically one. According to Aristotle, “the most distinctive mark of substance appears to be that, while remaining one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary qualities.”143 The mediating third, as that which “admits” both the subject and the object, must therefore be a kind of substance. To the extent that it does not itself form a new “subject” or “substance” in which the union between the subject and object inheres, it will not be able to avoid being reduced to an extension of the subject alone or object alone, or being taken simply as the place where the two overlap without being genuinely joined. Thus, to be a whole and therefore to fulfill the essential function we have seen assigned to it, the Gestalt must be relatively autonomous from both the subject and the object. Now, in a certain respect, this condition is already met in the image: “The sensible image and its intuition thus build a perfect unity, in which the receptive and spontaneous side of the power of the imagination, the achievement of the object in the sphere of the subject, and the achievement of the subject as the creative reproduction of the object’s stimulation, come to equal each other.”144 The image is relatively distinct from both the subject and object precisely because it is an achievement of each (and so a “more” with respect to each), while at the same time this mutual achievement forms a unity in itself. Although the image in the imagination is bound in a certain sense directly to the object, it enjoys a relative autonomy from both the subject and object to the extent that it emerges from the creativity of both of them. Were not this autonomy and externality, and the sort of physical multiplicity they together represent, so often a cause for regret in ancient philosophy? Nevertheless, the sensible image itself is not yet adequate for the full Gestalt we are seeking in this context; it does not yet represent the freedom that would be generated in a full (relative) autonomy. This fact is revealed in what psychology tells

143. Aristotle, Categories, 5.4a10–13. 144. TL 1:71–72. 228

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us about the infant’s wordless consciousness, which does not yet know how to distinguish itself from the world or the world from itself. If the sensible image is not adequate to stand for the Gestalt we are seeking, we might, by contrast, consider the universal concept. Indeed, it is true that the concept itself represents a sort of relatively autonomous Gestalt. This becomes most clear when we consider that the mind is “dumb” in immediate union with its object and that it cannot really understand the object until it produces something analogous to a spoken word as the medium (the mediator) in which to grasp the object.145 In scholastic philosophy, this mediator, that is, the “concept,” was called a “mental word” (verbum mentis). The mental word allows the intellect and the thing to be united precisely because it is a relatively distinct “third”: “The verbum mentis is a medium between the intellect and the thing known, because through its mediation the intellectual operation attains the thing.”146 As Prufer puts it, the verbum mentis is the medium in quo, which allows us to avoid both intentio without receptio (pure otherness) and receptio without intentio (pure self-sameness).147 Rousselot, citing this article in Aquinas, points out the “act” character of intelligence that this understanding of understanding implies, which reveals once again for Rousselot the necessity for movement in cognition.148 However, for our purposes, this movement is still insufficient insofar as it is the subject’s movement alone (as we have already pointed out in our review of Rousselot). The merely abstract concept, the verbum solius menti (the merely mental word) forms a Gestalt only analogously precisely because it is only analogously sensible. It is not yet real in the scholastic sense, that is, not yet a res in itself. A theory of truth that came to an end with the concept would remain essentially subjectivistic in form if not also in content. One might say that the essential difficulty in German Idealism is in fact the reduction of the verbum vocis (uttered word) to the verbum mentis, rather than affirming an analogy that moves in the other direction, with the result that subject and substance in the end completely converge—to the benefit of the subject. The movement of the whole argument of the present book points in the direction of a mutual transcendence

145. Ulrich strongly emphasizes this point in his analysis of the meaning of truth in Aquinas: “Die Wahrheit tritt also hervor, wenn der Intellekt sagt (!), was ist—oder nicht ist.” HA, 488. In this context, Ulrich in fact speaks of the birth of the word out of the union (adequatio) of mind and thing: ibid., 489. 146. Aquinas, De ver., 4, 2, ad 3. 147. Prufer, “Sein und Wort,” 106. 148. Rousselot, “Amour spirituel,” 238. Truth as Gestalt

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and therefore mutual immanence of both subject and object, paradigmatically in the spoken (or written) word but in fact in any genuine cultural work or organic (or interpersonal) whole.149 In this case, we have a true whole that is “independent” from both the subject and object even as it includes them. At the same time, it is not merely “separate” from the subject and object (as, for example, Derrida would have it in his “différance”totalitarianism), but it is precisely where the two are joined. It is in other words both the creative fruit (objective third) of their union and simultaneously that which mediates it. We can now turn to look more specifically at its proper characteristics.

The Word According to Balthasar, it is not the case that the mental word precedes the spoken word; as a matter of fact, one might even say that intelligence itself does not precede the spoken, physically expressed, word. “The child,” Balthasar affirms, “who awakens to consciousness, does not enter into the world as a pure spirit in order to tackle the problem of expression from scratch.”150 In other words, he does not “first” have a formed intelligence, and “then,” finding himself in the externality of the world, have to find some way to bring what is formed within him into that external world. Rather, he finds himself already from the beginning completely embedded in external, sensible realities; he grows up with them, one could say. Balthasar insists that this fact throws the most decisive light on the problem of knowledge because it reveals that since the spirit (mind) is always already embodied in the senses, and the senses are always already spiritualized, filled with intelligible meaning, the classic problem of building a bridge between the two, senses and intelligence, never arises. Now, at first glance, this position seems to be the reiteration of an insight common to much modern philosophy, namely, the mind’s finding itself always already involved with the senses, and indeed the dependence of the intelligence on language. The novelty of Balthasar’s approach, however, is seen once again in the comprehensive “originality” of his point of departure. Most modern versions of this problem are happy to begin with a mind involved with the senses, but they tend to miss the other side of the reality, that the senses are always saturated from the beginning with 149. One of the fullest developments of the insight that the physical “word” is the terminus of the cognitive act can be found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). 150. TL 1:162. 230

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mind, which is indispensable for preserving a nonreductive wholeness. Husserl, for example, affirms not only the “publicness” of perception and the intentionality of consciousness, but also the fact that the categorial acts that are most proper to intelligence are essentially founded on acts of intuition.151 Balthasar, however, would want to show that there is likewise a dependence of perception on categorial intuition and that this dependence arises in part from the fact that the child’s capacity to perceive (intelligently) grows in his being spoken to by his mother and father. Thus, even his most fundamental sense perceptions are mediated and therefore interpreted by his more fundamental experience—which is simultaneously sensual and intellectual—of a word. Whereas most phenomenological approaches start with the most basic sensual acts and “build” on these until they reach complex categorial wholes, Balthasar starts with the complete whole and differentiates, so to speak, in both directions, toward the sensual and toward the intellectual. What results is a more organic sense of language in Balthasar compared to the more particularly “logical” sense of language in Husserl. It thus becomes clear, once again, how important it is to understand this original event as an event of love: only as such is the word transparent; that is, only as an event of love can the child see the word, not as a mere, possibly deceptive outer expression but as the real expression, the gift, of the mother’s being, even as it is a gift that allows that being to be seen as infinitely more than the actual, single expression. Thus, the first word must be a word that says infinitely more than it says. But it is equally crucial to see that the completion of the full phenomenon does not lie simply outside the child in the sense of being an objective event before which he presides as a mere spectator, but it lies only in that act in which the child himself responds with the whole of his being. This means, then, that not only does the child “witness” an example of a “full” word, but he himself is “fully” involved in it; indeed, that is why it is so full. Thus, the mother’s smile is the “medium,” the objective third, in which she and the child enjoy a union—the smile, then, is in a sense the fruit of this union— and from that moment on, the child never ceases to live as it were inside of truth, inside the objective, sensible medium of intelligibility. From the very beginning, therefore, the intelligence’s occupation with words means that it comes to be what it is precisely within the medium of mediated immediacy. And because it is both, and not just one or the other, the intelligence has its own independent inner wholeness always already

151. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 6, sec. 48, 792–95. Truth as Gestalt

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within a context in which the other gives himself really without losing his own inner being and independent wholeness. Thus, on the one hand, the subject grows on the “food” of the pregnant word simultaneously in two directions, both into his own “secret” depths of interiority, and in the direction of the world, as immersed in the genuine otherness of other beings. On the other hand, it likewise means that the physicality of words is never something foreign to the spirit’s elastic inner life but is precisely its enabling condition. Once we see the inner dependence of intelligence on material expressions, it allows us in principle to include any physical manifestation of meaning among those words that are not foreign to the inner life of the mind. Balthasar, in fact, in addition to the spoken word, mentions the analogous “words” of sign language and body language, as well as music, architecture, or other arts.152 This whole world of Gestalten, then, is the medium in which the intelligence comes to be intelligence, and so, when it dwells in such communicative forms, it is not straying into foreign lands but is always at home. On the other hand, since “home” is here a place where one is wholly involved with the whole other, it is not a place of boring “sameness” but rather the constant adventure of total fullness. Why fullness? What is the word “full” of? The most correct answer to the question is to say that the original word is full of being, and it is full of being because it is full of truth. We will see the larger scope of this answer in chapter 5, when I address specifically the meaning of being in relation to the transcendentals, but we are already in possession of certain elements of the answer. We said at the end of the last section that Gestalt is the privileged place where being comes to light. The parts of the Gestalt can “come together” in an intrinsic way only if the union is given from above; in a comprehensive sense, the union of the Gestalt is the unity of being. Now, we saw in chapter 2 that the meaning of being is gift, because of the irreducible fourfold difference lying at its heart. It is precisely this structure, then, that revealed that being can be being only in action. But action is the more perfect the more concretely it realizes itself. It is consummated, then, where the action joins and, one could say, indissolubly intertwines with another action, so that it forms a single act of two irreducible acts. If we refer to the epigraph from Gilson that opened this section, we see that being, which is act, can be “grasped” only by a responding act, not by being “taken in” by the subject but by being internalized

152. TL 1:160. In fact, Balthasar gives a certain primacy to images as the root of words: see GL 1:393–94. 232

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in the subject’s “going out” in a distinct act.153 And what is this act? It is essentially the word: “every act of understanding . . . is an act of uttering.”154 Both Rousselot and de Finance interpret this passage in just this way.155 According to de Finance, who emphasizes the act character of being in a way that Rousselot does not, it is precisely the act of uttering that brings the subject into relation to the actuality, that is, the actual existence, of the object. However, for both de Finance and Rousselot, at issue in this “uttering” is in the first place the verbum mentis.156 As we have seen, such a method cannot fail to turn inadequate at decisive points: in particular, it betrays a primarily “subjective” notion of actuality; we might say it implies a more “transcendental” sense of act (i.e., as the subject’s striving) than a genuinely transcendent sense. In this respect, the act that answers an act, which we see in both Gilson and de Finance, threatens to degenerate into an extrinsic mirroring on the one side what happens on the other, or at best establishes a kind of parallel between two “raylike” acts. What is missing is their intrinsic, identical union. Since this is missing, the only way a dualistic parallelism can be avoided is by acknowledging the objective ground where the acts come together, namely, the physical word. Insofar as this word is itself a real ens, it is by the same token an esse habens (a thing that has its own existence), and it has being as an act

153. For the context of the quotation, see Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 207–8. In fact, for Gilson, this “act” that answers the act of being is not so much the act of uttering the word but the act of judgment. It is judgment, he says, that reaches being. In his book, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence, Frederick Wilhelmsen criticizes Gilson on this point, saying that being escapes even judgment, taken in itself, since judgment ends in conceptualization, and being cannot be conceptualized (32–34). Wilhelmsen thus insists that being is “attained” only in the third act of the mind, reasoning, which never comes to an end and so never rests in the rigidity of mere concepts. According to the notion of Gestalt I have been developing, we could agree with Wilhelmsen’s wanting to avoid bringing the movement of thought to a halt, and yet argue that this movement is already in the fruit of judgment, precisely because it is fruit. Although, on the one hand, the actual act of reasoning seems to have privileged access to being in its immediacy, reasoning is empty without words. And, what is more, words in a certain sense transcend reasoning in their very objectivity and thus contain within themselves a kind of fullness and living movement that is lacking even to the lightning insights of reason. 154. Aquinas, De ver., 4, 2, ad 5. 155. See Rousselot, “Amour spirituel,” 237–38, and de Finance, Être et agir, 290–94. 156. Similarly, Jan Aertsen in his treatment of the transcendentals says that the “word is the terminus of the process of knowing,” but he likewise insists that what “is primarily meant [is] not the spoken outer word, but the ‘inner’ word of the mind.” Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 267. The reason for the constant insistence by commentators on the verbum mentis seems to be to uphold the notion that truth “ends” in the mind, a notion I have shown to be problematic in many significant ways. The moment we give up this notion, we are freed to view conception more concretely. Truth as Gestalt

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in being the converging center of a subject and an objective act. It is in this sense that the word is an event of being, and we see a decisive point where Thomistic philosophy joins the insights of Heidegger.157 Conversely, speech is possible only where being as a whole is open to consciousness.158 And, thus, the subject can speak only if he has been “freed for speech,” which means that he has been invited into the fullness of a Gestalt, a word, and thereby carried into the movement of detachment or difference within the Gestalt, which is what first allows being as a whole to appear, or what first gives the unity of apperception necessary to see, to judge, and to speak. Specifically, it is only because the word is an event of being that the subject can not only relate to an object in the word, but at the same time relate to this relation, which means being in a position to judge the whole and in this way to manifest the truth. Man’s particular relation to being and to truth is thus intrinsically related to his being the “rational animal,” the animal with logos: the animal with the word.159 It is now possible to address more specifically the relation between language and being on the basis of the notion of Gestalt. We saw in the last section that truth always subsists within certain sets of tensions, one of which was “essence and existence.” Such a tension will always exist precisely because the word in which truth is embodied is both where being actually manifests itself (existentially) and at the same time, as a relatively independent “third” is able to be abstracted or considered in isolation from the event of ontological union between the subject and object, of which it is the symbol. This duality, of course, can easily become a dualism, and the danger lies precisely in that aspect of the word that we have seen to be so essential to the role the word plays in mediating truth, namely, its freedom or independence. In distinction to the other modes of encounter that make up being, namely, goodness and beauty, Balthasar explains that a particular danger lies in truth because of the freedom it allows in relation to actuality. More specifically, 157. I have in mind specifically the notion that “language is the house of being.” This famous phrase continues in a direction pertinent to the argument being made here: “In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. This guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks.” “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 193. On the possibility of a “rapprochement” between Aquinas and Heidegger on the question of truth, see Bertrand Rioux, L’Être et la vérité chez Heidegger et saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 158. E, 60. 159. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.1253a5–10. 234

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truth can be abstracted from things and thus fall into inauthenticity.160 The union between subject and object is as it were captured in the word (regardless of whether we view it as a mental or a spoken word); it is a witness to the union, which outlasts the union itself and may in fact remain forever, long after the union is “actually” over. Its permanence is what allows it to be taken from its original context and used in others, allows it to be generalized beyond its original purpose, and even makes it vulnerable to being used contrary to its original purpose.161 On the one hand, the concept, or mental word, can be taken entirely out of its “existential context” and used, so to speak, to erect conceptual scaffolding, which can achieve such an inner consistency that it can stand on its own and even substitute for the reality itself. On the other hand, the spoken or written word can be dislodged from its meaningful context, from the act that constitutes it, and thus fall into the inauthenticity of speech that Husserl characterized so well under the name “vague” or “confused” thinking.162 Where speech strays so far from its constituting acts that it no longer bears any trace of its origin, it is understandably shoved aside in the name of existentialism, as nothing but a hindrance to a direct contact with reality. As Nietzsche so powerfully puts it, “whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond. In all speech there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, medium, communicable. With language the speaker immediately vulgarizes himself.”163 And yet the moment words or concepts are eliminated in the search for direct contact with the real, one finds that this existential (or Dionysian) rapture quickly betrays its shallowness. The promise of a transcendent silence beyond words inevitably becomes a deceit, for the reasons we mentioned earlier: an “immediate” encounter is in fact no encounter at all but ultimately a solitude. Now, Balthasar’s concept of Gestalt as fruitfulness, as an objective “third” that forms the union of the two, integrates both the essential and the existential dimensions of truth without letting them fracture into dialectical opposites. The word is thus seen to be the objective form of the relationship between subject and object. On the one hand, the objectivity of the word gives it an enormous freedom with respect to the encounter 160. E, 65: “Die Selbstaussage, das Wort, ist, als wesenhaft frei, das von den dreien Gefährdetste, weil es sich von der Sache isolieren und—als rein abstrakte, ‘exaktwissenschaftliche’ Sprache oder auch als nichtssagendes Gerede—der Uneigentlichkeit verfallen kann.” 161. This is, of course, Plato’s concern about the written word: Phaedrus, 275d–e. 162. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 16, 51–62. 163. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 530–31. Truth as Gestalt

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between the subject and object. It internalizes and embodies this encounter, one could say, and so the word can take this meaning with it in the absence of the subject and the object. The “existentiality” of this encounter is thus not added to it from the outside, but intrinsic to it. The word itself, as word, is not a “dead object” but a living reality. To be sure, the freedom of the word in its objective transcendence makes it vulnerable to inauthenticity, to such an extent that we might say it scarcely ever escapes misuse or avoids the vulgarization that Nietzsche spoke about. And yet, the answer to this misuse is not the destruction of the word. Rather, the “authenticity,” the actuality of the act, the “immediate” mutual reciprocity between the subject and object in their integrity, lies in principle already in the word. To recover the act, our first step is not to overcome its objectivity or essentiality but precisely to entrust ourselves to it. On the other hand, this notion of Gestalt recalls us to the correlative aspect, namely, that there is no “existential” encounter anywhere, of any sort, that is not at the same time mediated by an “essential” structure, which so to speak embodies it as its fruit.164 We refer to the argument that an intrinsic relation between any two things requires an objective “third.” Thus, insofar as the word plays the role of this objective third, then, far from intruding upon the “intimacy” of existential encounter, it is where that encounter is consummated. Far from obstructing movement by its rigid form, it is just what makes movement possible—and, indeed, the more “rigid” it is, in the sense of sharpness, clarity and precision, the more successfully it embodies that movement. In short, logos as Gestalt reveals a more organic relation between being and language than we are generally accustomed to admitting, and yet at the same time it opens up complete freedom for the conventionality or creativity of speech in relation to nature,165 which is one of the major impulses for Ferdinand de Saussure

164. This point leads us to see a difference between Balthasar’s sense of language and the sense presented by Catherine Pickstock in After Writing. Pickstock claims, in discussing liturgical texts, that the oral “performance” of liturgical texts has a unilateral primacy over the written texts: “The liturgical text as a whole is not in excess of its vocal performances, which suggests that, rather than obtaining a universalized presence, it is continuous with repeated oralizations through time” (216). While Balthasar would agree that there is a clear priority of “oralization”—i.e., the living “actualization” of relation in language through speech—he would nevertheless complement this priority with the paradoxical assertion of the relative priority of the written word over speech. If it is true that speech is in one sense in excess of writing, there is a sense in which writing is in excess of speech. 165. Balthasar describes the “taut tension” between the inner freedom, and the organic naturalness of language, as well as the tension between personal expression and conventionality: E, 59. 236

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and structuralism. Beyond structuralism, however, we might say conversely that without compromising the freedom of language, Balthasar’s understanding of Gestalt allows us to see that, nevertheless, there is no word that does not have its roots sunk deep in being. Once we have seen the organic relation between being and meaning understood as the fruitfulness of a Gestalt, the scope of truth, so to speak, expands simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, I have already shown that this allows us to see even in the autonomous structures of language a vital, indeed organic, relation to being. This goes so far as to implicate the very shape of logic. On the other hand, the sense of truth allows us to see that even the most “physical” aspects of reality are not truthless; nor are they true merely in the sense of being able to be put into a correct relation with a mind. Rather, we can see that the foundations of physicality, space, and time already have the form of epiphany, decision, union, and fruit. In other words, the “ideality” of logic, from the beginning, bears an internal relationship to “reality,” while the reality of space and time are always already a primitive form of ideality. An analysis of these issues would require more extensive treatment than I can give without digressing from the central theme. But remaining with the theme demands that I at least mention a few points in regard to these issues, in order to give a certain intuitive fulfillment to the notion of truth as Gestalt and thereby to bring the chapter to completion.

Logic and Being The rootedness of language—and therefore thinking—in being implies that it is not logical categories that come first in our thinking but rather ontological ones. Or, to put it another way, logic is founded on being rather than being on logic. Although the question of the relationship between logic and being, as we have said, is far too vast to be given systematic treatment here, we may nevertheless address the more specific question, What “shape” does logic have when considered from the perspective of the notion of Gestalt? Now, Aristotle, Hegel, and Balthasar all agree that logic in its most elemental form represents a relation between three terms.166 For both Hegel and Balthasar, moreover, recognizing the triadic structure of logic is the key to seeing its necessary embeddedness in the concrete. Nev166. For Aristotle, see Prior Analytics, 1.25.41b36–37: “It is clear too that every demonstration will proceed through three terms and no more.” For Hegel, see The Phenomenology of Spirit, 29. For Balthasar, see TL 2:33, section title “The triadic structure of worldly logic.” Truth as Gestalt

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ertheless, they have radically different ways of conceiving this embeddedness.167 The fundamental categories of logic are identity and difference. However, we have seen the difficulty that these notions create when taken first abstractly. Balthasar puts it thus: Neither “identity” nor pure “difference” . . . can express the structure of real worldly being. A logic constructed on the basis of such propositions (A = A; A =/ B) is an abstract residue of the actual constitution of this being, and in that respect is at best a secondary aid to avoid missing within this relation the absolute demand for decision. In the end, difference, the “other than myself,” is always already overtaken by a third element within which I am able to note its otherness in the first place. Contraries, in fact, are not indifferent, but are always different for one another.168 If we begin with logical categories, the only way to get beyond the mere “indifference” of difference would be to relate identity and difference dialectically, which means the determination of identity through the negation of difference: omnis determinatio negatio est. In abstraction, which means when it is taken as not concrete, and not with the other, a thing’s identity is defined in reference to itself alone; the immersion of such an identity into the concrete relations of real being requires an intrusion on this identity and then a recovery from this intrusion. The motive force of the movement from logic to the concrete is thus the power of negation: If A = A and only A, then A =/ B; or A is not-B: the identity of A is the negation of B. By the principle of contraposition, we can say at the same time that B is not-A, or that the identity of B is the negation of A. In order to bring the two together into a union in such a way that respects (at least apparently) the difference between the two, we allow the relative negation to stand between them, and then we negate the whole, so that the subsequent “union” between A and B does not circumvent the difference

167. Hegel criticizes Aristotle because he, whose genius first brought to light the triadic form of logic, failed to integrate that form into his “properly philosophical inquiries.” The Encyclopedia Logic, 260; see also 262–63. 168. TL 2:33: “Weder ‘Identität’ noch bloße ‘Differenz’ . . . können die Struktur des realen Weltseins ausdrücken. Eine auf diesen Sätzen (A = A; A =/ B) aufgebaute Logik ist ein abstraktes Restprodukt seiner wirklichen Verfaßtheit, und darin höchstens ein in seiner Stringenz sekundäres Hilfsmittel, um innerhalb des Relativen die unbedingte Entscheidungsforderung nicht zu verfehlen. Im Realen ist die Differenz, das ‘Andere meiner selbst’ immer schon von einem Dritten überholt, innerhalb dessen ich dieses Anderssein allererst feststellen kann. Die Gegensätze sind ja nicht indifferent, sondern je füreinander anders.” 238

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between them but passes through it.169 Nevertheless, the final integration, as the identity of identity and difference, is necessarily one-sided, as we have seen. If we assume that the issue of identity and difference is a matter to be solved in a progression from an abstract first and second, and only then to a concrete third, the inner logic of the matter itself will therefore eventually leave us with only a single term. An abstract triadic logic inevitably ends in a monadic One. Schelling’s criticism of Hegel is, on this score, to the point: the third term in which the two are united, which Hegel claims preserves the difference between them, in fact engulfs that difference, since there is nothing at all in the first or second terms that is not already contained in the third, and so its existence makes that of the other two essentially unjustifiable.170 Balthasar’s logic, by contrast, if we can extrapolate from everything we have said to this point, begins with the simultaneity of the unity and difference between the two terms, which is therefore never overcome but rather sustained in the third. As we have seen, the simultaneity of relations cannot be understood statically, but only in terms of motion. Thus, the relation between A and B, for Balthasar, can be described, not as a single movement but as two irreducible and reciprocal movements, each of which can be described either from the perspective of A or B, and therefore in a twofold manner: A moves to B and returns to A; B moves to A and returns to B. Because these are genuinely reciprocal movements, we can describe the same movements “from the other direction”: B egresses from A and returns to A; A egresses from B and returns to B. At no moment do we have an identity of a term first and then a subsequent movement. If we did so, then the movement of B out of A, for example, would turn into a mere deduction of B from A and for that reason a reduction of B to A. Thus, B must always already “have” something more than A; it must be not only negative with respect to A but also in some genuine sense positive. At the same time, if what B has in addition to A, that is, its positivity with respect to A, were something that it had merely “before” its relation to A, rather than being something it received from within its relation to A, then its relation to A would be superfluous, which means in fact that it would not relate to A. We would in this respect return to

169. For a clear presentation of this inner logic of dialectic, see Heinrich Beck, Der Akt-Charakter des Seins (Munich: Max Heuber, 1965), 81–108. 170. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, 141: “ in becoming [i.e., the third term between being and nothing], nothing and being are not united but instead nothing is left behind.” One could argue, indeed, that in the Hegelian dialectic, the third term always ends up reducing back to the first, precisely to the exclusion of the second. Truth as Gestalt

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atomistic identities and at the same moment fall outside of real being. The possibility of unity-in-difference of the two terms A and B presupposes as it were a common medium that is distinct from both.171 Furthermore, in line with what we saw earlier, this “third” has to be in some respect distinct from the two within the same order as they occupy; if it does not fall within the same order, in fact, it will reduce to one or the other or both. In other words, a thing cannot be distinct from another thing without being in some respect “juxtaposed” to it. And if the third term cannot be juxtaposed to the other two, it cannot be the “place” in which they are simultaneously united and distinguished from each other. The question then arises whether this “third” comes “before” or “after” the other two. It is clear that it can be neither simply before nor simply after. If it were simply before the relation, then it would not be the union between the two terms. It would be, as it were, already complete in itself prior to its relation to the two and so would not be the mediation of their relatedness. On the other hand, if it were merely “after,” it would be something produced and thus derived from the two: in this case the relation between the two would be merely the sum of the two, and not the presupposition of their unity, a presupposition required to be able to affirm a unity between the two without eliminating difference. Therefore, the “third” term must come in a certain sense before and in a certain sense after the relation of the two. Now, the simultaneity of this before and after entails a radically new step. We have seen in another context (namely, in relation to the question of the apriority of the light of the agent intellect), that the only way to avoid the mutually impossible alternatives that result when the elements are taken sequentially within a single order, is to see the whole as an event. This means that the whole is given vertically from above, but in such a way as to include essentially the horizontal unfolding “from below.” In other words, as we have seen many times, the continuous integrity of one order is given only within the discontinuity of relation within a radically different order. This does not mean that the one order is left behind in order to move to the other (which would in fact compromise the discontinuity); rather, the continuity and discontinuity are inseparable aspects of a single whole: a Gestalt. What does this mean in relation to logic specifically? It means that we cannot conceive of reasoning as the simple sequential passage from one term to the next, or from one proposition to the next.

171. See Aristotle’s discussion of a common “substratum” as necessary for the existence of pairs of contraries: Physics, 1.6. 240

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Instead, we have to see that the sequential process of logical reasoning is constituted, in a manner of speaking, in its wholeness only within the transcending movement into the radically extralogical order. For Balthasar, the radically extralogical order is the order of real being, understood in one respect as esse and in another as the act of reason: “The light of the intellectus agens is the light of esse as reality: with this orientation the intellect attains essences [i.e., logical structures], and in this meta-logical light they become comprehensible. But this means that the essential categories . . . thrive in ‘spherically-curved’ space.”172 To put it another way, the sequential movement of reason is not denied, since it is precisely this sequentiality, this order, that is constituted in the movement of transcendence; it is merely that this whole “crystallizes” in its “ideality” only within the “radically other” order of “reality.” It is this radically other order that allows us to grasp the unity and difference of the two terms in a third as “happening” in a certain way before and after the two terms taken in themselves. At several points in our analyses, we have discussed concrete relations in terms of triads, which in another sense occur only “quadratically”: we might think of the four-pointed figures drawn several times. Indeed, insofar as created being subsists in its unity only within the tension of irreducible orders, we will always have to see it as both triadic in a certain sense and quadratic in a certain sense: it is triadic to the extent that it is a whole, and it is a whole to the extent that it is constituted as such in a fourth dimension, radically different from the other three.173 This, in a sense, is the essence of a Gestalt. And it is what allows us to affirm a kind of wholeness of logic, even while insisting that this wholeness occurs only in the “transcendent” concrete order of real minds in relation to real beings. Thus, while Aristotle’s triadic logic ends up separating the ideal and real, since he “ends” his logic with the syllogism and never succeeds in integrating logic into his more organic sense of being (which leaves him vulnerable to the sort of logical positivism that “Aristotelianism” sometimes falls into)—and while Hegel’s triadic logic swallows up the real order within the ideal—Balthasar’s triadic logic is at the same time intrinsically “quadratic,” and thus he is able to affirm a necessary unity between logic and

172. GL 4:407–8. In the next section, “Space and Time,” we will discuss the significance of the term spherically curved space. 173. We might think in this context of Aristotle’s fourfold causality. There is a certain ideal unity in the three causes—efficiency, formality, and finality—and yet their unity is given only concretely; it is crystallized in relation to the radically different order represented by material causality. Truth as Gestalt

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being even while avoiding a reduction of either one to the other. He never faces the problem of having to build a “bridge” between logic and reality, not because logic and reality are identical (Hegel), but because logic is always already involved within reality and finds its own integrity only within this relation. We might say that this triadic-quadratic logic, the logic of Gestalt, is in fact the very logic of fruitfulness: a constant opening up to the genuine novelty of a radically discontinuous order, an openness that does not imply the destruction of ideal forms but is in fact what first gives them their solidity, their wholeness, and, indeed, their fascination. From this paradoxical relationship that thus emerges between reality and ideality once we consider logic in terms of Gestalt, we are able to make sense of the place Balthasar accords to the notion of logic developed by Blondel and Claudel, notions that would otherwise rumble around like so many undigested elements. In TL 2, Balthasar introduces these notions in two brief sections on “the logic of love” (Blondel) and “the triadic form of logic” (Claudel).174 A quick glance at these two sections will permit us to make two further observations. First, Balthasar elaborates Blondel’s notion of an “existential” logic that concerns action. According to Blondel, the original principles of logic are not free-floating entities but are grounded in, and indeed arise from, the concrete content of human action and decision. Thus, in line with what we have just seen above, he says, “there is no purely formal logic, every thinking is an act, and every act is initiative and synthesis.”175 In the dialectic of action, decision has to be made within the interplay of opposing vital drives and interests, within a more comprehensive context of the meaning of a part in relation to the sense of the whole. In making decisions, a person particularizes himself, which always means at the same time both gain and renunciation or loss. Moreover, such action always faces judgment, and it must contend not only with the opposition of good and evil but indeed with their outright contradiction. Thus, Blondel points to the existential phenomenon of renunciation or - as the originating ground for what turns out to be merely its loss (steresis) inadequate symbol in formal logic, namely, negation (antiphasis).176 However, the total contradiction between good and evil becomes the enabling space for the relative opposition of logical contrariety. This leads to our first observation. Formal logic has its basis in the principle of noncontradiction. If we see that formal logic is constituted only 174. TL 2:29–35. 175. Blondel, “Principe élémentaire d’une logique de la vie morale,” in Les premiers écrits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: PUF, 1956), 123–47, cited in TL 2:30. 176. TL 2:31. 242

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in relation to real being, we can affirm the principle of noncontradiction without denying the possibility of real contradiction (evil) in the existential or moral order. The counterapproach is represented by Hegel. He gives priority to logic in his integration of ideality and reality. And so, while he seems to take evil even more seriously by making it a logical contradiction, nevertheless, since it is in fact in the first place logical, evil gets reduced to mere contrariety, and so it gets relativized as a moment in the necessary progression of the dialectic.177 Thus, once again Hegel shows himself to be simultaneously too radical, in his denial of the principle of noncontradiction, and not radical enough, because a complete contradiction always turns out to be a mere relative, and eventually sublimated, difference. Blondel’s perspective, by contrast, allows us to take both evil and logic seriously. In fact, the continuity within discontinuity that it implies provides a new way to interpret the traditional metaphysical identification of evil and nothingness. To the extent that logic and being are taken to be identical (essentialism), the problem of evil forces the alternatives of evil into being nothing at all, or of evil having a “positive” significance and thus forcing us into a Gnostic dualism. If, however, we understand that logic is united with being within a radical discontinuity, we can affirm the real existence of evil without, for all of that, “essentializing” evil into a positive being with a positive ground. To put it another way, this allows us to speak existentially of contradiction without denying the integral structure of logic. But this is because the inner structure of logic is not complete in itself by itself, but is complete (in itself) only in being rooted within a transcendent ground, that is, in the drama of concrete reality. Thus, even if logic essentially excludes contradiction, it is not simply indifferent to it. As Balthasar puts it, Blondel sums up with the affirmation that “ideological logic is only a partial expression of the dialectic of action.”178 Next to Blondel in Balthasar’s understanding of logic stands Paul Claudel, with his dense and difficult treatise L’art poétique, a work Claudel himself called “a mother-work, a book that I feel is full of books.”179 Without entering into the details of this treatise, which is primarily a development of connaissance as co-naissance, that is, knowledge as a “being-born together” (because, Claudel says, no one can be born alone), we can note the salient 177. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 194. 178. TL 2:30. 179. Paul Claudel, notes to L’art poétique, in Oeuvre Poétique, 1060: “C’est une oeuvre-mère, un livre que je sens plein de livres.” This sentence is quoted from a letter Claudel wrote to Frizeau in July 1905. Truth as Gestalt

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points. Claudel explains that the one thing common to all realities in the universe is movement, and that even what seems to be static is in fact involved in a particular kind of motion. Now, if movement, which is a going outside of oneself, is positively constitutive of the identity of things, then it ultimately follows that there “can be logically no A without, 1) the finite progression of non-A’s that determine it and, 2) without a relation of this entire finite series of determined-delimited things to an unlimited reality that determines them all.”180 Thus, because things transcend themselves in movement, things depend on others for their meaning. This is true of each, and it is true of them all, taken as a cosmos. The conclusion that Claudel draws is that knowledge means the simultaneous connection in which each needs every other member of the whole, and the whole in turn needs each,181 and that these two reciprocal affirmations depend on the fundamental difference between God and the world. The point for us, in particular, is to see how such a logic, rooted in real being, makes difference concretely positive before it is abstractly negative.182 Moreover, it shows that the mutual relation of positivities needs to be grounded in the basic God-world difference: this is therefore precisely the logic needed for a dramatic analogy of being (as opposed to mere dialectic), which alone is capable of providing an adequate interpretation of the “being-in-action” that we saw emerge in chapter 1 from the fourfold ontological difference.

Space and Time The notion of truth as Gestalt not only roots logical meaning more deeply in being than we generally suspect, but it reciprocally roots being in meaning. Indeed, it entails a profoundly new sense of objectivity, a new sense of the concrete shape of space and time. Pieper repeatedly laments in his writings the loss of a sense of the ontological truth of things, a sense that beings themselves are true in their very being, for the sake of a merely logical, propositional notion of truth.183 For Pieper, recovering this sense means

180. TL 2:35: “[Damit ist gesagt, daß] es logisch kein A gibt ohne 1. die endliche Reihe von Nicht-A, die es bestimmt, und 2. ohne einen Bezug dieser ganzen unendlichen Reihe von Bestimmt-Begrenzten zu einem bestimmenden Unbegrenzten.” 181. Claudel expresses this reciprocity in a striking pair of sentences whose pithiness defy translation: “Connaître donc, c’est être: cela qui manque à tout le reste.” L’art poétique, 153. And on page 135 of the same work: “Ma richesse est inépuisable! C’est posséder tout l’Univers que de manquer tout l’Univers et de lui manquer moi-même.” 182. See TL 2:35: “B, C usf. sind gleichzeitig (abstrakt) die Negation von A, aber (konkret) seine Mitkonstituenten, sofern ihr Anderssein A positiv mitbestimmt.” 183. See in particular Pieper, Die Wahrheit der Dinge, 11–31. 244

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recovering a sense that things are known already by God, a sense in which God’s (creative) knowledge of things is their being. Affirming the validity of Pieper’s insistence, however, does not relieve us from the obligation of interpreting it with great care. The need for such an interpretation becomes clear in light of Heidegger’s objection that the grounding of the “ontological” truth of Being in the relation it has to the divine intellect, far from preserving its ontological dimension, binds this dimension ever more irretrievably to “mind.”184 To avoid falling into an understanding of God’s knowledge of things as the source of their ontological truth that could justify Heidegger’s objection, we must avoid projecting a conventional view of the mind-being relation onto God. We can do so primarily by seeing that God’s knowledge of the world is mediated to human understanding—in a way that is indispensable—by the truth of being. The meaning of this suggestion will become clear at the end of this subsection (and in chapter 5), when we return to this problem. The point is to recover a sense that things have an ontological truth already in their concrete and even “physical” way of being. To put it in a word, if truth and therefore knowledge, as Gestalt, is necessarily in some respect concrete (physical), it is because physical being is already in some significant sense a kind of truth and physical relation is already a kind of knowing. Again, this topic would require more extensive elaboration than I can offer here, but it is at least possible to indicate a few basic principles in relation to space and time. The key to understanding the ontological truth character of space and time is to see that they can both essentially be understood as event-like Gestalten.185 I referred in chapter 1 to Heidegger’s notion of temporality as ek-stasis. Ek-stasis is, for Heidegger, the decisive characteristic of Dasein. Heidegger’s notion, in fact, has some relation to Kant’s explanation of the forms of intuition, because Kant, like Heidegger, asserts that time is not an objective property of beings in the world, as something that so to speak exists in itself, but is rather a function of the inner structure of “subjectivity.”186 The point, for Heidegger, is that the possibility of time,

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

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even in its objective sense of “clock” time, depends on the possibility of transcendence, and transcendence is not the mode of being of objects, but is rather the very being of Dasein (and Dasein alone).187 Similarly, Heidegger insists that the “dis-severance” (Ent-fernung) that is the essence of space is likewise grounded on the “transcending” structure of Dasein: “Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space; but, the subject (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial.”188 The “Ent-fernung” is an expression of the entsetzen-entzücken (displacement-rapture) structure of ek-stasis that we discussed earlier, and this connection is ultimately what allows Heidegger to identify being and time. Balthasar, however, as we have seen, understands both subjects and objects in terms of a kind of transcendence or ek-stasis; that is, they both are simultaneously spontaneous and receptive in relation to each other, a relation therefore both reciprocally (and asymmetrically) dependent and genuinely creative or fruitful. And this entails several significant consequences. Borrowing Heidegger’s notion in which space and time are constituted in transcendence, and affirming, contrary to Heidegger, that transcendence is essentially reciprocal and thus basically something that beings do together (whether subject and object, object and object, or subject and subject)—to the extent that there is no transcendence without reciprocity—we can say that both space and time are Gestalten or events, produced in every case as the fruit of union. This entails a sense of space primarily as spherically curved and a sense of time as primarily kairos and decision, and it sees both as being the very ground of truth. I will take each of these points briefly in sequence. There is a connection between, on the one hand, the sense in which the objectivity of truth means nothing more than “universally valid” and, on the other hand, an understanding of space primarily in terms of coordinates on a grid: they are both abstract formalizations. In a way, this abstract formalism can be summed up symbolically by the straight lines of geometry, which Descartes took as the fundamental model for both thought and the extension of things in space.189 In contrast to a conventional understanding of “objectivity” in the “linear” sense of universal validity or the formal consistency of the logic of geometry, Balthasar characterizes the 187. On Heidegger’s notion of it being only “subjects” that transcend, see J. L. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 133. 188. Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 24, 146. 189. The “method” of the single science, the mathesis universale to which all sciences (including both philosophy and physics) can be reduced, is modeled on that of geometry: see rule IV of “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, 9–14. On extension as geometrical, see rule 14, 54–65. 246

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Gestalt character of space, which we find, for example, in Goethe, in terms of “spherical curvature.”190 In the conventional sense, abstract lines suffice to characterize both thought and space because the “objectivity” of objects is constituted by the unidirectional “ray” of subjective intentionality. For Balthasar, in contrast, objective space is not only curved (which may yet be conceived merely two-dimensionally), but spherically curved, precisely because it is an encounter between the mutually receptive and irreducible spontaneities of subject and object (or object and object, etc.).191 The encounter, the Gestalt, is constituted in the subject’s and the object’s both transcending themselves, both going outside of themselves ek-statically, and thereby disrupting the vector-directionality of straight lines, not in the sense of deconstructionist fracturing but in the bending of things into real wholes, that is, three-dimensional spheres. This three- (and by implication four-, insofar as the real objectivity of the whole necessarily includes a relation to time) dimensionality of space is the only understanding adequate to the organic complexity of the relation between things that occurs in knowing, the paradoxical relation between unity and difference that takes place there. Unity and difference are, after all, spatial metaphors, or we might say conversely that nearness and distance are to be understood by analogy to the metaphysical concepts. The organic ordering of space, in the building and architecture of both humans and animals, the relating of distance and nearness, lines and shapes, into a meaningful, useful, and beautiful whole is thus a sort of fulfillment of the very meaning of space, and not something that is “tacked onto” space as some mere indifferently neutral backdrop. This is also why space itself has an event-like character: it is, in fact, the event of encounter between beings in which they spontaneously go out to meet and welcome each other, which means that they “give each other space” and at the same time fill it. But in light of what we have already said about Gestalt and mutually intrinsic relation, this means that space is not simply dead extensio (extension), but is itself already, one could say, creative activity, and its being essentially creative is directly related to its being spherically curved. It is crucial to note that this affirmation is not mere metaphor, 190. See Georges de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu, 63–64. Here, de Schrijver gives an account of Balthasar’s presentation of Goethe in ADS. It is interesting to note, moreover, that Balthasar entitled the first section on Goethe in GL 5: “1. The mean as a form of resistance: the curve” (Mitte als Widerstand: Die Kurve), GL 5:339. Clearly, since Goethe is so to speak the representative of Gestalt, there is a connection in Balthasar’s mind between Gestalt and curves. 191. Cf., GL 5:369, on nature in Goethe as the mutual indwelling of subject and object: it is perfect immanence but without the removal of transcendence. Truth as Gestalt

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which means mere anthropomorphism. The act of welcoming, giving space, and filling it that occurs between human beings is not simply a moral act played out in (dead) space, which for its part is just “there,” but is in fact a human, personal recapitulation of the essential structure of space in general. Space, as the fruit of the union of reciprocally transcending beings, is a Gestalt. Similarly, time is not simply monological ek-stasis or the self-transcendence of subjectivity, since transcendence is always reciprocal, but it is itself a fruit, a kind of whole generated from the mutual relation of beings. I already mentioned certain aspects of Balthasar’s understanding of temporality in relation to being in the chapter 1, and it is appropriate in this context to refer back to what was said there. The development of the notion of Gestalt in relation to the act of knowing or the event of truth, however, allows us to add further decisive elements, particularly the reciprocal character of temporality. For this, we receive help from Ulrich. In his discussion of knowledge as kennen and erkennen, Ulrich makes the claim that in the act of knowing, the knower enacts (vollzieht) the temporality of the ontological constitution of that which is known.192 The presupposition in Ulrich’s account is a notion of knowledge as a fulfilling movement of creativity, which is so because of the essential gift-character of being. In other words, according to Ulrich, knowing is the knower’s “carrying to term” (austragen) the ontological genesis of the thing known. This means, specifically, that through knowledge, the thing known “comes-to” (Zu-kunft) itself, which is the “transcendental” constitution of futurity. In this, we see as it were the spontaneous or creative aspect of knowing. At the same time, insofar as knowing is an affirming reception of the reality of the object known, the knower confirms the object’s essence (Wesen), that which it has been (ge-wesen). We might recall here the imperfect tense, indicating continuity in the past or repetition, that Aristotle “built into” - einai.” Finally, in the actuality his term for the “what” of a thing, “to ti en of the act of knowing, the knower synthesizes, or perhaps crystallizes, the presence of the object (Gegenwart) out of the two “ontological distances” of the future and the past. Aristotle speaks of the present “moment” as being a sort of middle term uniting past and future.193 But we have seen that every middle term is a creative fruit: the presence is not one of the various passing sequences of moments, but it is a creative event wherein past and future are synthetically brought together. It is precisely here,

192. Ulrich, “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe,” 161. 193. See Aristotle, Physics, 8.1.251b17–27. 248

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within the creative act of “presencing,” which involves both the subject and object reciprocally, that we can insert the whole dynamic of manifestation, decision, and grasping (in being grasped) that I have used to characterize the act of knowing. The key, for us, is to see that such a Gestalt, as the “shape” of time, is in a sense nothing more than a fundamental unfolding of the logic of gift. There is no such thing as gift without relation to an “other”; the fullness implied in the word gift arises only out of the difference implied in giving. But this means that what it is in itself is not a simple, circumscribed “all at once” “there-ness”; rather, it requires, out of its most inward exigence, a “gradual unfurling.” A gift has to take time. It “arrives”—that is, it comes from another. And it also “lasts”—that is, it is truly given (and so not immediately taken back). The temporality of knowing, then, results from the gift character of being. If gift characterizes the essence of being in general (and not just human being), then a dynamic that is in some sense analogous to the relation of knowing, such as we have described it, will be played out in the ground of the real. The “nearness” and the “distance” of temporality are the Gestalt of union that creates fruit and fruit that creates union in the foundational relations among things. The “personal” quality of time, then—that is, the various dramas that it entails, involving decision, endurance, loss, patience, celebration, and so forth—is again a recapitulation in human being of the meaning of time itself. The purpose of this understanding of the nature of time and space is twofold. In the first place, it is to see that objective being, the physical things in the world, and indeed physicality itself, can be understood already as a kind of knowing.194 Once we saw the Gestalt nature of truth, and the necessary physical dimension of knowing that followed from it, we were given the possibility of seeing relation in general as analogous to knowing. This possibility has an important immediate implication. The Thomistic insistence on the convertibility of truth and being and the more recent stance of phenomenology, which requires seeing an intrinsic reciprocal correlation between being and being known, raise the perennial question: Would things exist at all if they were not known? Aquinas asserts that they would not, but that this does not mean they must be the object of human knowledge. Rather, truth and being are convertible because the very existence of things is their being known by God.195 To a modern mind, such an answer seems gratuitous or improperly theological; in fact,

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

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rather than accept such an answer, phenomenology tends instead to disregard the question as essentially moot. It is asserted that the notion of being without some relation to mind falls to the retortion argument: it is self-contradictory. Such an answer, however, cannot help but prompt in common sense the suspicion of sophistry. It seems in any event to make the “objective” world somehow dependent on our knowing of it, and therefore in an inappropriate sense a function of our knowledge. Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt, however, allows a different approach. If all relation is genuinely analogous to knowing, then the assertion that things can exist without actually being known (in some analogous sense) reduces essentially to the assertion that things can exist without being in relation, which is a much more obvious impossibility. We can thus say that knowledge has a genuinely ontological, constitutional, or creative function, without in the least suggesting any sort of solipsistic idealism.196 Actual human knowing, on the other hand, attains in a creative manner to the very being of things precisely because it is a recapitulation at a cognitive level of the relation that co-constitutes things in their metaphysical identity and difference, and in their physical nearness and distance in space and time. This sense of knowing as the recapitulation of ontological relations, in turn, leads us to the second purpose of this understanding of space and time: specifically, it allows us to see that any generation of “wholes” or Gestalten is the bringing into being of a kind of truth, and that therefore the productive activity that gives rise to such Gestalten is itself a kind of knowing. Such praxis, in other words, is not simply the opposite of theoria. Rather, action has the inner form of knowing, just as knowing is a kind of creative action. To speak more generally, they are both inseparable aspects of the making and enjoying of culture. I will thus close this chapter with some reflections on the relationship between truth, work, culture, and community.

196. Aquinas himself, in fact, in De ver., 2, 14, asserts that God’s creative knowing of things is mediated in two ways: first, it is mediated by the divine will (an assertion that accords nicely with what Balthasar says about how God’s creative knowing of things in the divine ideas is in some respect identical to any particular thing’s “mission,” i.e., the task it is “sent” to achieve in the world, which we discussed in chapter 1); second, it is mediated by the secondary causality of creatures. Thus, if we interpret secondary causality as analogous to this primary causality, and therefore as analogous to creative knowing, then we can say that God creates things only by means of their creatively knowing each other. If we understand knowing, here, conversely in the analogous sense of creative relations (i.e., “Adam knew Eve and she bore a son . . .”), then we can justify once again the ontological role of mutual relation: the gift of being given. 250

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

According to Aquinas, truth is the final end of the entire cosmos.197 There is, in other words, nothing greater than truth, nothing to come after it. But if this is so, it becomes a matter of urgency to ask after its most basic form or structure. If the structure of truth is the immediate union of subject and object, a “union” wholly circumscribed by the soul of the subject—which is a common way of interpreting the notion that the terminus ad quem of truth is in the mind of the knower198—then the final end of the cosmos, its purpose or meaning, is to be concentrated into that single point of immediacy. Anything that remains outside is unintelligibility and untruth. Such a view of truth has its model in the system, if we take system to mean the ultimate reducibility of parts to a single first principle, such that the parts do not “add” anything whatsoever to that principle. This system is characterized by a pure immanence that generates both form and content “from below,” that is, from within itself. But this model will necessarily have two, diametrically opposed faces. Because it is a total immanent possession, there is nothing in the cosmos that resists identification with the self, and so the final form of truth will be the noesis - os. - On the other hand, because of the undeniable multiplicity of noese knowers in the universe, the whole will be at the same time a conglomeration of wholly unrelated “atom”-souls, each enclosing everything and therefore having no need of, and thus no openness to, the others.199 We see a radically different image emerge when we affirm that truth has its terminus ad quem in the Gestalt, such as it has been elaborated in this chapter. In this case, the “circle” of the subject-object relation does not come to a close in the subject alone. Instead, the circle closes in a concrete whole, and only therefore does it close in a certain way in the subject and in a certain way in the object. But to the extent that the “closing” happens primarily in what lies beyond both subject and object, the structure of truth itself has

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

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an inward openness to more which is precisely constitutive of its completion. With this affirmation, we come as far as we possibly can from an “identitarian” model of truth. If truth has its ultimate locus, that is, its resting place, in a concrete totality, the final form of truth can only be the most comprehensively concrete totality that there is: the concrete cosmos itself, now taken as a real Gestalt in itself and therefore as a community. In other words, while truth ending in the mind means truth is system, truth ending in the Gestalt means that truth is community. In this latter case, the “completion” of the truth relation becomes literally “objective”; the truth of things, their complete sense, is not something first possessed by the individual knower, but rather by the individual-transcending community, and is also possessed by the individual to the extent that he is immersed in the community. I will note some consequences of this understanding in conclusion. First, to say that the “ends” of truth come together in the Gestalt and ultimately in the community understood as a real Gestalt, makes truth “objective” in a way that does not prohibit but rather enables a profound freedom. The objectivity is not in the first place an abstract form possessed by individuals, like Kant’s “subjective universal,” but a concrete life that both contains and supports individuals in their cognitive life. With such support, the individual can play out the drama of seeking, losing, and finding ultimate meaning—in a way I will elaborate further in the following chapter—on a “stage” that allows the meaning to be genuinely meaningful. Second, “landing” truth in the concrete Gestalt entails a new way of understanding the relation between action and thought, a way that avoids both extrinsicism and reduction. We tend to think of “ideality” (the realm of thought) and “reality” (the realm of action) as, so to speak, parallel universes, which relate only by reflecting each other from a distance, and which would never make genuine “contact” even if each were extended into infinity. Thus, from this perspective, thoughts are true when they most perfectly “mirror” reality, and the passage “beyond mere ideas” into reality is made only by putting already-completed thoughts into action. In this respect, action is not intrinsic to thought as thought. If, by contrast, we exchange “intelligible essence,” taken in a wholly abstract sense, for the concrete Gestalt as the basic vessel of meaning, then the integrity of thought as thought is seen to occur only in its transcending itself into the radically different order of action. Likewise, we understand that action itself is not empty positivity or sheer physical movement: it is all the more action the more it is the bringing into being of intelligible form. The perspective offered by Balthasar becomes clearest in contrast with Hegel’s and Marx’s. On the one hand, Hegel deduces the real from the ideal: history becomes a necessary unfolding of the concept. Marx, on the 252

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other hand, deduces the ideal from the real: “ideology” is a superstructure, that is, it is a mere epiphenomenon of material conditions. In contrast to both, Balthasar’s Gestalt joins ideality and reality in a single whole, but it joins them as radically different orders. Thus, from this perspective, thought becomes relatively distinct thought only in transcending itself into reality (initially as a real word, but in principle in all forms of work and action), while action has its own relative autonomy only in being the realization of intelligibility. According to what we saw in the previous two sections, we might say that both ideality and reality are crystallized into integral, self-related wholes only in their inner self-surpassing relation to the other order. In other words, it follows that truth is intellectually grasped only in being concretely lived; as Heracleitus once said, truth is not something we merely know or speak but something we do.200 That which makes a thing intelligible is precisely the same thing that makes it transcend the (mere) intelligence—not in the sense of being beyond knowing, but more specifically in the sense of being immanent only to the thinking that is already beyond itself. The notion of truth as Gestalt affirms both the intelligibility of action and the action of intelligibility. Once we see the intrinsic relation between thought and action that is implied in the proposal of the Gestalt as the basic vessel of truth, action acquires a further significance in epistemology. In chapter 1, it was shown that action is not something that simply follows upon being, but it also in a certain sense gives rise to being: action is the self-manifestation of a thing because it is through action that a thing becomes what it is. In this chapter, we have seen that self-manifestation, as epiphany, is as it were the seed of truth: it is where truth begins. Moreover, we “filled out” the notion of epiphany as a complex event of the giving and receiving of self in relation to others. The point for us in this context is that this activity lies at the foundation of the very possibility of truth. Self-giving and receiving action is, so to speak, the proper atmosphere in which things can be true. Action becomes an epiphany in persevering work into which one pours one’s substance, in self-sacrificial deeds that attest to a reality beyond appearance, and in the personal relationships that one forms by committing, not one’s surfaces but one’s being. Such action, then, “builds up” community because it serves to form an intelligible whole, a Gestalt. In a community that thus comes about, the light of Being shines in and through the things of the world and allows them to show themselves as - aletheia 200. DK B 112: “sophonein arete- megiste kai sophie, legein kai poiein kata physin epaiontas.” Cf. St. Paul’s famous use of the word truth as a verb: aletheuein (Eph 4:15). Truth as Gestalt

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they are. Whenever, by contrast, the impetus for authentic self-gift in work is drained from a culture, whenever the cultural forms of epiphany are worn away, then the intelligibility of things begins to dim. I will take this theme up again in the next chapter. Here, I wish to insist that each of the elements discussed above have their final form in their function as part of concrete community. Thus, the otherwise abstract notion of space and time must be understood in terms of their most “filled” (concrete) sense: namely, as place and history.201 The “word” and “language” becomes dialogue; it finds its unity only “in the Gestalt of speech and answer.”202 Thought and action become the joint modes of the “figuring forth”203 of truth in the form of work. Culture as a whole, then, from this perspective, is understood in its most fundamental essence as the incarnation of truth, as its indispensable body. Human truth can no more be without culture than the human being can be without a body. Truth as community, in sum, does not overcome the “closedness” of system by seeking to avoid the “completion” of clear and stable forms or genuine wholes. Rather, it affirms that real transcendence, the openness to the ever-greater and thus the avoidance of system, is best conceived in terms of fruitfulness. But fruitfulness requires reciprocity; indeed, it requires community. One cannot be fruitful alone. The destruction of “fixed forms,” that is, of Gestalten, though it seems to represent the most direct route to the mystery of absence, to transcendence, in the long run fails that transcendence; it leads to the pure immanence of the “monological act,” precisely because it is only in the Gestalt that the other can be truly encountered as other. The more perfect the presence, that is, the more intimate the union, the more the result is transcendent of that union. It is in this respect, in truth, that the immanence of closure is not at odds with the openness of transcendence, even if that openness is in the end the final word. But if “openness” is the “final” word of truth—and if, as Balthasar puts it, truth forms conclusions only at the service of an openness for evergreater truth—then this final end is likewise the very first beginning: “truth is always an opening, not only to itself and in itself, but to further truth.”204 And this is ultimately because truth is not death, but life.

201. TL 1:204–6. 202. See ibid., 173. 203. Phillip Sidney translated Aristotle’s mimesis as a “figuring forth” of ideas, and he understood it as the basic function of poetry. See Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 25. 204. TL 1:39. 254

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4

Meta-anthropology The Person as Actor of Truth Aber vielleicht kann man den Menschen und sein gesammeltstes Abbild, den Künstler, nicht besser definieren, als indem man sagt, er sei das einzige Wesen, von dem zuviel verlangt werde.1 —Elizabeth Brock-Sulzer Chaque homme a été créé pour être le témoin et l’acteur d’un certain spectacle, pour en déterminer en lui le sens.2 —Paul Claudel

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

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

in this case, is the following: Is there a way that the irreducibly different tensions that make up any “relative” whole—that is, transcendence and immanence, infinity and finitude, sensibility and supersensibility, and so forth—can converge in a single, paradigmatic whole, such that their difference can be preserved without the danger of fragmentation? To put it another way, is there a fundamental unity capable of holding all the relative unities together? What we are looking for, in a word, is a foundation for the possibility of truth. The problem of grounding the possibility of truth has been often addressed in the history of philosophy, and so it is essential to point out how the nature of the problem in the present context differs from the usual way the problem is conceived. In modern philosophy, the problem was understood as that of finding a single principle into which all knowledge ultimately resolves, so that, once this principle is grasped with certainty, all knowledge falls into secure possession. If, however, the truth in question is not a system of interlocking propositions, each implying the others, but is in the end a Gestalt that is nonreductive by its very nature, a Gestalt that accepts unity only when it can see that unity shared among parts that are essentially different from each other, even while it refuses any difference that does not manifest a deeper unity, then the problem of foundations is not that of finding a unity to which all difference reduces, but rather of finding a perfect unity that at the same time liberates difference. If truth itself, as we saw in the last chapter, cannot be truth without subsisting within irreducible tensions, then the question of founding truth is the question of not only allowing the possibility of tensions, but of producing them. It has become a commonplace in recent philosophy to reject the need to establish a ground, or an “absolute foundation,” for truth. Such a need, it is said, is merely an expression of the modernist fetish for system, control, and domination. But, we may ask, in order to abandon this “fetish,” do we have to remain content with only partial, relative, and temporary “truths” without a foundation, which, in the final analysis, cannot be said to be truths at all? Do we have to concede from the outset the impossibility of establishing foundations in any other sense than that of modernist closed systems, or is there such a thing as a foundation that avoids the modernist tendency without surrendering its founding function? This chapter will attempt to show how Balthasar’s dramatic approach provides the possibility of establishing a foundation that is, in principle, perfect, which does not preclude but in fact ensures the various open tensions of existence. For Balthasar, the establishment of epistemological

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foundations is the establishment of tension, and it is indeed the necessary precondition for tensions. In Balthasar’s philosophy, the resolution of the problem of foundations, and therefore the establishment of basic tensions, falls in a particular way to the human person as a fundamental task. It is not that there would necessarily be no such tensions without man—such a possibility is no longer one we can raise. Rather, it is that man comes into the world at the intersection of tensions; they cut through him to the heart of his existence. He may therefore not remain indifferent to them: it is in every case too late. The nature of the tensions is such that man participates in them in the form of being called to decision—to personal decision, but with implications extending far beyond his own person. From Balthasar’s perspective, then, the problem of founding truth can be resolved only through dramatic engagement. In Balthasar’s terminology, the philosophy that sees man as “caught up” in the tensions that make up existence and as called upon to make a decision with respect to them, is essentially a meta-anthropology. He introduces this term in contrast to the classical term metaphysics.3 Metaphysics, in classical philosophy, was the endeavor to uncover the meaning of the world as a whole. According to Balthasar’s reading of the tradition, metaphysics fulfills this function, not only by determining the whole in its most basic respect (being as being), but even more fundamentally in its movement beyond the whole (metaphysics). Thus, he says, for the classical mind, physics stood in a representative way for the whole of the cosmos, and man was taken to be a part of that whole.4 The movement beyond this whole, then, was the “playing out” of the existence of the world against the backdrop of the divine. The world, from this perspective, is not merely a thing closed in on itself (physics); it receives its meaning in a tension toward what is essentially greater and essentially different from it: the 3. It is important to note that Balthasar does not mean to imply that metaphysics is thereby rendered obsolete. Unlike many strains of contemporary philosophy, Balthasar does not seek to “overcome” metaphysics, i.e., the inquiry into being as being. Indeed, as we have seen particularly in chapter 2, metaphysics plays an indispensable role in Balthasar’s thinking. The point of the term meta-anthropology, which Balthasar uses in fact only in two places (in addition to the final summary of his thought, which I have cited here, he mentions this term in the same sense in an interview with Angelo Scola, Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good [= TE] [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989], 24–25, where he points out, moreover, that he borrowed the term from his cousin Peter Henrici), is to set a particular dimension of his thought into relief. 4. RT, 2–3.

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cosmos is cosmos only against a horizon that is illuminated by the breaking-in of dawn.5 Meta-anthropology sets this “transcending” aspect of metaphysics into relief, within a somewhat different sense of the cosmos (and a very different sense of “physics,” which, in the modern world, means merely the cosmos taken in its material aspect): “For us, the cosmos perfects itself in man, who at the same time sums up the world and surpasses it. Thus, our philosophy will be essentially a meta-anthropology, presupposing not only the cosmological sciences, but also the anthropological sciences, and surpassing them toward the question of the being or the essence of man.”6 The key phrase in this text is the simultaneity of “summing up” and “surpassing.” Perhaps we should reverse their order. In any event, this simultaneity recalls Hegel’s incontrovertible insight that no limit, and therefore no determination of a definite whole, can be established except in passing beyond that limit in some respect.7 Moreover, it echoes a “pattern” we have encountered often in our analyses thus far, especially in our discussion of the meaning of Gestalt, and it reiterates this pattern, as it were, on a cosmological level. As we have seen, whenever we wish to grasp something that constitutes a genuine whole, some sort of leap is required. Every whole is an intersection of irreducibly different orders; it is a continuous whole only in the context of a radical discontinuity. This is true for the wholeness of any particular instance of truth, but it is equally true for the truth of the cosmos in general. The task of founding the truth of the whole and making it manifest will therefore necessarily entail in some

5. This explains the otherwise strange fact that Balthasar’s first volume on philosophy in the trilogy, entitled “The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity” (GL 4), deals at great length with the ancient poets and tragedians, and that it reads the pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato as standing within this tradition. Now, it is true, as Robert Sokolowski has shown, that the ancient world had an imperfect sense of the “essential difference” of the divine with respect to the world: as he puts it, the ancient mind was ignorant of the “Christian distinction”: see The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 12–30. It is therefore true to say that ancient thinkers were unable to articulate the analogia entis in an adequate manner. Nevertheless, an authentic “lived” sense of the essential difference between the divine and the cosmos, between the gods and men, is unmistakable in the piety of the ancient poets (in Homer and Aeschylus, for example). The authenticity of Homer’s piety and of his awe before the difference separating gods and men, for example, becomes especially clear when we contrast it with the “religion” of the Hellenistic age, which tended to degenerate into a worship of the cosmos or even a self-worship. 6. RT, 3 (emphasis mine). 7. One of Hegel’s most decisive criticisms of Kant was for his use of reason to determine the unsurpassable limits of reason. 258

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sense a leap beyond the whole. Now, we have also seen that the fact that it is the joining of discontinuous orders means that no whole can be established without movement, and that this movement requires concrete engagement and decision in time. In this respect, a meta-anthropology (no less, indeed, than a metaphysics if we understand the term in the way Balthasar uses it) cannot be constructed abstractly as a system of propositions or ideas, but it is essentially an event. If it is not an event, then it does not— structurally speaking—concern the meaning of the whole as a whole. To say that meta-anthropology is an event, however, does not mean that it is not a matter of thought. Rather, along the lines we saw at the end of the last chapter, it is a lived thought, a thinking that emerges from active engagement, and an activity that is intelligible, that is, a bearing of truth in analogy with the act of knowing. In dramatic terms, meta-anthropology is a role given to man; it is the call to make the tensions of existence concrete, and in this way to serve as the foundation of the ontological truth of the world. It is in this sense that the person is the “actor of truth.” We should note right from the outset that meta-anthropology is precisely not anthropomorphic in the sense of reducing the meaning of the whole to the meaning of man in himself. Balthasar insists, in the term metaanthropology, we “cannot neglect the meaning of ‘meta’ in any way,” indicating that an inquiry into the meaning of the world through man cannot come to an end in the human.8 As Bieler has said, “Balthasar . . . makes a case not simply for a metaphysics in the conventional sense, but for a metaanthropology that takes man in his freedom as the key to understanding being—without, however, slipping into an anthropological reduction.”9 Thus, the object of meta-anthropology, as we will treat it in this chapter, is not, as one might at first suppose, to consider the particular region of human being, set off against other possible ways of being; it is not to investigate the ethical dimension of human behavior in relation to the question of truth. Although such an investigation is valuable in itself, it would represent a digression with respect to our central theme, namely, the structure of truth. Instead, “meta-anthropology” implies that by virtue of a special relationship between man and being, essentially human structures are able to illuminate the meaning of being in itself, particularly in its truth

8. TE, 25. 9. Bieler, “Future of the Philosophy of Being,” 472. On the role of meta-anthropology in Balthasar’s thought, see also M. Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology,” 129–46; Pérez Haro, El misterio del ser, 99–100; and Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar, 84–100. See also Juan Sara, Forma y amor, 238–40. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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aspect. The focus on man in this chapter, then, is not in the first place an attempt to understand man but to understand the world. We saw in chapter 2, and specifically in the fourfold difference, that man and being illuminate each other reciprocally. Meta-anthropology is a thematizing of that mutual illumination. Now, it is especially the dramatic aspect of meta-anthropology that focuses this point. An “anthropology” in the conventional sense is an analysis of the essential structures of human being, what man is in himself, considered abstractly. However, Balthasar argues that we cannot get to the heart of the meaning of man through such an approach: “if we wanted to ask about man’s essence, we can do so only in the midst of his dramatic performance of existence. There is no anthropology but the dramatic.”10 To get to the heart of man, we cannot “remain” with man, but we must go beyond him (meta-anthropology), essentially because he has his meaning in a task that serves something greater than himself; in this case, it is the task of revealing the meaning of being. In the last chapter, we saw that freedom takes the form of being called to decision because it is essentially other centered. Meta-anthropology in general likewise has the form of being called to decision—that is, it has a dramatic form—because it is rooted in this ontological task. We thus see several points converge: man is “caught up” in the tensions that lie at the core of the world’s existence, and he reveals both his own meaning and the meaning of the whole in his living out of those tensions. The more deeply he enters into this specifically human task, the more dramatic his own existence becomes and the more he thereby bears the meaning of what lies beyond him. This is what allows Brock-Sulzer to define man as “the being of whom too much is asked.” In a discussion describing how human life finds its place at the intersection of the world’s tensions, Balthasar points to Kierkegaard as one who, in more recent times, recovered the ancient theme of man as the confinium, the one who stands at the place where the world’s tensions meet: “I live on the confinium of existence, like a night watchman, close to the powder keg, a loaded weapon in my hand, in the midst of the storm.”11 Meta-anthropology, thus conceived, carries a certain ontological presupposition, namely, that human being is so to speak the place wherein the cosmos is both “summed up” and “surpassed.”12 This theme is, of course, 10. TD 2:335. 11. Kierkegaard, cited without reference in TD 2:362, n. 49. 12. This is not to say that the whole cosmos (totus et totaliter) is “contained” in man such that he has nothing any longer to receive from other beings, i.e., that the cosmos does not likewise represent an irreducible positivity with respect to him (in other words, a “more” that is not contained by him). The qualification of this notion is, indeed, the matter of the present paragraphs. 260

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not new with Balthasar but has its roots in the tradition,13 even if Balthasar interprets it in a particularly dramatic way. He elaborates this fundamental presupposition of meta-anthropology in the Theodrama, under the title of man as “rooted in the cosmos.”14 There is an essential polarity that we can pick out of this rather dense and complicated section, which serves as a nice summary of this basic presupposition. On the one hand, Balthasar explains, in reference to many thinkers in the philosophical tradition, the basic forces of the cosmos come to expression in man. The human being represents “the epitome of the cosmic tensions and oppositions.”15 In this respect, man is wholly immersed in the cosmos; indeed, he is a part of it, even if a very peculiar part. According to Balthasar, it is therefore possible to understand man in terms of the cosmos, that is, “from below,” as the highest (or one of the highest) links of the chain of being. He does not stand apart from the tensions of the cosmos, but is always already involved within them, and is even in some respect a function of them. On the other hand, it is also possible to look down “from above” in order to understand the human being. Man is not only an expression of the forces of the cosmos, but is a being capable of fashioning these forces in a certain sense from outside of them, as one who transcends them. As Aristotle and Aquinas put it, the soul of man is quodammodo omnia.16 There is a sense in which man can comprehend the universe “inside” himself. If we wanted to formulate man’s being “rooted in the cosmos” but not being reducible to that cosmos as a succinct polarity, we could say that, on the one hand, man lies within the cosmos, and on the other hand, the cosmos lies within man. This polarity is essentially what is expressed in the classical notion of man as the “recapitulation” of the universe, which is a notion Balthasar affirms at several points in his aphorisms: “The Fathers like to stress the fact that man sums up and sets free all of nature and beings in himself.”17 Moreover, to describe this mediating position of man, in and beyond the world, Balthasar refers to a formulation by John Scotus Erigena, who spoke of man specifically as a tertium mundum, a “third

13. This theme was especially common in the Church Fathers, and in particular, Maximus the Confessor. Balthasar discusses this theme in Maximus at great length in KL, 171–75, under the title, man as “microcosm.” 14. TD 2:346–55. 15. Ibid., 354. 16. Balthasar refers to this text in both authors in ibid., 353. 17. GW, 17. See also GW, 19: “Dead nature (the mineral realm) attains to its qualitative variegation and depth only in the life of the vegetable and animal realms, and this life attains to its objectivity only in the spiritual realm. Here we have the basis for the possibility of nature’s being redeemed along with man.” Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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cosmos.”18 This polarity is the necessary presupposition for Balthasar’s meta-anthropology, and in fact it is another way of expressing its fundamental principle, namely, that man sums up and surpasses the world. Man must do both—he must be a “function” of the cosmos, but in a way that transcends it—if, through his activity, he is to reveal the meaning, not only of himself but of the whole. Neither side of the polarity can be reduced to the other, even if they are intrinsically related. Once again, such a polarity can subsist only dramatically; it must be carried out as a task. How are we to understand this task? There are, of course, countless possible ways we could approach an answer to that question. However, since we are dealing most basically with the problem of truth, I will approach it in the specific sense of its being an “epistemological” task, or a function of establishing the foundation that makes the truth of the world possible. Nevertheless, it is important to keep the “cosmological” scope of meta-anthropology in mind as we proceed, insofar as the epistemological dimension is embedded within that context. Indeed, what especially characterizes Balthasar’s philosophy in general is a refusal to separate particular issues from the whole that comprehends them, to the extent that this relation to the whole brings out certain dimensions in the particular issue that would otherwise have remained hidden. And this is what is going on in the present case. Thus, we will see, in the first main section of this chapter (“Body and Soul in Human Being and Knowing”), that the “cosmic tensions and oppositions” that man epitomizes are most directly expressed in the irreducible body-soul polarity that constitutes man’s being. I will discuss this polarity in itself, and then in relation to the reciprocal role of the mind and the senses in the act of knowing. The polarity of spirit (mind) and senses, indeed, corresponds to the irreducible polarity that characterizes the phenomenon of truth as Gestalt. Specifically, Gestalt is a complex interrelationship of visible and invisible elements or, we might say, sensible and intellectual elements; correlatively, man as a knower is himself a complex relationship of senses and spirit. This interrelationship will be characterized as a dynamic played out between transcendence and immanence in relation to the world. These two aspects are radically irreducible to each other and at the same time intrinsically related. In a sense, the whole of this chapter will be an attempt to resolve this relationship in a nonreductive manner. On the one hand, we will see that the two anthropological principles, body (senses) and soul (spirit), need to be intrinsically mediated, which

18. John Scotus Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue of St. John, cited in TL 2:206. 262

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is a role that will be played by the imagination or heart (as we have already briefly mentioned in the last two chapters). On the other hand, we will see how these principles cannot be resolved “internally” unless they are also resolved “externally,” in terms of what Balthasar refers to as dramatic engagement.19 This will be the topic of the second main section (“Death, Martyrdom, and Drama: The Foundation of Truth”). We could describe the engagement as the attempt, anthropologically, to bring “inside” (soul) and “outside” (body) to adequation; or we might say it is the work, or the act, of resolving transcendence and immanence in a concrete unity. In a sense, we have seen many analogous examples of such a resolution, everything from language and logic to simple motion. The point here, however, is that the analogous examples, precisely because they are analogous, need to be grounded in a paradigmatic instance. Through comparison with insights from Plato and Heidegger, I will look at the epistemological implications of the dramatic art form as well as the phenomenon of martyrdom. In the section “Status Vitae as Paradigm of Dramatic Gestalt,” then, I will present what can be called the fundamental instance of existential drama in the thinking of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the choosing of a state of life, a definitive life-form (Lebensgestalt). In particular, I will look at marriage as a Gestalt. Again, the focus will be on the human institution not for its own sake, but rather as it is one of the paradigmatic foundations for the real experience of truth. What would otherwise seem to be a phenomenon utterly heterogeneous to the question of truth—namely, the definitive commitment of freedom to another human being for the sake of founding an institution of communal life—will be seen to have an indispensable epistemological role once we make the move from truth understood as the coordinating of propositions to truth as the coming to view of the infinite in a concrete Gestalt. This chapter in a sense represents the completion of chapter 2, the “anthropological” chapter on consciousness. If the governing image of that chapter was birth, the predominant image guiding this chapter is death. Indeed, Balthasar shows that historically speaking, death has always presented the horizon that makes drama possible.20 Moreover, he claims that the phenomenon of death most directly illuminates the paradox of spirit and senses, transcendence and immanence, that lies as an irreducible polarity within man, since it reveals in a dramatic way that this polarity is not 19. “[T]he unity of the contrary movements can only arise out of a dramatic engagement.” TL 2:364. 20. In laying out the fundamental themes of a “theodramatics,” Balthasar accords ample space to the role of death: see TD 1:369–408. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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a static ordering of principles, but a tension-filled mystery that is both veiled and unveiled when man confronts his ultimate limits: “Man seems to be built according to a polarity, obliged to engage in a polarity, always seeking complementarity and peace in the other pole. And for that very reason, he is pointed beyond his whole polar structure. He is always found crossing the boundary, and thus he is defined most exactly by that boundary with which death brutally confronts him.”21 Death illuminates the anthropological tensions because it is the point where flesh and spirit both come together and come apart. In addition, insofar as death represents so to speak the final frontier of human existence, any question of ultimacy must eventually reckon with the question of death. Since truth, as we shall see, cannot finally be truth unless it has its roots in the ultimate, the question of truth necessarily runs up against the question of death. Kierkegaard once wrote: “every man is more or less afraid of the truth, and that is the voice of his humanity. . . . Between man and truth lies death—that is why we are all more or less afraid.”22 Between man and truth lies death: there is something literally true about this phrase, not because truth comes only in the “afterlife,” but because the inner structure of truth has within it a radical rupture or discontinuity, which in a genuine sense means death. To “cross over” this radical rupture without reductively closing it is to grapple with, and indeed in some sense internalize, the question of death. When we say, then, that the person is the actor of truth, that he, being himself an intersection of transcendence and immanence, has the task of bringing about a coincidence of inside and outside in a nonreductive way, and thus of bearing fruit in an “absolute” sense—that is, of bearing fruit that is infinitely greater than he is—it means that he must confront death and establish a relationship to it. The confronting of death, or, better, the being-confronted by death, is an essential aspect of the dramatic structure of truth. And yet this beingconfronted by death is not (merely) a violent imposition on man, but stems 21. TD 2:353. In this passage, Balthasar is speaking about not only the spirit/body polarity but also about that between individual and community, and then the most central one between man and woman. (On the centrality of the man/woman polarity, see Gardner and Moss, 76–79. Balthasar himself affirms this centrality in TD 2:365. Although they agree with the pivotal position of this polarity, Gardner and Moss raise strong objections to Balthasar’s understanding of woman in relation to man, and they use their objection to unravel fundamental aspects of his theology.) Because my concern is in the first place with the epistemological dimension of anthropology, I will focus on the first polarity between body and soul, and I will address the other two only in an indirect manner. 22. Kierkegaard, Tagebücher, vol. 4 (Düsseldorf and Cologne: 1970), 213, cited in Bieler, “Future of the Philosophy of Being,” 457. 264

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

Body and Soul in Human Being and Knowing The theme of the relationship between body and soul is one of the most basic in the history of philosophy, and there are, indeed, countless aspects under which this theme has appeared: there is the anthropological issue in itself, namely, as the question of the unity of the human being as a bodysoul “composite”; the ethical question of bringing the two “parts” into harmony; the theological question of the disorder introduced into the bodysoul relationship through sin; the Christological issue of the relationship in the person of Christ between the divine and the human nature, which is made up of body and soul; or the question of the role each plays in man’s perception of reality. Balthasar himself takes up all of these various aspects of the theme in many places in his corpus. It is clear that in a certain respect, none of these aspects are simply indifferent to the others. However, because of the nature of our theme, and the scope of the book in general, I will focus on one particular issue, which has two dimensions. The first is the nature of the body-soul relationship in terms of man’s general relation to the world. The background of this discussion is man’s simultaneous rootedness in, and transcendence of, the cosmos, which I have just presented above. The second dimension is the corresponding relationship between the spirit and the senses in terms of man’s specifically “cognitive” relation to the world.23

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

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It is helpful to note from the outset how these dimensions belong together. If truth is of its essence a “nonsensible” reality, then the body cannot but be conceived as a hindrance to the soul, or at least as something that does not represent a positive “aid” to knowing. Given a basically “abstract” sense of truth, the general ethical approach one will take will either be to find the way best to “free” the soul from the body or to seek an ideal of “untroubled rest” in the soul’s domination of the body.24 Conversely, it may be the case that the universal experience of the “opposition” between the soul and the body—which, according to Balthasar, not only Plato but also Aristotle, the “eudaemonist,” observes25—as well as the difficulties in the nonChristian world, which I mentioned in chapter 1, of conceiving of a unity that is non-reductive, has led to a tendency of body-soul dualism, which in turn has encouraged a more abstract sense of truth. Thus, Balthasar says, “Extra-Biblical religious philosophy professes a dualism, which, in spite of all its ideals of harmony and kalokagathia, when it does not actually consider the body a ‘tomb’ (Pythagoras), is at heart ready to cast it off like Socrates and with Menander looks out for a ‘better lodging.’ ”26 The point, in any event, is that there is a necessary correspondence between how one understands the body-soul relationship, and how one conceives the object of knowledge—and, therefore, the nature of truth. If truth finally occurs “in the mind,” then the body is most ideally left behind, or at best it is included as an afterthought. If, by contrast, truth finally occurs in the concrete Gestalt, which represents a paradoxical relationship between the hidden and the visible, then it will follow that one cannot participate in it except “body and soul.” In other words, it will follow that the more the body is left behind, the more the vision of things as they really are will be impaired, even if it is equally (and far more obviously) true that vision is impaired if the soul or the mind is somehow improperly subordinated to the body. Since we spoke of the relation between the visible and the “more-than-visible” elements of the Gestalt in terms of the relation of transcendence and

24. Plato is the one who most clearly ties the ethical issues of the body-soul relation to the question of achieving a clear perception of reality: see, for example, Phaedo, 65c. 25. Balthasar refers to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 7.1145a16–1145b21, where Aristotle concedes man’s “wicked, uncontrollable nature,” even in the context of an ethical system founded on the intrinsic “informing” of the passions rather than their elimination: see TD 2:359. 26. TL 2:204: “während erst recht außerbiblische religiöse Philosophie einem Dualismus huldigt, der trotzt aller Harmonie- und Kalokagathie-Ideale den Leib wenn nicht geradezu für ein ‘Grab’ der Seele hält (Pythagoras), so ihn doch wie Sokrates gern abstreift und mit Menander nach einer ‘bessern Herberge’ Ausschau hält.” 266

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

Body and Soul Because the intelligence (soul) is ordered to the act of being, Balthasar says, man experiences a kind of inner infinity with respect to the things of the world that he contemplates: just as the act of being transcends the totality of particular beings, such that it can never be exhausted or even barely “tapped into” by them, so too is man, as capax entis (having the capacity to apprehend being), the home of endless possibilities, stretching infinitely beyond what is actual.27 In this, Balthasar says, there arises the almost overwhelming temptation in man to identify himself, or this aspect of himself, with God. However, all things created are caught within polar tensions. The act of being is thus incomplete in itself because it does not subsist in itself but can come to subsistence only in something that is really other (distinctio realis), namely, the essence or the concretely existing being. By itself, in spite of its superactuality (which indeed is impossible to conceive by itself), being would be sheer emptiness. We might think of the related phenomenon of the emptiness of human freedom, considered in isolation from its being crystallized through a determinate object.28 In a manner analogous to the actus essendi requiring an “other” in order to subsist concretely, the human person does not “subsist” as pure (infinite) spirit, but rather finds himself always already embodied. If the first aspect in a sense reveals man’s transcendence of the world, this second—man’s embodiment—shifts the accent to man’s being a part of the world, and in this respect his immanence within it. In TL 1, Balthasar puts it thus: “Simply in order for man to be at all, there could never be a moment when he was not already taken out of himself into the world. His body belongs in equal degrees to the world and to him; from the very outset his senses are just as much at home in things (indeed, in a certain sense are these things themselves) as in him; and it is only thanks to the surrounding world that his spirit awakens to itself.”29

27. See TL 2:209–10. 28. Balthasar gives a brief account of Aquinas’s notion of freedom in relation to his metaphysics in TD 2:224–27. 29. TL 2:210: “Um überhaupt zu sein, [ist er] immer schon der an die Welt Entäußerte. Sein Leib ist ebensosehr zu ihn wie zur Welt gehörig, seine Sinne sind vom vornherein ebensosehr bei den Dingen (ja in gewissem Sinn diese selbst), als sie bei ihm sind; und einzig von der ihn umgebundenen Welt her erwacht sein Geist zu sich selber.” Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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Balthasar here suggests a point we already saw in the last chapter, namely, that the spirit never has to find a way to externalize itself as something that is already complete in itself. Rather, it always finds itself already externalized, and finds its inner completion in that externalization, since the spirit is always embodied. Moreover, because the body, as the externalization of the spirit, belongs “in equal degrees” both to the surrounding world and to the spirit, the body represents a kind of expropriation of the spirit. The fact that the spirit is always already externalized in some way in the body, since the body, as external, has a certain “belongingness to the world,” or perhaps “worldliness,” the body itself, from the beginning, is an intersection of tensions. It is in this sense the place where self and other encounter each other. We will return to this aspect shortly. For the moment, it is important first to see that corporeality represents the spirit’s rootedness or immanence within the world. This is, of course, a classical theme, and Balthasar expounds aspects of it in his treatment of the spirit/body tension in TD 2. We would be tempted to formulate the tension of the body-soul relationship, in light of what we just saw: thus, man, as spirit, transcends the world, but as flesh he is in the world. However, in this all-too-obvious formulation of the body-soul relationship, there is in fact no tension, to the degree that tension involves some genuine mutual interdependence. Here, the soul is not dependent on the body, but relates to it as a (temporary) obstacle. Specifically, in order for there to be a genuine body-soul polarity, there must be some way in which the soul needs the body in order to be soul. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s notion of soul as forma corporis, has asserted that the soul is joined to the body, not for the body’s sake but for the soul’s sake,30 and moreover he has affirmed that the soul is more like God with the body than without the body.31 The reasons he gives are that it is the nature of the soul to be embodied, and, more specifically, the soul has a certain dependence on sensible images, and therefore on the body’s senses, in order to know, which means that the soul needs the body to accomplish what is most proper to it as soul. These explanations would remain unconvincing, however, without a further context, not least of all because they offer more a negative explanation (that is, they do not show the soul’s intrinsic need for the body: to say simply that the body is necessary to the soul and nothing else does not preclude the possibility that it is merely a necessary evil or a faute de mieux instrument) than a positive explanation, that is, one showing the positive contribution

30. See Aquinas, ST 1:76, 1, ad 6. 31. Aquinas, De pot. 5, 10 ad 5. Balthasar cites this quotation in TL 2:207. 268

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the body makes to the soul. Balthasar’s philosophy, in fact, presents certain principles that serve just this purpose. Accordingly, I will briefly mention the points Balthasar makes in terms of the nature of the body-soul relationship, and then follow this in the section “Spirit and Senses” with a discussion of their relation in the act of knowing. If the spirit and body, according to Balthasar, are not to represent merely externally related principles, then it must be the case that the emergence of spirit amidst the natural forms of the world—that is, the emergence of spirit in man—is not something that occurs simply from above, as something added from outside nature; it must have some anticipations already within the material world. In other words, we must be able to see, not only that the (human) spirit always finds itself embodied, as mentioned above, but in fact that matter itself is always “ensouled”— that it always already has something analogous to spirit in it. In The Truth of the World, Balthasar characterizes these analogies at great length in the various “stages” of being—mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and angelic being—under the rubric of the “freedom of the object.”32 It is thus possible to see man in a sense not merely as a “new” kind of creature, but also as the “recapitulation” of prior stages.33 In this context, Balthasar refers to Aquinas’s notion that the human soul recapitulates ascending cosmic forms, and he refers to Augustine’s teaching (borrowed, apparently, from the Stoic notion of logoi spermatikoi) about the rationes seminales, the seeds of reason in all things, which means that there is nothing in itself that is simply foreign to the spirit.34 Yet, Balthasar goes on to say that the human capacity for reflection (reditio completa) and self-presence is utterly unique,35 and it divides man from everything else he will encounter in the cosmos by an insuperable chasm.36 If, in the first case, spirit lies in matter—and therefore the soul lies in the body—in the second case, the spirit stands over matter, and the soul stands over the body, such that it can relate to the body as its instrument. Balthasar characterizes these two, irreducibly different principles by saying that while the first represents the “higher” being produced

32. TL 1:84–102. 33. TD 2:356. 34. Ibid. Incidentally, if we admit something like rationes seminales, there is a way that we can affirm the attempt in modern philosophy to see the mind as an epiphenomenon of the body without leading to a materialistic reduction: specifically, because matter itself is not “materialistic.” This is not to say, however, that, by itself, “mind as epiphenomenon of the body” is an adequate formulation of the reality, as we shall see. 35. TD 2:207–10. 36. Ibid., 356. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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by the “lower” as its goal, the second represents the higher as “producing” the lower, insofar as, being the final meaning of the lower, it is what first sets it in motion. These two principles give rise, then, to different ethical “shapes.” Soul “in” body suggests the “spiritualizing” of matter by “ethicizing” it, that is, informing it with reason from within; while soul “over” body suggests the “control” of the passions “from the outside.”37 Now, these principles on their own are far from sufficient to provide an adequate anthropology. The first, the notion of ascending forms from “nature” to “spirit,” is unable to account for the “teleology” of this evolution, while the second, the affirmation of a radical discontinuity between spirit and matter, cannot account for their intercourse at all except in terms of some kind of fall. Furthermore, while these two principles might affirm on some grounds the (negative) necessity of the soul’s being united to the body, we have yet to see a positive reason for that unity, and to that extent we have yet to see a genuine body-soul polarity or tension. In order to affirm a real tension, in fact, we cannot remain with the formulation that spirit represents man’s transcendence and matter represents man’s immanence. Although Balthasar does not raise this point in his discussion of the spirit-body tension in TD 2, he offers resources for a further step in other places. We already saw in the passage quoted above from TL 2 that the body itself is not merely the place where man is immanent within the world, but it in fact already contains within itself the tension of encounter and therefore of both transcendence and immanence. This point comes out even more forcefully in the Epilog: My body is an ungraspable border-zone [unbegreifliche Zwischenzone] between me and the world. It belongs to me not in the manner of an object, but “as if it were a part of me”—and yet at the same time it resembles a piece of the external world, a fact that is constantly being called to my attention (as for example in the case of an amputation). Insofar as it belongs to me, it is that by which I—often clumsily— run up against other bodies and only thereby become aware of the fact that the world, and other beings in their free otherness, are things that my spirit cannot bring under its control (“Thoughts live lightly alongside one another. / But things knock gruffly against each other in space”).38

37. Ibid., 363. 38. E, 81: “Mein Leib ist eine unbegreifliche Zwischenzone zwischen mir und der Welt. Er gehört mir nicht wie ein Gegenstand, sondern ‘als wär’s ein Stück von mir’— und doch ist er auch so etwas wie ein Stück der Außenwelt, was mir immerfort (zum 270

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This seemingly simple idea has enormous implications in relation to classical philosophy. First of all, Balthasar describes the body as a boundary or border zone and, what is more, as ungraspable. The body is, in a certain respect, the place where the person becomes immanent to the world. However, it is so not as an “instrument” of the soul, but, as belonging in a certain sense as much to the surrounding world as to the person whose body it is (although, of course, this “mutual ownership” is by no means symmetrical), it “extends” in a sense further than the soul. It is unbegreifliche because it “transcends” the soul for exactly the same reason that the body represents the “expropriation” of the person, his “externalization” into what is not he. Thus, the body is the transcendence of the person so that he may be immanent to the world. But that is not all. There is another sense in which the body is not only immanence within the world, but also transcendence with respect to other things in the world. In contrast to spirit, it is the particular characteristic of matter not to allow two things to be in the same place at the same time. The “externality” of matter in fact in some respect excludes the possibility of two things lying inside, i.e., being immanent within, one another. By virtue of matter, things remain separate from and thus other than one another. Indeed, Balthasar points out that it is precisely the “running up against” another, which occurs only because one has a body, that one comes to be aware of the otherness of the world. This awareness is, in fact, simultaneously a recognition that the other is other than “me” and that “I” am other than the other. Thus, the mediation of the body is essential for the affirmation we saw Balthasar make earlier, namely, that self-consciousness and consciousness of the world grow in tandem: they do so because they turn, as it were, on the same point. In any event, we could sum up by saying that the body represents in an indispensable sense the means by which man makes contact with the world, establishing both its transcendence and immanence to him, and his transcendence and immanence to it. Moreover, as we have begun to see, it is likewise an oversimplification to say that the soul represents man’s transcendence of the world; it would not be false to say that spirit is even more immanent within the world than matter. If matter is “other-excluding” externality, spirit is “otherincluding” internality: in spirit, two people can be in the same “place”

Beispiel bei einer Amputation) in Erinnerung gerufen wird. Sofern er mir gehört, ist er das, wodurch ich—oft unsanft—an andere Leiber stoße und dabei erst innewerde, daß die Welt, die Andern in ihrem freien Anderssein für meinen Geist unbeherrschbar sind. (‘Leicht beieinander wohnen die Gedanken, / Doch hart im Raume stoßen sich die Sachen.’)” Balthasar does not give a reference for the verse. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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at the same time. It is in fact precisely the spirit’s transcendence of the world that allows it to be immanent within the world. As we have seen before, one of Balthasar’s most commonly cited phrases from Aquinas is the one Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle: the soul is in a certain sense all things. It is this “elasticity” of the soul that allows it not only to gaze at the world, but to penetrate and thus in some sense to become its objects. In Platonic terms, it is the transcendence of the nous that allows it to have a perfect identity with its objects.39 In Heidegger’s language, it is the spirit’s nihilating (nichten, “not being” or “nothing” as a verbal noun) which is both its “transcendence” and what allows it to be radically receptive to the other, to let it be.40 Citing Helmut Plessner, Balthasar explains that man, as opposed to the animals that are “centric,” is always “ex-centric” precisely because of his spiritual nature. He can be in himself only by simultaneously being in another.41 Spirit means having a center both inside and outside, as it were. In fact, we already saw something similar in chapter 2. Analogous to what Balthasar said about how the body belongs simultaneously to me and to the world, we saw that the same thing can be said about the “structure” of consciousness: it too belongs simultaneously to me and to the world because of its intentional nature. Moreover, just as being embodied means that man is always already outside of himself, so too is the spirit an always already being with another. It, too, as we saw earlier, represents the “expropriation” of the self, because the most fundamental act of the spirit, the act that in fact constitutes the spirit as spirit, is ek-stasis. Thus, it is not simply the case that spirit is (inner) rest while the body is (external) motion;42 rather, the situation is far more complex: there is a sense in which spirit is rest and the body is motion, but there is also a sense in which the body is rest and the spirit is motion. In short, far from merely identifying the body with immanence and the spirit with transcendence, it would be more appropriate to characterize their relation in terms Balthasar uses in another context: the spirit is indwelling transcendence (immanenierende Transzendenz) while the body is transcending immanence (transzendierende Immanenz).43 39. See Balthasar’s account of this notion in Plotinus in GL 4:292–93. 40. See GL 5:435–38. 41. TD 2:339. 42. We see this notion, for example, in Aristotle, De Anima, 1.3. 43. Of course, we could just as legitimately reverse the designations, i.e., soul as transcending immanence and body as “immanenting” transcendence, depending on the perspective. Balthasar uses these phrases in his brief elaboration of the God-world relationship in TL 2:76–79, as a way of overcoming a dialectical dualism. 272

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Spirit and Senses We have just seen that even in their difference, the body and soul do not simply stand over against each other as dialectical opposites, but rather they represent in principle analogous movements. I will now sharpen the sense of their interrelationship by looking at how they function in relation to each other in the act of knowing. In the last chapter, we saw that truth involved a paradoxical simultaneity of mediation and immediacy, transcendence and immanence, and sensibility and supersensibility. This sense of truth will provide the guiding thread for our discussion. The argument is basically that a simple separation between the mind and the senses leads to a false immediacy on both sides—both an intellectual immediacy in relation to a purely “ideal” object and a sensual immediacy in relation to a purely “real” or “material” object. Both of these immediacies conspire to undermine a real relation to the world as a genuine whole, a genuine “other.” To avoid this problem, it will be necessary to see that both the intellect and the senses make a positive contribution to the single act of knowing, and they are therefore mutually dependent on each other even in their irreducible difference. In one of his aphorisms, Balthasar states that in a certain respect, ethical activity, in relation to the good, is more transcendent than intellectual activity, in relation to the true. While the good, in the end, calls for an expropriating deed from the one who loves, the thinker can remain “at home” even in his most daring intellectual adventures.44 In writing this, he has in mind, no doubt, Aquinas’s notion that “knowledge is of things as they exist in the knower, but the will is related to things as they exist in themselves.”45 Aquinas, in turn, draws his insight from Aristotle’s related assertion that sensation apprehends its objects outside while knowledge apprehends its objects inside the soul.46 Now, if we were to suspend for

44. GW, 41: “Thomas Aquinas says that truth resides primarily in the thinking spirit but goodness primarily in the thing strived for. It follows from this that ethical transcendence is much more radical than theoretical transcendence. When we are engaged in thought, we always remain ‘at home within us’ even in our most extravagant speculations. When we are engaged in action, however, our whole self risks being lifted from its hinges. It is not sufficient to know what lies beyond our self; everything in us must, so to speak, be thrown out of our windows.” 45. Aquinas, ST 1:19, 3, ad 6. 46. Aristotle, De Anima, 2.5.417b20–24. Relating the passage from Aristotle and the one from Aquinas requires that we connect somehow the operation of the senses with the operation of the will. Although it would be out of place at this point to make an argument for the connection, we may at least consider the fact that, fundamentally, they both refer to the subject’s relation to concrete individuals. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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a moment what we saw in the last chapter, we would say that there is a certain plausibility to this assertion, especially given that one can know something in its physical absence, while sensing an absent object is impossible. Nevertheless, it is clear that if we leave the affirmation as it stands, it cannot avoid falling apart into a dualism. If it is the case that the senses and the intellect apprehend their objects by moving in “opposite” directions, it would imply, for example, that the senses have no intrinsic need for the intellect whatever in order to reach their own object, because if they did, the senses would have to share in some fundamental respect in the intellect’s movement. Further, if the senses have no need for the intellect to complete their own movement, they cannot be said to be intrinsically related to the intellect. Indeed, they would be in this case merely extrinsically related; they would relate to the intellect, if at all, only in addition to the movement that is proper to the senses as senses. If the intellect had any intrinsic relation to the senses, it would have to share in their movement. But this would mean that the movement proper to each could not simply be the opposite of the other. Rather, each movement would somehow have to include the movement of the other within itself (without reducing it to its own movement). To put it another way, in order to be intrinsically related to each other, each would have to mediate the other in the attainment of its proper object. Thus, on the one hand, the senses, insofar as they joined with their object, would in one respect have an immediate relation to that object, and on the other hand, the relation would not be merely immediate. We are speaking about the operation of the senses and the intellect as movements; indeed, they would have to be movements of some analogous sort inasmuch as they represent the “joining” of things that are different from each other—that is, subject and object—whether that joining takes place primarily on the side of the subject or on the side of the object. In either case, there is a starting point, one could say, and a goal. And because the two points are different, there must be something analogous to a movement connecting them. Now, the moment we remove the movement character of the operation, we are no longer able to speak of them as the joining of things that are different. But this is precisely what happens when we take the relationship established in the exercise of the operation as merely immediate. In this case, once the senses reached the object, the object would no longer be an object that retains any otherness with respect to the senses; it would collapse into a mere identity. In fact, it would not make any difference in the end whether we understood this immediacy to be identically the object or identically the senses—in either case we would no longer have an object for the 274

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senses. The same argument could, of course, be made with respect to the operation of the intellect. Now, to “reintroduce” movement into the operation of the intellect and the senses, it is not sufficient, on the one hand, to interpose a new object of the same order, nor, on the other hand, to interrupt the movement through the intrusion of an object of an alien order. In the first case, the attempt would leave in place the assumption that the relationship is essentially immediate, and it would seek to overcome this static immediacy through another static immediacy. But a series of static moments is not movement: Zeno, as we saw at the beginning of the last chapter, demonstrated that such a conception of motion is in fact a logical impossibility. Our second case is hindered by the same assumption. Because it attempts to overcome a static immediacy simply by breaking it off in relation to an order that is simply alien, it likewise abandons the first to its immediacy for the sake of another immediacy. In other words, it is not enough, for example, to bring motion into the act of sensing by affirming first a completed act of sensing, and then an act of intellection, and then once again an act of sensing.47 Just like before, such an approach would fall into the pseudomovement of a series of static moments. Balthasar’s approach, by contrast, affirms that each intrinsically mediates the other in its immediacy. The order of the senses, thus, enjoys a continuous motion in the exercise of its proper operation precisely within the radical discontinuity of its relation to the order of intellection. The leap beyond the senses, in other words, is immanent to the working of the senses within its own order of activity. Similarly, the activity of the intellect does not simply float above the sensible world in a parallel world of separate ideas, but it, too, requires a leap, a radical disjunction—indeed, we could use the term expropriation again in this context—not in order to attain some object other than its own, that is, a sensible object, which would represent a confusion of orders, but precisely to be intellect. The radical disjunction of transcendence into another order is what preserves its own integrity and graceful continuity. This transcendence, just because it is a real transcendence, does not occur next to, but rather as immanent within, its own order. To summarize, then, we could say that the only way to affirm a real unity within difference and difference within unity of the intellect and senses in relation to their proper objects is to affirm that the senses mediate the intellect to itself while the intellect mediates the senses to themselves.

47. This example reveals the danger of thinking of the process of sensation, abstraction, and conversio as a series of separate moments. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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We are accustomed to think of the intellect as transcendent with respect to the senses. Although this is true in some profound sense, the argument thus far has led us to see that it is also the case that the senses are in some decisive respect transcendent with respect to the intellect. This means not only that they are “other” than the intellect, but that they are so in a way that is intrinsically necessary to the intellect. If the intellect extends further in some respect than the senses, there is another respect in which the senses extend further than the intellect. It is worth emphasizing this point because it is not an aspect that has received much attention in the tradition, although we see how crucial it is. If the intellect were different from the senses, and the senses not different from the intellect, the intellect could “include” within itself everything that the senses might contribute to the act of knowing, without having to “step out” of its own order. The intellect would have everything that the senses have, “and then some.” Now, it is not that this claim is simply false. Indeed, the real paradox of the mutual transcendence of orders requires that we see what the senses add in knowledge, not as something “else” within the order of the intellect but as the transcendence of a new order. In this respect, “abstractly” speaking, within its own order, the intellect “has” everything that the senses have. What the intellect precisely lacks, however, is the otherness of the radically different order of the senses. Therefore, while it is true in some sense that the intellect has everything the senses have within its own order, and then some, it is equally true that the senses have everything the intellect has within their own order, and then some. However, as we have seen, neither the senses nor the intellect can remain “in their own order” in their concrete operation if that operation is to be a genuine movement, which means if the operation is to attain an object that remains an object. Or, to put it more adequately, the operations remain within their own order, but only within the context of a radical, discontinuous leap into another order. This is what it means to say that the senses mediate the intellect to itself and the intellect mediates the senses to themselves in their concrete operation. It is also what it means to say that the intellect and the senses are mutually transcendent of each other within their mutual, but asymmetrical, interdependence. Thus, if the intellect could include the order of the senses simply within itself; if, that is, the intellect transcended the senses without the senses likewise transcending the intellect, then the intellect would arrive at a “merely” immediate relation to its object, which, as we have repeatedly seen, is no relation at all. But this means that the transcendence of the senses within the operation of the intellect is precisely what enables the intellectual object to remain 276

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transcendent in relation to the intellect even within the (immediate) union of the two in the act of knowing. The senses mediate the intellect’s immediacy with its object. This is what makes the intellect’s grasp of an object in every case a mediated immediacy.48 It is not the case that the intellect merely begins and ends with the senses, but, rather, the senses accompany the intellect through the whole course of its operation. As Gilson puts it, “the whole cycle of operations which begins in sensible intuition ends in the very same sensible intuition, and at no moment, supposing that it takes more than one, does it get out of it.”49 By the same token, the intellect accompanies the senses throughout the course of their own operation. The transcendence of the intellect to the senses is often taken to mean that the senses are operative alone at an early, primitive stage of the act of knowing, while the intellect merely builds on sense intuitions in order to articulate a more complex object. However, if the action of the intellect merely comes after the work of the senses, then they remain “unmediated”; this means that they could not in fact be relations but sheer, “opaque” moments. They therefore need the mediation of the radically other order of the intellect in order to apprehend their own object as a sensible object. While the senses make a positive contribution to the intellect as intellect, the intellect likewise makes a positive contribution to the senses as senses. Now, because they represent radically different orders, it follows that their reciprocal mediation is not symmetrical. The senses mediate the intellect to the intellect in a way that is radically different from the way the intellect mediates the senses to the senses. How are we to characterize this asymmetry? It seems, on the one hand, that while the senses are in some respect assimilated to their object, the intellect in some respect assimilates the object to itself. We recall Balthasar’s observation, quoted earlier, that the senses “in a certain sense are these things themselves”; that is, they “are” their objects. Aquinas’s claim that the sense of touch lies at the root of all the other senses seems to confirm this idea.50 Because they are so to speak

48. This implies, in turn, that there is no act of the intellect that does not involve a joint act of the senses. The traditional formulation states that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. What we need to recognize, however, is that this affirmation does not yet get us safely beyond a sense-intellect dualism unless we complement it with the further affirmation that the senses are involved with every act of knowing, not simply as a necessary starting point (which can be subsequently left behind) but as the accompanying mediator. 49. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 206–7. 50. In ST 1, 78, 3, ad 3, Aquinas adverts to Aristotle’s notion that touch forms the common genus of the senses. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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external, it is their essence to relate to their object—to be joined with their object, externally. They make contact, and in this contact, they “become” their objects. On the other hand, the mind is also in a certain sense its objects, as we have already affirmed at many points. But since the mind, as spirit, is essentially “internality” or “interiority,” it becomes its objects by, so to speak, spiritualizing them and bringing them in. In this respect, the intellect or spirit is, to use Heidegger’s notion, what accounts for man’s capacity to be in the world, what accounts for the fact that he does not merely run up against objects but can “hold” them within himself. We could say, then, that the senses are what allow us to make contact with the world, and the intellect is what allows us to enter deeply into it. But what is depth without contact? And what is contact without depth? Each alone would represent a gaping abyss, an emptiness. It is clear, in fact, from all we have said, that neither of these is ever simply without the other, and that each shares in some sense in what is proper to the other. Thus, even the externality of the senses is mediated intrinsically to the intellect, while the interiority of the intellect is mediated intrinsically to the senses. Given this complex mutual dependence, the following formulation of the relation between senses and intellect in the act of knowing suggests itself: although both senses and intellect are simultaneously subjective and objective in both form and content, the senses seem to have a priority of the object in form and a priority of the subject in content, while the intellect seems to have a priority of the object in content and a priority of the subject in form. This is why we speak of the objectivity of the intellectual life, in spite of the fact that, considered abstractly, thoughts are “in the soul,” and we speak of feelings and sensible experiences as subjective in spite of the fact that a person has to go out to an object to have them. If we split the intellect and senses apart, then they both become simultaneously subjectivistic and objectivistic in different, but equally problematic, ways. But if we find their unity, then not only is each restored to its full integrity within its own order, but they both work in consort to yield knowledge of a whole object to a whole subject, which remain irreducibly different to each other within perfect union. Before I go on to address the question of the unity of the senses and the intellect—indeed, it is important to realize that showing their mutual dependence is not yet to show their unity, but it is only to make showing their unity an even more pressing task—I will “flesh” out a further dimension of their relationship that is particularly important to Balthasar’s thought on truth. We have spoken about the operation of the spirit and the senses as movements, and, moreover, we have said that they cannot represent simply 278

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opposite movements, but each must be a radically different movement that nevertheless includes the movement of the other somehow within its own. Thus, rather than being mere dialectical opposites, the spirit and senses acquire a relationship of analogy with each other: something of the externality of the senses will always be part of the intellect in its proper operation, while something of the interiority of the spirit will always be a part of the senses in their proper operation. Both of these points receive emphasis from Balthasar in many places in his work. The first is often treated under the notion of the “spiritual senses,” which was a major theme in the Church Fathers, but which gradually disappeared in the “spiritual” writers of the late Middle Ages. It is important to see that the theme of the spiritual senses does not have to do merely with religious life and religious experience, but that it must also have an analogous counterpart in intellectual life in general and thus must have a function in epistemology. The second point is one of the major themes of Balthasar’s aesthetics; it is one of Balthasar’s most decisive responses to Kant’s epistemology: basically, it amounts to the assertion that the “supersensible” dimension of all wholes, that is, all of reality, is not merely posited spontaneously by the intellect but is also receptively perceived in some analogous manner by the senses, as paradoxical as it sounds. Here, we find a confirmation and development of what we saw in chapter 2 about how the perception of unity is both a spontaneous and receptive act. At first glance, it may seem that these are marginal points, but in fact they are both crucial, since it is possible to affirm that any epistemology that lacks either of them necessarily, on the subjective side, has not discovered a body-soul polarity and is therefore both dualistic and monistic, while, on the objective side, such an epistemology will have failed to grasp the paradoxes that make up the appearance of a Gestalt. In other words, if the arguments of this book have any validity at all, we could say that an epistemology that does not affirm an analogy between the mind and the senses cannot avoid a problematically “identitarian” model of truth. Thus, when Balthasar delineates “the main concerns of a Christian anthropology” founded on the “seeing of Gestalt,” he draws on the works of four major thinkers from completely different perspectives—a theologian (Karl Barth), a religious phenomenologist (Romano Guardini), a philosopher (Gustav Siewerth), and a poet (Paul Claudel)—in order to show how, in spite of their diversity, these four thinkers come to the same conclusions with respect to the joint workings of the spirit and the senses.51 I

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will not treat each of these individually, as Balthasar does, but rather take their testimonies as a whole, and draw out the most fundamental points in relation to our theme. It is primarily Barth and Claudel who emphasize the first point, that the working of the spirit (mind) has an inescapable and analogous sensible dimension. Thus, “for Barth, the soul does not lose its sensibility even in its reflection on itself. In scholastic terms, the soul cannot attain to reditio completa (or abstractio) without a conversio (per phantasma) ad rem.”52 This is because a human being is not a “union of two parts or two ‘substances’” but rather a single whole, which is simultaneously an “embodied soul and ensouled body.”53 Because of the soul’s essential connection to the body, Barth is able to affirm: This act in which my soul is at once subject and object [is] also a wholly corporeal act . . . for I do not exist without being this material body. . . . Without having some command and making some use of [the senses], I cannot be aware of objects different from myself, I cannot distinguish myself from others as the object identical with myself, and cannot therefore recognize myself as a subject. . . . It may well be true that this act of knowledge is not seeing, hearing, or smelling or any perception communicated by my physical senses, but an inner experience of myself. Yet it is just as much true that this experience . . . is also external and a moment in the history of my material body.54 Now, some of this is infelicitously put: Barth seems to distinguish simply between the senses and the soul.55 Nevertheless, it is clear that he wants to insist on seeing the body and its senses as inwardly necessary to the soul’s own activity. Balthasar claims that in Barth’s thought, “both things—sensory perception and spiritual thinking—are constantly considered in their unity.”56 Similarly, Claudel dwells at great length on the “sensual” faculties of the soul, that is, the spiritual analogies of the senses, in his classic essay “La Sensation du Divin,”57 in which he elaborates what is specific to each of the five

52. Ibid., 385. 53. The phrases are from Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 (1948), 327, cited by Balthasar in ibid., 384. 54. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 375, cited by Balthasar in GL 1:385–86. 55. He says, for example, that the self-presence of the soul is not a seeing or hearing, when it would be more adequate to say it is analogously so. 56. Ibid., 387. 57. Balthasar references this essay from Présence et Prophétie (Freiburg, Germany: L.U.F., 1942), 49–126. 280

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(spiritual) senses. Balthasar sums up the philosophical import of Claudel’s insights by saying “the body is a work of the soul, its expression and its extension in matter. Through the body, the soul experiences the world and has a shaping effect on the world.”58 It therefore follows that “it is the spirit-soul which hears, sees, and tastes; but in its nothingness and relativity it creates for itself the material organs necessary for perception.”59 Even if the senses are radically different from the soul, because of the particular nature of the soul’s dependence on the senses, the soul possesses within itself the analogous movement that the senses imply. Thus, in its knowing, there is a legitimate sense in which we could say that the intellect “hears,” “sees,” “touches,” “tastes,” or “smells” its object. What is the significance of this affirmation? It brings home the fact that the essence of knowledge is not reductive abstraction, but a kind of concrete indwelling that does not remove difference. There is an ancient etymology that connects the word sapientia with the verb sapere, “to taste.”60 The perspective developed by Barth and Claudel points to the claim that the perfection of the intelligence lies in (concrete) wisdom more than in (formalistic) knowledge. One of the most immediate implications of this claim draws on our earlier discussion. If the intellect, from a formalistic perspective, lacks the mediation of the senses, its knowing becomes, as it were, instantaneous. It grasps its object “immediately,” and thus has nowhere else to go and nothing else to do with it. Its knowing is essentially static, such that the second it knows something, it is finished with it and can remain “moving” only by picking up with something else, something that will turn out to be equally abstract. Bonaventure asks, “To know much and taste nothing—of what use is that?”61 A “wisdom” perspective—an understanding of the intellect that possesses analogously the movement of the senses—by contrast, precisely because it is essentially mediated, is never finished with its object. Because of the mediation, there remains a “permanent” distance in its knowing, even if,

58. GL 1:402. 59. Ibid., 403. The “nothingness and relativity” of the soul Balthasar is referring to in this passage is the soul’s dependence on the body, which Claudel describes in his essay. 60. See Richard Onians, 61–63. Interestingly, Onians shows, contrary to the conventional interpretation, that the root connection is not in the first place the subjective one of “tasting” but the objective one of “being tasty”: he shows that there is a more fundamental relationship of wisdom to “sap,” i.e., the “juice” in a being that represents its concentrated “essence.” This sap is, in turn, what gives a thing its taste. Thus, wisdom is not only having a discriminating taste, but being fully ripe with one’s essence. 61. Bonaventure, Hexaemeron 23:21. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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as we have seen, this distance does not impair true intimacy. Thus, the intellect does not merely know its object in a lightning flash, but in its most perfect sense it savors its object. It patiently allows its object to unfold itself within its grasp. A wine does not have a “single” taste, but it presents a whole history, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if a discriminating palate is able to read this whole in its unity. So, too, a real object does not have, as it were, a single intelligibility, but rather it has an intelligible unity that is mediated through the diversity of its history. The unity is, therefore, not abstracted from that history, but is more fundamentally enjoyed within that history. It is precisely the analogy with the senses, in sum, that allows us to see the perfection of the intellect, not in a nonmediate grasping of its object, which then moves on, but in a “staying with” its object, a remaining or an indwelling, and therefore a progressive deepening of its relationship.62 A knowing that perfected itself in abstraction would eventually lose precisely this depth dimension of knowing. Guardini and Siewerth develop in a particular way the second point, namely, that the senses are so to speak not (dialectically) limited to the sensible, but somehow have access to the transcendent whole precisely as senses, that is, without leaving their own order. In his summary of the joint contribution of the four thinkers, Balthasar puts the point synthetically: “all the senses perceive the non-sensual sensually.”63 Guardini speaks directly to this point. As Balthasar explains it, for Guardini, one of the most lamentable traits of modern culture is the loss of the intrinsic depth dimension of the senses: “Seeing has become a matter of observing and verifying to which is afterwards added the activity of our abstract intellect as it orders and elaborates what is perceived.”64 Guardini insists with force that this emptiness of the senses—or, to use the language we have been developing, their lack of an interiority analogous to the spirit—will eventually lead to the destruction of the human: “We no longer exist in images. Concepts have taken the place of images that can be contemplated. Machines have taken the place of embodied images, and segments of time the place of living rhythms. . . . Truly, if he follows this road, man can only become sick because his interior being can . . . live only in images.”65 62. On knowing as “indwelling,” see David Schindler (Sr.)’s succinct presentation of the epistemology of Michael Polanyi in “God and the End of Intelligence: Knowledge as Relationship,” Communio: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 529–30. 63. GL 1:406. 64. Ibid., 389–90. Balthasar, in his treatment of Guardini, refers primarily to his book Die Sinne und die religiöse Erkenntnis (1950). 65. Guardini, Die Sinne und die religiöse Erkenntnis, 63–65, cited in GL 1:390.

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There is therefore not only a danger of abstraction with regard to the intellect, as we saw above, but likewise a danger of abstraction with regard to the senses. We tend to overlook this danger. We typically think of the senses as inescapably concrete, and we illustrate this concreteness by pounding on a desk or slapping a wall. However, such gestures are utterly abstract. Sensation is not the brute “slamming” up against “opaque” things. Rather, as Guardini explains, normally speaking, sensation is the perception of concrete wholes, which are always more than “sheer” matter— indeed, if we attend concretely to our experience, we see that we, in fact, always treat things as such, that is, as more than extension in space, but as meaningful “things.”66 Or, as Guardini himself puts it, what we sensibly interact with are forms (Gestalten): But form is not only corporeal. It means laws of proportion, a functional context, a developmental form, an essential image, value-figure—and all of this both spiritually and materially. The purely material thing does not exist; the body is from the outset determined spiritually. And this spiritual element is not subsequently added to the sensory datum, for instance by the work of the intellect; it is grasped by the eye at once, even if indeterminately and imperfectly at first.67 Balthasar elaborates the significance of this passage by drawing attention to the fact that the inner reality, and thus the “supersensible” center, the mysterious ground or heart of a thing, is not something we merely infer from what we see; it is something we literally, physically see: “The eye sees the vitality of the animal. In man, it sees (and does not ‘infer’) the soul in [his] gestures, expressions and actions; indeed, it sees the soul even before the body, and the body only in the soul.”68

66. Heidegger, too, has a very rich sense of the concrete meaning of things. See his essay on this topic: What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967). 67. Guardini, Die Sinne und die religiöse Erkenntnis, 18ff., cited in GL 1:390–91. 68. GL 1:391. We could contrast the point Balthasar (and Guardini) are making here with the method Husserl adopts in the fifth Cartesian Meditation in dealing with the problem of grounding intersubjectivity phenomenologically. Here, with respect to the “experiencing of someone else,” Husserl speaks of an apperception of what is not simply intuitively present, which is not an inference or thinking act (Cartesian Meditations, 108–11). Nevertheless, Husserl founds apperception wholly on my experiencing of myself as an animate organism—as having an inside so to speak—while Balthasar would insist that there is a fundamental sense in which my experience of myself is

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From a similar perspective, Siewerth dwells at length on the notion that the senses are not opaque, purely external, or closed entities, but rather, “openness is the essence of the senses.”69 This openness, he insists, does not extend to things in their materiality alone. If this were the case, we could not strictly speaking talk of perception, but we would rather have simply the knocking together of Humean billiard balls. Instead, he says, what the senses primarily perceive is Being itself, as it manifests itself in sensible objects. Thus, Siewerth’s position has two aspects: first, the openness of the senses is not merely the openness of man’s body, but it is rather the openness of the whole man in his body: “Our senses are essentially the open heart of man.”70 Second, when the whole man receives a thing through his senses and thereby “internalizes” it, what he is doing is at the same time ek-statically transcending into Being itself: “ ‘To take something into oneself’ does not mean ‘to make it subjective,’ but rather to concentrate one’s vision on the depth of Being manifesting itself in the image. It means, in other words, to empty oneself out more deeply into the stream of light of the real. It means to receive the ‘ground and foundation’ which is in Being itself.”71 We saw that the senses’ mediation of the intellect is what “slows it down” and allows it to penetrate gradually and deeply into its object. The same thing holds conversely: since the intellect mediates the senses’ grasp of their object, this contact is not merely a contact with surfaces. The senses do not merely brush past their objects in their immediacy on the way to something else, but they rather have an “interior” openness to their object as part of their basic structure. In other words, they “touch” not only surfaces but also and, even especially, depths. We thus end up as far as one could get from a conventional Kantian epistemology. Whereas Kant, in the usual interpretation, simply divides the sensible and the supersensible, the a posteriori and the a priori, Balthasar sees all these aspects as interpenetrating each other from the beginning. From

founded on a more primordial experience of another (the mother’s smile). The reason this distinction is significant is that if my experience of another as transcendent other is derived without remainder from my own experience of transcendence, we lose any basis for an analogous perception (apperception) of the other’s transcendence, and make it instead something that I project onto the other from my own subjectivity. The point, in short, is that in order to affirm what Husserl’s means by apperception in this context, we have to move beyond his own presuppositions, and affirm something like the phenomenon of the mother’s smile. 69. Siewerth, Die Sinne und das Wort (1956), 8, cited in GL 1:394. 70. Siewerth, Wort und Bild (1952), 25, cited in GL 1:395. 71. Siewerth, Wort und Bild, 15, cited in GL 1:396. 284

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his perspective, then, the senses do not perceive only the sensible object, leaving what lies beyond sensibility to be supplied by the intellect, but rather they perceive the whole object, which is simultaneously sensible and supersensible, from within the order of the senses. Accordingly, the intellect does not merely grasp an abstract, nonsensible object but cognizes the whole object in its intelligibility and its sensibility, from within the order of the mind. Each grasps the whole but from a different perspective, as it were. Again, if we affirm anything less, we lose the possibility of a Gestalt approach to truth, which posits a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and we end up instead with a mere series of parts or partial elements. We would thus face the regrettable task of fitting them together: regrettable because impossible.

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

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casually affirmed that each is dependent on the other. But the possibility of this mutuality is far from obvious. How can things so radically different as spirit and matter ever in any real sense internalize one another? We might be able to imagine that spirit internalizes matter, but what we imagine would be inadequate to the extent that we were unable to conceive of the converse, the genuine internalizing of spirit by matter. As Balthasar puts it, “the demand set before us, in its present form, is that we should realize spirit in body, and body in spirit, and this contains a contradiction.”72 Indeed, we have claimed in this section that it is in some sense necessary to affirm that the senses sense what is nonsensible and that the spirit grasps what is nonspiritual, and that the capacity to do so is not a marginal aspect but the essence of the their operations of sensing and grasping. But we have not yet shown how such a thing can be possible. The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated: there is little in this entire study that would survive if this possibility cannot be found; on it depends the unity of the Gestalt and therefore the unity of both being and consciousness. It is not enough to insist on the mutual analogies between the spirit and senses, and it is not enough to affirm that they both grasp the whole object differently, since both of these affirmations leave in place the possibility that the two operations might simply run parallel to each other. But there is an infinite difference between the state in which the operations merely overlap one another, and that in which they are genuinely joined in a real unity. Balthasar claims that “the unity of these contrary movements can only arise out of a dramatic engagement.”73 Indeed, if it is the case, as we saw with Barth, that reditio completa is complete only through the conversio, and it is likewise the case, as we saw in the long quotation from Claudel in chapter 1, that we come to know something when we see it in action—in demanding, concrete engagement—then the unity of the “contrary” movements of body and soul must in some basic respect be achieved. The human person must have some way of communicating his whole being, of “externalizing” and making visible “everything that he is,” that is, of bringing the inside and the outside to adequation (without dissolving their difference). Only thus can he be said to be a unified whole; only thus can he be said in a genuine sense to come to self-presence. And if self-presence (reditio completa) is a condition of possibility for all knowing, then this possibility is also necessary for the possibility of truth at all. At the same time, however, as we have seen many times before, such a unity can be achieved only if it is simultaneously “given.” This section will therefore 72. TD 2:364. 73. Ibid. 286

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conclude with a brief discussion of the “inner” condition of unity, before turning in the next section more generally to talk about the “external” realization of that unity in action, in the deed. In chapter 2, we discussed the fact that if consciousness is truly to be consciousness at all, it cannot be a “single part” of the human being, which so to speak means it leaves the other parts at rest, but it must be the whole person moving at once (within a particular order).74 Moreover, we saw that such can be the case only if the soul moves itself in being moved: if its movement is how it actively responds to being addressed in its very being by the whole of Being, as mediated through the love of the child’s parents, which comes to concrete expression in the mother’s smile. In order to affirm such a thing, we had to discover a sort of center of the person. We are now in a position to speak a little more to this issue; however, it is the very nature of the issue, like all truly simple things, that it defies simple systematic treatment. What I wish to do here is no more than list some of the basic characteristics that converge at this center. The point is to suggest that the “ethical” issues in relation to the body-soul problem; the “epistemological” issues in relation to the spirit-senses problem, as well as the problem of the unity of consciousness; the “aesthetic” issues in relation to the perception of beauty; and the “dramatic” issues of personal decision in light of ultimate meaning, are all in the end inseparable from one another.75 I will deal at greater length with the question of beauty in the next chapter, though I mention it here in order to mark its connectedness with the other issues. As for the rest, the reason that they all converge is that the polarity between the body and soul, because it concerns the whole person, must simultaneously have its root in a certain “third,” within the person, as well as in a “fourth,” in a point within the order

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

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that transcends the person. This is the reason that Balthasar claims the problem can be resolved only dramatically: the person must be called, in the center of his being, to engage himself in a decisively meaningful action in the world, an action that both presupposes his personal identity and gives rise to it. At the same time, if such dramatic engagement is a precondition for the unity of the person, if such unity is the precondition for self-presence, and if self-presence is a precondition for any full grasp of truth, then it necessarily follows that the epistemological problem itself cannot be resolved outside of this engagement. However, the self-transcendence of the person in drama can be a genuine transcendence if there is a whole person there to transcend. In other words, such activity cannot only give rise to the body-soul unity but must also paradoxically presuppose it, as the point in the person on which such engagement calls. This will become clearer as we proceed. Now, though there is no need to find a univocal term for this center of the person, perhaps the most comprehensive name, with deep resonance in the tradition, is the “heart.”76 Balthasar expresses this concrete center thus: “man enters into existence at a point (which he never leaves behind) where from the outset the spirit was already slumbering in the flesh, and still does so, where it ‘awakens’ to itself through the call of another and where it finds its center not in the head, but in the heart, in which spirit and body, inseparably intertwined, are ‘one flesh.’”77 There are several things to note about this passage. First, Balthasar distinguishes the heart from the head, which is the seat of the spirit (Geist = mind), and he insists that it is the heart that unifies the person. Indeed, if there is in fact a polarity between the spirit and the body in the human person, to say that the two poles had their unity in one of the poles is necessarily to reduce

76. Indeed, the great variety of anthropologies in the philosophical tradition, in a positive sense, discourages any attempt to reconcile them all in a single system. There would be, for example, another obvious term for the issue at hand, namely, spirit itself. There is, in fact, an extensive tradition in the Church Fathers of a “tripartite” anthropology, which distinguishes spirit from soul, and which gives the spirit the role of mediating body and soul. Balthasar, in the context of a different problem, quotes a relevant text from Kierkegaard that recalls this point: “Man is a synthesis of soul and body, however a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit”: CA, 83. Henri de Lubac is responsible for recovering this patristic theme in more recent times: see “Tripartite Anthropology,” in Theology and History, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 117–200. 77. TL 2:211: “[D]er Mensch . . . [tritt] an einer (nie verlassenen) Stelle ins Dasein, wo Geist immer schon und noch im Fleisch schlummert, durch sinnlichen Anruf zu sich selber ‘erwacht’ und seine Mitte nicht im Gehirn hat, sondern im Herzen, in welchem Geist und Leib, untrennbar ineinanderliegend, ‘ein Fleisch’ sind.” 288

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the one pole (the body) to the other (spirit) utterly without remainder, insofar as the least “excess” of the body in relation to the spirit would suggest that the body has its being in something other than the spirit. This would indicate that the body exists either because of a fall from unity (which we would have to rule out if we would speak of a genuine polarity), or that there is something else in which the two are both united and distinguished. Thus, to perceive a polarity, we have to affirm the seat of the whole person residing in something other than the spirit in itself or the body in itself: this is, according to Balthasar, the heart. Yet, it is crucial to see that this does not imply an anti-intellectualism. Often, when one speaks today about the heart rather than the head, one means something that has nothing to do with the mind. Balthasar means just the opposite: for him, the heart has everything to do with the mind. It is precisely the distinction of the heart from the mind that allows it to include the whole of the intellect in its complete integrity. Indeed, if the spirit subsists concretely within a polar relation with the body, and therefore has its integrity only by including a relationship to the body, then affirming a distinct “third” as the seat of the person is the only way to preserve the full integrity of the spirit or mind. And since it likewise includes the whole body, as a distinct “part,” it allows the legitimacy of the body’s whole life in its integrity. Affirming the unity of each in something that is mutually distinct from both allows each to be internal to the other without having to become the other. I note, as well, that what Balthasar says here about the heart is nearly identical to what he said forty years earlier, in The Truth of the World, about the imagination (Einbildungskraft).78 Here, we recall, Balthasar had indicated that the imagination, which is simultaneously productive (spontaneous) and receptive, is the seed out of which the spirit and the senses grow and further differentiate. Indeed, we could say that the imagination, as the point in which the intellect and the senses “coincide,” is not simply something other than the heart but is in fact the heart itself, considered in its epistemological role. But once we make this connection between the heart and the imagination, we take another step further. In the previous chapter, I proposed that there is an intrinsic link between the imagination and the operation of the conversio ad phantasmata, inasmuch as they both contain the intellect and the senses in a unity (perhaps we could say that the conversio is the imagination in action, or the proper operation of the imagination). Moreover, we saw that the grasp of the whole object that

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the conversio implies occurs only in the complex event in which the object “inspires” the subject (rapture), and calls the subject outside of himself to commit himself in judgment. If we relate this point to the one we made above concerning the fact that both the intellect and senses, in irreducibly different ways, imply a complex interrelationship of transcendence and immanence in relation to the world, we see that the heart, which is the point in which the person comes together in his own unity, is not merely the place in which the person is most perfectly at rest within himself but at the same time the place in which the person is most perfectly expropriated in his transcendence and immanence into the world. Thus the heart, in a certain sense the seat of wisdom—that is, the place where an object is grasped in its wholeness and thus “savored” in its intelligible sensibility—is at the same time the seat of self-committing judgment.79 It is in the heart, then, that the person is most directly related both to self and to other (the world, but also the absolute other, God, as we will see more fully in the next section). This formulation, in addition, recalls the way we formulated the phenomenon of consciousness in chapter 2. Although we cannot develop this possibility here, there is reason to think that consciousness itself is another dimension of the heart. While we generally associate consciousness with “the head,” experience suggests quite forcefully that it is not an “exclusively” intellectual affair. Rather, there is a real sense in which we could say that the body, as body, has a certain “awareness” of the world—Barth, in fact, goes so far as to say that “it is certainly not only my soul but also my body which thinks.”80 We can justify this assertion, and justify as well the notion that the senses have an intrinsic and indispensable relation to the meaning of consciousness, without making it any less a strictly “spiritual” phenomenon, by rooting consciousness in the center of man, the heart, which includes all these things in their difference. The text that we have cited from TL 2 has a footnote in which Balthasar refers to Siewerth’s “almost hymnic” discussion of the heart in Der Mensch und sein Leib (1953), then to a study of the role of the heart in Augustine’s thinking, by Anton Maxsein.81 The list of the various aspects of this 79. We will not speak directly about the heart as, so to speak, the organ of beauty until the next chapter, but it is worth pointing out, in this context, the extremely interesting fact that the book Kant called the Critique of Judgment discusses, as its primary concerns, the judgment of beauty and the judging of organic wholes (or perhaps we could say “Gestalts”). These functions, for Balthasar, have a direct relation to the heart. 80. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 400, cited in GL 1:386. 81. Anton Maxsein, Philosophia Cordis: Das Wesen der Personalität bei Augustinus (Salzburg, Austria: O. Müller, 1966). 290

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role that Balthasar draws from the book serves nicely to summarize what we have just seen: “For [Maxsein] (in harmony with Augustine) ‘cor,’ the heart, represents ‘the center of the person’; he likewise sees in the heart the mediating organ of sense knowledge (194ff.), ‘the impulse power of intellectual cognition’ (203ff.), the organ of intellectual illumination (215ff.), [and] the link with God and the openness of the person to the world (246ff., 281ff.).”82 The heart, too, was mentioned by the thinkers Balthasar discussed in his development of the spirit/senses polarity, as the place wherein they are unified. Here, we see both the receptive aspect and the active aspect emphasized. Thus, on the one hand, Siewerth observed that the heart is where man is most receptive to the world: “the heart (in the openness of the senses) is itself in its own way an enveloping womb.”83 On the other hand, this same heart is the concentration of man’s most spontaneous and productive “energies”: “So, too, the ‘heart’ [in Barth] is made to be the very center of man, and this naturally means the bodily heart as well, not only as the ‘seat or center of the spiritual and psychic forces,’ but as the quintessence and crossroads of man’s total corporeal and spiritual realities. ‘With all one’s heart’ is necessarily identical with ‘with all one’s soul’ and, thus, also ‘with all one’s strength.’”84 Let us note a final element in the text from TL 2. The image that Balthasar uses to describe the union of the spirit and the senses in the heart of man is marriage: they are “two in one flesh.” At the end of this chapter, we will discuss in greater depth the philosophical significance of marriage in Balthasar’s thought, but we can already observe, at this point, that the image suggests that the union is not just an abstract correlation of principles, but a dramatic event, something that is given even while it needs to be achieved. We have just elaborated the reasons we need to affirm a sort of third that serves to unify the spirit and senses. But we have also said that this unity is not only presupposed, as an element within the human person, but is at the same time something that arises only with man’s dramatic engagement of activity in the world. Now, to put the problem in these terms recalls to mind something we saw in the last chapter, particularly in the brief passage on logic: in order for a third to function as a real unity of two principles, it must somehow come both before and after 82. N. 28, TL 2:211: “für den (mit Augustinus zusammen) ‘Cor als personale Mitte’ gilt und der im Herzen das vermittelnde Organ der Sinneserkenntnis (194f), ‘die treibende Kraft der intellektuellen Erkenntnis’ (203f), das Organ der intellektuellen Erleuchtung (215f), der Verbindung mit Gott und der personalen Offenheit zur Welt (246f, 281f) sieht.” 83. GL 1:395. 84. Ibid., 389. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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the two. It is clear why the same point holds in the present case. If the unity of the two principles, spirit and senses, were achieved merely outside, in the world, it would be impossible to speak of the unity of the person. Something that has its center merely outside of itself has no center: the distance between “it” and its center would be such that anything else could indifferently take its place, and thus we would have no abiding identities.85 However, if the unity of the person came simply before the spirit and senses and their constitutive relation to the outside world, then it could not be said to be their union, since it would represent a “third” merely juxtaposed to the “two,” something already complete in itself and therefore having only an extrinsic relation (of superaddition) to them. We have seen that the only way to account for a unity that is both prior and posterior is in terms of event, that is, as the transcendence of the whole into a wholly other order, a movement that represents at one and the same time the crystallization of a triadic unity and its being surpassed. These two aspects occur at once, even if the whole takes time and space to unfold. Thus, if the heart unifies the mind and senses in their full integrity, this means it is not only an (abstract) principle of unity but a concrete whole that embraces them in their historical operation, that is, in their simultaneous ek-static transcendence beyond the self into the (wholly other order of the) world. This is, of course, perfectly in line with the fundamental character of the heart as we described it, designating the unity of the person not in opposition to his relation to the world, but rather simultaneously in the person’s relation to the world. If the senses, with their roots in the body, are somehow a “hinge” between the person and the world, that is, as something which, belonging simultaneously though asymmetrically both to the world and to the self, is the place where the person is both always already expropriated and at home—and if the mind, as rooted in the soul, is likewise in a different way a hinge with the analogous movements—it is because they are both rooted ultimately in the unity-in-difference and the difference-in-unity of the heart: the heart is the most perfect form of this dual transcendence and immanence, the place where the movements both crystallize and open up. We might, therefore, call the heart the seat of drama, and it is thus that the heart functions most characteristically in Balthasar’s thought. This

85. This, we recall, was the problem with the “neutral monism” theory of consciousness, criticized by Manfred Frank, which affirms that “consciousness” does not refer to anything within a “sphere of psychic life” but merely designates a particular relationship between external events: see, once again, “Subjectivity and Individuality,” 13–14. 292

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name suggests itself because of the meaning the heart acquires at this stage of the problem: we have seen that man is essentially “ex-centric” because of his inescapably polar nature. In chapter 2, we spoke at length about the fact that the unity of apperception, which is the condition of possibility of all knowledge, is itself a function of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness itself arises only in the self’s ek-static movement in being called by another, but we left the problem, as it were, suspended “in mid-air.”86 It is only now that we are in a position to see the fulfillment of the problem involved. If the “polarity” of the heart, as both the inner unity of the person as well as the external manifestation, or mediation, of that unity in action, is not to fall apart into a dualism, there must be some way to bring these two poles, the interior unity and the external manifestation, to adequation. In other words, if, as we have seen many times, man’s self-knowledge increases in tandem with his knowledge of the world, which is another way of saying that his self-possession (or reditio completa) is necessarily mediated by relation to the other (or the conversio ad phantasmata), even if it is likewise the case that the former in turn mediates the latter, then there must be a comprehensive deed that crystallizes the whole of man in a concrete form, which in a paradigmatic manner mirrors himself to himself and thus, for the first time, tells him who he really is. The charge is a heavy one, given the inexhaustibly rich diversity that constitutes the heart in its unity, as we have seen. In a certain respect, Descartes was aiming at an analogous deed with his cogito. While it represented, for him, the foundation of all other knowledge, it could not be left as an abstract principle but had to be “achieved” by going through the process of doubting everything, which is undeniably a dramatic act. Only thus could the “principle” be grasped and made real, and everything that then followed from this principle, “depended” on and as it were participated in the perfection of this initial act. However, we saw in chapter 2 that Descartes sought its perfection in the exclusion of all content, an approach that was echoed in Kant and led to a whole series of fundamental problems in German Idealism. Now, much of recent philosophy, especially deconstruction, has rejected the possibility of having 86. It would be more adequate to say that we established several principles (i.e., the unity of the whole in being, and the implicit perfection of the whole in the mother’s smile), but that these principles require a ground. It is not the case, therefore, that these principles are incomplete and in need of fulfillment (which would be in fact a Hegelian interpretation that Balthasar rejects); rather, they are in a certain, relative sense already complete in themselves. Nevertheless, we will see that they were “already” complete only when we arrive at the end. The meaning of this assertion will become clear at the conclusion of this chapter. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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any “foundations” at all. However, such a rejection is not only inwardly inconsistent, insofar as any rejection of foundation requires a basis for that rejection, but it undermines the possibility of any truth at all. It is, ultimately, and in spite of its (unjustifiable) “ideals” of justice, a nihilistic gesture, destructive of the world and of the whole human being. But to say that some foundation is necessary does not yet show how a foundation can be realized. Indeed, the way we have formulated the problem in some sense exacerbates it. The adequation of inside and outside seems at first glance impossible. What is, after all, the heart of man, this Realsymbol of the whole human being, in all of his tensions? What is this hidden point of unity that lies deeper than all his knowing, willing, and sensing, inasmuch as all of these are particular acts of the person, acts that presuppose the center and therefore do not seem capable of taking that center as an object? Is it not a simple, straightforward contradiction to make a subject an object, or to make interiority appear externally? But, in drawing attention to these difficulties, are we not simply returning to the problems we saw in our discussion of the problem of the self in classical German philosophy, problems we thought we had overcome by introducing the intrinsic necessity of self-knowledge being mediated by an other? For Balthasar, the heart, the whole of man, because it is both “rooted in the cosmos” and transcendent of the cosmos, that is, rooted in some sense in the “divine,” finds its fulfillment only in the total surpassing of itself (again, it is a meta-anthropology). In other words, as Pascal famously expressed it, “l’homme dépasse infiniment l’homme” (man infinitely transcends himself) the whole is a whole only in radical transcendence. Moreover, genuine transcendence, as we saw in chapter 3 and repeatedly since then, must always be twofold, both vertical and horizontal. And so, man embodies the limits of his polar structure, that is, he realizes the constitutive tensions of the cosmos, only in somehow arriving beyond them, even while this movement beyond must be simultaneously the attainment of the “Absolute” and the relation to the “relative absolute” in a concrete form. In short, the “dramatic engagement” that Balthasar said was necessary to resolve the tensions that constitute the human person is in the end the drama of trying to give an adequate answer to the question, How can the absolute appear, as absolute, in the relative? How can the “beyond” become manifest within the world? How can the eternal enter time? The claim is that if this question is left without an answer, then truth is left without a foundation, and everything that has been said up to this point would fracture back into the problematic pieces we have been trying to bring to unity. 294

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

From the outset, it is important to affirm that there is not a single answer to our question, even if, as we will see, it is the case that we seem to be able to find a paradigmatic answer in Balthasar. If I single out particular aspects here, I do not mean thereby to say the final word. There are aspects I will not address: Balthasar’s theological notions of election and mission are particularly important, especially when we read them not only in terms of a “personal” event, but in terms of their relation to his notion of the divine idea or exemplary identity, which in a certain way “mediates” between God and the world.87 Nevertheless, I will attempt to draw out some basic principles, which would have to be present in all the various and analogous expressions. In her book After Writing, Pickstock makes an argument from a more theological perspective, along lines similar in some ways to the ones we have been following, that liturgy, and especially the Eucharist (which does not come to be “outside” of the liturgy, even as it gives rise to that celebration, and indeed to the church as a whole), is the condition of possibility of all meaning.88 There is much in the works of Mircea Eliade, and in his notions of ritual (liturgy) as the actualization of myth, to support this idea through more general analogies with non-Christian cultures. 89 While not denying the importance of myth and ritual,90 and even affirming that a specifically theological response, such as the one Pickstock proposes, will have to be the final one in the end, it is essential to see that an exclusive emphasis on myth, or on a theological response, if it is not “mediated” by a specifically philosophical response, could degenerate into irrationalism or positivism. In the present discussion, then, I will turn first to Heidegger and to Plato, in order to focus on the philosophical 87. See TL 1:238–40, where Balthasar discusses the divine ideas by analogy with imagination. See, also TD 4:61 and TD 5:391–92, where he associates the divine ideas with their incarnation in Christ, then specifically connects them with mission. 88. See Pickstock, After Writing, 261–64, among other places. 89. As he explains, in “primitive” cultures, ritual, as the actualization of myth, was essentially an epiphany of the divine. As such an “inbreak” of the beyond, it served to establish an absolute center, which was what gave the rest of the cosmos meaning: see, for example, Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard Task (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1987). 90. Indeed, Balthasar himself insists over and over on the importance of myth (and its relation to ritual) and on the fact that Christianity, which in a certain sense perfects myth by realizing it, does not for all of that replace it. See, for example, GL 4:243–44. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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

Heidegger: Being-unto-Death91 There is a tendency to split Heidegger’s first great (and unfinished) work, Being and Time, into the first part, which seems more rigorously philosophical, and the second part, which seems more “existential” or even psychological.92 But splitting the book in this way undermines one of Heidegger’s most fundamental arguments.93 Indeed, the book becomes particularly compelling when we grasp the connection between the two parts, although, admittedly, the full implications of the connection become clear only in light of later works. I cannot attempt an interpretation of the book in general, or even any particular section, in this forum.94 Instead, I presuppose a certain basic familiarity with the book’s insights as the context for drawing particular attention to a few points. What I wish to show, “in a nutshell,” is that there is an essential relation between the authentic facing of one’s own death and the revelatory experience of Angst, and that this latter, in turn, is what opens up the ontological difference. In short, it is the facing of one’s death that allows beings to appear in their “strangeness,” that is, in their objectivity or real difference from me, and thus in their truth. This is why the “dramatic engagement” of facing death plays an indispensable epistemological role. One of the best-known Heidegger commentators in the United States, William Richardson, formulated the philosopher’s principal insight as “finite transcendence.”95 This term captures, in condensed fashion, the

91. Sein-zum-Tode is generally translated as “Being-towards-death.” However, “Being-unto-death” seems more adequate, not only because it makes more immediate sense but also it recalls the term’s indebtedness to its source. Like many key notions in Being and Time (authenticity, the moment [Augenblick], Angst itself, repetition [Wiederholung], conscience, the “they,” and so on), the phrase Sein-zum-Tode seems to have been inspired by Kierkegaard and his analysis of “sickness unto death” (which is translated into German as Krankheit zum Tode). 92. See the observations made by Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), vi–vii. 93. Heidegger himself says that the analysis of Being unto death, in the second part of the book, is indispensable to the “insufficient” previous analysis of Dasein in the first part: see Being and Time, sec. 46, 219–81. 94. It is worth mentioning, too, that this speculative interpretation, which is not uncontroversial, would require a much more thorough study for a full justification. Here, it is merely offered as a proposal, its primary purpose being to “set up” the significance of Balthasar’s position. 95. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 4th ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), esp. 85–93. 296

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point we will try to articulate here by looking back to Being and Time in light of the important later essay “What Is Metaphysics?” This essay treats the experience of Angst as that which frees space for the disclosure of beings in their ground. Balthasar gets to the heart of the matter in a passage from Der Christ und die Angst: “The point of the overwhelming of subjectivity through the pure ‘being-in-itself’ of the object, the exclusion of all rose-colored wishes and strivings through the majestic objectivity of the ‘thus-and-no-other-way’ of Being is . . . the point of angst.”96 According to Heidegger, a grasp of the Being of beings, or the “presencing” of that which is present—and in this sense the objectivity of beings, or their otherness from me, which Heidegger speaks of as a “being overwhelmed” by the “total strangeness of beings”97—is possible only on the basis of wonder. And wonder, as we saw in chapter 1, is itself possible only if one grasps—or, better, is grasped by—the radical discontinuity between Being and beings, which is expressed in the question, Why are there beings rather than nothing? Now, this question is not a casual one, which could be posed in abstraction or out of idle curiosity, but rather one that can be genuinely asked only as arising out of an experience that is so fundamental, it has the sui generis character of being an experience that is paradoxically greater than the “experiencer.” Specifically, it is the experience of the possibility that all things (including myself) might not have been. We might say that the radicality of this experience by definition means that it cannot lie circumscribed within a person’s own horizons, for such a limitation would contradict the content of the experience. The absolute radicality of the original questioning means that the subject of the experience is deeper and more comprehensive than the human subject; we would have to affirm, in this case, that the experience itself experiences the experiencer. For Heidegger, it does not suffice to experience the possibility that this or that thing might not be, to project the possibility of not-being on one being after another. Indeed, the real difference between Being and beings can come to light only if “beings” are experienced as a totality—and there is literally an

96. CA, 70–71: “Dieser Punkt der Überwältigung der Subjektivität durch das reine An-sich des Gegenstandes, der Ausschaltung aller die Schau färbenden Wünsche und Strebungen durch unbekümmerte, majestätische Sachlichkeit des So-undnicht-anders-Seins ist auch der Punkt der Angst.” 97. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 111. Objectivity is not the term Heidegger himself uses in this context (indeed, one of his translators, Joan Stambaugh, uses the term objective presence to translate Vorhandensein, which is for Heidegger precisely the “opposite” mode of being from the one he intends here); nevertheless, we will use this term for the sake of continuity with Balthasar’s terminology. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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infinite difference between beings taken as an endless series, and beings taken as a totality. Because of the infinity or radical discontinuity of this difference, the fundamental experience cannot be the assemblage of partial experiences but must have an “all at once” character. What is this all at once experience? If something can be grasped only through its distinction from what it is not, the totality of beings in their totality can come into view only against the horizon of radical nothingness. At this point, a paradox emerges: since this nothingness is what allows beings to emerge as a whole, it is not “something” that is merely juxtaposed to beings as a whole; it represents precisely their most fundamental determination. It therefore follows, Heidegger argues, that this Nothing is ultimately “the same” as the Being of beings.98 By virtue of this association, Heidegger is able to affirm that it is just this nothingness that lets beings be, and that therefore lets them be most truly what they are, lets them stand out in presence: “Only in the nothingness of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their proper possibility—that is, in a finite way—come to themselves.”99 But in describing what the experience is, we have yet to see how it is possible, how the human being can have “access” to an experience that implies his own nonexistence or, as Heidegger puts it, how we can ask a question that “puts us, the questioners, in question.”100 In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger further elaborates this experience as an “Angst,” which he had introduced in Being and Time. In a word, Angst designates the “slipping away of the whole,” not the anxious fear of losing one thing or another but the basic calm that watches as the totality of beings is rendered “superfluous” and engulfed without remainder in the looming shadow of the nothing.101 But there is a strange problem that arises with this notion, which Heidegger himself does not explicitly mention. How is it possible to experience one’s own nothingness as included in that of the totality of beings in the world? Moreover, would not the most radical form of this experience be more akin to the paralysis of despair and depression, which, far from making wonder possible, seems to wipe it out altogether? The experience of the “strangeness” of beings implies that they are “other” than “me” and thus that “I” am other than them: but nothingness, lacking any positivity, is the complete elimination of otherness. Heidegger himself talks about Angst, not so much in the negative sense of depression but in more 98. 99. 100. 101. 298

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positive terms as a kind of heroic “daring.”102 Indeed, it seems that we are best able to make sense of this “positive” interpretation of Angst only in light of the notion Heidegger developed in Being and Time, namely, Seinzum-Tode, “Being-unto-death.” In the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger criticized Descartes’s determination of the “world” as res extensa, that is, a “thing” that stands before man as an objectified “presence-at-hand,” insofar as the world, for Heidegger, is not something Dasein possesses as object but is rather a constitutive mode of Dasein’s own being. While Descartes believes that man, in a second moment, has to find “access” to the world by means of abstract ideas, Heidegger insists that “worldliness” is the very meaning of man: Dasein is being-in-the-world.103 Heidegger later shows, in a related way, that temporality (and thus finitude) is the fundamental mode of this being. But this raises the question, if temporality and worldliness is the being of Dasein, how is the transcendence possible by which Dasein manifests the truth of beings? Heidegger rejects the more traditional view that affirms transcendence as a function of the immortality of the soul, which he believes compromises the finitude or worldliness of Dasein and leads to the sort of false abstraction we find in Descartes. Against this view, Heidegger affirms transcendence as essentially a function of man’s finitude. It is not the overcoming of contingency, as it were, that makes man transcendent, but rather his plunging into it, inasmuch as the relation to nothingness that contingency implies is a relation to the nothingness that lies beyond beings as a whole. Man is transcendent because death is, for him, an issue. The evasion of this issue, then, is a failure in the basic human task—indeed, it makes genuine transcendence impossible. The issue can be avoided, Heidegger explains, not only through facile ideas of immortality, which he insists do not secure a genuine transcendence but merely extend a kind of ontic understanding of Dasein into a projected “afterlife,”104 but also through the inauthentic, or “fallen,” way of being, which refuses to penetrate to the ontological depths of existence. For this mode of being, the end or the border of existence (death) and wholeness or totality do not come together, because death always takes such an existence by surprise. Death, in other words, becomes “immanentized” as a moment that will occur somewhere further along the continuous line of fallen existence in the average, everyday world.

102. Ibid., 108. 103. Being and Time, sec. 21. 104. Ibid., sec. 49, 292. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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The question for Heidegger thus becomes, Is there a way that man, in his worldliness, can grasp himself as a totality (Ganzheit)?105 If man cannot find access to himself as a whole, then he cannot be finite transcendence. But this means—in light of the developments in “What Is Metaphysics?”—that he cannot pose the fundamental ontological question, he cannot wonder at the difference between Being and beings, and he therefore cannot become the open space in which beings come to themselves in their most profound and proper depths, in their Being. Heidegger thus proposes that Dasein ought to anticipate (in “running ahead” = Vorlaufen) his own death; that he—we might say ek-statically—ought to confront or face the possibility that he himself absolutely and definitively might not be. Doing so, Dasein comes to stand resolutely before his “ownmost possibility of Being,”106 because it is only in this moment (Augenblick) that he opens up to himself in his totality and at the same time becomes the placeholder of the essentially creative “nothing.” It is thus, Heidegger says, that Dasein exists most authentically and moreover becomes a sort of light that frees others into their own existence. The facing of one’s own death appears to embrace the paradox of finite transcendence more decisively than Angst alone does, although it clearly has an intrinsic relation to this basic “mood.” While Angst alone would seem to run the danger of losing the possibility of wonder, the facing of one’s own death implies a positive, or ek-static, running out to meet nothingness, and not merely getting overrun by it, even if it remains essentially a “ being overwhelmed.” In this respect, there is a clear “standing out” into the difference, and thus a transcending beyond beings as a totality that does not deny man’s finitude and even the hermeneutical situation of perspective, but in fact for the first time genuinely constitutes it, since it determines man in his finality—that is, simultaneously opens him up (in relation to nothingness) and determines him in his totality. Balthasar affirms, in principle, everything Heidegger argues here, although he places it in a profoundly different context.107 Heidegger seems to be one of the few recent philosophers who has seen that the problem of the constitution of man in his wholeness as a “knower,” which is a necessary aspect of truth, can be resolved only dramatically. Like Balthasar, he sees that this 105. Ibid., sec. 46, 279–80. 106. Ibid., sec. 50. 107. Balthasar gives a positive account of his points of agreement with Heidegger, as well as his decisive points of difference, in his early essay “Heideggersphil.” In essence, while he embraces Heidegger’s emphasis on man’s finitude, with everything it implies, he shows that such an understanding of finitude is possible only in relation to the infinite, just as Heidegger’s emphasis on temporality is possible only in relation to the eternal. Finitude and temporality cannot be simple “nothingness” but must also have a positivity. 300

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is the case because man, in the core of his being, is an irreducible tension. While Heidegger describes this in terms of finite transcendence (a concept, we will see, that is somewhat problematic for Balthasar), Balthasar sees the tension as a complex interrelationship between transcendence and immanence, finitude and infinity, which is concretely “incarnated” in the bodysoul polarity. Moreover, Heidegger sees that the dramatic engagement with the issue of death is not a mere “anthropological” problem, but that it has to do with the very meaning of Being, inasmuch as it has to do with the possibility of the truth of Being. The “total strangeness” of beings, and therefore transcendence—because there can be no transcendence at all without absolute transcendence, that is, without transcending the totality of things as a whole—depends on facing the limits of existence, and in this on sense bringing the “absoluteness” that the limits imply into the “relativity” (temporality or worldliness) of experience. Balthasar does not hesitate, therefore, to affirm in principle Heidegger’s sense of death as revealing the limits of the finite and thus opening an “absolute light.”108 Finally, Heidegger confirms a fundamental point that we also saw in Balthasar, namely, that transcendence is simultaneous with wholeness, that man’s grasp of himself is in some basic sense simultaneous with his “infinite” surpassing of himself. Nevertheless, there are fundamental problems that emerge from Heidegger’s approach.109 According to Balthasar, the most basic difficulty it

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

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presents lies in one of the aspects that Heidegger most positively highlights. Heidegger affirms a radical difference between the experiencing of other people’s death and the experience of one’s own death.110 The death of an other is a painful loss, Heidegger says, but it does not disclose the ontological sense of the possibility of not-being, that is, the loss of beings in their totality, insofar as the one who experiences the death of an other remains, as it were, in the world. It is thus only one’s own death that is sufficiently radical, and this experience is one in which, by necessity, I am absolutely alone. No one can go through this experience in my place. For Balthasar, by contrast, while “facing one’s death” seems to be the most radical experience—to the extent that it concerns a death that is mine and no one else’s and indeed, touches me in the depth of my being (or even deeper!)—making it fundamental, he says, cannot avoid “instrumentalizing” my relationship to everyone and everything else.111 In other words, absolutizing one’s own death implies a kind of ultimate solitude and even solipsism. But such a solipsism means that authentic transcendence, understood as relationship to the other as other, is in the end an illusion. If we begin, by contrast, with an affirmation of relation to the other that is simultaneous with my own existence as a self112—if we begin, that is, with the mother’s smile—then we can affirm a certain solidarity in death, and therefore an experience of the death of the other as radically as my own “facing of my death.”113 Because of the structural dependence of the self on the other, there is a sense in which I experience the death of the other, to whom I am bound in love, even more radically than the anticipatory thought of my own death. History is fraught with examples of those who have chosen to die in place of another, thus revealing a reversal of Heidegger’s principle. In light of the radical experience of an other’s death, 110. Being and Time, sec. 47, 281–85: “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him. . . . By its very essence, death is in every case mine.” 111. TD 4:96. In a footnote on the same page, Balthasar shows how Heidegger’s presuppositions prevent him from “reaching” in any genuine sense another person. 112. Balthasar’s sense that a relation is as fundamental as substance in his understanding of person has come under heavy criticism from Josef Seifert: “Person und Individuum: Über Hans Urs von Balthasars Philosophie der Person und die philosophische Implikationen seiner Dreifaltigkeitstheologie,” Forum Katolische Theologie 13 (1997): 81–105. Seifert does not acknowledge any possibility at all of a paradoxical relationship between substance and relation, which would make each prior to the other in a different order, and would thus allow a complete affirmation of both. Thus, he is forced into the claim that Balthasar denies that “person” is something that exists in itself (90), which, in light of what we have seen here and in chapter 3, is untenable. 113. See Balthasar’s reference to Marcel’s ideas on this topic: “Marcel is right: the death of the beloved is a threshold, the threshold. But we ourselves cannot cross it.” TD 1:392. 302

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Balthasar claims that we must speak of both “my” death and “our” death; though these two are irreducibly different, they both need to be affirmed.114 The solipsism that is implied in the absolutizing of “my death” is immediately related to the other major problem in Heidegger’s approach, which was mentioned in the introduction and chapter 1, namely, the identification of the Absolute (Being) with nothingness. Thus, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s transcendence is not in any genuine sense a being with an “other” but rather a projection, a standing-out into the nothing, which, in the end, is always my own nothing—“nothing” other than me. The Angst that arises in the facing of one’s own death in this case loses its radical character. It can no longer be called the “uncanny,” because it is now perfectly familiar since it is my nothing. In other words, the unheimlich (uncanny) is exhaustively transformed into the heimisch (native; familiar). If “my death” gets absolutized, in the same moment it gets tamed. From this perspective, the heart of Dasein is not left vulnerable to the otherness of the other and exposed to the end by the gaping wound of the ontological difference, but finally it shields itself. The radicality that Heidegger sought can be affirmed, it seems, only when we interpret the ontological difference in terms of the fourfold difference. And this brings us back to the first point. Because Heidegger does not permit a positive, ultimate otherness (since Being is nothing), he has “no room” for any relative other. The transcendence he wanted to affirm in the radical experience of finitude, since it cannot finally affirm a real mediation by an other (“our death”), will have to collapse into an immediacy, which is no transcendence at all. In the end, to embrace Heidegger’s profound insight that death brings to light the paradox of wholeness, we have to look elsewhere for its ground.

Plato: Dying for the Truth We have begun to see that the making immanent of the transcendent, which alone is what allows the possibility of truth, cannot be an abstractly fixed principle; nor, however, is it simply contrary to determinate, intelligible form. Instead, it is an intelligible form, a wholeness, that emerges only within dramatic engagement. Furthermore, inasmuch as it concerns a paradigmatic form that grounds, in some sense, all the others, this dramatic engagement must involve the very limits of existence, that is, death and the ground of being. This perspective opens up an extraordinary access into

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the philosopher “for whom death is an issue” in an even more comprehensive manner than for Heidegger: namely, Plato. Indeed, a certain unity among the major dialogues emerges once we take the dramatic significance of death as an interpretive key, not only to Plato’s moral teaching, but in an even more fundamental sense to the epistemological dimension of his philosophy, which is as inseparable for Plato from the moral dimension as rea- or as truth is from the good. Death is not son (logos) is from love (eros), only the constant theme in all the early dialogues, but it provides the basic horizon of meaning of the middle dialogues (e.g., Phaedo and Republic), and even the later ones (e.g., Theatetus).115 But the meaning of death in Plato, from the beginning, has a different “tone” from the one we see in Heidegger. Whereas, for Heidegger, death is primarily an “issue” for the authentic individual, for Plato, it is the “place” where relation to an other most perfectly comes to expression: for Plato, death is always connected to martyrdom, bearing witness (and bearing witness always refers to an “other”). At the heart of the Republic, in the midst of a discontinuous break with the main topic of the dialogue, there emerges precisely the question we have alluded to as essential content of the task of meta-anthropology: How can the transcendent (in this case, the Good), be made visible so as to provide the ground of meaning for all else? Plato’s primary response to the question of an “adequate” immanent image of the transcendent Good, I propose, is neither the sun image, nor the divided line, but finally Socrates himself.116 He images the Good by dying for its sake. Although it would require more space to elaborate than we have here, a basis for the proposal of Socrates as the image of the Good in the Republic can be seen already in the relation Plato draws between Socrates and the central cave analogy. It is possible to illuminate this relation in terms of the meta-anthropological problem we have been discussing. 115. I can do no more than assert these claims at this point, for a discussion in any detail would take us far from the theme. One of the Plato commentators, next to Balthasar (see, for example, Balthasar’s lengthy discussion of Plato in GL 4:166–215, which begins with this theme, 166–75), who has repeatedly drawn attention to the importance of death in Plato is Eric Voegelin: see Order and History, vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985; originally published 1957). In relation to the Theatetus, for example, Voegelin points out that the allusion to the dying Theatetus (who is explicitly taken as an “image” of Socrates: Theatetus 143e, Statesman, 257d–258a) at the beginning of the dialogue is the necessary context for understanding not only this dialogue, which is, interestingly enough, Plato’s most thoroughly “epistemological” dialogue, but also the meaning of the two that are connected with it, the Sophist and the Statesman. 116. For a further elaboration of this in the Republic, see D. C. Schindler, “Going Down: Founding Reason in the Republic,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies (September 2003): 81–132. 304

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The clearest expression of the transcendent beyond not “left” separate from the world of senses, but breaking in to that world, is the moment that Socrates breaks in to the image that he was drawing of the cave, in order to compel the philosopher to go back down for the sake of the other prisoners. The cave represents the immanence or life of immediacy of the prisoners, who are not only stuck underground but even more emphatically trapped in themselves. Indeed, it is even too much to say that they are trapped in themselves, since they, in fact, have no access to themselves for the same reason they have no access to one another, as Plato indicates.117 The point here, which is in a certain sense the point of this whole chapter in relation to the theme of truth in general, is that the moment a genuine connection between transcendence and immanence is sundered, there is nothing to prevent immanence from becoming infinite. That is to say, without the connection, transcendence and therefore any kind of whole that remains “other” is undermined at every single level, and so by logical necessity there arises the compelling movement toward pure immanence (of sensible images, to use Plato’s language) or, in a more comprehensive sense, toward the pure abstraction of abstract formalism, which includes both the abstraction of sensual immediacy and intellectual immediacy. However, the moment a genuine connection is established between immanence and transcendence, there is nothing to prevent the opposite movement of increasingly comprehensive and transcendent wholes, until we reach the moment of the in-breaking of the absolute: this is the “ascent” of the philosopher through various stages out of the cave and into the light of day. But the movement cannot end there. Even though there is a fundamental difference between the sensible and the intelligible realms, for Plato, which is analogous to all of the “relative infinities” we have seen in the Gestalten formed at various stages in the structure of truth, there is a sense in which these differences all remain within a continuous order. We see this not only in the fact that the cave image Socrates draws lays all these stages out within the same basic, sensible reality (i.e., the whole image is drawn in “representational” figures) but also in the fact that what ultimately distinguishes sense appearance from the being, the proper “object” of the soul, is the radically other order of the good.118 If the absolute is to be shown in its absoluteness, the “ascending movement” has to be interrupted. There has to be in some sense a leap into a radically different order, which entails a fundamental “reversal,” such as the one we saw Balthasar describe in relation to Heidegger’s notion of Angst as the experience indispensable 117. Plato, Rep. 7.515a. 118. Ibid., 505d. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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for “setting up” the “objectivity” of things, and therefore indispensable for their transcendence. This reversal is, alone, what simultaneously secures wonder, transcendence, relation to the other, and objectivity. We begin now to see how many themes in the Republic—many more than we can indicate in this context—converge in Socrates’ sending the philosopher back down into the cave. He is, indeed, sending the philosopher to his death. This is why it is so important that Socrates sends him down, since it is Socrates who, in Plato’s eyes, stands as the martyr, the one who died for the truth, thus making the ground of truth manifest and at the same time making philosophy, that is, the love and knowledge of what truly is, possible. The notion of the deed of martyrdom as the ground of truth moreover accounts for the explicit self-reference, the first-person singular speech, at the very beginning and end of the dialogue, which is - “I rare in Plato.119 The first, pregnant word of the Republic is kataben: [Socrates] went down.” At the end, after relating the myth of judgment, Socrates once again “breaks into” the image, and he contrasts being “persuaded by” the image (which, as we have seen, can persuade concerning a reality that is deeper than mere image only by virtue of an absolute ground) with “being persuaded by me”120—and we are meant to understand this “me” not only as the flesh-and-blood person telling the story but also as the unsurpassably real (i.e., transcendent and objective) person who was put to death for the sake of reality. He is the one who opens the immanent to judgment, and therefore to truth. Now, both Heidegger and Plato affirm that genuine transcendence, the transcendence that makes truth possible, cannot be simply an abstract principle of anthropology, but it must be achieved through a dramatic event. For Heidegger, we saw, the transcendence ultimately gets compromised precisely to the extent that it is not an other-centered transcendence, that is, to the extent that it is rooted, not in a positive other but in an absolute nothing. We thus see the reason for Balthasar’s claim that Heidegger essentializes the ontological difference: his “facing of one’s own death” or Angst opens up the difference between Being and beings, but he fails to see how this transcendence can also, nonreductively, bring them 119. The other dialogues that begin in the first person are the Lysis, the Statesman, the Apology, and the Charmides. While there does not seem to be a clear reason why Plato chose to narrate these other dialogues thus, we will argue that the first-person perspective of the Republic is crucial. In a footnote to the Loeb text (trans. Paul Shorey [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930], 2), Shorey mentions an anecdote about how this passage was found in Plato’s tablets in many variations, which suggests that the final version was not haphazard. 120. Plato, Rep., X, 621c. 306

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back into relation.121 For Plato, by contrast, the genuine otherness of the transcendence is preserved. The radical difference of the good is simultaneously what accounts for both the ascent (or the difference between being and image) and the descent (or the relation between being and image: the philosopher returns to the cave of images), to the extent that as the good appears as the object of all striving as well as that which, embodied in Socrates as the one who went down to Hades for its sake, sends the philosopher back down into the sensible “world.” This return, however, does not make the discontinuity between the orders any less radical. Heidegger affirms the complete withdrawal of all beings as a totality in the fundamental experience of the nothing, but he oscillates between a being overwhelmed by the nothing in Angst and a sort of preempting of the nothing in the heroic “staring down” of death. Plato echoes the same radical withdrawal in the act of dying for the good— we recall that the terms set for the rest of the dialogue in the story of Gyge’s Ring called for the “just man” to sacrifice every possible relation to appearance122—and yet, the act that makes the absolute really manifest in the relative does not thereby reduce it to the relative. The otherness is truly held open. This is why the dramatic engagement with death in Plato, in contrast to the engagement in Heidegger, is weighted from the beginning in the direction of otherness. Socrates speaks of the great danger involved in seeking truth, because, in doing so, one is responsible not only for oneself but even more basically for others;123 the total isolation of the prisoners in the cave is most perfectly contrasted with the philosopher who does not live the “better life” for himself, but who sacrifices it in order “to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens in harmony with each other.”124 Indeed, Plato goes so far as to say that 121. This is a point we elaborated in our discussion of the fourfold difference in chapter 1. 122. Indeed, Heidegger’s withdrawal of all beings in the experience of Angst fades into a mere “psychological” experience when compared to the radicality Plato intends. Plato could not put the point any more forcefully: after being scorned and stripped of all possible honors (all relation to appearance), the just man “will be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with fire, and, at the end, when he has suffered every kind of evil, he’ll be impaled.” Ibid., 2.361e–362a. And after being abandoned by men, he will finally be abandoned even by the gods, who prefer the unjust man, the one who, to all appearances, made “adequate sacrifices” and “magnificent offerings to them” (362b–c). 123. Ibid., 450e–451a: “But to speak, as I’m doing, at a time when one is unsure of oneself and searching for the truth, is a frightening and insecure thing to do. I’m not afraid of being laughed at—that would be childish indeed. But I’m afraid that, if I slip from the truth, just where it’s most important not to, I’d not only fall myself but drag my friends down as well.” 124. Ibid., 519e. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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this transcendent act is what constitutes the whole as a whole, that it is what “bind[s] the city together.”125 We thus see a confirmation of what was affirmed about the task of meta-anthropology in relation to truth: the truth of any part both gives rise to and is consequent upon the truth of the whole—the community—that this polarity requires a founding act, which is man’s task of becoming paradigmatically a whole by surpassing himself toward the absolute in a dramatic engagement with death. Balthasar, after laying out the significance of Socrates’ death for Plato’s philosophy, writes that “the question as to how far Plato’s picture of Socrates is idealized plays no role here, only the fact that the philosophical act consists in the decision to die, which springs from his absolute dedication to the truth.”126 Indeed, Balthasar integrates the point that Plato is making here, without reservation, into his own philosophy. In The Truth of the World, he argues that it is the very nature of truth to require a witness, and that this does not make it “dependent” on man in a way that reduces truth to subjectivity, but in fact most profoundly secures its utter objectivity.127 It does so because the perfect act of witness, martyrdom, is an unsurpassably objective act. And yet, at the same time, this pure objectivity, which anchors truth in a transcendence beyond any subjective limitation, does not thereby exclude subjectivity but rather requires the whole of it. This act, then, establishes a foundation for truth that is total and yet nonreductive, that has an essentially “transcendent” character, which implies that at every single level—from the most supreme of personal truths to the most formal of logical truths and the most common of acts of perception—there is no reductive access to the object, no way of reaching the truth of the object without participating in some way in the act that founds it, and therefore “committing” oneself in a manner analogous to the act of martyrdom. Thus, Balthasar insists, even “logical truth cannot be abstracted from personal truthfulness,”128 granted that we take personal truthfulness to mean remaining true (fidelity) or bearing witness to truth. He fills out the meaning of this claim when he elaborates the “conditions of possibility” for the meaning of human language in Theologik volume 3. “Human understanding,” he explains, “begins with being addressed by a Thou, that is, a foreign freedom, who draws my attention to a determinate state of affairs.”129 125. Ibid., 520a. 126. GL 4:171 (translation slightly modified). 127. TL 1:120–30. 128. TD 2:252. 129. TL 3:331: “Menschliches Verstehen beginnt mit dem Angesprochensein durch ein Du, das heißt durch eine fremde Freiheit, die mich, auf einen bestimmten Sachverhalt hinweisend, aufmerken läßt.” 308

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At the same time, he continues, the “I” can grasp this state of affairs, regardless of what it is, only insofar as it is illuminated by a comprehensive horizon. Thus, “language, which is always a referential gesture, occurs— in every conversation—within two open spheres: one is the commonality of an absolute (pre-linguistic) horizon of meaning that embraces both interlocutors, and the other is the freedom of each speaker, which can never be presented, and thus one whose expressions one always has to ‘trust,’ even when it is more often accompanied by empirical proofs of its correctness.”130 These two spheres, however, would remain precariously poised, if it were not for the possibility that they might be brought together in a single expression of freedom that embodied or, rather, manifested that absolute horizon: “Nevertheless, behind [this horizon that transcends all human activity] there stands a choice and decision to posit the whole (beyond my interests) as valid: an option for a meaning that cannot be further constructed, which bears all of the indissoluble contradictions in the world and in existence through an affirmation of a meaning that comprehends them all, a meaning without which one could not even speak of the meaning-lessness of the contradictions.”131 Martyrdom presents, as it were, the ideal form of this expression of freedom: it permits the withdrawal of the totality of beings precisely for the sake of that totality. Nevertheless, once we grant the fact that Balthasar affirms the significance of literal martyrdom, we are confronted with a new question. Does not the extremity or “ideality” of martyrdom raise a certain question as to the role it serves epistemologically? Is there not a certain contradiction in the fact that the content of the act that is supposed to ground the manifest truth of the cosmos, the world, is precisely the loss of that reality? But, on the other hand, if it is not the loss of that reality, then, as we have seen with Heidegger, it is not sufficiently radical to ground the truth of the whole. What are we to make of this dilemma? Now, in spite of the “epiphanic” depth of insight in the Republic, it seems as though Plato himself is not able to hold the tension; he often lets go of 130. Ibid., 332: “Sprache, die je eine hinweisende Handlung ist, welche auf etwas zeigt, ereignet sich—auch in jedem Gespräch—nur innerhalb zweier Räume: der eine ist die Gemeinsamkeit eines beide umgreifenden Horizonts von (vor-sprachlichem) Sinnverstehen überhaupt, der andere ist die nie vorzeigbare Freiheit jedes Sprechenden, dem man jeweils sein Geäußertes ‘glauben’ muß, auch wenn es öfter empirische Beweise für dessen Richtigkeit gibt” (emphasis mine). 131. Ibid., 332–33: “Dennoch steht dahinter eine Wahl und Entscheidung: das Ganze (jenseits meiner Interessen) als gültig zu setzen: Option für einen nicht mehr konstruierbaren Sinn, als Ertragen der unauflösbaren Widersprüche in Welt und Dasein aus der Bejahung eines sie umgreifenden Sinns, ohne den man nicht einmal von der Sinn-losigkeit der Widersprüche reden könnte.” Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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one of its essential sides. The key basis for assessing this issue in Plato would seem to be the question of the body-soul polarity in relation to the “structure” of transcendence. We saw earlier in the chapter that genuine transcendence requires the body (senses) to mediate the soul (spirit) to itself and vice versa. Without this mutual mediation, we will collapse the structure of man’s relation to the world into different variations of a reduction to immediacy. This mutual mediation, in turn, has as its indispensable presupposition a polarity between body and soul, and this polarity itself is impossible unless we affirm that the body represents in some fundamental respect a positive excess or “more” with respect to the soul. It must, in other words, make a genuine, intrinsic contribution to the soul’s knowledge, not merely (negatively) as an indispensable occasion for knowing—the point from which the act of knowing begins and then to which it is applied—but (positively) as the conveyor of objectivity in form and subjectivity in content. A basic ambiguity in Plato on this point is undeniable, and no doubt one of the most important things about Pickstock’s After Writing is its compelling demonstration that the notion that Plato simply rejects the body, and all it implies, is shortsighted: what he rejects, she says, is a “mundane apprehension of physicality.”132 Nevertheless, we can ask whether Plato’s integration of the body from a nonmundane perspective, that is, from above, sufficiently appreciates the soul’s good dependence on the body, as possessing in some ultimate sense something more than the soul can possess itself. Without this recognition, there will inevitably be a tendency to emphasize the ascending movement of abstraction from the senses, which is clearly a major theme in Plato, and at the same time to collapse the transcendent into the immanent, which seems to occur especially in the “late” Plato: as Balthasar points out, the last dialogues present an “aesthetic ethic - yearnimmanent in the world,” wherein “it is no longer a matter of ‘eros ing for wisdom’ (philosophia) but of wisdom itself, which is one with the cosmic-human consonance.”133 A consequence of this dual tendency, then, will be an exclusive positing of literal martyrdom, a “negation” of life, as the founding philosophical act. This exclusivity is connected to a setting of the ideal or absolute in opposition to the real or relative, which then can dialectically either subsume the latter or reduce itself to it.

132. Pickstock, After Writing, 15. 133. GL 4:213. Balthasar is referring, here, to the passage in the Laws, 3.689d, where Plato speaks of the “perfectly rational life” and identifies it with “wisdom,” rather than the love of wisdom. 310

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Since, as we have seen, the problems that arise from dialectical opposition can be avoided only through the discovery of a polarity, we are led to the fascinating question: Does martyrdom have an irreducibly different pole? If martyrdom, in other words, is the integration of the relative on the basis of the Absolute or the manifestation of the truth of the relative through the concrete expression of the radical discontinuity between the cosmos and the divine, what we need to find, as paradoxical as it may initially sound, is an image capable of integrating the Absolute within the relative. With respect to the different but related problem of avoiding a dialectic between finite and infinite freedom, Balthasar says, “not only must the Infinite take the finite into itself . . . but the finite must also be capable of taking the Infinite into itself.”134 And this is another polarity.

Balthasar: The Dramatic Foundation of Truth La créativité dramatique, c’est d’être vrai avec le corps et l’âme.135 —François Mauriac Nicht der Schmerz ist der letzte Sinn des Tragischen, sondern die Wahrheit, die freilich nicht ohne Schmerz, die nur als Schmerz gesehen kann.136 —Gerhard Nebel

Because this “polar” integration must take place in an image, I will first turn to Balthasar’s notion of art, specifically, the dramatic art: drama itself. “Since man can neither throw off his vertical relationship to the absolute,” he says in TD 4, “nor entrap the absolute within his own finitude by his own (magical) efforts, he becomes, right from the start, a figure of pathos on the world stage.”137 The very fact of man’s polarity sends him to the stage. Balthasar goes on to elaborate the nearly impossible tensions expressed in the fact that man is both rational and finite: “The paradoxes associated with a rationality that is embedded in a transitory existence are indissoluble.”138 Rationality means relation to the true and the good, which are not true and good unless they are rooted in an absolute foundation and yet which demand to be embodied in the poor, ephemeral creature, man. He will have no choice, in the end, but to give himself up. However, 134. TD 2:201. 135. Dramatic creativity is being true with body and soul. 136. The ultimate meaning of the tragic is not suffering, but truth—although to be sure the truth cannot happen without suffering, but, indeed, only as suffering. 137. TD 4:73. 138. Ibid., 81. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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this surrender finds expression in man’s drive to make a judgment that remains valid, to speak a word that is permanent, a word that “says everything.” The human being knows that his pledging of himself occurs in time, and that time means that both the circumstances in which he pledges himself, and even he himself who pledges, are bound to suffer change: nevertheless, “as he moves through this volatile element, through these shifting sands, such knowledge does not stop him from taking his pilgrim’s staff and inscribing with it some word that is ultimate.”139 According to Balthasar, this fundamental tension at the heart of the human being is not only what is portrayed on the stage in the world’s greatest dramas, but it also accounts for the existence of theater in the first place. Drama, in other words, as the “tension-filled” manifestation of tensions, reveals a remarkable convergence of form and content, which is precisely what we are seeking as the fulfillment of the role of meta-anthropology. That the form of drama itself is an expression of polar tensions, and thus of the “content” of meta-anthropology, is a basic theme in Balthasar’s thought. This convergence of form and content in drama is negatively confirmed by Plato, who, as we have just seen, simultaneously lets slip the anthropological polarity and banishes the dramatic poets.140 In a similar fashion, Hegel, though he has accorded drama an importance that was unprecedented in the history of philosophy, eventually claims on the basis of epistemological presuppositions that drama must ultimately be superseded and left behind.141 In other words, because Hegel does not affirm an ultimate polarity/analogy of being, but rather an identity of identity and difference, he likewise rejects the perduring “otherness” carried by drama in form if not in content. Balthasar, by contrast, affirms polarity as the inalienable mark of created being, and so of man, and he therefore gives drama a centrality that appears to be unique in the history of thought.142 Balthasar works out the form and content of a “theodrama” in its historical, philosophical, literary, and theological aspects over the course of 139. Ibid. 140. Balthasar discusses the historical tension between philosophy and drama as expressed in this moment in Plato, in ibid., 73–75. 141. Hegel’s “objection” to drama, as one that Balthasar says, “touches the nerve of our endeavor at a . . . central point,” is presented in TD 1:54–70. 142. One might want to offer Nietzsche as an example of one who preceded Balthasar in affirming the centrality of drama (and especially tragedy), since Nietzsche, in his first book, presented tragedy as the basic form of philosophy, because it is the key to understanding the human being, the creature who embodies the tensions between the infinite (Dionysus) and the finite (Apollo). While Nietzsche’s profound treatment of this theme in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), has many things in common with Balthasar’s own approach, 312

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five volumes. The immensity of Balthasar’s work on this theme will force the present discussion to be rather abstract and schematic, and to leave out much that would be illuminating for the problem of truth. Thus, for example, Balthasar goes into great detail exploring the philosophical and theological significance of every aspect of the form of drama: the tensions of time and place in plot; the staging; the distinctions between actor and role, performer and director; and the Gestalt formed from the combined work of the author, the actor’s and producer’s interpretation, the contribution of the audience, and so forth. As for the content of drama, Balthasar discusses in concrete detail almost every one of the major dramatists of the Western world, and he draws from these the most significant themes in relation to his theology.143 Our interest here is very specific, and so our discussion will be regrettably far more narrow. I will first note how the themes we have been discussing in Heidegger and Plato are integrated into what Balthasar takes to be aspects of the essential content of drama, and then I will show how these themes are in a sense expressed in the form of drama itself. According to Balthasar, the fundamental purpose of the theater in world history has been not merely to describe one or another aspect of the essence of existence but to reveal man to himself, to display in a concrete image who he is. It does so by presenting man engaged in “significant action.” In order to get at the heart of drama, we have to see the mutual implication of these terms, that is, why significance is not significant unless it unfolds in action, and why action is not a “transcendent act” unless it “has” significance. First, a meaning that is isolated in itself, taken abstractly and thus as unrelated to the concrete order of existence, cannot be said to be significant. It is significant only when it is the meaning of that order, only when it brings itself to bear on that order, when it is manifest in its relation to that order. Although there are many analogous ways that such a manifestation can occur, the most decisive way it actually happens is through an action or deed. One of the first dramatic poets said, “Not with words, but with deeds we seek to confer a ray of light on life.”144 As we saw in

there is a great difference between the two. Although there is no room to elaborate this point, it seems that among other things, Nietzsche did not have a metaphysics that allowed him to sustain a tension, and so it is not surprising to see that before long in Nietzsche’s work, the tension between Apollo and Dionysus disappeared, and Nietzsche was left, finally, with Dionysus alone. 143. Most of the formal aspects of drama and their basic themes find elucidation in volume 1, the Prolegomena, and volume 4, the Action. We will be referring primarily to these two books in what follows. 144. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1143–44, cited in GL 4:131. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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the chapter 1, action serves in a particular way to “concentrate” the whole of a being by directing it to a goal beyond itself. There is something essentially “self-surpassing” in the act, and that is why it functions so powerfully to sum up, to bring out the meaning of a whole. However, at the same time, an act is not genuinely self-surpassing (horizontally) except in relation to a (vertically) transcendent meaning. With respect to the transcending function of action, Balthasar cites a passage from Max Scheler: “In every act, the conscious person transcends the given insofar as that given represents a ‘limit’ on the part of the body—which is ‘given’ him along with the experience.”145 The act that Scheler describes here differs from mere mechanical movement insofar as mechanical movement does not transcend the limits of corporality, but it merely displaces corporality within the same horizontal order.146 For the movement to be transcendent, it has to be capable of gathering together the “manyness” of the elements in the immanent, horizontal plane “all at once” into a whole, and it can do so only in relation to a meaning. Such a gathering of horizontally extended moments occurs whenever the action is the fruit of a decision; this is why Scheler describes it as the act of a conscious person. In making a decision, a person gathers up what is given by judging it in relation to a meaning, and this meaning is both absolute and relative; it is not only a “what is best in itself” but also “what is best in relation to the circumstances.” The “hinge,” therefore, between the vertical transcendence of the meaning and the horizontal transcendence of the action, is the concrete decision.147 Man emerges as a whole between these points of

145. Max Scheler, “Tod und Fortleben,” in Schriften aus dem Nachlass I, Werke 10 (1976): 42, cited in TD 4:96. 146. The notion of “mere mechanical movement” that I use here to contrast with action, however, is an abstraction, and in reality an impossibility. Merely mechanical motion would be a sequence of discrete moments within a strictly horizontal plane. But, given what I said at the beginning of the previous chapter, the most “mechanical” of movements that may occur concretely cannot avoid being, to some extent, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and therefore to the same extent “more” than the merely “horizontal.” 147. To illustrate the significance of decision in establishing a relation between irreducible poles, I refer to the “synthesizing” role of prudence in Aquinas’s moral theory, inasmuch as prudence “unites” the speculative and the moral order. The content of “what is to be done” in given circumstances cannot be deduced from universal principles, but it is not thereby left unrelated to them. Rather, the universal and particular are “creatively” synthesized by practical wisdom, and they cannot be brought together otherwise than in such a creative synthesis, in which a person is called on to commit himself in judgment. On the operation of prudence in the thought of Aquinas, see Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, et. al. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 10–22. See also, Robert Sokolowski, 314

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transcendence. Man can be “summed up” as a whole only in being “surpassed,” and he can be surpassed only in being summed up in his free action. The transcendence in which he seeks fulfillment is, in other words, a tension stretched out in the vertical-horizontal polarity, and if either of its poles is denied, the tension that gives rise to the whole is lost, as we will see shortly. The more transcendent the meaning is in relation to which the action unfolds, the more significant the action becomes—the more, that is, it is able to gather up the elements of the horizontal order into a meaningful whole. Action becomes essentially dramatic when it plays itself out not merely in relation to some “relative” meaning among other more or less valid possibilities, but in relation to a meaning that can embrace the whole immanent order at once; in other words, in relation to a definitive meaning: “Against all [that tries to gainsay it], contrary to all objections and yet borne out by the facts, we must assert that dramatic action is ultimately only meaningful when seen against the background of a given, absolute meaning—albeit in the wake of Hegel such meaning can no longer be rationally adumbrated and demonstrated in concepts.”148 The ab-solute meaning is thus paradoxically not un-related, as an abstract idea, but it is the meaning that comes to light in the dramatic tensions of action, even while it is precisely the absolute transcendence of the meaning that can allow the various parts of the drama to unfold in their tension—a tension that can reach the point of violent extremity—without falsifying or simplifying them. This is the notion lying behind what Balthasar calls a summary, “sideglance definition” of drama, in TD 4: drama is “an action of ultimate significance that takes place within a finite framework.”149 The tension of the definition itself should not be overlooked. How can something of ultimate significance occur in a finite situation? It is not without paradox, and the paradox shows up in what Balthasar takes to be the fundamental themes of drama: “The Theme of Death,” which he elaborates within a larger section called “Finitude,”

The God of Faith and Reason, 66–67: “The ability to emerge as an agent requires the ability to think about the situation that calls for something to be done. Such thinking is not the consideration of maxims and the placing of a case under a general rule; it is more elementary, more of a raw articulation of what is really going on. It is an appraisal of a concrete situation. It involves generalities, but the focus of the thought is not on the general but on the situation. It is a recognition that something should be done, and it is a projection of what can be done. In the immediacy of a situation such thinking lets ends emerge and unravels arrays of means. It exhibits insight into what is at issue and shows imagination about what can be done.” 148. TD 1:74. 149. TD 4:88 (translation modified). Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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and “The Struggle for the Good.”150 These themes receive further elaboration in TD 4, under the heading “The Pathos of the World Stage.”151 It bears remarking how similar these two themes are to what Heidegger and Plato illuminated concerning the fundamental philosophical act. The similarity is not accidental; it arises from the fact that the purpose of drama, like the purpose of the basic philosophical act that these two thinkers describe, is to shed light on human existence as a whole, and thereby on the meaning of being, by setting it in all of its finitude in relation to an absolute. I will treat, in turn, Balthasar’s dramatic sense of confronting death and his understanding of the striving after the absolute good. For Balthasar, as for Heidegger and Plato, death is an event of literally absolute significance because it is not merely one occurrence among others in the course of life, but represents the very boundary of life in the full extent of its horizontal unfolding. It is therefore a point in which the vertical and horizontal intersect. The event of death cannot but reveal an absolute meaning, whether that meaning is the ultimate meaninglessness of all things, or that the whole is definitively embraced by something greater. Either way, the theme of death is by its nature one of the most constant in the history of drama. In TD 1, Balthasar lists some of the basic ways this theme has appeared, offering numerous concrete examples for each: as “destiny”; as the great “interpreter of life,” in which all masks come off; as lying “immanent in life” and saturating life with its meaning; as representing “the borderline”; as the means of “atonement”; as connected with love; as undertaken on “behalf of someone else”; and in relation to the “unmaking of kings” in classical tragedies.152 As I mentioned, Balthasar integrated Heidegger’s sense of time, finitude, and death into his own sense of drama;153 indeed, we see that the absoluteness that it expresses for Heidegger comes to light in Balthasar’s dramatic theory with the same purpose: it presents the “final frontier” of life and thus the place where the depths of existence come to view. Because it touches these depths, it does not eliminate but rather reinforces “the paradox of existence, namely, the endeavor to express the absolute through the relative.”154 But the diversity of forms in which the theme of death appears in Balthasar reveals an essential difference from Heidegger. For

150. TD 1:343–481. 151. TD 4:71–201. 152. TD 1:369–413. 153. On some elements of this integration, see Imperatori, “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 191–210. 154. TD 4:95. 316

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Heidegger, death is a “wholly vertical” issue; it brings to concrete expression the fact that man “ek-sists,” or stands out in a nothingness that concerns himself alone, even if, in a second moment, this nothingness of Dasein is what lets beings be. For Balthasar, by contrast, the transcendence of death is both vertical, a “direct” relation of self to the absolute, and—precisely because this absolute is not negative, as it is for Heidegger, but (negative and) positive, as for Plato—it also represents a horizontal transcendence in relation to others. This duality is why the engagement with death, for Balthasar, is not in the first place the private act of an individual but takes place horizontally within a communal and concrete order, that is, on the “world stage” through the interaction of individual persons who find themselves in precise circumstances. The “deed” of the engagement, thus, is not an arbitrary act that “comes out of the blue”; it is concretely provoked precisely through the particularity of the circumstances. In this respect, the “facing of death” can acquire a much richer meaning than it has for Heidegger; it can, for example, embody the ultimate tensions of existence through the suffering of the death of a beloved, or, as in Euripides’ Alcestis, the acceptance to die in his place. In these examples, the person gathers up all of the elements of his life as a totality (Ganzheit) in a single gesture, and yet that gesture has the positive meaning of a gift. Furthermore, and because of that positivity, not only is the “totality” thereby achieved, that of the person who carries out the meaningful deed, but at the same time the deed itself confers a final meaning on him for whom the deed was undertaken—in fact, it brings meaning to all of the characters and the events of the drama that conspired to bring the action to that fateful point. The whole of the dramatic piece, and therefore the horizontal line of persons and things involved, thus receives its meaning through the ultimate significance of a single character’s decision. If the radical seriousness of dramatic action is revealed most directly in the theme of death, the real paradox of dramatic action comes most clearly to light in the second theme Balthasar treats at length, namely, “the struggle for the good.” It is significant that the theme concerns a value, a good, which is something to be pursued, and yet does not for all of that lie “present at hand” but requires a difficult approach toward it, a struggle. In fact, the primary aspect under which Balthasar discusses this theme is “The Good Slips Away.”155 The essentially “elusive” character of the good is indispensable to drama. Why is this so? As we have seen, action requires both a vertical and a horizontal transcendence; that is, it

155. TD 1:413. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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must relate to a meaning but one that is pursued in freedom. We saw in the last chapter, in the discussion of the simultaneity of vision and rapture in the subject’s free, ek-static movement toward the object, that ek-stasis cannot be transcendent freedom if it is sheer discontinuity, that is, if it excludes the continuity of “vision.” To be transcendent, it must be simultaneously, though asymmetrically, continuous and discontinuous. This “figure” of transcendence was confirmed later in the chapter specifically in relation to desire and the good. One cannot genuinely move (in transcendent action) unless one is moved by another. This general figure is most paradigmatically expressed in drama, and with the paradigm comes the paradox. On the one hand, Balthasar affirms that “in every case, the goal of the [dramatic] decision is the Good.”156 The action of drama has to be motivated; there must be something sought. But one cannot seek something except when one experiences it as good: “finite freedom, the openness to all being, can only strive for something it perceives as good (having a value)—even if in fact it is evil.”157 Thus, the Good that is sought must necessarily be in some respect relative, that is, “for me.” The criteria of the dramatic choices in pursuit of the Good, Balthasar says, “are grasped, not in the either-or of a purely objective and a purely subjective scale of values, as if man were able abstractly to choose either the ‘good-in-itself’ or the ‘good-for-him,’ but in the intertwining of both points of view that arises from fellowship with other human beings, from the dialogue character of existence.”158 What may seem a minor point has great significance. An abstract approach determines “beforehand” what is good in itself and therefore needs no movement; a concrete approach knows, at first, only the good that initially calls one into the action, and it is through the action that the depth of the good comes to light. At first, the person sees that it is good for him but does not yet know if it is good in itself. Only in this way is the movement toward the good transcendent, and this is why action, work, decision, uncertainty, and suffering are required: hence, the struggle for the good. In other words, the “absoluteness” of the good cannot appear right from the outset, but it must remain hidden under the aspect of a relative good.159 If the absolute were there at the outset, there would be no free-

156. Ibid., 414. 157. TD 2:211. 158. TD 1:415. 159. In a discussion of the relation between finite and infinite freedom, Balthasar says that the only way infinite freedom can appear without destroying finite freedom is by “going incognito.” TD 2:373. 318

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dom and therefore no movement: freedom requires relation (a being-moved by a good) and the simple ab-solute is by definition un-related. The good in its absoluteness would thus have no relation to the horizontal, and in its sheer discontinuity it would be present only either as a violent intrusion, or in its sheer “in-itself-ness” it would paradoxically reduce to being just one among the many objects in the horizontal order.160 Therefore, Balthasar says, “the Absolute does not make itself present simply, in a bodily way: it announces itself only in the relative goods and values.”161 However, the good does not allow itself to be reduced to relativity precisely to the extent that it is really good: “but eventually [the Absolute announces itself] so clearly that no hesitation is legitimate.”162 If the meaning pursued exhausted itself wholly in its being relative, that is, “meaningful for me,” there would likewise be no real movement, and the action would collapse into insignificance. The good that is (relatively, continuously, or horizontally) pursued must at some point show some sort of vertical discontinuity or in-itself-ness, or the drama ceases once again to be interesting. An action is not significant unless it gathers up a “many” into a “one.” The wholeness of dramatic action, that which distinguishes it from being a merely random sequence of basically unrelated events, is therefore possible only if there comes a moment of decision. And since this decision is the relating of a horizontal “given” to a meaning that lies above it, the decision does not come to pass except as a being-judged. In the moment of decision and judgment, the immanent order therefore breaks open to that which definitively transcends it. If the absoluteness of the good is at first necessarily hidden, it must also necessarily be unveiled. The real movement of drama occurs only when the first condition is fulfilled, and only when the second follows. It is important to see, moreover, that the unveiling of the in-itselfness of the good after its relativity cannot simply be the contradiction of that relativity. This would once again slacken all tensions.163 Instead, it must be a moment that is simultaneously discontinuous and continuous, both a reversal and a fulfillment. Once again, we see what Aristotle basically

160. This is one of the reasons that “didactic” art, which presents absolute norms without showing their relatedness, that is, their desirability, is so boring: it lacks dramatic tension. 161. TD 1:418. 162. Ibid. 163. In a sense, this would be the problem with a deus ex machina ending: the resolution does not emerge from within the play itself in an organic fashion; it intrudes gratuitously on the plot. In other words, it is sheer discontinuity, and therefore it cannot stand in any relationship of tension with what went before it. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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meant by the “discovery” and “reversal” that is essential to good drama, which we discussed in the introduction, particularly in relation to David Yeago’s essay on the theme. The moment of discontinuity is why Balthasar describes the struggle for the good essentially as “the good slips away.” The greatness of tragedy is that it achieves such a moment of transcendence in decision and judgment powerfully and explicitly, but Balthasar shows how something analogous happens in every comedy or tragicomedy, in short, in every play in which an interesting action takes place.164 The point, in any event, of the “slipping away” of the good is that though the good is by necessity relatively received, it is nonetheless not measured by its reception. What is received may begin by being received in the mode of the recipient, but in the end, precisely because it is really good, it spurs the reception to grow into the mode of that which is received. Perhaps we could therefore describe the heart of dramatic action thus: a person commits himself in a decisive movement toward what he considers meaningful for him and seizes it. As the plot unfolds, and the layers of meaning are stripped away one by one, he finds that the meaning is, in fact, what has seized him. It is thus that drama affirms both the relative and the absolute at once and nonreductively.165 That judgment, if it is to be true dramatic judgment, must have the character of an absolute means that great drama tends to be the carrying out of a significant action under the divine sphere: it is no accident that drama was “born” under this sign, in the great Greek tragedians. But the relation to God does not have to be explicit; the vertical transcendence of the divine sphere, as we have seen, is simultaneously reflected in transcendence horizontally. Thus, the in-breaking of the absolute can occur analogously, any time that the “struggle for the good” is taken to the point where the person posits the good as a value greater than himself: “Anyone, even outside of Christianity, who is willing to break out of his egoistic narrowness and do the good simply for its own sake is given a light that shows him the way he can and should go; such light both uncovers truth and communicates life that is more alive.”166 This “doing the good

164. Ibid., 414. 165. Here we see again why Plato is more dramatic than Heidegger. For Plato, it is the Good that accounts for both the continuity of desire (ascent) and the discontinuity of real transcendence (descent) at once. Heidegger’s affirmation of only the discontinuity seems to be related to the fact that he gives so little attention in his philosophy to the good and to eros. 166. TD 3:529. We point out the reduplication of verb and noun at the end of this passage: the truth (aletheia = “unhiddenness”) is uncovered, and life is “livingly” communicated. To put it straightforwardly: disclosure is disclosed and life is enlivened. 320

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for its own sake,” in a manner that breaks action open to a meaning that transcends it and is in the end final, reveals the dramatic possibility of a host of fundamental experiences that Balthasar “inventories” as “basic gestures.” Basic gestures, he explains, “are those made in the light of Being as a whole, which is also the light of the good, the true, and the beautiful. . . . This light, however, also illuminates a process that is extended in time, imparting to it a meaning that is regarded as ultimate. This light that comes down from the absolute can only be received by man’s free reason, which is open to the whole of Being, through an act of decision without which we cannot speak of drama at all.”167 In this passage, we see once again many of the elements we have been elaborating, particularly the simultaneity of an absolute that is received by the finitude of man’s freedom. The various basic gestures that gather all of these elements together, which Balthasar finds in the history of drama, are the following: there is conversion, or the inspiration to change one’s life in the encounter with a particular event or a person; there is the being-called to an act of justice or forgiveness; there is the world-changing experience of love; the movement of positing an ultimate hope beyond all ambiguities and doubts; or the resolute openness of a fundamental yearning.168 The defining characteristics of such a basic gesture, which opens the relative to the absolute, are that it involves a decision in being inspired by Being, or the good, as a whole—that is, as final and definitive—and that it reveals this definitiveness by showing that the in-itselfness of the good has in the end a priority over the “for me,” even though it includes this relationship. Because of the relative priority of the in-itself-ness, the “reversal” of the discontinuity must find expression in the drama, for example, in a moment of self-sacrifice, proven or made manifest in a concrete deed. As we have seen, this reversal can occur powerfully in the vertical breaking open of the engagement with death, but it can also occur horizontally when, say, a person remains faithful to a loved one who has disappeared. In either case, a certain discontinuity comes to expression, and the drama acquires a compelling tension: the finite event unfolds in a comprehending light, and indeed it makes that light for the first time luminous. But in this case, even these analogous forms, in their most compelling examples,

There is something about essentially dramatic action, as we are arguing, that brings together form and content “in a seamless whole.” 167. TD 4:111. 168. Balthasar gives a brief account of each of these basic gestures as they occur in a number of dramas, in TD 4:111–17. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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confirm the fundamental insight of Greek tragedy, as both Balthasar and Nietzsche have expressed it. In tragedy, the search for meaning, which finds itself facing frustration and even outright contradiction, is not for all of that in vain but, precisely in its vanity, finds what it was after: a meaning that arrives as a gift, a meaning that shows that all of the gravity of life “can be embraced and kept safe by God’s sphere” and that, therefore, the whole is gathered up in an affirmation and a “great amen.”169 Now, we have seen that the in-itself-ness of the good appears only in the dramatic event of a decision in light of the ultimate, which comes fully to expression in the discontinuity of sacrifice, brokenness, and even death. Granted that the horizontal manifestation of that discontinuity can give it a positive meaning and save it from the sheer vertical transcendence of Heidegger’s Angst, does it not still retain a predominant note of negativity, at least for the character who is left broken or sacrificed? In this case, have we in fact progressed any further in the question of meta-anthropology? At this point, the perspective takes a sudden turn. The wholeness that comes to light through the events of the drama is not, in the first place, that of the individual character or characters in the action, but rather that of the play itself. In a well-constructed plot, the various elements work together through time and space in the making of decisions and the struggling for the true good, to arrive at a moment that “retroactively” and “proleptically” confers a meaning on all that preceded and will follow. The deed that breaks the action open to judgment thereby gives that action a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Balthasar points out in reference to Aristotle.170 Once again, we see that a wholeness (which we might even call triadic) “arrives” only in a radical discontinuous movement of transcendence into another order. But how, exactly, is the decisive act transcendent if, for all of its discontinuity, it remains one act among the others in the course of the drama? The key is that the decisive judgment is literally transcendent to the play; the moment of judgment comes, in a certain sense, from the play’s author,

169. Ibid., 134. The “vanity” of the struggle for the Good can in fact become just the “transparence” that allows the transfiguring absolute most directly to “shine in”: “Human existence, even where it is stripped of all its power, is still able to bear witness to the Good that has been glimpsed in and through all the conflicts.” TD 1:418. Nietzsche, for his part, began with the thesis that all the world’s contradictions were transfigured and embraced in an ultimate affirmation in Greek tragedy, a view he echoed later in Zarathustra’s “Great Amen.” 170. “This very act gives a shape to the continuing stream of events (which is actually unforeseeable); it gives drama a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Aristotle required.” TD 4:111. 322

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whose idea transcends the play as a whole—which allows the end to be already implicit, or immanent, in the beginning—even if, as we saw in the introduction, the author himself depends on the horizontal unfolding of the idea in the play itself. But in another sense, the “transcendent” judgment is brought by the “spectators”; the final judgment is one in which they actively participate. Spectators do not (ideally speaking) merely stare at a passing sequence of events; they follow the story, they make sense of it through the conferring of judgment, and the drama does not have a wholeness (for them) until judgment is made. In this respect, the spectators find themselves in a position not unlike that of Socrates with respect to the cave image he “staged” and later the myth of Er that he “judged.”171 They participate, as it were, in the transcendence that both judges the action and gives the drama a wholeness precisely because they are not themselves on stage (at least in some respect):172 they represent a “wholly other” order with respect to the drama. But if the “living” spectators are “other” than the drama, the drama itself, in turn, represents an order different from that of “real life.” It is thus crucially important to Balthasar (in contrast to Plato and Hegel) that the theater retain a certain relative autonomy. The otherness is what gives the drama itself a wholeness—that is, it allows the whole tensions of the human “condition” to unfold in their integrity through events that have unforeseen consequences even as they find unexpected fulfillment—but it is conversely what allows this “whole” to be played out before man, showing him who he is. We said that the carrying out of the meta-anthropological role requires that man objectify himself to himself in a comprehensive deed that is crystallized in a concrete form. The understanding of drama that has been emerging fulfills this function in certain clear ways. As we saw briefly in the introduction, drama is a Gestalt. It is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and as such it allows these parts to exist in real tension with each other: the “parts” themselves, that is, the characters, their actions, and so forth, particularly in a good drama, have a remarkable individuality and freedom with respect to each other, and even with respect to the basic meaning of the plot, even while their meaning and the sense of their actions always await the responsive actions of the others

171. We recall here a point we noted in the last chapter: namely, that Plato deliberately describes the “drama” of judgment in the myth of Er in terms of watching a play. See Rep., X, 620a. 172. Clearly, there is another sense in which they are also participating: to the extent, that is, that what is being played out before them is the meaning of existence in general and therefore also their own. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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and await the consequences and events that arise from the joint meaning of their decisions. Both the independence and the dependence of the parts are secured by the “transcendent” meaning. Moreover, drama is a supremely concrete Gestalt. Not only does it depict a transcendent meaning that cannot dispense with a temporal and spatial unfolding, but it is performed in a particular space and time. The characters are not (only) the author’s imaginative ideas; they are embodied by real actors, who lend to these figures their souls and bodies and do so more compellingly the more totally they commit themselves, the more completely they “enter into” their roles. Hence, the appropriateness of Mauriac’s statement quoted as an epigraph to this section: “Dramatic creativity is being true with body and soul.” The various tensions involved in the staging of a drama are, in a sense, the incarnation of the tensions that are being portrayed. Form and content thus converge in a manner that we might say finds no comparison in the world, and, as we saw in the last chapter, such a convergence, in giving rise to a Gestalt, gives rise to an inexhaustible—literally infinite—meaning: it is creativity itself. In Balthasar’s understanding of drama, we see a genuine polarity emerge between life (the human being who is an unfathomable mystery to himself) and art (the dramatic portrayal, and thus in some sense, the interpretation of that mystery in a form that is itself mysterious, i.e., infinitely meaningful). On the one hand, each has an essential autonomy with respect to the other. The author, the actors, and the spectators stand in an order that transcends the play and makes it possible. The play also has a certain autonomy with respect to life. Balthasar insists strongly that there be no instrumentalizing of drama for the sake of “social edification.”173 The reason he gives is that a merely ethical or didactic play remains within a kind of immanent order (of ethical success or failure), and lacks the “breaking open” into the grace of a transcendent and comprehending meaning. Thus, paradoxically, the more directly art attempts to influence life, the more “partially” it speaks to man, since it thus misses the fundamental tension that constitutes him anthropologically. An art that is free, Balthasar says in reference to Schiller, most deeply influences man, because it can thus educate him in freedom.174 On the other hand, there is a genuine life-art polarity because each stands in need of the other. Balthasar argues that drama would be empty 173. TD 1:266. 174. Ibid., 267. We recall that freedom means, in this context, not just self-possession or determination but more fundamentally a call to man, who is a finite being related to an absolute beyond the cosmos, to dramatic decision and deed. 324

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except for what it can draw from life itself: “if a tension of this kind [i.e., between the divine and the human] is to be built into a performance, it must already be part and parcel of existence.”175 Drama is, after all, a playing out of the meaning of man, for man, and it would not have endured so long as an art form if it did not translate existence with some “fidelity.” At the same time, life needs art precisely because of its capacity to translate, and thus illuminate: “Existence [Existenz] has a need to see itself mirrored (speculari), and this makes the theater a legitimate instrument in the pursuit of self-knowledge and the elucidation of Being—an instrument, moreover, that points beyond itself.”176 We have seen the phenomenon of reciprocal illumination at many levels already—in, for example, the illumination of being and person in the fourfold difference, and in the phenomenon of an a priori and a posteriori unity of apperception—and we see it here in its most direct and explicit form: a mysterious image of the human being, which in turn reveals the human being to himself.

Status Vitae as Paradigm of Dramatic Gestalt The reference in the last text from Balthasar to the elucidation of Being recalls, however, that what is most profoundly at issue is not man merely anthropologically, but meta-anthropologically, in relation to his task of embodying and interpreting the tensions of the cosmos in a paradigmatic manner. These tensions, we saw, are manifest in the body-soul polarity, which in turn finds expression in the senses-spirit polarity of man’s “cognitional” relation to the world. In order to ground that relationship, it became necessary to find not only a static principle of unity (which would lead back to the sort of foundationalism often criticized in Descartes) but also a dramatic event, in which man “infinitely surpasses” himself. This transcendence, discussed earlier, is not only necessary to allow man to appear as a whole and thus to become present to himself in a nonreductive way, but it is moreover necessary for Being as a whole and beings in general to appear, insofar as the “reversal” or discontinuity of the dramatic event opens up the space, not only of the ontological difference but of the fourfold difference in Being. We saw essential elements of this dramatic event in both Heidegger and Plato, and yet each seemed to lack a

175. Ibid., 260. 176. Ibid., 86. See also the section entitled “The Loss of the Image,” 76–79, where Balthasar writes that “life manifests a fundamental urge to observe itself as an action exhibiting both meaning and mystery. This urge is no more extinct in adults than in children” (78–79). Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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crucial aspect of the meta-anthropological tension. It seems that Balthasar has been able to gather up everything affirmed by these two thinkers, and moreover has integrated them within a more comprehensive context in his dramatic theory. Yet, our exploration of this theory has brought us, one more time, to a polarity that is irreducible, that between art and life. What are we to make of it? Is there not, this time as well, a danger of fracturing into a dualism? Indeed, the danger is great, and in fact common. We are perhaps even more familiar on the one hand with a drama that is so detached from life that it has no interest in a revelation or in making a judgment on existence, and on the other with a life that is so detached from drama it is content to understand itself as an unconnected sequence of events, with no relation to Being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness as a whole, and therefore no need to come to a fundamental decision. In fact, pointing to the “play” of drama as a kind of solution to the meta-anthropological tensions, for whatever it gains with respect to Heidegger and Plato, seems to run the danger of losing precisely their absolute “seriousness.” However, I have already noted that drama is not Balthasar’s final answer to the question, but is itself grounded in something more ultimate. I mentioned above that watching a drama in a certain sense puts the spectators in the same position Socrates stood in with respect to the cave. This has an immediate consequence: just as this position leads, with Socrates, to the “going down” that comes from total dedication to the Good, which is expressed in a central decision to commit oneself to a “single goal at which all [one’s] actions, public and private, inevitably aim,”177 so too, with Balthasar, it means being called to make a single, definitive “life-determining” choice. I thus turn to look at the philosophical and epistemological implications of Balthasar’s teaching on the form of the “states of life,” the Gestalt that Balthasar refers to as the primal or paradigmatic form (Urgestalt): “The primal form is not a form among others, but a form which is identical with existence, a form beyond ‘open’ and ‘closed,’ beyond ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ (since it, and it alone, encompasses both), a form which is even beyond autonomy and heteronomy since it unites God and man in an unimaginable intimacy.”178 One of the best-known and most fully articulated aspects of Balthasar’s theology is the divine election and response that crystallizes in a person’s definitive choice either to “leave everything” in the following of

177. Plato, Rep., 7.519c. 178. GL 1:25 (emphasis mine). 326

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Christ through the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or the analogous leaving of one’s father and mother to cleave to one’s spouse in the vows of marriage.179 In either case, what is at issue is not just a decision but the realization (“making real”) of that decision in a comprehensive life-form (Lebensgestalt). Now, the ground of this decision is clearly theological, and it would require a theological exposition to unfold the full depth of meaning of the states of life.180 Nevertheless, his theology, on this point, has vast philosophical implications, and a brief look at these implications is indispensable for the problem at hand, namely, the task of meta-anthropology. It is important to note that I will be approaching this issue from a very particular perspective, and so I will leave much unsaid that would both broaden and deepen our own analyses. Specifically, because of the nature of the problem at hand, I will focus almost exclusively on marriage, although it will be shown that an important analogy exists between the two states, which serves to shed light on the problem of finding an immanent correlate to martyrdom that we saw raised by Plato. The definitive choice of a state of life is different from other choices a person makes over the course of his life because of its “once and for all” character, and it has such a character because it concerns a form that makes a claim on a person’s whole being and whole history: “We are speaking here of an absolute that engages our whole existence, hence the call to a state of life is ‘once and for all.’”181 Such a notion may seem a somewhat arbitrary proposal in relation to our general theme, and so it is helpful to indicate some of the “necessities” in light of foregoing discussions. We saw in chapter 2 that consciousness, and the unity of apperception itself, cannot have the unity that is necessary to it unless it is possible to “move itself” as a whole, and, moreover, this motion is possible only through a call from another, which cannot address a “surface” aspect of the child’s existence, but which must penetrate to the core of his being and “lay claim” to him as a whole. I showed how this occurred as a foundational principle, but I left open the explicit realization. Later, in the last chapter, we saw that if the subject is truly to reach the object through freedom and judgment in a genuine transcendent unity, he must be “laid claim to” by 179. Balthasar’s most comprehensive treatment of the issue is the book The Christian State of Life [= CSL], trans. Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983). 180. Balthasar’s theology, in particular, concerns the state of life of secular institutes. For a presentation of this theology in light of Balthasar’s trilogy, see Juan Sara, “Balthasar y los institutos seculares,” Proyecto 30 (1998): 238–52. 181. CSL, 19–20. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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the object’s inspiring him. We saw several relative stages of the need for transcendence at the various levels of the epistemological act. Now, the relative cases of such a transcendence remain in a certain twilight— until the dawn breaks, until, that is, such a movement occurs in a definitive and comprehensive way. It is in this context that we approach the question of the states of life in Balthasar. The first thing to point out, therefore, is the fact that such a definitive “movement” cannot but have the character of a being-called, a “beinglaid-claim-to” as a whole. Balthasar always insists on the moment of “election” in the establishing of a state of life, which has a direct form in the call to the “counsels” of poverty, chastity, and obedience but cannot do without an analogous form in marriage. In either case, however, the call, if it is to be a total laying-claim-to, must address man at the center of his being, such as we described it above. This means, as we will see more at length in the next chapter, that it must come by way of beauty. It is beauty, for Balthasar (as for Plato), that most comprehensively addresses the human being: “How cowardly a flight from the world would the Apostle’s act of forsaking all things in order to follow Christ be if he were not moved by the folly of that enthusiasm which even Plato knew in his own way, and which every person knows who for the sake of beauty gladly becomes a fool without giving it a second thought.”182 To embrace such a form of life, one must therefore first be able to see it and be moved by it: “But if man is to live in an original form, that form has first to be sighted. One must possess a spiritual eye capable of perceiving (wahrnehmen) the forms of existence with awe.”183 These texts echo, in fact, a text we saw in chapter 2 on the child’s awakening to consciousness in already-being moved and finding himself moving, and the coincidence is not accidental. We must above all avoid the assumption that such an event takes a univocal form, in the single experience of a “beautiful object.” For this, the brief discussion of drama is helpful; it suggests that there are infinite ways that such an event comes to pass, and inevitably it is at first clouded by all the vicissitudes of historical living, illusions, false seeking, and so forth. But at some point, beauty will inevitably appear and bring with it a call to decision. Understanding the event dramatically keeps us from interpreting the event somewhat abstractly, like Heidegger, as the “sheer verticality” of Angst and the facing of death. For

182. GL 1:33. 183. Ibid., 24. 328

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Balthasar, because transcendence is not ek-stasis into the nothing but comprehends this discontinuity (without making it any less discontinuous) in being moved by another, the event always takes place concretely, through the unfolding of a person’s existence in time. Now, this movement of transcendence that is inspired by beauty prompts a comparison with Plato. It is often, in Plato, the experience of beauty that sets transcendence in motion, and in the Symposium, we see that it begins with the beauty of a person.184 Because the beautiful is also the good (both for Plato and for Balthasar),185 the first inspiration entails, ultimately, a movement beyond the world, but at the same time, and precisely because of the positivity of the radical discontinuity, a movement into the world “from above.”186 Plato, it has been argued, does not reject the world, but so to speak seeks to integrate it into the divine. As we have also seen, some such understanding is absolutely essential in order to bring together the absolute and the relative in a way that preserves their radical discontinuity—in order to hold the “ontological difference” open, in contrast to the tendency we saw in Heidegger. Nevertheless, I pointed out that this movement tends in Plato as well to a dualism, and this is the case because of his failure to see the bodysoul relationship as an irreducible polarity. I therefore proposed that in order for this movement in Plato to be sustained, we had to find a polar analogy: if the first movement is the integration of the relative into the Absolute, we saw, with Balthasar, a need for the analogous movement, integrating the Absolute into the relative. Balthasar’s understanding of the two, irreducible, and analogously polar states of life presents just such a possibility. While, for Balthasar, the state of the “counsels” has its roots in the “eschaton,” that is, in the radically other order beyond the cosmos, it relates analogously to the state of marriage, which is rooted in the world. For Balthasar, this relationship is genuinely polar, such that each is irreducible to the other, even as each at

184. Plato, Symposium, 210a. 185. Whether the good and the beautiful are formally the same for Plato is, to be sure, a controversial question. But no one would dispute that he closely associates them with one another in at least some respect: see, for example, Diotima’s instruction of Socrates, in which she substitutes the good for the beautiful without apology: Symposium, 204e. 186. Of course, the “return” movement is most clearly expressed in the philosopher’s “going down” in the Republic, but one can also see a glimmer of the same movement in the Symposium: the “lover” does not come to a standstill in the perfect transcendence of the Beautiful, but is as it were becomes eternally fruitful in the Beauty, begetting and giving birth to “ideas,” “theories,” and “virtue”: 210d, 212a. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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the same time serves to illuminate a decisive aspect of the other. By virtue of the polarity and ensuing analogy, the religious state is kept from becoming, in dualistic fashion, a “flight” from the world (purely other-worldly), but is rather, like Plato’s philosopher, completed only in “going down,” while the married state is kept from becoming mundane (purely this-worldly), and is shown to be completed in the order of grace (i.e., to be a sacrament).187 It would be out of place here to develop this aspect further,188 but it is worthwhile to point out a surprising confirmation of this point in Plato, which also confirms our criticism of him. In order to characterize the content of the perfect transcendence of the philosopher (which we might see as an image of the “eschatological” religious state of the counsels),189 the best analogy he can find is not just to the sexual relationship but to the full, dramatic “institution” of marriage: in the Symposium, the eternity or immortality of life in the “Beautiful-in-itself” considered absolutely, as transcendent of any worldly instances, is expressed most clearly in the world in the love between the sexes, reproduction and the nurturing, care, and defense of the young, even if it means that the parents starve themselves to feed them or die in battle protecting them.190 Only what Plato means here is not the marriage of human beings but of animals! It seems that because of his lack of a body-soul polarity, in a one-sided fashion he can affirm only the eschatological state as appropriate for the human being. Contrary to expectations, perhaps, what Balthasar, the Catholic theologian, brings to Plato’s view is not (only) a different understanding of the religious life but a justification of marriage. How is it, in Balthasar’s understanding, that marriage serves to “integrate the Absolute into the relative” or, as it were, to crystallize transcendence in a worldly—that is, immanent or horizontal—form? The key is

187. This relation is expounded—with infinite and subtle qualifications and developments—in CSL. See also the article, “Zur Theologie des Rätestandes,” published in two parts in English as “A Theology of the Counsels,” Cross Currents (Spring 1966): 213–36 and (Summer 1966): 325–37, where Balthasar describes the relationship between the two states specifically as a polarity: the religious state moves from God to the world to God, while the lay state moves from the world to God to the world: part 1, 220–24. 188. For an excellent development of the implications for marriage of the polarity between the states of life, see David Crawford, “Humanae Vitae and the Perfection of Love,” Communio: International Catholic Review 25 (Fall 1998): 414–38. 189. In fact, in the essay PCM, Balthasar shows how, in the early Middle Ages, the monastic life was called “philosophy” and explicitly understood itself to be the fulfillment of the life Plato intended under the term philosopher. 190. Plato, Symposium, 207a–c. 330

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to see marriage as an indissoluble Gestalt. To get directly to the heart of the matter, we cite a large section of a paragraph from GL 1, in which Balthasar takes marriage, in fact, as a paradigmatic example (Urgestalt) of what he means in general by Gestalt: What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage? And marriage is only true to itself if it is a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual’s cravings to “break out” of its bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence’s tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves—the shifting songs of their own freedom—but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons. As persons, the spouses entrust themselves not only to the beloved “thou” and to the biological laws of fertility and family; they entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life—from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and life in the Holy Spirit. And now, suddenly, all fruitfulness, all freedom is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery (as Claudel has shown powerfully in his “Fifth Ode”), which mystery is no longer accessible from the profane sphere of the general. But what are we to say of the person who ignores this form and tramples it underfoot, then to enter into relationships answerable only to his own psychology’s principle of “this far and no further”? He is but quicksand, doomed to certain barrenness.191 This paragraph contains, in condensed form, all of the elements of marriage’s meta-anthropological implications for the question of truth, and so I will proceed by elaborating certain notions that are herein suggested. First, I note, formally, the paradoxical formulation “the form that chooses them because they have chosen it,” which is not mere wordplay but philosophically precise. It brings to paradigmatic expression, in fact,

191. GL 1:27–28. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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a phenomenon we have seen many times, for example, in the notion of consciousness as self-moving in being moved, or vision (grasping in free judgment) as being simultaneous with rapture (being “possessed” by the object). Marriage is a Lebensgestalt that can be brought about only through freedom, that is, when spouses freely pledge themselves to each other in the vows, and, yet, that which is brought about is something that, in its objectivity, transcends in a sense the freedom that engenders it, not by excluding it but rather by including it completely. I mentioned something similar in the discussion of martyrdom in Plato, namely, that the unsurpassable objectivity of the act—since the act is the complete devotion of self to something greater and is therefore constituted only by the whole of the self and the whole of subjectivity—the nature of its objectivity is, as it were, saturated with subjectivity without ever reducing to subjectivity. So too in marriage: the form of marriage is nothing but freedom. Marriage is a reciprocal gift of self, because it is principally a mutual gift of freedom. In a certain sense, there is a convergence of form and content in any commitment, since freedom is what gives rise to a commitment—it is the formal, or forming, condition of possibility for any commitment—and at the same time freedom is the basic content of the commitment. A commitment is a pledge concerning the “use” of freedom. When that commitment is total and complete (in both a vertical and horizontal sense, as we will see in a moment), as when one freely pledges the whole of freedom, form and content converge perfectly. This gives rise to a certain paradox: the paradox of freedom itself, understood as transcendence. We said a moment ago that the “objectivity” of the Gestalt of marriage includes but transcends freedom. That was not precise; if freedom is self-transcendence, then the transcending of itself as self-transcendence is the most perfect expression of freedom. “The form that chooses them because they have chosen it”: another way to put this is that what they choose is no longer to be able to choose. If they chose any less, the capacity to choose would reveal not its sovereignty but its impotence, insofar as it would reveal its incapacity to choose something definitive and total—so total, indeed, that it includes itself (and here we should hear an echo of similarity with Heidegger’s fundamental ontological question—why are there beings rather than nothing?—which is so radical, it places the questioner himself in question: the similarity is not an accident). The reason we can say that this is the paradox of freedom, however, is not only because of the radicality of the choice but because it discloses the essence of transcendence.

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We have seen that transcendence must of its very nature be relation to a concrete other.192 Transcendence, as movement beyond, means being more than self, that is, being self with an other. It does not mean simply the movement taken abstractly in itself in the sense of “transcendental” striving, or in the sense of moving toward an other that one has always “not yet reached”; in its foundations it must be always already rooted in the other, even while it is simultaneously “not yet” there precisely to the extent that the other remains other (i.e., transcendent). It is for the same reason that transcendence is not possible unless it is relation to an other that is concrete. “Concrete” indicates, as we have seen, a whole that is not a whole unless it is at the same time a paradoxical polarity (Gestalt). And, if it is a paradoxical polarity, the relation will necessarily be simultaneously mediated and immediate, which is the only way to affirm a unity that is not reductive (into a monism and dualism). Relation to an other that is abstract and not concrete will be unable to avoid reduction to immediacy, that is, to self, and thus will lose transcendence. As we have seen in many different contexts and in various formulations, real relation to an other (and therefore transcendence) necessarily involves a radical discontinuity, which is not (dualistically) left as an inaccessible “beyond” but is precisely bridged, even while this discontinuity is not (in a monistic sense) eliminated. Such was, we saw, the paradoxical structure of consciousness understood as intentionality. In order to arrive at that point, we had to see that the thing most central to the child as a conscious self—and one might say that this is the most “spontaneous” aspect of that selfhood—lay precisely beyond the child’s means, and so it could come about only as a gift: this is the core meaning of the mother’s smile awakening the child to consciousness. This structure is “perfected” in the form of marriage as Balthasar describes it. Freedom is not freedom unless it can reach what lies beyond it (because it would therefore not be transcendence), and yet what it “aims” at does not lie beyond it unless it is a “more,” unless it lies beyond its own capacity to reach it. If it were within its means it would not be more than it. This is why marriage vows cannot be vows that establish a Lebensgestalt unless they are a single, reciprocal act. In choosing marriage and therefore embracing a form that is

192. I leave aside the question of transcendence in relation to God, who, of course, according to the Scholastics, is not concrete (insofar as concrete requires the relation of irreducibly different parts, and God is perfectly simple). But we must keep in mind that he is not abstract either. He is beyond the difference between abstract and concrete, just as he is beyond the “finite” meaning of simplicity: oneness in the world is always polar. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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more than one is, one “arrives” further than one could have possibly dreamed, and, if it were not so, it would not be a perfect act of freedom. Hence, Balthasar insists on the objectivity of marriage (we will see in a moment how this is connected with its being a “third” distinct from the partners) as that which achieves this “transcendence,” because it “confronts with an iron hand all existence’s tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined.” The objectivity of marriage is the reason it is saturated with freedom. As the crystallization of the transcendence that is freedom, the exclusion of “subsequent total choices” (which would be a contradiction) is what gives the spouses objective space to become themselves in becoming “perfectly” related; as freedom, the objectivity is as it were what frees them for freedom. Using an expression reminiscent of Heidegger, Balthasar writes that the objectivity of the form is what shapes the person, what “surrounds him inexorably like a coat of armor, and which nonetheless is the very thing that bestows suppleness on him and which makes him free of all uncertainty and all paralyzing fears, free for himself and his highest possibilities.”193 This is what makes marriage a form that chooses the spouses because they have chosen it, and what makes the spouses both the authors and the servants of their love.194 But let us look more “materially” at what is given in the choosing of the life-form of marriage. It becomes quickly clear how the single form of marriage serves to “tie together” the various polarities I have shown to constitute man in his concrete existence. I will here pass briefly through each of them and then will expound further on certain aspects as we proceed toward the end of the chapter. First, and most obviously, marriage is nothing if not a complete gift of self, which includes both body and soul inseparably. It is not just a pair of biological, reproducing animals that come together in marriage; nor is marriage merely the “union of true minds,” to borrow from Shakespeare. Rather, the choice made is the institution of the common life of two persons, a life that is at once bodily and “of the soul.”195 Even more than dramatic creativity, marriage is “being true in body and soul.” 193. Ibid., 23–24. In this passage, Balthasar is talking about the Lebensgestalt, or state of life in general, and not only marriage. 194. In an epithalamium, appropriately titled “Dance Me to the End of love,” Leonard Cohen felicitously expresses this point: “We’re both of us beneath our love, both of us above.” 195. Balthasar discusses the “body and soul” dimension of the Lebensgestalten in CSL, 238. 334

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Second, marriage is just that, a life, and it is so because it is at once historical and “eternal,” or absolute.196 Indeed, these two aspects reveal themselves to be completely distinct and yet inseparable. On the one hand, the history of the relationship is not a “random” sequence of events with no connection to each other. Instead, this history possesses a determinate shape because it is included within the vow, which is not merely one moment among all of the others, but which “transcends” time precisely to the extent that it comprehends it. In this respect, the vow is not relative to that time, but it is in a decisive way ab-solute with respect to it. On the other hand, the “absoluteness” of the vow is not something detached that lies, floating, above the history of the marriage, but it is directly related to the history because the vow is precisely a promise to unfold that history, to “go through life together.” Third, this temporal-eternal polarity is immediately related to another, namely, the transcendent-immanent or vertical-horizontal polarity. We have seen that mutual transcendence has a direct relation to death; death represents a “frontier” like no other in the world, since it marks precisely the difference between being in the world and no longer being in the world. It is of the utmost significance that marriage is of its nature “unto death,” but it is so in a way that we can contrast with both Heidegger and Plato. Heidegger’s “Being-unto-death” is both reductively transcendent and reductively immanent insofar as it is not “other” related. In Plato, death is other related, but one might say it is insufficiently self-related to the extent that it is related univocally to martyrdom. In marriage, death is included in principle (which does not mean it is not really included, as we will see in the next section); it is in fact “confronted” just as radically as in Heidegger and Plato, with all of the implications this has for these thinkers, and yet it nevertheless remains in the world. Indeed, we can say more: the transcendence of death serves the “remaining in the world” because it has its meaning in the concrete, historical life with and for the spouse. Just as martyrdom includes the whole immanent, horizontal order of existence in itself as the compelling expression of a single, great deed, so too marriage includes the whole vertical radicality of martyrdom within the horizontal unfolding of life in the world, and it is therefore just as compelling. 196. There is no need, in this context, to address the theologically controversial question of whether marriage contracted on earth continues to exist in some form in heaven, i.e., in the “beyond.” On this question, see Crawford, “Humanae Vitae,” 429, n. 34. The point here concerns only the assertion of a certain “more than time” element, which can be made regardless of how one answers the theological question. Marriage vows are more than time to the extent that they are capable of “gathering up” time at once. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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Finally, the movement that constitutes the dramatic Gestalt of marriage, considered as an objective form, is simultaneously spontaneous and receptive and, for that reason, simultaneously “generous” and “desirous.” One cannot give oneself definitively to an other in marriage without in that very gesture receiving that other just as definitively. It is not that one first gives (spontaneously) and then, in a second moment, receptively takes the other in. Rather, the single gesture contains both acts at once. If we - a love that is predominantly “desirous,” and agape- a love wished to call eros that is predominantly “generous,” then we are forced to say that in itself, the objective form of marriage is numerically-identically both.197 It is true that no one enters marriage with such a perfect integration of these aspects, but the simultaneity of the two is what the objective form means, and the objectivity of that meaning is what frees the spouses—dramatically—to embody it. There is a single, indispensable condition that allows marriage simultaneously to integrate all the elements we have been discussing, without thereby compromising in any way their irreducible differences, and that is that marriage forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If marriage lacked the objective dimension that carries with itself all of subjectivity, then the relationship would crumble into parts that have a (pseudo) completeness in themselves, a “completeness” that Balthasar calls “psychology’s principle of ‘this and no further,’ ” which, by its very logic and therefore in spite of all the best efforts, cannot build itself into a whole with the other completed parts. A relationship that tried to work itself out between two (mere) individuals would not be able to avoid an oscillation between various forms of reduction: one person would be “sucked into” the other in the attempt at self-gift, and then would react in the next moment by withdrawing defensively into oneself. The only way for the two to relate

- as mere desire and agape- as mere self-gift 197. Of course, the designation of eros or generosity is shown to be inadequate when we view the use of these terms in the tradition: see, for example, the article by Ysabel de Andia, “Eros and Agape: The Divine Passion of Love,” Communio: International Catholic Review 24 (Spring 1997): - Eric 29–50, which shows that the Church Fathers even referred to God’s love as eros. - and agape- in Dionysius the Areopagite with great Perl elaborates the identity of eros metaphysical detail in “The Metaphysics of Love in Dionysius the Areopagite,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studies 6 (1997): 45–73, esp. 69–70. There would be reason, nevertheless, to distinguish the two terms as representing a natural love and a Christian perfection of what is natural (see, on aspects of this suggestion, the article by Balthasar on Claudel: “Auch die Sünde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel,” Stimmen der Zeit 69 [1939]: 222–37). In this case, however, we could call sacramental marriage the Christian perfection of the simultaneity of desire and self-gift that characterizes even natural love. 336

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totally and unreservedly to each other in a manner that does not eliminate either one but, precisely to the contrary and given all that has been argued in this chapter, allows each for the first time to be wholly oneself, to be individually as a body-soul whole, is if the relationship is “sheltered” in a third that transcends and includes the two. Marriage is meta-anthropological because it allows the spouses to live “beyond” themselves and for that very reason to become themselves. The marriage vow itself, as in a certain respect distinct from the partners who make it, is what simultaneously unites and distinguishes them. Only when we see the vows as an objective “third” can we speak of marriage as a Gestalt, indeed, as an Urgestalt. The Gestalt character of marriage, according to Balthasar, is what can include the whole person because it transcends the person. It is this that makes a vow quintessentially human, by making the person who pledges himself or herself in it for the first time fully human: “What is a person without a life-form, that is to say, without a form which he has chosen for his life, a form into which and through which to pour out his life, so that his life becomes the soul of the form and the form becomes the expression of his soul? For this is no extraneous form, but rather so intimate a one that it is greatly rewarding to identify oneself with it. Nor is it a forcibly imposed form, rather one which has been bestowed from within and has been freely chosen.”198 The way in which the form of marriage is “distinct” from the two partners is what gives the spouses room for the growth and the striving without which they would not be full human beings, but it is also what keeps them from having to reduce their fulfillment to that striving itself, and it brings their fulfillment to rest—in a way that would be incomprehensible to a merely “transcendental” approach—in a “sphere beyond their striving.”199 At the same time, the relationship does not come to a final rest in the vertical transcendence of the objectivity of the vows, but is compelled by the meaning of that objectivity to “incarnate” its meaning horizontally. We have seen that a Gestalt generally has, not three, but four points: in this case, we find that the vows, though perfect in themselves, need to be “consummated,” embodied in a single union in the concrete order. Balthasar speaks of the child, as the gift of fruitfulness, who lies overagainst the two spouses as another human being like they; the child is both the issue of their union and a concrete whole that is more than that union, 198. GL 1:24. Here, Balthasar is speaking about life-form in general, i.e., intending both the state of the counsels and the state of marriage. 199. Balthasar speaks in TD 2:226, of how the life-form represents a sphere in which we find fulfillment “beyond our striving.” Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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and thus forms a permanent Realsymbol of both their unity and their difference. Because he thus has a history of his own, he transcends the parents horizontally just as perfectly as the marriage transcends them vertically.200 Given this, one may ask whether the marriage of the spouses is more perfectly expressed in their bodily union or in the fruit of that union; perhaps it is best to say that each is best, in a polar fashion. In any event, there is no need to draw up a systematic framework for such a fundamental and dramatic institution; there are, after all, many analogous ways that spouses can live a common bodily life, and analogous ways that this common life can be fruitful. The point is just to insist that marriage cannot be merely an ideal entity (the vertical transcendence of the vows), nor can it be merely real (the horizontal transcendence of a common life), but it must be an ideality that is really embodied. Only in this way is it transcendent both vertically and horizontally, and only thus is it a concrete Gestalt, a worldly form that manifests the absolute.

Conclusion: Marriage and the Task of Meta-anthropology Whenever two people love each other, the whole world is at stake. —Hans Urs von Balthasar

Although we have dwelt for a while with the theme of marriage as a state of life, our “analyses” would be pale, indeed, if they intended to bring to light the mystery of that reality, which is known best by those who live it. The purpose of the foregoing was to show the paradigmatic manner in which marriage fulfills the task allotted to meta-anthropology. I must now show how it does so in relation to the problem of truth more generally. It goes without saying—although we say it once again—that the focus on marriage is not meant to preclude other “modes of meta-anthropology.” Marriage itself cannot be understood as a state of life, first of all, except in its analogical relationship to the other state, an analogy we mentioned but which we cannot develop without going far beyond the scope of the thesis. Moreover, it does not “supersede” but rather grounds and enables, in a sense, the relative autonomy of the dramatic analogy and of art in general. Likewise, myth, ritual, and liturgy play an analogous role. The point is that marriage, as a paradigm or “Urgestalt,” illuminates aspects of these other forms (and more), even while the greater whole that it points

200. See, on this point, for example, ibid., 211, or TL 3:40, where Balthasar shows that it is just the “element” of fruitfulness represented by the child that is lacking in Hegel. 338

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to requires the illumination of these other forms in reciprocal ways. I insist on this point in order to broaden the context of the present discussion. The problem presented in meta-anthropology is the problem of reditio completa. According to Balthasar, this “self-intuition” or primal “selfpossession” as the essential act, or even the essence, of the soul, is on the one hand necessary for the grasp of anything else,201 while on the other hand—since it is dependent on sense experience and the conversio ad phantasmata—it cannot grasp itself without simultaneously grasping the whole, of which it is merely a part.202 But man cannot grasp the whole without both being a part of it and transcending it—and somehow bringing these together. I have thus argued that there must be some basic act that both “goes beyond” man and that crystallizes him as a whole, but in a way that “interprets him to himself” in a concrete form. This concrete form, then, becomes the “place” in which man for the first time is truly present to himself. It becomes the paradigmatic manifestation of the meaning of being; the basis for reading the sensible and supersensible aspects of reality in their unity; and, finally, the ground upon which to grasp any being at all as “objective,” that is, as both transcendently other and immanent to self and therefore as really true. In other words, this concrete form is a “foundation.” To understand the significance of the notion of the Lebensgestalt as a foundation of truth, it is helpful to consider it in light of what seem to be three other possible positions with respect to the question of foundations. There is, first of all, the possibility of denying any foundation whatsoever, which is the deconstruction alternative. Because of the difficulties involved in the question of “self-presence,” some of which we have seen in this and in chapter 2, Derrida has rejected the possibility in principle, proposing that taking self-presence as a kind of ideal and ground for meaning is itself a groundless myth, to be relativized by other, more interesting myths. But such a rejection is virtually synonymous with nihilism and, moreover, rests on unjustified presuppositions.203 Second, there is the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian “transcendental unity of apperception” as a foundation (which is, in fact, the basic form Derrida criticizes). Here, the whole is given at once in the foundation in the form of a single principle or proposition. However, in order for this foundation to be, on the one hand, really transcendent and therefore unsurpassably first and comprehensive and, on 201. TD 2:207–10. See also TL 1:43–55. 202. TD 2:211. 203. I refer once again to Pickstock’s After Writing, which mounts a remarkable case against deconstruction as it is embodied in Derrida and Foucault. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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the other hand, to account for the irreducibly empirical aspect of human knowledge, this foundation is understood in purely abstract and formalistic terms as precisely the exclusion of all content, which then leaves all subsequent content, in a dualistic fashion, to be abstractly a posteriori. But the joining of abstractions does not make a concrete whole: I have shown in the preceding chapter, and in this one, that any time there is a dualism there is simultaneously a monism, and that therefore such a perspective, which separates a priori and a posteriori parts, undermines the possibility of knowing an object without for all of that forcing it to cease being an object, that is, a transcendent other. The third approach, represented by Hegel, is by far the most illuminating in relation to Balthasar’s own. For Hegel, the whole is given in the beginning. In a certain respect, this whole is perfectly abstract, as it is for Descartes and Kant, but, unlike theirs, it is not abstract as a single principle, but rather as the whole “material” totality considered most universally, that is, abstractly. Thus, for Hegel, the beginning is not yet complete in itself, but it has within its formal structure a drive to fulfill itself in the concrete. Although the whole is given in the beginning, it is more radically given in the end, and the meaning of existence is the movement between these two wholes. The great genius of Hegel is revealed in this brilliant attempt to overcome dualism in a manner one would almost wish to call dramatic, were it not that Hegel had already named it: dialectic. The dramatic aspect of Hegel is that he wanted to find a way to affirm a real whole at the beginning, which did not subsequently preclude the reality of the wholes that came later. The dialectical aspect of Hegel is that the latter in turn necessarily “outshines” the former; the reality of the concrete whole is bought at the expense of the unreality of the “moments” that went in to constitute it. In a word, the dialectic is undramatic to the extent that it represents a unilateral movement from abstraction to concreteness.204 And this serves to set into relief what is so dramatic about Balthasar’s approach to foundations. For Balthasar, the whole is given in the beginning in the form of a pledge, a promise, a vow. It is therefore, from the beginning, perfectly concrete. At the same time, the perfection and completeness of this starting point in no way compromise an openness to “what is to come” but 204. This is a point that Schelling, in his own way, had already seen; consider his profound assessment of Hegel in On the History of Modern Philosophy, 134–63. Schelling points out that the foundation of Hegel’s system, in spite of all his protests to the contrary, is essentially “inert” insofar as the synthetic moment cannot possibly have any tension with the prior moments. The third, as we have seen, in Hegel, has everything in itself that the two constituting principles have, and in fact in a more perfect form, and so the whole collapses into a reduction. It goes slack. To put it in terms I have 340

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in a sense precisely perfect this openness so that what arrives is always a surprise, is always genuinely novel and “unforeseen.” This is why Balthasar calls the Lebensgestalt a primal form that is “beyond ‘open’ and ‘closed,’ ”205 as if these two represented mutually exclusive alternatives. To put it another way, Hegel can allow an openness to the future only by positing an initial indeterminacy that awaits further determination. But the indeterminacy is what makes the initial form abstract, and by the same token it is what makes it “inert” and “lifeless.” Ulrich, as I mentioned in chapter 1, speaks of the dialectic as an attempt to stir up through violence what is dead into life: the negation of a negation. Balthasar, by contrast, speaks at one point of an “infinitely determined super-form” (eine unendlich bestimmte ÜberGestalt), which lies beyond the alternatives, either limit/determination - 206 (peiros) or formlessness/indeterminacy (apeiron). A determinate indeterminacy seems a simple oxymoron, and it goes against much that is common in the tradition of philosophy.207 Yet, it finds clear confirmation in experience. In pronouncing wedding vows, the spouses both grasp the complete meaning of marriage all at once, and yet they must wait to find out what it means. For better or for worse, in sick-

been using, the reason that what I have called the “unilateral movement” of the dialectic, from the abstract to the concrete, is not dramatic is that there is nothing at all to be lost in the movement forward but only something to be gained. This is why the “kenosis” (the negative moment of self-emptying) of the dialectic turns out to be the relatively painless working out of logical necessity. There is no moment of decision, which, I have shown, occurs only against the background of a radically transcendent meaning, only when there is something to be lost in the very moment something is gained, only, that is, when everything exists in polar dependency on everything else. 205. I refer again to GL 1:25. 206. Ibid., 432. Here, Balthasar is speaking specifically of the form of Christian revelation, but it is clearly analogous to what he means by the vows. 207. The most obvious exception is, of course, Aquinas’s notion of esse, which is not indeterminacy with respect to the determination of formal act but “transcends” that act as the “(super-) determinacy of all formal determination” [actualitas omnium actuum, perfectio omnium perfectionum]: De pot., 7, 2, ad 9). On a comparison of this point in Aquinas to the presuppositions in German philosophy, see Schmitz, Gift, 98–103, 109. On the other hand, the analogy with the vows (as we will see) brings to light an aspect of Thomistic metaphysics that is easily overlooked: namely, that the perfection of esse is paradoxically more perfect in concrete things (in which it is limited, i.e., determined), as we have already discussed in chapter 1. In other words, it is not a matter of choosing between the perfection of the beginning or the perfection of the end/result, but of affirming both, without being able to say, in fact, which is more perfect. We have to say, that is, that both Hegel (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk”) and Péguy (“Every beginning has a quality that will never again be recovered”) are right. In all of this, we see a confirmation of the notion that being and person illuminate each other, which is a key principle of meta-anthropology, and which I will elaborate in the next chapter. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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ness and in health: there is no way to “foresee” beforehand which concrete alternatives will be the case in reality; there is no way to predict how the “risky venture” will indeed turn out. In this respect, the events that occur in the unfolding of the history of the marriage come as a complete surprise. However, the newness of the events that occur is not, as it were, an irrational novelty. The events are not a “random” and senseless series of one thing coming after another. Rather, even though they are not in one respect anticipated, in another respect they are: whatever it is that may happen to come about in the history of the marriage has always already been included from the outset; it has always already been embraced and affirmed—“unto death.” What is more, the vows are not “abstract and empty” principles that drop out of the sky, which in this case would embrace the whole deterministically, but they are freely willed, they are chosen, and they are thus constituted concretely, at a precise moment in history. There is a real sense in which the living out of the vows in concrete, real history is absolutely everything: it is the marriage, the whole history of joys and sorrows, brokenness and reconciliation. But the only way that the partners can truly suffer the history of these experiences and thereby enter into their depths is by embracing them beforehand in a comprehensive objectivity that gives space for both doubt and wonder. They can be “ready” for the unexpected occurrence of the historical events of the marriage in all of their free integrity only because—in a concrete, actual, “all at once” way—they are ready for anything. In short, one can be surprised by history only because one has “anticipated” it, that is, embraced and affirmed it in advance. Perhaps this is something of what Heracleitus meant by saying “The one who does not expect will not discover the unexpected.”208 Thus, marriage is for Balthasar essentially dramatic because it is not the easy passage from abstract to concrete, but it is rather a concrete vertical totality that precisely forms the condition of possibility for the “complete surprise” of the horizontal unfolding of that totality in the historical order. Marriage can have a history (reality) only because of the eternity of the vows (ideality), while the eternity of the vows do not have their meaning except in their being lived out in history. Each, as it were, frees the other. The whole is embraced at once in a nonreductive manner. And this leads us to the crucial point: we can affirm the need for a foundation in the question of truth, without falling into the modern association of foundation with “system,” because there is no essential contradiction between determinateness and openness. Indeed, quite to the contrary, the

208. Heracleitus, in DK B 89. 342

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moment we take a dramatic approach to the problem, we see that far from excluding each other, the clarity and even the “rigidity” of form and the incessant movement of openness require, confirm, and give rise to each other. They increase in proportion to each other. The paradoxical mutual dependence of rigidity and movement allows us to see the gravity of Quash’s misunderstanding of Balthasar’s dramatic theory, which we addressed briefly in the introduction. Quash suggests that Balthasar’s occasional (and seemingly unwitting) tendency to refer to “relatively stable forms” or to “transcendent wholes” is the residue of Hegel and modernism, from which Balthasar, in spite of his efforts, could not shake free. It is this tendency, Quash goes on to say, that undermines his otherwise praiseworthy attempt to introduce a dramatic mode into thinking. Often, when we wish to overcome a “false rigidity,” we try to do so through setting things in motion. But from Balthasar’s perspective, the movement that arises in reaction to a false rigidity is inevitably itself a false motion. Thus, for him, false rigidity is overcome only by deepening the sense of the objectivity of form, and this necessarily brings with it true movement. The recommendation is perhaps as “counterinstinctive” as the command to “turn in the direction one is spinning” when one has lost control of a car on the ice. But, for Balthasar, form and movement stand and fall together. Defense of one requires defense of the other. There is no drama without Gestalt and no Gestalt without drama. In terms of “foundations,” then, it is the rock-solid certainty of the starting point that guarantees surprise and novelty, because only such a certainty allows one to be open, and indeed vulnerable, to the truth that is to come. The foundation is what makes truth in every genuine case something that inspires deep wonder. The notions of drama, Gestalt, and meta-anthropology, which Balthasar developed through the course of his intellectual life, cast a decisive light on what is arguably the central theme of The Truth of the World, namely, that all real truth is mystery and that all real mystery is truth.209 I will close this chapter by noting some of the implications of this foundation in relation to themes from earlier chapters. The most obvious way the Lebensgestalt of marriage is a foundation concerns the development of consciousness. I spoke in the last chapter about the word (not only the spoken word but any physical gesture intended to communicate a meaning), which is the simultaneously sensual and spiritual medium in which the child comes to consciousness. This notion of 209. One of the best, succinct presentations of this theme in TL 1 in the secondary literature is the section entitled “Wahrheit als Geheimnis” in Jörg Splett, “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit,” 414–17. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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word was connected with the discussion in chapter 2 of the event of the mother’s smile, which has to be a personal word of love addressed to the child if it is to lay claim to his very being and thereby allow his consciousness in a “whole” manner to be both receptive and generous, self- and other-centered. In both discussions, I pointed to the fact that the event can occur only when the being of the speaker, that is, the mother in her basic gestures toward the child, is perfectly visible in the word or, conversely, when the word is perfectly transparent to her being. In this way, the word has “to say infinitely more than it says.” We are now in a position to see how this is concretely possible paradigmatically in the context of a vow. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of people who have taken religious vows, says: “They may be compared to those who do some particular good work as the infinite is compared to the finite. Whoever gives himself to another to do all the other may command, gives himself infinitely more than does one who gives himself to do some particular work.”210 What creates the difference is, of course, the vow: in a vow, one sets no limits to what one gives, and this makes the gift literally infinite, limitless. What Aquinas says about the religious can clearly be said about those in marriage. Because of the definitive gift of self in the vows, any word that is passed from one spouse to another is spoken out of the totality of the existence that was handed over, and so it bears within its shallow physical surfaces a depth that transcends it infinitely. Now, we said that the relationship between the mother and child, just as that between the father and child, is not a matter strictly between the two of them, but is itself the fruit of the primal form (Urgestalt) of marriage. The word the mother speaks to the child is an expression of that Gestalt, and she addresses the child himself as an expression of that Gestalt. Because she has, so to speak, poured her existence into the form of marriage, the word that she speaks on the basis of this form expresses the totality of her existence without her even having to think about it. This is what makes the word say “infinitely more than it says,” and this is what allows the child to see the mother’s being in her gestures, to see a perfect unity of “inside” and “outside,” which is what interprets to the child the unity of his own self-consciousness and provides the foundation for every later experience of truth. Understanding marriage as Gestalt allows us to see that the ground or origin of consciousness is a concrete and superdetermined fullness open to the other also as future, rather than being an “abstract” potentiality that awaits, with a necessary impatience,

210. Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales, 3, 7, ad 6 (emphasis mine). 344

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its actualization. Only now do we see the significance of calling consciousness donum doni, the fruit of the mutual self-gift of the parents symbolized in the Gestalt of marriage. But we also have to relate this event of the child awakening to consciousness to what was said about the child’s fundamental experience in chapter 1 on the fourfold difference. The Gestalt of marriage must in some sense allow Being itself to be seen. How is this the case? Self-presence, if it is understood as the circumscribed grasp of self as an object, is not ontological, inasmuch as Being is precisely the “always-more”; that is, it is in every case greater than any object or any subject. But this does not therefore necessarily mean that self-presence is merely ontic. We have seen that something intrinsically greater than a subject can be in a certain sense paradoxically grasped by a subject to the extent that the subject “transcendently” immerses himself in it, which means that he allows himself to be grasped by it in his own grasping. One can grasp one’s very foundations only when one grasps in being grasped; and this, we recall, is the very nature of a Lebensgestalt, which chooses me because I choose it. It follows, then, that vows manifest Being.211 And since they make Being visible dramatically, that is, without reducing it to any particular being, they manifest Being in leaving wide open the ontological difference. This is why Balthasar says that, in a “luminous Gestalt” (Lichtgestalt), the “Being of the existent [das Sein des Seienden] becomes perceivable as nowhere else.”212 When a child is born into such a Gestalt, the open difference within the manifestation both affirms him, and leaves him free. The child experiences both the contemplative indifference (disinterestedness) of Being at the same time as he sees being as worth striving for (it is interesting). It is thus that the mother’s smile represents an invitation to a totality that does not overwhelm him. In a word, the child experiences existence, in its ontological foundations as well as in its ontic presence, as a gift. The paradoxes that are “realized” in the primal life-form resonate through all of the stages and aspects of the problem of truth that we have discussed up to this point. I mentioned earlier that all relative instances of truth— even as formal as, for example, the principle of identity: A = A—stand in a kind of twilight. Lacking a straightforward and obvious sense of urgency themselves, they get decided or “clarified” one way or the other (i.e., either dramatically or reductively) on the basis of a fundamental experience. In 211. Vows become an instance of the reciprocal causality that I will elaborate in the next chapter, a reciprocal causality that alone is capable of manifesting the ontological depths of reality. 212. GL 1:153. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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other words, any time at all that there is a “whole” involved in a cognitive act, in any grasp of a logical proposition, in fact in any perception at all, a decision has to be made: Am I projecting the unity, or is it greater than me, even as it requires me? But if it is something I both give rise to and participate in, it can only be because I can relate to something that remains other, that is, because both I and the object “transcend.” But, further, such transcendence is not possible unless I transcend wholly—absolutely— because only an absolute transcendence has room for the discontinuity of real otherness. Thus, when that act is completed in its most decisive instance, it sets into relief the transcendence of every relative instance. Where it is basically denied, this failure is likewise communicated to every relative instance, and we fall back into what Plato called the world of (mere) appearance. It is a world in which the deep serenity of objectivity, of Being in itself and of the Being of beings, is lacking, and thus a world in which the mode of relating and communicating is making one mere appearance more forceful than another (modern politics). At issue, then, in meta-anthropology is grounding a genuine ontological locus of truth (the central theme of the next chapter), which is what Balthasar says can happen only when reality is seen in terms of Gestalt.213 Recovering the ontological depths of truth, in this sense, does not mean, however, being disabused of the senses’ illusions. Rather, it means grounding their validity once and for all while at the same time not substituting them for the “spiritual.” Balthasar insists that “form (Gestalt) is a meaningful unity in a multiplicity of organs”;214 it can be grasped as a transcendent whole only through the irreducibility of the organs that perceive it, and this means, in the present case, the irreducible difference of sense and intellect. But this diversity can grasp the meaningful unity only if they are not simply separate from each other, but mutually necessary, and therefore analogous. They must thus themselves be rooted in a concrete unity. At every point of our argument, we have seen something similar. Every aspect of the problem has presented a polarity, a gap, which both needs to be overcome and yet cannot be removed: rest and motion, unity and difference, finitude and infinity, determinateness and openness, subjective and objective, sensible and supersensible, essential and existential, and so on. The alternatives are always the same: either we affirm the irreducibility without the unity, in which case we have a chaotic dualism, or we affirm the unity without the irreducibility, in which case we are left with a dull

213. Ibid., 152. 214. TD 2:87. 346

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monism. Or, finally, there is the third alternative: we affirm both. This final possibility can occur only dramatically. That is to say, according to Balthasar, it can occur only in an event that is dramatic in both form and content. We will have access to the truth of Being only if we are willing to receive it with the whole of our Being. At some point, we will be faced with a truth that asks everything of us, the whole of ourselves, without remainder. But should we be surprised? What sort of truth would it be if it did not demand, and promise, everything? If truth called on only a part of ourselves, only temporarily—what would we do with the rest? What use would it be? . . . The response to truth and consequently the manifestation of truth— crystallized in martyrdom, religious vows, marriage vows, the arts that depict the “pathos” of the human being as a whole, culture-forming work, and any other Gestalt to which a person devotes himself—are thus the foundations of all knowledge, both abstractly as a form that illuminates the meaning of the Gestalt, and concretely as the embodiment and actualization of that meaning. They give rise to the community we spoke of at the end of the last chapter. Meta-anthropology is man’s surpassing himself in order to bring a luminous whole into being. Marriage and family carry this task out concretely in the constitution of any community. But any deed that bears selfless witness to the truth gives rise to a whole that is greater than itself. Truth is always fruitful. Now, the emphasis on meta-anthropology in the revelation of the meaning of being leads once again to the conclusion that truth has its roots in community. One may see here in Balthasar a reflection of the modern turn to language, an approach that seeks to ground “truth” in intersubjectivity. The suspicion that such an approach is not sufficiently “objective” because it cannot distinguish itself from a solipsism that is merely shared generally has some grounds. While Balthasar affirms the fact that man is an essential mediator of truth and that language is an essential medium, he differs from the general form of this position in that he views man not merely anthropologically (or sociologically, psychologically, etc.), but meta-anthropologically: man as mediator of what goes beyond (meta) man. This is so because the language in question is not just any collection of words in general, but the unsurpassably objective word of a pledge, in which man gives himself without looking back and shows thereby that he serves a reality greater than his own. The dramatic character of the meta-anthropological act may seem to lead to a kind of esotericism, to allow only those capable of an extreme act of heroism to have access to truth, and thus to deprive truth of its most characteristic property: its universality. The response to this objection has two aspects, which I mention in conclusion. The first is that the objectivity Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth

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of meta-anthropology possesses an inner richness (it is analogy and not univocity or equivocity) that comprehends and illuminates all areas of human experience without forcing them into any homogeneity. Heidegger, so to speak, polarizes authenticity (heroism) and inauthenticity (everyday life) into opposites. For Balthasar, these aspects, by contrast, stand inwardly related as a bipolarity. The objectivity of the meta-anthropological act includes both the most extreme forms of heroism and martyrdom and the most everyday reality of married life. These do not compete with each other; instead, they reinforce each other in profound ways, even as they mutually illuminate each other. There are few martyrs, but there are many marriages. Of course, those who marry do not think of themselves in the first place as “actors of truth,” fulfilling the meta-anthropological role, but the reality is there nonetheless, and it is brought to light with a radical clarity in the rarer occasions of true martyrdom.215 In turn, the “unself-consciousness” of married life—the fact that in so many instances of marriage a person commits an entire existence so subtly, so unnoticeably—brings to light a depth of objectivity that even martyrdom cannot make known. Secondly, and more directly, Balthasar’s understanding of the dramatic act of foundations has an essentially “for-others” character. The act itself radiates beyond itself. In this way, a single person who pledges his existence and remains faithful to his pledge makes manifest an objectivity that frees others. It frees others even as it makes a claim on them: or because it makes a claim. Such existences “release” an ontological depth beyond themselves, and thus create an “atmosphere” of truth, a certain cultural horizon or ethos. Doing so, they provide the soul of a community. We should note that even art serves this end. A particularly dramatic work, which brings to light the depth of human existence because it illuminates that existence against that which is infinitely greater, can ground a community in an unsurpassable manner: we might think, in this context, of Homer’s epics, which gave unity to the incredible diversity of Greek culture, for centuries on end.216 The point is that the few “epiphanies” of the foundations of truth make truth more generally “available.” It is like a large, motley group of people who have assembled to sing. The invariably few strong voices that are able to find the right key immediately make

215. In fact, in the Orthodox wedding ceremony, the bride and bridegroom are “crowned to each other” with crowns of martyrdom in the act that brings about the sacrament of marriage. 216. On this point, see Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 35–56. 348

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it easier for the weaker voices; the ones who were never able to carry a tune before find themselves singing steadily and confidently in harmony with the rest. At the same time, the stronger voices do not simply substitute for the weaker ones, but rather they blend with them in order to produce a whole that is greater than any of the parts alone. It was said at the outset that meta-anthropology is characterized by the definition of man as the creature “of whom too much is asked.” Indeed, what is asked—the joining of the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, in order to provide the foundation of truth—is not something that any one person can do. It can be done only by everyone, and by all things together.

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5

The Transcendentals Nihil igitur vacat, omnia inuunt, sed intellectorem requirunt.1 —Augustine

Truth rests finally in community, as the last chapter proposed, only because its roots lie in something more profound than mere intersubjectivity: they lie in being. Cornelio Fabro is therefore correct to insist that the adequate “ground of metaphysics” cannot be sought in any Kantian transcendentalism, but only in the unfolding of being in the transcendentals, such as we find them described in the opening question of Aquinas’s De veritate. 2 Yet, at the same time, Aquinas himself affirms in this question that being’s truth depends in some way on its relation to the cognitive soul. A certain ambiguity thus lurks in the notion of transcendentality, insofar as it implies simultaneously a rootedness in being and a fundamental dependence on the soul. This chapter’s first section, “The Transcendental Paradox,” briefly traces the history of the notion of transcendentality in order to show its ambiguity and to bring the inherent paradox to a sharp point. The chapter will then show that the ontological dimension (or “transcendentality” in the classical, not the modern, sense) of truth becomes manifest only in the dramatic encounter between beings. Truth, in other words, is an event that objectively embraces the mutuality of beings, of the knower and the known. As we saw in the Gestalten of the two previous chapters, mutuality is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The excess in mutuality, indeed, is what reveals most clearly that truth is not just a predicate of human knowing, but that it belongs first to being itself. Since it belongs fundamentally to being, truth is related “circumincessively” to the other transcendentals (goodness, unity, and beauty), and it cannot be understood 1. Therefore nothing is still; all things make meaningful signs—but they require an interpreter. 2. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Ens-Esse,” 407. 350

in a profound sense except in its relation to these. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate, in fact, that the relationship to beauty in particular—or, more precisely, the relationship to goodness in beauty—is what most fundamentally undergirds the dramatic structure of truth. To make this argument, after pointing out the paradox inherent in the notion of transcendentality, the next section, “The Transcendentals in Balthasar,” gives a synthetic account of Balthasar’s understanding of the transcendentals, primarily as he elaborates them in the Epilog but also with reference to TL 1 and GL 1. Then, in the most substantial part of the chapter, “Truth and Goodness in Beauty,” I bring out some of the philosophical implications of Balthasar’s understanding through dialogue with recent interpretations of the transcendentals in Aquinas, particularly with regard to the transcendental status of beauty. While the status of beauty is somewhat questionable in Aquinas, beauty is arguably the most important of the transcendentals for Balthasar. It will be shown that beauty is in fact what ensures the transcendentality of the other transcendentals, and that transcendentality is reciprocity or reciprocal causality, that is, the mutual engagement of irreducible principles. In other words, transcendentality, at its core, is drama. By ensuring the transcendentality of the other transcendentals, and therefore of truth, beauty is what makes them inherently dramatic. This will lead, in the last section, “The Transcendentals and the Meaning of Being,” to a concluding discussion of the meaning of being as a whole in light of the transcendental paradox.

The Transcendental Paradox According to Balthasar, the “transcendental properties of being [are] those . . . which transcend every species and belong to every existent as such.”3 The verb transcendere means, literally, to stand over, to pass beyond, to overstep, or to be outside of. Used metaphysically, it means “to go beyond real or logical categories.”4 While the (Aristotelian) categories are “finite,” the more fundamental transcendental determinations of being are so to speak infinite. Thus, the former are by their nature mutually exclusive, while the latter necessarily include one another reciprocally: “The transcendentals are not categories. Categories have a finite content and so can be de-fined over against one another. The transcendentals, by contrast, are all-pervasive and, therefore, mutually immanent qualities 3. GL 4:372. 4. Francis Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin: Eine genetische und systematische Analyse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1961), 183–85. The Transcendentals

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of being as such.”5 The depth and comprehensiveness of the transcendentals make them vulnerable to a certain ambiguity. As fundamental characteristics of being, the transcendentals are the most basic way the world is perceived. Because there is nothing more basic, it becomes difficult at this level to decide whether the transcendentals in the first place describe being or whether they describe the experiencing of being. This ambiguity has allowed for a shift of emphasis in the understanding of the notion over the course of history. The ancients viewed the transcendentals as concerning the meaning of the world;6 the scholastics viewed them as “that which is first known” or most evident to the intellect; 7 in late German Scholasticism, the transcendentals come to refer to essential concepts that have the property of logical necessity;8 and, finally, in Kant, the notion transcendental means the a priori conditions of possibility for all knowledge and experience of the world.9 The Kantian sense of transcendental is what is intended in the term transcendental Thomism,10 and it is the primary inheritance of phenomenology.11 Balthasar’s own understanding is, as we will see, explicitly metaphysical rather than critical or epistemological, and so in this chapter I will present his understanding primarily in dialogue with that of Aquinas. At the same time, his approach is by no means “naively” objectivistic; it fully integrates the “subjective contribution” to the meaning of being. As we proceed, I will take up the

5. TL 1:15. See also Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 92–96. 6. GL 4:19–21. It should be noted, however, that an explicit doctrine of the transcendentals occurred only in the thirteenth century. 7. See Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 42–44, 56, 73–84, etc. 8. Nikolaus Knoepffler, Der Begriff “transzendental” bei Immanuel Kant (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 1996), 13–18. 9. Knoepffler, Der Begriff, 62. Cf. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), 200–203. 10. More precisely, the Thomistic notion of the intellectus agens is interpreted along the lines of Kantian a priori conditions of possibility. On this point, see Nikolaus Knoepffler, Der Begriff “transzendental” bei Karl Rahner: Zur Frage seiner Kantischen Herkunft (Innsbruck, Austria: Tyrolia-Verlag, 1993), 42–57. 11. It is clear that “transcendental” means primarily “conditions of possibility” for Husserl, although Kockelmans makes the claim that Husserl’s interpretation of the term resembles Descartes’ more directly than Kant’s, since Husserl takes the (transcendental) ego to be the ultimate ground for all conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience: Kockelmans, 203–5. As for Heideggerian phenomenology, it is possible to read the existentialia of Being and Time as an attempt to combine the Kantian with the more ancient tradition: they are, for Heidegger, not so much conditions of possibility of knowledge but as it were ontological conditions of possibility, i.e., the fundamental structures of being in the world. 352

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question how it is possible to do so without reducing being to subjective a priori conditions. The historical “roots” of the notion of such nonfinite determinations that reciprocally interpenetrate and apply to anything that exists lie deep in the tradition. Before the notion was philosophically articulated, it constituted the essence of the ancient experience of the world. While most scholars point to Aristotle’s discussion of the “extracategoriality” of being as the origin of the doctrine, Balthasar, from a more “existential” perspective, sees the transcendentals—the notion that being as a whole is one, good, true, and beautiful—as expressed first in the poetry of Homer and the Greek tragedians, and as coming to a flourishing point in Plotinus and Virgil.12 The first articulation is most clearly to be found in Plato,13 and Aristotle speaks of the “convertibility” of one and being in the Metaphysics.14 The theme of the one, the true, the good, and the beautiful was a major one in Neoplatonism, and it passed into the Middle Ages through Boethius,15 through the Arabic philosophers,16 and in a basic way through Dionysius the Areopagite.17 Nevertheless, it is not until the first half of the thirteenth century that the doctrine of the transcendentals is explicitly formulated, and, in fact, the name transcendental first appears even later.18 Aquinas himself uses the term but “only sparingly.”19 According to Jan Aertsen, the reason the teaching emerged explicitly at this late date is that the idea of transcendentality requires a different notion of causality than the one operating, in general, in the ancient world. Specifically, if categories describe being considered fundamentally as substance or essence, the transcendentals, lying as they do beyond the categories, describe being in a “more than substantial” mode—in other words, being considered in the light of

12. GL 4:21: “In Virgil and Plotinus the mutual indwelling of the transcendentalia has become complete.” 13. The idea of Being, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the One (as well as other notions that were not picked up in the later tradition: i.e., Sameness, Difference, Rest, and Motion [see Sophist, 254c–255c.]) are constant themes in Plato. One of the most direct expressions of their inseparability is Philebus, 64e–65a, a text Balthasar refers to in TL 1:7. 14. Aristotle, Meta., 11.3. 15. See Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 423–25. 16. Ibid., 81. 17. See ibid., 425–27; cf. GL 4:373–74. Balthasar claims, in fact, that the “posing of the question of transcendental philosophy in general, especially as it applies to the beautiful, is bound up with the Dionysian Renaissance.” 18. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 24; GL 4:372–73. 19. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 104. The Transcendentals

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ex nihilo causality.20 For Balthasar, Aquinas (interpreted in the light of Dionysius the Areopagite) represents a sort of kairos in transcendental philosophy particularly because of his metaphysics of creation.21 Whether there is an “official canon” of transcendentals is a disputed question. Unity, truth, and goodness, at the very least, are accepted by nearly all medieval thinkers. In what is generally taken to be the most fundamental text on the transcendentals, De veritate, 1, 1, Aquinas lists five transcendentals in addition to being (ens) itself, namely, the above three, plus “res” and “aliquid.” According to Aertsen, these latter two seem to have a source in the Arabic philosophers, who tended to present more “logical” concepts as primary in the thinking of being.22 Although he varies the number from time to time, Aquinas most often refers to unity, truth, and goodness as basic,23 although later and in particular after writing his commentary on The Divine Names, the beautiful is sometimes included in discussions of these others.24 Although the De veritate text lists five transcendentals (in addition to being itself), it is generally thought that the terms res and aliquid can be logically reduced to others: res to ens itself, because Aquinas states explicitly that res, which describes essence, follows even etymologically from being (esse); and aliquid to unum (unity), because aliquid is simply the unity of a being in relation to other

20. Ibid., 155. This notion is supported in principle by Gilson, who holds that the development of a philosophical understanding of the doctrine of creation is what enabled the Middle Ages to get beyond a strictly “essentialistic” notion of being: see Being and Some Philosophers, 74–107. Fabro, too, insists that the key to the notion of the transcendentals is the ens-esse relationship: “Transcendentality of Ens-Esse.” Although Neoplatonism, outside of a biblical context, does not speak of creation ex nihilo, it is important to note that it affirms a ground of reality that is beyond substance, as it were, which perhaps accounts for the great importance of the transcendentals in general in Neoplatonic thinking. 21. GL 4:400–407. 22. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 102. 23. According to Mark Jordan, these three make up the “irreducible list” of transcendentals in Aquinas: see “The Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 393. 24. Whether Aquinas ultimately thought of beauty as a transcendental is controversial. He never calls it such explicitly (although it is true that the word was far from being a technical term), but on the other hand it seems to fulfill all of the requirements for transcendentality as Aquinas enumerates them in other contexts. Francis Kovach has shown textually how beauty fills all the requirements for transcendentality in “The Transcendentality of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,” in Miscellanea Mediaevalia, vol. 2: Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter, ed. P. Wilpert (Berlin: 1963), 386–92. In his book, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, Kovach makes the argument that Thomas became convinced of the transcendentality of beauty as he wrote his commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite. 354

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beings.25 Thus, in the end, there seem to be three “primary” transcendentals in Aquinas, and these are the three accepted most generally in the Middle Ages. Balthasar claims that the limitation of the transcendentals to three properties (unity, truth, and goodness), which was fairly common but by no means exclusive in the Middle Ages, is partly due to the fact that the transcendentals were almost always approached explicitly as a reflection of the Trinity.26 The relation to the Trinity is, indeed, not accidental but is already suggested by the nature of the transcendentals: if they are by definition able to be attributed to all being, they are also “predicable” of divine being; a “triad” of transcendental attributes, which are all attributes of being, serves most appropriately to describe the three divine Hypostases that are one in substance. In spite of the Trinitarian analogy, Balthasar points out that, nevertheless, beauty was also widely addressed in medieval discussions of the transcendentals, and moreover it was among the first transcendentals to be introduced.27 Abstracting from the historical aspect of the question of beauty, what concerns us foremost is where beauty would “fit in” to the ordering of the primary transcendentals if it were indeed a transcendental attribute. Now, beauty clearly has an analogy to the good and the true since all these in different ways represent a relationship between a subject and an object.28 This relationship, in general, already carries with it a profound

25. See, for example, J. B. Lotz, “Zur Konstitution der transzendentalen Bestimmungen des Seins nach Thomas von Aquin,” in Die Metaphysik der Mittelalter, 334–40; Gilbert, “L’articulation des transcendantaux,” 617; and Winfried Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin (Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1964), 88. 26. GL 4:377. See also TL 2:159–64. 27. GL 4:373. To support this claim, Balthasar refers to an “important collection of texts” on the beautiful in the Middle Ages: H. Pouillon, “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les scholastiques (1220–1270),” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 21 (1946): 263–329. According to Balthasar, beauty is explicitly called a transcendental in one of the earliest texts on the transcendentals, called Tractatus de transcendentalibus entis conditionibus (Assisi: Biblioteca Comunale Codex 186), ed. Dieter Halcom, in Franziskanische Studien 41 (1959): 41–106. It is generally assumed to have been written by the young Bonaventure. Aertsen, who makes the claim that beauty was never a significant transcendental until the eighteenth century, passes over this text when he presents the original three treatments of the transcendentals. Only much later in the book does he mention it and, along with this text, the fact that another of the three original discussions of the transcendentals, the Summa Fratris Alexandri, discussed the beautiful at length. His book thus gives a misleading impression about the understanding of beauty in the Middle Ages. See Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 347–51. 28. Günther Pöltner says that beauty, in Aquinas, concerns the unity between the soul and being, in a manner analogous to goodness and truth but not identical to them: Pöltner, Schönheit: Eine Untersuchung zum Ursprung des Denkens bei Thomas von Aquin (Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1978), 20. The Transcendentals

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problem that relates to the very possibility of the transcendentals. This problem, as we will see, bears an analogy to the absolute-relative polarity we have been discussing throughout this book, and particularly in the last chapter. It is helpful, therefore, first to focus on this problem in itself, as it appears in the “classic text” on the transcendentals, De veritate, in order to set into relief a remarkable aspect of the transcendental relation. Toward the end of the chapter, I will raise this question once again in relation to beauty. In De veritate, 1,1, Aquinas begins right from the start with the problem that the notion of transcendentals presents by its very nature. The problem, in a nutshell, is how there can be properties of being as such if properties indicate a specificity and if being as such would seem to brook no such differentiation. This problem, as Aertsen has explained, does not arise with the categories but only with the transcendentals themselves.29 This is because, while the categories describe being as “contracted” into some finite mode and are thus distinguishable from other modes, the transcendentals describe being as being, insofar as it is being at all. The problem is that on the one hand, the transcendentals have to be “exactly the same” as being, while on the other hand, they have to “add” something to being, at least enough so that it is not meaningless to say, for example, that “being is true.”30 If either part of this affirmation is surrendered, the transcendental ceases to be a transcendental and, indeed, ceases to be of interest. Kant would therefore seem to be right to reject the “transcendental philosophy of the ancients,” which is expressed in the “Scholastic proposition” “quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum” (every being is one, true, and good) inasmuch as this principle “has proved very meager in consequences, and has indeed yielded only propositions that are tautological.”31 But he is right only if we neglect the other aspect, namely, that the transcendentals “add” something to being. At the same time, to say merely that the transcendentals add something to being, whatever gain it would seem to promise, would make them no longer transcendentals, that is, attributes predicable of being as being, but it would rather turn them into finite determinations analogous to the categories.32 Since being is the first thing to fall into the intelligence and is that to which all other concepts can be reduced, 29. Ibid., 158. 30. Aquinas, De ver., 1, 1, ad 1. 31. Kant, CPR, B 113. 32. As a matter of fact, even the categories pose an analogous problem, which Aquinas does not address. It is claimed that the categories are unproblematic because as they specify being, that is, because they add a special difference. But they can do so only with respect to a genus. However, just several sentences before Aquinas justifies the categories as special modes, he adverts to Aristotle’s proof (Meta. 2.3.993b23) that 356

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there is nothing at all that can be added to being that was not always already included within being: outside of being, there is precisely nothing. Aertsen presents this issue under the title “The Problem of the Addition to Being,” and he says it is one of the fundamental issues that has to be addressed in classical transcendental philosophy.33 The problem becomes particularly acute in relation to the true and the good, although none of the other transcendentals is exempt. The reason the problem becomes so clear in these two is that while the other transcendentals refer to the relation of being to itself (res and unum) or merely add a “negation” (aliquid: one thing is not another), goodness and truth add a relation to something “other,” and indeed a relation that Aquinas calls positive (affirmative) rather than negative. This other, according to Aquinas, is the intellectual soul, which, as quodammodo omnia, is the only thing with a scope as universal as being itself. Since the good and the true are transcendentals, however, the “relation” to this other that they necessarily imply cannot itself lie outside of being. We can therefore formulate the problem that emerges in the following way: how can there be a “positive addition” to being, and therefore the introduction of something “more,” that is nevertheless not more than being but something that has always already been included in being? The basic answer that Aquinas gives to the problem, both in the opening pages of De veritate, and also when he returns to the problem as the first question to be raised in relation to the good (21, 1), is that the transcendentals do not represent a special mode of being, which would require the addition of a real difference but rather a common mode and then, more substantially, that the relation that is positively added to being in the good and the true is not a real relation but a conceptual one. In other words, we might say that it does not add anything to being itself but only to our grasp of being. This is the solution, in fact, that Aertsen presents when he initially introduces the problem. This solution would seem to have resolved the problem without paradox and to have saved the transcendentals from tautology without making them any less “tautological”: the properties are

being (whether substance or ousia) cannot be a genus (see corpus of De ver., 1, 1). It would seem to be more appropriate, then, to say that the resolution of the problem of addition in the absolute case, i.e., in the case of the transcendentals, will provide by analogy a resolution for the problem in the relative case of the categories. Aertsen passes over this problem (see Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 87). 33. Ibid., 84–97. Cf., Pöltner, Schönheit, 61–66. Gustav Siewerth likewise addresses this problem, in relation to De ver., 1.1, dealing with it at length and offering a very speculative solution inspired by Heidegger and Hegel. See “Die transzendentale Selbigkeit und Verschiedenheit des Ens und des Verum bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Sein und Wahrheit (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 621–35. The Transcendentals

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identical to being but different in the mind, and because of this intentional difference, the conceptual movement from being to the transcendental attributes is in fact a positive one. In this way, it would be legitimate to speak of the transcendentals as so many conceptual unfoldings of the constant meaning of being. According to Aquinas (and following Aristotle), the difference between a “real relation” and a “rational relation” is that in the former, there is a mutual dependence between the two relata, while in the latter, the dependence is unilateral: A is dependent on B in order to be A, but B has in turn no reciprocal need for A in order to be B.34 Calling the transcendentals merely “rational relations” would therefore seem to allow them to be relations and yet not add anything to being. However, as Aertsen points out, this approach immediately raises a further problem, a problem that in fact relates to the aforementioned ambiguity inherent in the notion of the transcendentals.35 If the transcendental relations are merely intentional and to that extent nonreciprocal, how can we call them transcendentals of being? In other words, in relation to the question of truth specifically, if it is only the intellect that is “affected” by the relation, why do we not say simply that the intellect is true? Is it in fact possible at all to say that being itself is true if truth cannot do without relation? But if we deny the possibility of ontological truth, then in the same gesture we deny the transcendentality of truth, insofar as the transcendentals describe being as being. Because this problem touches the main nerve of the argument we have been making in this essay in general, it will be illuminating to consider specifically how Aertsen answers the problem on the basis of the texts from Aquinas. First, Aertsen distinguishes between being in its primary, “extramental” sense, and “mental” being, and says that what is true is indeed being, but it is being in this latter, secondary mode.36 This affirmation, however, makes “real” being true, not essentially but only per accidens,37 and moreover it remains the case that Aquinas affirms that the truth in “extramental” being is what causes the truth of the intellect.38 Thus, it turns out that the situation is more complex: if an adequatio between mind and thing, which Aquinas takes to be the primary definition of truth, is possible, the measure of truth must “be located in either term 34. Ibid., 270. 35. Ibid., 271. Aertsen refers to other authors who have noted the same problem: J. Van de Wiele, “Le problème de la vérité ontologique dans la philosophie de saint Thomas,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 52 (1954): 521–71; and J. P. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics 43 (1989): 295–326, 543–67. 36. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 250. 37. Ibid., 272. 38. Ibid., 253. 358

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of the adequatio formula.”39 In theoretical reason, the measure is given by the thing, and in practical reason it is given by the mind. The mind is called true when, theoretically, it conforms to the thing, but the thing itself is said to be true when, practically, it conforms to the mind. The truth of the thing in conformity with mind occurs most radically in creation, in which the being of things arises from their “conformity” to the divine mind. This divine “practical” conformity is what accounts for ontological truth, and this in turn is what makes possible the transcendentality of truth, that is, the truth as a “rational” relation between being and the soul (intellect). Aertsen’s response to the problem, though it is adequate in principle, remains unfinished, and to the extent it is unfinished, it is problematic. The real difficulty has yet to be addressed. The core of the “transcendental paradox” is to account for the positive relation of being to the human soul as, in some respect, a genuine addition that at the same time does not “add” something to being. As Aertsen articulates the response, the only “addition” to being is the act of creation, the relation of being to the divine mind. Human truth, that is, the truth to which the human mind has access, remains—unless more is said—only the truth of “mental being,” or in other words the truth of the mind itself. This truth remains a merely “rational relation,” which means, according to Aertsen, it is related to the truth of being “per accidens.” But, strictly speaking, it is not even possible to grant the truth of mental being an accidental relation to real being. We hit the nub of the problem only when we see that purely rational relations cannot even be accidental, precisely to the extent that accidents are real. We would rather have to say that “created” truth is absolutely unrelated from the side of being and that the relation occurs only on the side of the intellect. But this, in fact, brings to light a profound difficulty inherent in the notion of a “merely” rational relationship that is wholly unreal: a relationship that is in a strict, metaphysical sense absolutely one-sided is no relationship at all. The implications of this assertion will begin to unfold only gradually, as we enter more deeply into the meaning of the transcendentals. In terms of the problem at hand, what we see is that the proposed solution makes being true ontologically only in relation to the divine intellect, and it makes the human intellect true only in relation to itself. The question remains, What is the relationship between ontological truth and the truth of the mind? In order to find a way to relate the truth of being as it is brought about in God’s creative knowing with the truth of the human intellect, we need to get beyond both a univocal and an equivocal sense of truth. These amount,

39. Ibid., 272–73. The Transcendentals

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in fact, to the same thing in the end: if something is only the same as itself, it can only be different from what is other. If we have no alternatives other than univocity or equivocity, relation is impossible, and therefore so is transcendentality. What we need, then, in technical terms, is a genuine analogia veritatis (analogy of truth), an understanding of a genuine human participation in the divine knowledge, which is ontological truth. Aquinas himself opens up this possibility by affirming that God’s creative knowing is mediated by his will (because creation is a work of practical reason inasmuch as it is creative) as well as by the secondary causality of the mutual relations of creatures.40 It is possible, I propose, to affirm the transcendental relation—in its complex structures, as I will elaborate over the course of this chapter—as a paradigmatic form of this secondary causality. If secondary causality is an active participation in “first” causality, and if, according to Aquinas, the first causality is not “merely” theoretical, but is perfectly mediated by the divine will, then transcendentality, or human participation in God’s creative knowing, implies that man’s knowing of things is also not “merely” theoretical but is in an analogous way creative. In other words, it will have to be the case that any instance of knowing whatsoever is mediated to some degree by the spontaneous quality of the will.41 In order to justify the existence of the transcendental determinations of being at all, we have to reject a simple opposition between rational and real relations. I will return to this issue only after discussing Balthasar’s view of the relationship between being and the soul implied in each of the transcendentals (goodness, truth, and beauty) and setting his view in dialogue with some recent interpretations of Aquinas. For now, it is important to see the paradox implied in the notion of transcendentals in general, which we can now bring to a sharp point. There are two ways to formulate the problem. One is to see that the notion of transcendental requires the simultaneous affirmation of three things, which seem to exclude one another: (1) the transcendentals cannot add something to 40. Aquinas, De ver., 2, 14, corpus. 41. To make the point in a summary fashion: Aquinas claims that the only way there can be an “active effect” of knowing (and therefore a certain “reality” to the otherwise rational relationship) is if knowledge is mediated by the will (De ver., 2, 14, corpus). The question arises, then, whether there is ever a case of knowing that is not mediated by the will. Aquinas’s negative answer to this question is clear: for a series of texts in which Aquinas insists that the operation of the intellect is always necessarily mediated by the will, see Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 105, n. 294. It is, then, a matter of interpreting what the mediation of the will in knowing can mean (i.e., does it positively add something to knowledge in some respect, or is it merely what occasions the self-contained act of the intellect in knowing?), and what this implies with respect to the possibility of conceiving truth as a “purely” rational relationship. 360

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being essentially, (2) they cannot be accidental, and (3) they cannot be merely synonymous. Another way to formulate the problem is to say that the transcendentals are in some respect conceptual relations, which means that they must necessarily pass through the mediation of “soul,” and yet they are for all of that not transcendentals of the soul but of being. Both of these formulations point in the same direction. The only solution that these various stipulations seem to allow is to see the transcendentals as expressing that what is always already there in being as such nevertheless requires the soul in order to come about. In other words, the soul represents the indispensable condition for being to have the meaning that it is. This is the transcendental paradox.

The Transcendentals in Balthasar The transcendentals occupy a central place in the thought of Balthasar, a fact brought out strongly by the book recently published by Mario SaintPierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar.42 According to SaintPierre, the idea of ordering his thought most fundamentally in relation to the transcendentals arose early for Balthasar. We see it already in his “first trilogy,” on the Church Fathers, published between 1936 and 1941, which consists of a study on Origen (who primarily represents truth), Gregory of Nyssa (beauty), and Maximus the Confessor (goodness).43 The ordering of the transcendentals at this early stage is somewhat different from the way they appear in Balthasar’s most mature writing, which begins with beauty and ends with truth. (It may be possible to see a relation between this early conception of the transcendentals and the approach taken by Przywara, whose influence on Balthasar was particularly strong at this point.)44 The idea came to fruition, of course, with the great trilogy 42. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité. This book was originally presented as a thesis under the title “Les transcendantaux dans la trilogie de Hans Urs von Balthasar” in the University of Laval, Quebec, 1996. 43. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 143–55. 44. Przywara’s conception of the analogia entis is grounded by the relation of the transcendentals. By means of them, Przywara attempts to bring together the ancient “meta-ontic” (being transcending itself toward noetic structures, or what he calls “transcendental metaphysics”) and the modern “meta-noetic” (the mind transcending itself towards being, or what he calls “metaphysical transcendentalism”). From Przywara’s perspective, beauty primarily represents subjectivity, truth primarily represents objectivity, and (Augustinian) goodness is the analogical movement that brings them together. See his book Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C. Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), which uses these structures to develop a philosophy of religion that brings together transcendence and immanence. On the general shape of Przywara’s thought in relation to Balthasar, see Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 130–35; Juan Sara, Forma y amor, 66–72; and Balthasar’s own essay, MetaPrz. The Transcendentals

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Balthasar wrote over the course of the last thirty or so years of his life (with the exception of TL 1, which was first published in 1947, and then included later among the other volumes). The first part (Herrlichkeit), seven volumes (in English), deals primarily with the beautiful (and with the related term glory); the second part (Theodramatik), five volumes (in English), concerns the good; and the last part (Theologik), three volumes (the first of which is in English), focuses on the true. Saint-Pierre adds that the concluding Epilog can be seen as dealing with unity because it explicitly takes up the question of the relationship among the transcendentals together, and it shows how, by virtue of their circumincession, unity is intrinsic to each.45 Balthasar’s ordering the trilogy around the beautiful, the good, and the true, rather than unum, verum, and bonum, has prompted Henrici to observe that Balthasar draws his understanding of the transcendentals more directly from classical German philosophy than from Scholasticism or Neoscholasticism, although Henrici points out that even in relation to German philosophy, Balthasar presents them in a different order.46 The similarity of Balthasar’s “triad” to that which emerges after the Middle Ages should nevertheless not obscure the differences between his and the classical German understanding or the similarities of his understanding with that of the Scholastics, and Aquinas in particular. There are three things to point out in this regard. First, the fact, which Henrici indicated, that Balthasar has a different ordering of the transcendentals is already deeply significant. For Kant, beauty comes last; it thus confers a unity on the other two Critiques that is “regulative” and explicitly not metaphysical. Balthasar’s placing beauty first is the result of a conception of unity that is closer to that of medieval tradition than that of German philosophy generally. Second, we recall Balthasar’s observation that the medieval approach to the number and ordering of the transcendentals was tied to their understanding of the Trinity. If Balthasar therefore does not follow the Scholastic triad of “unum, bonum, et verum,” it does not necessarily mean that he chooses Kant over Aquinas; it can also be interpreted as a consequence of his “freeing” the transcendentals from a one-to-one correspondence with individual persons of the Trinity. As Balthasar claims in his intro45. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 230–34. One of the most interesting parts of the book is Saint-Pierre’s discussion of the structural relation of the Epilog to the trilogy, 215–32. He suggests that one of the strongest models is the ancient dramatic triad, which was followed by a satyr play: 225–26. 46. Henrici, “La structure de la trilogie,” 15–17. Saint-Pierre claims as well that Balthasar’s primary dialogue partner in the development of his own understanding of the transcendentals is German Idealism: Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 109. 362

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duction to the Theologik, the three parts of the trilogy are not meant to correspond to each of the divine Persons separately, but rather the whole triune God is present in each part.47 Third, and perhaps most important, though Balthasar’s “triad” initially looks more German than Latin, his understanding of the fundamental meaning of the transcendentals is in one decisive respect clearly more medieval. “Transcendental,” for Balthasar, is not intended first in the Kantian or even the phenomenological sense, but it is rather a metaphysical notion.48 The transcendentals describe, not the most basic ways we know things but the most basic “modes” of being itself, even if it is true that as we mentioned above, these basic modes have a certain reciprocal dependence on relation to the (cognitive) soul. Although Balthasar makes constant reference to the transcendentals in his writing, the two most explicit and sustained treatments of what they are and how they are ordered with respect to each other occur in TL 1,49 and in the Epilog.50 The thorough and well-researched study by SaintPierre eliminates the need to address the gradual development of Balthasar’s thinking on the transcendentals. Since our interests, in any event, are more thematic than historical, I will focus on the presentation in the Epilog and mention aspects from TL 1 only in relation to this. As we saw in chapter 1, the central metaphysical part of the Epilog deals with the structures of being. This central part, in fact, has an extraordinarily compact and harmoniously articulated structure. After raising the issue of the “thinking of being” in section 1, Balthasar discusses the polar structure of Being in itself (“2. Being and beings”), describes the relationship between being and its appearing for another (“3. Appearance and hiddenness”), and then shows how the polarity in being opens up to the divine identity (“4. Polarity in Being”). After these four sections, Balthasar engages a discussion of the transcendentals: first, he discusses beauty under the title “Self-manifestation” (Sich-Zeigen), then goodness under the title “Self-gift” (Sich-Geben),

47. Significantly, Balthasar raises this point in response to an objection made by Karl Rahner. The introduction of beauty among the transcendentals, Rahner claims, can only serve to confuse our understanding of the Trinity, because, in the Trinity, there are only two processions: see TL 1:19–20. 48. This statement is not by any means intended to set phenomenology and metaphysics in opposition to each other in principle. Rather, granting a unity between them, it is no less the case that there is an irreducible polarity between being in itself and being as it appears. To insist that it is being that appears does not necessarily entail the identification of being and appearance, as we saw in chapter 3. Balthasar insists that these two aspects can neither be separated from each other, nor reduced to each other. Given this polarity, Balthasar roots his thought more fundamentally in being in itself. 49. TL 1:216–25. 50. E, 45–66. The Transcendentals

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and finally truth under the title “self-expression” (Sich-Sagen). Each of these sections on the transcendentals is, in turn, broken down into three further subsections, which echo exactly the structure of the three previous sections: (a) each initial subsection elaborates the polar structure of the transcendental in itself; (b) each presents the polar relationship implied in each transcendental as being in itself and as being for another; and finally, (c) each shows how the irreducible polarity expressed in the transcendental opens it up from within to comprehensive theological dimensions. The part of subsection c that discusses truth does so in a more general way that recapitulates the prior sections.51 In what follows, we will not deal explicitly with any of the theological aspects. Moreover, most of what Balthasar says in relation to each of the transcendentals has already appeared at some point in our discussion, so I may be brief and synthetic.

1. Beauty Balthasar never tires of insisting on two things: first, that the transcendentals are by their nature indefinable,52 since they represent fundamental determinations of that which is fundamental—being itself—and a thing can be defined only in relation to what is more universal or more fundamental; and second, that the transcendentals are convertible with one another, and so they can be understood only in relation to the others.53 There is therefore something artificial about taking each one discretely. I do so, then, only as a way of entering into the problem, but we note that what is truly deepest in each will begin to emerge only when we address their interrelation. What the transcendental “beauty” most basically expresses is the fact that “all worldly being is epiphanous,”54 as we saw in chapter 3. Epiphany, being’s “self-manifestation,” is the movement of inner ground to outward

51. My reading of the structure of this part of the Epilog is different from that presented by Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 234–38, who attempts in an interesting way to coordinate the Epilog with Aquinas’s deduction of the transcendentals in De veritate. Moreover, Saint-Pierre suggests that the logic followed in the three subsections on the transcendentals is (a) objective dimensions, (b) subjective reception, and (c) an anticipation of the integration of the transcendental in Christological revelation (237). In addition, he does not draw much attention to the issue of polarity. This issue, however, seems to me to be the most crucial, and it helps avoid a misunderstanding of the “b” sections: they do not concern the “subjective” reception of being as much as a paradoxical event that is simultaneously subjective and objective, i.e., a polarity. 52. GL 4:411. 53. See, for example, TL 1:7, 15. 54. E, 45: “Alles weltlich Seiende ist epiphan.” 364

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appearance, aspects that are not to be taken dualistically as two separate things that need to be put into relation but as a single whole. In other words, the fundamental phenomenon of reality, than which nothing more basic can be found, is Gestalt. Because the movement of epiphany is itself an affair of being, the seeing of the whole that is greater than mere surface (sensible) appearance is not left up to the beholding subject as a task he must carry out on his own; it is in part undertaken by the self-manifesting being itself: “In every case, even in those that are purely natural, the epiphany of the essence is self-interpretation [Selbstdeutung]; it is significant [be-deutend], even if the significance is only intimated [an-deutend]. And since it unfolds its meaning [Bedeuten] in a subject, it charges the subject with the task of interpretation [Aus-deutung].”55 As we have already seen, the tensions that make up the Gestalt of being’s appearance give rise to a polarity-in-unity in the phenomenon of beauty itself. The same light that irrupts in the movement of epiphany simultaneously illuminates the inner harmony and proportion of the outer form itself, and it points back beyond this form to the transcendent beauty of Being itself. What we take to be an opposition between classical aesthetics (Apollo) and romantic aesthetics (Dionysus) is but the polar expression of the same irreducible phenomenon.56 This polarity in the epiphany of being entails a polarity in the perception of being. The outward appearance of being is not merely the matter awaiting the form of cognition, but is itself a spontaneous whole. The subject’s perceiving the epiphany is at the same time the experiencing of himself as a whole. The Gestalt is therefore a communion of the “I” and the particular being in the depths of reality (Wirklichkeit = esse).57

2. Goodness The inseparability of the transcendentals shows itself in the fact that being does not make itself manifest without in that very act giving itself. This self-gift within manifestation is the foundation of all goodness and value.58 Because goodness has its roots in beauty; that is, in being’s self-manifestation, it too has an irreducible polarity. The good is what all things desire

55. Ibid., 46: “In allen Fällen, auch in den rein naturhaften, ist die Epiphanie der Wesen ihre Selbstdeutung, ist sie be-deutend, wenn auch nur an-deutend. Und da sie ihr Bedeuten in ein Subjekt hineinlegen, obliegt diesem die Aufgabe der Aus-deutung.” 56. Ibid., 46–47. Cf. TL 1:224–25. 57. E, 48–49. 58. Ibid., 52. Cf. TL 1:219–21. The Transcendentals

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and strive after, according to Aquinas,59 and yet things are not good because they are desired but are rather desired because they are good. To put it in terms we have used before, because the good is a “self-gift,” or in other words because the goodness of the good is founded on the original phenomenon of beauty, the good’s being receptive to the subject’s spontaneous striving is simultaneous with its giving itself (spontaneously) to the subject’s receptivity. This means, Balthasar says, that being can be good, that is, can give itself, only to one who gives himself in return. We see this most clearly, he continues, in the paradoxical human situation in which each person has a right to be loved, and yet love by its essence can only be offered freely.60 Thus, while every person desires love, love cannot be simply an object of desire; it must be received in love, which means that love must be given. This basic polarity of goodness comes to expression in countless forms: in the fact that moral action involves both (subjective) conscience and (objective) absolute norms; in the conflict between power and love; in the opposition of various rights; and in the tension between justice and mercy. The same paradox that obtains, he says, in the subject’s striving after the good (which has to give itself and be received “freely”) can be viewed from the perspective of the self-giving object: by the very nature of goodness, the object’s self-gift to the subject can be received in freedom. To make the gift, then, the object must in some sense await the free reception by the subject, and in that respect in its very freedom in giving it has a certain dependence on the freedom that receives.61 The good can therefore be good, not through force but through “persuasion” and vulnerability to rejection. At the limit, this rejection can be a mortal hatred. But if perishing in the vulnerability of freedom is itself an expression of goodness, the failure to communicate goodness can in fact turn out to be the most profound communication of goodness. Thus, Balthasar points in this context to the intuition of ancient tragedy (in Oedipus at Colonus, for example), where the perishing through self-gift turns out to bring “grace” and “healing” (or “salvation”: Heil) to an entire country.62

3. Truth Before Balthasar presents truth, he observes that in a certain respect, truth is final, even while in another respect it should be first. The reason for this 59. 60. 61. 62. 366

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ambiguity that he offers here is that while the truth seems to be final insofar as it represents a certain perfection of a development we saw in the other two transcendentals—namely, a movement from mere showing of self, to gift, and finally to articulate self-expression—there is a sense in which the other transcendentals first come to be what they are only in light of truth. In other words, true goodness and true beauty require the reception by a self-conscious subject.63 This first-last tension, in fact, points in some ways to the meta-anthropological tension we spoke of in the last chapter. Moreover, it illustrates something analogous to the transcendental paradox itself, such as I described it above: in a certain way, truth presupposes the other two transcendentals, but in another way, they presuppose truth. I will comment on this when we address the relation among the transcendentals towards the end of the section “Truth and Goodness in Beauty.” In the Epilog, Balthasar approaches truth as “self-expression” (SichSagen), and therefore he turns first to the phenomenon of language. Language becomes possible only where Being as a whole has been grasped in the reflective act of self-conscious being. The Being that is herein grasped is esse, which is always more than the totality of beings. It is that outside of which there is nothing at all. All particular beings are illuminated themselves only in the light of this Being, a light that finds itself first reflected only in the human spirit. However, this spirit is itself dependent on the senses, and therefore on the sensibility of particular beings. All knowing thus requires a grasp of what is beyond the senses (esse), while at the same time it achieves this grasp only through the senses. Balthasar then shows how this polarity relates to the Thomistic affirmation that all knowing is a saying; that is, all our thinking and judging occur in the medium of sensible language.64 This means at the same time, however, that language is not a mere ens rationis but attains to “ontological reality.”65 We grasp the relation to reality best, Balthasar claims, when we see the freedom of speech on the basis of the “organic” movement already expressed by the beautiful and good, namely, as a communication of self. Now, the polarity intrinsic to language as a medium of self-expression points to an even more fundamental mystery: the subject can “disclose” being in his reflexive act only to the extent that he is himself simultaneously disclosed by being.66 This opens up a deeper insight into the polarity of truth in the

63. Ibid., 59. 64. E, 60–61. 65. Ibid., 61. In this context, Balthasar refers to the study by Theo Kobusch, Sein und Sprache: Grundlegung einer Ontologie der Sprache (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1987). 66. E, 63. The Transcendentals

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world: the freedom of the act of judgment in any instance of knowing can be carried out in its freedom only in dependence on the self-unveiling of the particular being that is known, which is what grants the light of being to consciousness. The heart of truth is the irreducible polarity of grasping in being grasped, knowing in being known.

4. Unity and Circumincession Such as I have quickly run through them, the transcendentals appear to be a series of characteristics that serve to describe the various ways in which things relate to each other. But if that is what they are, then they are not transcendentals, because only “finite” modes can be juxtaposed to each other thus in a series, and transcendentals are not finite modes but “infinite”; that is, they describe being as being. To grasp any transcendental at all is to grasp paradox, because their infinite character makes them inseparably interwoven with each other without allowing them to fall, as it were, into an inert synonymy. The theme of the circumincession of the transcendentals is a major one for Balthasar, and he connects this theme in a special way with beauty, on the one hand, and unity on the other. As Balthasar says in GL 1: “[Beauty] . . . dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. . . . [S]he will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”67 The importance of beauty, for Balthasar, cannot be overstated, and I will point out in a moment some of the ways in which beauty allows truth to be true and goodness to be good. The theme of the interplay between the beautiful, the good, and the true, as we said above, is the fundamental ordering principle of Balthasar’s thought. But it is crucial to come to terms with the role unity plays in relation to beauty and the circumincession of the transcendentals generally. Balthasar himself says that we are “led by the very nature of the object itself—in this case the fact that all the transcendentals equally determine the whole of being—not only to underscore their inseparability . . . , reciprocal interpenetration, and mutual implication, but also, and for the same reason, to highlight the fundamental transcendental quality of unity.”68 If unity, in Balthasar’s discussions of the transcendentals, does not “fall into line” with

67. GL 1:18. 68. TL 1:7. 368

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the triad of beauty, goodness, and truth, and if it does not have a number of volumes devoted to it in the trilogy like the others, it is not because it is the least significant transcendental, which receives occasional mention only for the sake of tradition, or because it does not fit into an otherwise fixed schema. Rather, we wish to argue that unity is in a sense the transcendence that makes the circumincession of the three possible, and this is why it cannot be simply included among them. It is the most hidden in Balthasar’s work, one might say, because it is in a sense the deepest. At this point, I will only indicate certain general aspects of the circumincession of the transcendentals in general in line with what Balthasar says in the Epilog. The heart of the matter will be brought out only through philosophical engagement with Aquinas. The circumincession, or mutual interpenetration and implication, of the transcendentals means that they subsist within a definite order. In other words, they do not stand “side by side” in a symmetrical series (which would make them finite, as we said above), but instead they are asymmetrical, which means they relate to each other in terms of subordination. At the same time, however, precisely because it is circumincessive, the order is not simply unilateral, but it is asymmetrical in the sense of mutual subordination according to a more complex set of possibilities. Thus, for Balthasar, there is clearly a “fundamental” order among the transcendentals, which is the order of the trilogy itself, and yet he insists that there is another sense in which each of the three has a certain primacy within a different order. Saint-Pierre has described the fundamental order of the transcendentals clearly at the conclusion of his study: Beauty is essentially the first transcendental; it is connected with the primal phenomenon of Gestalt, and thus it is what makes all the transcendentals concrete without reducing them to the particular. Goodness is the central transcendental; it represents the “hinge” of the transcendentals in the order of action, which results from the basic meaning of gift. Finally, truth is the ultimate transcendental. It is as it were the place where the relation implied by the other two transcendentals is consummated in a fruitful way, and thus it ensures that the whole crystallizes in a mysterious unity.69 Balthasar expresses the “organic” unfolding of the transcendentals in this basic order

69. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 349. Saint Pierre places particular emphasis on the fact that truth preserves beauty from fading into a bland aestheticism and, moreover, that the centrality of self-gift implied in the Good could lead to an absolutizing of negativity—a kind of gnosis or idolizing of “kenosis” (self-emptying)—were it not for the positive light of truth. In this, he agrees with the interpretation Paul Gilbert offers: “L’articulation des transcendantaux,” 628–29. I will return to this point later. The Transcendentals

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succinctly in the Epilog: “The being [or essence: Wesen] presents itself in appearance. This presentation [Dar-stellung] gives the being a Ge-stalt in the world, in which it makes out its meaningful (full of logos [logoshaft]) content [Ge-halt] as something able to be intuited as a whole. Thus, it thereby makes itself available to a world-context so that it can, as a gift, be used (uti) or enjoyed (frui), wherein it finally shows its truth.”70 The notion that truth comes last can, moreover, be supported by a consideration of grades of being, wherein all beings can show themselves (beauty) and living beings can give themselves (goodness), but only selfconscious beings can express themselves articulately (truth). Nevertheless, this order is not static but circumincessive, and we would upset the circumincession if we allowed them to move, as it were, only in one direction. Once we have grasped in principle how they relate, and that they can be by no means separated from each other, we are freed in a certain way in the concrete order to begin with any one of them in particular, or to lay a special emphasis on one rather than the other. Indeed, it is significant that while Balthasar often points to beauty as that which ensures the unity of the rest,71 in this summary presentation of the transcendentals in the Epilog, Balthasar does not give beauty any special status, but in fact he shows how each of the transcendentals contains the others. Thus, he says, objectively speaking, beauty can be seen to contain truth and goodness in the phenomenon of a great work of art, in which the very givenness (Hingegebenheit) of the meaning is so fully handed over, it places itself beyond any definite discrete articulation. But the good can also be seen to have a certain primacy, and thus to contain the others: a dramatic act of self-gift has an overwhelming beauty and at the same time makes a “statement” that is unmistakable. Finally, he says, the truth of genuine human speech has a beauty in its images and expressions, and this truth can be the most profound gift of self, the disclosure of one’s heart. Subjectively considered, Balthasar continues, the “dominance” of beauty corresponds to wonder, which only increases the more the object is known. The dominance of goodness corresponds to gratitude, which never grows “accustomed” to the gift. And the dominance of truth corresponds to faith or trust (Glaube), which does not disappear 70. E, 64: “Das Wesen stellt sich in seiner Erscheinung dar, diese Dar-stellung gibt ihm in der Welt eine Ge-stalt, in der es seinen sinnvollen (logoshaften) Ge-halt als etwas ganzheitlich Anschaubares hin-stellt, sich damit auch in den Weltzusammenhang hinein-gibt, so daß es als Gabe verwendet (uti), aber auch genossen (frui) werden kann, worin sich schließlich auch seine Wahrheit erweist.” 71. In addition to the pages cited above from GL 1, we might consider TL 1:221–25, where Balthasar more or less defines beauty as the unity of the good and the true. 370

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in genuine knowledge.72 None of these aspects, either from the subjective or the objective side, is meant to replace any of the others. Indeed, it would be difficult, and even somewhat foolish, to try to say which is more important.73 And yet, directly after showing the “relativity” or relative primacy of the transcendentals among themselves, Balthasar points to a kind of primary primacy of unity, which he calls the “first of the transcendental modes.”74 The “firstness” is expressed in the fact that it “undergirds” (untergreift) the others, or, as Balthasar puts it at the beginning of the second part of the Epilog, unity is what “pervasively accompanies” (or “accompanyingly pervades”: mitfolgend durchwaltet) the other three.75 The reason it both pervades and accompanies the others comes to light when we consider that each of the transcendentals is constituted by an irreducible polarity. If the polarity is not to fracture into a dualism, we cannot think of the poles as separate parts, but as an “ununited unity” (nicht-einen Einheit) that has its ground in something deeper. But the primacy of unity means that it cannot be treated first, or even “in itself.” If Balthasar had considered unity first, it would not have been able to appear as the unity of poles or as a “polar unity.” Instead, it would have appeared as a “monistic” one. And for the same reason, it would no longer have been the “accompanying” and “undergirding” first of the transcendentals—that is, as the unity in which their polarity is preserved—but it would have fallen simply in line with the rest. Thus, Balthasar says, “we can talk about unity as a transcendental only after having dealt thematically with the other transcendentals first.”76 The depth of the meaning of unity cannot be unfolded for its own sake, but only as implied by the meaning of the transcendentals, that is, as the unity of the transcendentals, in themselves and in one another. Thus, if it is the case that beauty, goodness, and truth show themselves in the end to have a certain dependence on the transcendence of unity, this one, in turn, has need of them for its own meaning. I will return to this problem toward the end of the chapter.

72. All of these objective and subjective aspects are presented in E, 65. 73. In fact, in Balthasar’s final summary presentation of his thought, he describes the unfolding of the transcendentals in the following order: unity, goodness, truth, and beauty (RT, 3). This order seems to be unique in his writings, and underscores the fact that even if there is an “ultimate” order, it is always “relativized” according to context. 74. E, 65. 75. Ibid., 37. 76. TL 1:8. The Transcendentals

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The relativizing of the three transcendentals and the “privileging” of unity here in the Epilog, however, do not render null Balthasar’s more common claim of a special primacy for beauty. In fact, there is a certain way in which they support this claim, although we will see how they do so only at the end. Before we turn to a discussion of beauty, goodness, and truth in Aquinas, however, it will be helpful to point out specifically why beauty has such importance for Balthasar. Next to his observations in the opening pages of the trilogy, the clearest case Balthasar makes for the centrality of beauty is in TL 1. There, Balthasar describes beauty as so to speak the place where goodness and truth meet, are joined, and become different because of the relation. On the one hand, he says, “the light of truth could seem cold and joyless if it did not also have the warmth of the good.”77 In GL 1, Balthasar says further that the “very conclusions” of truth, once it has been sundered from beauty, and therefore its intrinsic relation to goodness, “are no longer conclusive.”78 There will be much more to say on this point later, but we should see that the “warmth,” attractiveness, or “conclusiveness” that beauty’s relation to the good brings to truth is not the addition of something new—something extra that does not belong to truth proper—but it is rather something that is part of the nature of truth as truth. It would be an “extra” addition only if truth were taken to be primarily a matter of abstract propositions. But we have shown that such propositions, in their abstraction, cease in fact to be true if they remain merely abstract and indeed if they have truth only when understood as part of an ek-static event of a life-giving relationship between subject and object. If attractiveness is essentially related to ek-stasis, then the persuasiveness or conclusiveness that Balthasar speaks of is part of the native structure of truth. In this case, then, its being severed from beauty leads to the dissolution of its own structure and not merely the loss of something accidental. On the other hand, it is only by virtue of beauty that goodness is seen to be valuable—which is so little the addition of a new item that it is almost like saying it gives flavor to salt. The reason beauty reveals the goodness of the good is that it mediates truth to it. It is undeniable, Balthasar remarks, that goodness is essentially relative, namely, that it is by its nature a good “for me,” a good relative to a subjective appetite. However, if it were only relative (which is in fact impossible to conceive) or if it were exhaustively measured by the coordinated appetite, it would “be at

77. TL 1:221. 78. GL 1:19. 372

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the mercy of a total subjectivism and relativism.”79 Indeed, a wholly relativized good would collapse into the subject and could not even be objective enough to be an object of desire. It would lose all value the same moment it lost any degree of in-itself-ness. In this case, Balthasar says, “man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil.”80 The mystery of beauty that we will try gradually to penetrate is hinted at in the convergence of the problems that arise in the true and the good when they separate from the beautiful and therefore from each other. There are a number of ways we could describe this convergence. On the one hand we could say that they both reveal an extrinsic relationship between the “in-itself” aspect and the “for-another” aspect of being. Another way to put it is that they both represent a sort of breakdown of relationship into sheer immediacy. The good collapses into an unmediated subjectivity that does not have to go “outside” itself in a genuine openness to an object, insofar as it is not mediated by truth, while the true collapses into an unmediated objectivity, which does not of its very nature make a claim on the subject, insofar as it is not mediated by goodness. Or, finally, we could say quite simply that without beauty, what both the true and the good lack is precisely transcendence. Beauty has a key role in the fact that the transcendentals are transcendentals. In TL 1, Balthasar characterizes the fundamental primacy of the beautiful in terms of groundlessness. In both the true and the good, being manifests itself in the self-communicative movement of ground to appearance (and the falling away of appearance into ground). Beginning with the appearance, we might be able to give a reason for the ground; beginning with the ground, we could even more clearly give a reason for the appearance. But if we understand them as a polar relation in which each finds fulfillment in the other, and we thus take the phenomenon as a whole, then the “ground of being becomes bottomless.”81 This is the groundlessness of beauty, according to Balthasar: not that there is no reason (Grund), or that it has irrationally been held back or dissolved in an endless regress, but that the ground has been so perfectly communicated, it cannot be grounded in something else. We will see at the end the far-reaching implications of this point, and we will see, too, that Balthasar’s philosophy provides the resources for

79. TL 1:222. 80. GL 1:19. 81. TL 1:223. The Transcendentals

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giving the insight a broader base.82 For the time being, we note that groundlessness is the mark of ultimacy. As we saw above in the Epilog, Balthasar connects beauty with wonder, and, in TL 1, he explicitly relates it to the fundamental question “why,” which is the open marveling at the existence of an object. And, finally, he relates it to the unsurpassable phenomenon of joy.83 The fact that Balthasar uses all these notions to characterize the experience of beauty points to a question: Is there a particular relationship among them all? In other words, what is the connection, if there is one, between joy and beauty, between beauty and wonder, between fundamental questioning and groundlessness, and so between groundlessness and joy? In order to approach these questions, we need to enter more deeply into the philosophical structures operative in these phenomena.

Truth and Goodness in Beauty The best way for us to unfold the philosophical structure of the transcendentals is to engage Aquinas’s notion of the relationship between the soul and being that is implied in the transcendentals of goodness and truth, to see how these relate to the experience of beauty.

The Multiplicity in Unity of the Good and the True Against a growing number of claims to the contrary, Jan Aertsen seeks to show that Aquinas never thought of beauty as a transcendental. The entire question, Aertsen asserts, turns on a single point, namely, whether beauty expresses something about the soul-being relationship that is not already expressed by truth or goodness. Beauty may fulfill every other requirement for transcendentality—that is, convertibility with other transcendentals, universality of application, and the like84—but if it can be reduced in some way to one or more of the other transcendentals such that it does not make itself indispensable precisely as beauty, then it ought not be included in the list of principal transcendentals. And so the basic question comes down to this: does beauty, as beauty, “add” anything to

82. Specifically, I will show how this “groundless ground” is the very character of any instance of genuine reciprocity. 83. Ibid., 224. 84. In a brief but dense series of pages, Kovach lists the conditions of transcendentality for Aquinas and cites texts to show that beauty fulfills all of them: “Transcendentality of Beauty,” 386–89. 374

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being that is not already added by truth or goodness, or by the relation between them that is already implied by convertibility?85 Aertsen’s question will be the one that drives the present discussion. The question is important for us because what is at stake is the logic of the dramatic Gestalt. If beauty, as the union of goodness and truth, does not add anything that is not already added by the two taken individually or together, then we cannot affirm in this paradigmatic case that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nor, as a consequence, can we say that the parts are somehow transformed because of their union. Furthermore, some of the fundamental assumptions undergirding the present study thus far are that the order of intelligibility bears an intrinsic relation to the order of action (or the will) and the order of the senses. If truth is not somehow different in relation to goodness or beauty, then we have no grounds to argue that it has a “dramatic structure.” Finally, this same dramatic structure requires the sort of subject-object reciprocity that, as we will see, forms the special characteristic of beauty precisely as the distinct union of goodness and truth. For all these reasons, if beauty does not add anything that the other transcendentals already have in themselves, then truth cannot be said to be dramatic. My argument will be that a “transcendental” relation between the soul and being is possible only if that relation is itself a complex tension, a multiplicity in unity. This tension, I will argue, is best conceived as a polarity, and a polarity requires not merely two but three elements. I will approach the relationship between the soul and being primarily in terms of the order of the good and the true as Aquinas presents it in the beginning of the De veritate. My procedure will be to show why there must be more than one positive transcendental, then why the two that Aquinas discusses have a “fittingness” inasmuch as they give rise to a certain whole made up of relatively opposed “parts.” It will be argued that these parts must be mutually dependent and yet remain distinct. To understand this relationship, we will consider a model proposed by Winfried Czapiewski in his study of beauty in Aquinas, and then the model of “reciprocal causality” of the intellect and will that Rousselot offers. Affirming this latter approach in principle, I will show how Balthasar’s understanding of the circumincession of the three transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty— provides a ground for an interpretation of reciprocal causality that removes the pitfalls that Rousselot himself cannot avoid. We will then, in the last 85. Aertsen himself puts the question thus: “If the beautiful is really a transcendental, then it must add a value to being conceptually that cannot be reduced to another transcendental.” Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 336. The Transcendentals

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part of this section, return to see how the mutual relationship among the transcendentals reveals what is most profound about each and, specifically, brings to light an aspect of the structure of truth that is indispensable for our thesis in general. This will allow us to take up the question of the transcendental paradox once again in a more meaningful context. It is important to note, for what follows, that in dealing with Aertsen’s question (What does beauty add?), we do not intend in any way to try to answer the (historical) question of whether Aquinas himself accepts beauty as a transcendental, which is the primary context of the question for Aertsen. Rather, it is clear that the question has implications beyond Aquinas, and so I approach it as the more general question of whether beauty is necessary as a transcendental, irrespective of whether Aquinas took it to be one or not.86 I will nevertheless take the “classic text” from Aquinas as our basic reference point, which will allow us to frame the terms of the issue. As we have already seen, the true and the good are for Aquinas the two transcendentals that represent a “positive” (affirmatio) relationship of being to the soul. That there are two such transcendentals follows from the fact that the soul has essentially two faculties, intellect and will. The true, of course, is the relationship between being and the intellect, and the good is the relationship between being and the will. According to Czapiewski, Aquinas never gives an account of why there must be more than one “power” of the soul, or even why there are these two, since the fact of the intellect-will duality is a fundamental “given” that cannot be further analyzed.87 Nevertheless, it seems that more can be said about why a plurality of powers is necessary. Given the fact that a certain duality between the intellect and will (namely, that one can know something without doing it, or that one can will something more or less blindly) is a matter of everyday experience and that we have a distinct experience of goodness and truth, it may seem at first glance that this question, if not “merely rhetorical,” is at least “merely theoretical” and therefore meaningless in relation to the way the world actually is. But the question is valuable because it

86. Balthasar’s own position is nuanced. While he agrees in principle with Kovach’s conclusions that after commenting on Dionysius’s Divine Names, Aquinas was persuaded to the transcendentality of beauty (GL 4:373), he nonetheless admits that “beauty is seldom a central concern for St. Thomas Aquinas, and for the most part his discussion is dependent on material presented to him by tradition” (ibid., 393). Balthasar claims that Aquinas does not make a significant contribution to aesthetics per se, although in the end, his metaphysics becomes the key for the development of a “transcendental aesthetics” (ibid., 407–12). 87. Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 101. 376

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allows us to bring into relief what is essentially good or even necessary about the irreducible difference between truth and goodness, intellect and will. Why can it not be the case that the soul is wholly intellect, and nothing else, or wholly will, and nothing else? If it is not so now, why can it not be so ultimately? Why can it not be the case that being has only a single positive relation to the soul, be it under the aspect of truth or under the aspect of goodness? It will be necessary to give a positive argument for the appropriateness of the existence of the two orders of the good and the true, but first it is worth explaining schematically why there cannot be only one. To affirm a single power of the soul, and by implication a single positive relation between the soul and being, would be to posit a conception of unity that is opposed to differentiation. If unity does not have, as unity, a dependence on difference in order to be unity, then it is more unified the more it either excludes difference or reduces difference to itself. But if this is the case, then, there are some points to consider. The inner differentiation of being that is implied by the notion of the transcendentals would be excluded by the unity of being, or else the unity of being would be excluded by the differentiation of the transcendentals, and so we are left with the alternative, either there are many transcendentals (i.e., more than one), or there are none at all, and being becomes the Parmenidean monolithic sphere. Furthermore, the unity of the soul, if it excluded inner differentiation, would also exclude the difference of relation to the world. If “power of the soul” or faculty means that by which the soul relates to what is other than itself, then it cannot be the case that the soul has (or rather is) only one “faculty.” Finally, given a “nonrelational” soul and a “nonrelational” being, it is clear that there can be no connection between them. It therefore follows not only that there must be more than one “affirmative-relational” transcendental—that is, more than one way that the soul relates to being— but that there must be more than one for there to be any transcendentals at all, or any faculties of the soul at all, since both of these necessarily imply relation. If it is the case that there must be more than one positive transcendental, it remains to be seen why, for Aquinas, it is appropriate that there be two, namely, goodness and truth. To see why they are appropriate, we must see how these transcendentals complement each other. If the true entails the relationship between being and intellect, and the good entails the relation between being and the will, the first question we should ask is, What is the relationship between these two relationships? Evidently, these two relationships cannot simply be irrelevant to one another: they cannot have their own completion merely outside one another. If this were the The Transcendentals

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case, they would be wholly extrinsic to each other. But such an external juxtaposition would have two immediate implications. First, if the two relationships were simply indifferent to each other, it would imply that the objects of the intellect and the will were “parts” of being that are separate from one another. But if these aspects are thus “set off” from one another, they are no longer transcendental attributes.88 Second, if the two faculties could operate independently of one another, it would compromise the unity of the soul. They are faculties of one soul. It is not the intellect that understands, nor the will that wills, but the person (with a will) who understands through the intellect and the person (with an intellect) who wills through the will. The whole, in other words, operates as a whole in each of its parts. Therefore, Aquinas affirms that any power arising from the essence of the soul is mediated by the other.89 At the same time, the fact that the faculties of the soul and the corresponding transcendental attributes of being are inseparable from each other cannot mean that they reduce to one another. If the faculties could reduce in essence to a single unity, or correspondingly, the transcendentals could reduce to a single attribute, we would fall back into the undifferentiated notion of unity we spoke of above. In order to affirm the transcendentals as representing a positive relation between being and the soul, it seems that we need to find a way to affirm an intrinsic and necessary relation between the multiple orders (of the true and the good) that nevertheless does not turn the one into the other. To put it another way, we must discover a genuine tension between them. Tension is possible only if there is a whole made up of irreducible parts. It is in light of this notion of tension that we can best see the significance of Aquinas’s description of the corresponding movements of the intellect and will. In De veritate, Aquinas refers to Aristotle’s notion of a “circle” of the soul’s relationship to being, that is, the circle formed by the soul’s basic acts in relation to what is other than it: “a thing outside the soul moves the intellect, and the thing known moves the appetite, which tends to reach the thing from which the motion originally started.”90 We note, first of all, the significance of Aquinas’s speaking of how the two relatively opposed movements come together to form a single, two-dimensional whole, rather than dealing simply with each separately as a single, unidirectional, onedimensional ray. We saw in the last chapter, with respect to the spirit-senses 88. Aertsen makes a similar observation: Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 288. 89. Aquinas, ST, 1:77, 7. 90. Aquinas, De ver., 1, 2, corpus. The reference is to Aristotle’s De anima, 3.8.431b29. 378

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relation, how a movement between the soul and a thing that is unidirectional and one-dimensional cannot sustain itself as a genuine movement, because it falls into immediacy. Within a single order, an object at any given moment can only be either not (yet) identical to the subject and therefore just so far out of union with the subject, or (merely) identical with the subject and therefore no longer an object for the subject. For the subject to be able to have a union with the object that does not collapse into immediacy, the single unidirectional movement must be resisted. But this resistance cannot be a mere opposition from without, which would return us to a dialectic of identity/nonidentity, but must occur within the movement as part of its own order. Here we see how important it is that the will and intellect represent two relatively opposed movements that make up a single whole, and this is what Aquinas means when he says that the intellect is mediated by the will and the will by the intellect. This mutual mediation is what gives each an inner resistance, and therefore a depth, within its own order, and what makes every union a mediated immediacy. But this also implies that we cannot define the movement of the intellect simply as that from object to subject, and the movement of the will as simply the reverse. Rather, each must include the movement of the other analogously within its own movement.91 We will come to see how this inner analogy is possible only at the end of this section, when we address the meaning of beauty. For now, we ought to see that the internal relatedness between these two relatively opposed orders gives rise to a relationship that is not an abstract one-dimensional ray but a circle, a two-dimensional whole. This phenomenon is similar to that of vision: it takes two eyes to see things as wholes and not as mere flat images. In order to see how beauty is necessary to the relationship between the intellect and will, we must first enter more deeply into the issue of their mutual dependence. The issue is in itself immense, and many studies have appeared on it in the last century. For reasons of space, I will not discuss the issue in itself but will depend on two studies in particular: first, the thesis by Winfried Czapiewski on beauty in Aquinas, and

91. In his analysis of this opening text of De veritate in the context of a study on Aquinas’s understanding of the good, Mark Jordan comes to exactly the same conclusion: it is impossible, given other substantial positions Aquinas takes, to read the acts of the intellect and will as two separate motions, one coming after the other. Rather, we must see them as analogous to each other when we take those movements to be operating concretely. See Mark Jordan, “The Transcendentality of Goodness and the Human Will,” in Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology, ed. Scott MacDonald (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129–50, here: 137. The Transcendentals

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then Rousselot’s Eyes of Faith. These two works will help us to set into relief the important aspects of Balthasar’s understanding.

Reciprocal Causality: Intellect and Will In his study on the notion of beauty in Aquinas, Winfried Czapiewski frames the issue precisely in terms of the interrelation between the intellect and will. Czapiewski’s analysis is helpful because he thinks through the intellect-will relation in the context of the more fundamental question of the relation between the soul and being as implied by transcendentality in general. In other words, it represents a specific attempt to respond to the central question that Aertsen raises about beauty, namely, What does it add to the other transcendentals, or what does it indispensably contribute to our understanding of the soul-being relationship? According to Czapiewski, the human soul is by its essence ordered to the totality of being as a whole: the soul is “quodammodo omnia,” which Czapiewski interprets as “to be spirit means the same as to dwell with Being.”92 Czapiewski frames his discussion in terms of the scholastic distinction between a being’s first act, essence, and its second act, operation. There is a certain sense, he continues, in which the soul in its “first act” (which establishes its essence and therefore “defines” it most basically) already possesses Being, since it is by its essence quodammodo omnia. What distinguishes the human soul from God and the angels, however, is the fact that this “already” being in the possession of the totality of Being is “not yet” realized. The spirit therefore has a “second act” by which it transcends itself toward the actualization of what it is by essence. The soul’s operations are what enables it to actualize itself. Thus, for Czapiewski, the human being represents a sort of tension of opposites: he is a potential infinity but an actual finitude, and the project of human existence is the movement from potency to act, by which one becomes what one, in a sense, already is.93 It is important to note that Czapiewski conceives this relationship between the infinite and the finite in the human person as a dialectic,94

92. Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 96: “Geist-sein bedeutet soviel wie Beim-Sein-sein.” 93. It should be noted that Czapiewski assumes what may be called a “German,” as opposed to an ancient or medieval, sense of the terms finite and infinite, which associates finitude with materiality. The medievals, by contrast, recognize “pure spirits” that are not absolutely but are only relatively infinite—namely, the angels. The existence of angels, however, does not immediately affect the point under discussion in this section. 94. Ibid., 98: “Geist-sein, d.h. Alles-sein, und Endlich-sein, d.h. Nicht-alles-sein, stehen sich so im endlichen Geist dialektisch gegenüber und prägen seinen Selbstvollzug.” 380

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which is profoundly different from Balthasar’s understanding. I will elaborate the implications of this difference shortly. Now, it is precisely this “anthropological” dialectic that accounts for the fact that the human soul is not a single unity, nor a mere multiplicity, but is rather a unity that unfolds itself into a multiplicity. To explain this unfolding, Czapiewski refers to Rahner’s notion of the human spirit as a ground that, by its nature, “gives rise” to the multiplicity of the faculties out of its unity in order to achieve the end proper to it by nature.95 The key to this notion is the verb “to give rise” (entspringenlassen); it expresses the fact that the faculties are not separate, self-contained “things,” but are expressions or extensions of the soul, and so they arise from the soul not by virtue of their own activity, but by virtue of the act of the soul itself that allows or enables it. In other words, we have to view the multiplicity of the faculties wholly on the basis of the unity of the soul, since it is impossible, according to Rahner (and Czapiewski who affirms the observation), to move to the unity of the soul on the basis of the multiplicity of the faculties. Aquinas, Rahner says, never fails to affirm the primacy of unity over multiplicity.96 Czapiewski concludes that the purpose of the faculties is to enable the soul to become the unity that it potentially is. This means, however, that the two faculties cannot have a final formal completion in themselves, but they must be ordered in the end to an actual unity that corresponds to the potential unity of the soul. He will therefore eventually view the formal objects of the two faculties as converging into an identity, namely, beauty. To this end, he will have to show that the intellect and the will cannot carry out their distinct operations independently from one another but are rather reciprocally dependent. Czapiewski formulates the reciprocal dependence thus: the intellect can be the instrument of the soul’s self-actualization only through the mediation of the will, and the will can be the same only through the mediation of the intellect.97 Having posited this mutual mediation as a thesis, Czapiewski supports it through a consideration of an abundance of texts from Aquinas. Aquinas confirms the reciprocal mediation of the intellect and will in their operation, he claims, under four different aspects: first, the two functions 95. “Der menschliche Geist existiert dauernd im Entspringenlassen seiner Vermögen und nur so.” Karl Rahner, Geist in Welt: Zur Metaphysik der endlichen Erkenntnis bei Thomas von Aquin, 2nd ed. (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1957), 264 f., cited in Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 102. 96. Rahner, Geist in Welt, 258, cited in Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 102–3. 97. Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 106. The Transcendentals

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have a reciprocal priority: each presupposes the other. As Czapiewski shows, Aquinas affirms in various places a priority of the intellect over the will and the priority of the will over the intellect. He claims that the reciprocal priority is not a contradiction, because it is neither a temporal nor a causal priority (this will be important later); rather, the reciprocal priority is the expression of the unity of the common source of the faculties.98 Second, the faculties reciprocally implicate or include one another. Because the true and the good are both convertible with being, the proper object of the other is included within the act of each. Specifically, the formal object of the one is necessarily the material object of the other.99 Third, the two faculties necessarily interpenetrate. Each informs and therefore leaves its stamp on the character of the other.100 Finally, the intellect and will are ordered to one another. When the act of the will attains its object, it offers that object to the intellect, and vice versa. This means, then, that neither act reaches completion in itself without passing over to the other act.101 Czapiewski’s elaboration of the reciprocal mediation of the faculties seems, prima facie, to express exactly the intrinsic relationship between the faculties that we said was necessary for the transcendentals in general, and it is especially helpful because Czapiewski catalogs dozens of fitting texts from Aquinas under each aspect. Granting the importance of the texts he cites, we must nevertheless ask how he relates them to the question of beauty. According to Czapiewski, if the multiplicity of the faculties is due to finitude and represents an instrument for the soul to “return” to its more fundamental unity, then it follows that the “lower” the (mediated) act of the soul is, the more “independent” the two faculties are from one another, and, conversely, the “higher” the act is, the more the two are involved with each other. The most perfect act, he says, is therefore the complete identity of the intellect and will.102 Because of its finitude, however, the soul is always caught between the perfect identity of pure spirit, which is complete self-actualization and therefore being completely “athome” in oneself, and the other extreme of pure matter (materia prima), wherein the soul is completely outside of itself, and its faculties utterly without relation.

98. Ibid., 107–9. For a list of a great number of relevant texts, which Czapiewski says is only a “selection,” see nn. 297, 298. 99. Ibid., 109–10. Relevant texts from Aquinas are listed in n. 302. 100. Ibid., 110. Texts from Aquinas are listed in n. 303. 101. Ibid., 111. See n. 304. 102. Ibid., 116. 382

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Czapiewski draws several basic conclusions from his analyses. He points out that Aquinas affirms in many texts an “identity” between beauty and goodness insofar as the latter is related to truth,103 and an identity between beauty and truth insofar as the latter is related to goodness.104 But if goodness and truth “touch” beauty to the extent that they relate to each other, they will have beauty—they will be nothing but beauty—to the extent that they are completely identical with each other. However, according to the logic of the analyses, such an identity is reserved for pure, infinite spirit alone; that is, beauty belongs properly to God. It will belong to the human being only in the eschaton.105 Prior to the eschaton, the human being can catch only glimpses of beauty, when it is refracted in the momentary “identities” of intellect and will in their highest acts (primarily in their “value-response” to other persons). Two general points follow. First, and in contrast to many other commentators,106 Czapiewski is able to affirm both the importance of beauty for Aquinas and the philosophical completeness of the “deduction” of the transcendentals in De ver. 1, 1, which omits any reference to beauty. Strictly speaking, beauty is eschatological; it does not lie next to the other transcendentals as one of a series, but it is the synthesis of the good and the true.107 Thus, the intellect and the will have distinct objects only because of the soul’s finitude. The proper object of the soul itself, in its native infinity, is beauty, which is the identity of goodness and truth. This leads to another point, which will be important for us later, namely, that Czapiewski rejects any notion that there could be some “third” faculty next to the intellect and will, such as “feeling,” as some have proposed.108 He rejects it because if there were a distinct faculty that had beauty as its distinct formal object, beauty could no longer be the relation of the good and the true, and therefore the object of the soul as a whole. Although he does not elaborate this point, we see its significance in relation to the rest of his argument. If we thus “immanentized” beauty by giving it a faculty “alongside” the intellect and will, it would cease to be the transcendent (eschatological) unity that the two faculties essentially seek, and thus the whole dialectic of finite spirit would lose its most basic impetus. 103. Ibid., 122. 104. Ibid., 125. 105. Ibid., 132–33. Here Czapiewski presents the true experience of beauty as the visio beatifica. 106. Czapiewski points out his difference on this point from Kovach, who is the other main author to have treated this subject in Aquinas: ibid., 142–48. 107. Ibid., 24–25. 108. Ibid., 121. See n. 315. The Transcendentals

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The great merit of Czapiewski’s study is that it is one of the few works that has developed, through substantial argumentation, the notion of beauty in terms of a relation of interdependence between the intellect and will.109 But there are four basic ways that Czapiewski’s approach is different from the one we are arguing in the name of Balthasar, and these four ways are all related to one another. First, Czapiewski “eschatologizes” beauty, while Balthasar includes it among the other transcendentals, goodness and truth. Second, and closely related to the first, Balthasar affirms a kind of third faculty of the soul, which Czapiewski rejects. Third, while Balthasar conceives of the mutual implication of the intellect and will in terms of a reciprocal causality (which we will see shortly), Czapiewski denies this possibility in favor of a dialectic. These three points are related to one another, however, because they are an expression of the most fundamental difference between Czapiewski and Balthasar: Czapiewski identifies finitude with imperfection. He is therefore forced (with Rahner) to understand the multiplicity of the soul’s faculties as a fall from the soul’s original unity. They do not, in their multiplicity, add anything in a positive way to the unity of the soul; rather, conversely, they are “nothing” in themselves but partial expressions of that unity, and thus mere means of the soul’s returning to itself.110 For Balthasar, by contrast, the multiplicity of the faculties is paradoxically a more perfect unity. They therefore cannot be simply reduced back to an original ground or unity, even if that unity is in some sense prior. While Czapiewski speaks of a unilateral progression from potency (emptiness) to act (fullness), which is driven by a need, Balthasar affirms that the existence of the (multiplicity of the) transcendentals results from the fullness and perfection of being: “Now, the capacity that all finite things have to show themselves [i.e., beauty], to give themselves [i.e., goodness], and to

109. Günther Pöltner is another, though his work makes use of Czapiewski’s study. In distinction from Czapiewski, Pöltner works out the relationship between the intellect and will in analogy to the real distinction between esse and essence (relating will to esse and intellect to essentia). For Pöltner, beauty is the unity of unities, i.e., the unity of the real difference between intellect and will in union with the unity of being in the real distinction: Pöltner, Schönheit, 25. 110. It is interesting to note that Jordan, who spoke of an “analogy” between the orders of the good and the true, nevertheless affirms (like Czapiewski) that their multiplicity is itself an imperfection and will disappear in the eschaton: Jordan, “Transcendentality of Goodness,” 150. For Balthasar, analogy is precisely a way of avoiding the identification of multiplicity and imperfection. From his perspective, then, there needs to be no elimination of difference between goodness and truth in the eschaton, even while this perduring difference does not in any way compromise perfect unity. 384

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express themselves [i.e., truth], is due not to their need, but rather to their essential ontological perfection.”111 The dialectical understanding of the relationship between unity and difference that Czapiewski articulates explains the connection between the other points. The key to this connection is that this dialectical understanding excludes the possibility that there might be in an ultimate and irreducible sense a whole constituted in genuine tension. If such a tension is not basic, the very existence of the (multiplicity of the) transcendentals cannot be ultimate, but an expression of imperfection and therefore something that eventually must be overcome. If we put this point in terms of the “transcendental paradox” elaborated above, we could say that the transcendentals, for Czapiewski, are synonymous with being considered ideally as infinite and are “additions” to being in its imperfect finitude. Rather than account for the paradox, Czapiewski’s approach separates the aspects of the problem and affirms precisely what is meant to be avoided, one as an ideal and the other as so to speak a necessary evil, and then makes these two affirmations dependent on each other. There is, here, no ontological surprise: what the transcendentals add is what being already anticipates in its need, and so the result is more relief than gratitude. The eschatologizing of beauty is a projection of this final relief into the “final end,” and it is significant that this end is the strict elimination of the difference between the good and the true, the intellect and the will. Furthermore, if the intellect and the will cannot make a “positive” contribution to the unity of the soul, they cannot make a positive contribution to each other. Although Czapiewski insists strongly on the reciprocity of the intellect and will, it seems he excludes in the end an intrinsic dependence of each on the other.112 He affirms, for example, that each requires the mediation of the other, not within its own order, but only in relation to the unity of the soul. In other words, he does not affirm that intellect has a need for the irreducibly different order of the will in order to be intellect and thus in order to be different from the will and irreducible to

111. E, 66: “Nun aber gehört das Sich-zeigen-, Sich-schenken-, Sich-sagen-Können der endlichen Dinge nicht zu ihrer Not, sondern zu ihrer wesentlichen Seinsvollkommenheit.” 112. This is, in fact, a simplification of Czapiewski’s position. His argument is more complex and adds many new dimensions that I cannot bring out here. For example, he affirms that the intellect and will “sind (unbeschadet ihrer Verschiedenheit) innerlich miteinander verbunden”: Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 110. The purpose of our discussion, however, is not so much to criticize Czapiewski as it is instead to clarify a fundamental point, and it is a secondary matter how far Czapiewski himself holds the point. The Transcendentals

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the simple unity of the soul itself. In order to affirm such a thing, we would have to take the will to be a (positive) principle of the intellect within the intellect’s proper order, and at the same time, in order to avoid reducing the intellect to the will, we would have to affirm the intellect as a (positive) principle of the will. In other words, we would have to speak of a reciprocal causality, to affirm that in some sense the effect is a cause of its cause. Czapiewski, as we saw, takes reciprocal causality to be a simple contradiction, and it is admittedly not immediately obvious how it could be possible. Nevertheless, we will see that reciprocal causality is, in the end, the only way to do justice to the phenomenon of the soul’s relation to being, to affirm an irreducible tension in the soul (and thus the goodness of finitude), to understand beauty (and thus truth and goodness), and finally, to justify the fact that there are any transcendentals at all. Ultimately, if the intellect and will are not intrinsically related to each other in the sense of reciprocal causality, which means being simultaneously a positive principle of the other and dependent on the other, then they must be in certain respects (simply) identical to each other and in other respects (simply) different from each other. This excludes the possibility of a tension, that is, of a permanently “mediated immediacy” in their relation. There can be an immediate relation that is not a reduction to identity only if there is a “third” in which the two are both united and distinguished. Czapiewski’s rejection of a third faculty alongside intellect and will is in fact a function of his identification of finitude with imperfection: they both stem from a notion of unity that excludes difference, and therefore one that does not require an ultimate and unsurpassable tension. To understand how such a tension can be ultimate, we must first look more closely at the meaning of the curious notion of “reciprocal causality.” A brilliant presentation of the relationship between the will and intellect in terms of reciprocal causality can be found in Pierre Rousselot’s classic two-part essay The Eyes of Faith. The major issue Rousselot sets himself to address in the essay is the problem of the reasonability of the act of faith: how can we avoid the dual errors of an irrationalism that would reduce the act to a blind leap (“Just believe and then you will understand!”) or a rationalism that would remove any “leap” at all, and reduce faith to its objectively enumerable reasons (“Just understand and then you will believe!”)? In addressing this question, Rousselot shows that at issue is not only the question of faith, but also that this question is itself tied to an analogous problem for all knowledge at a “natural” level. Both questions concern the possibility of overcoming a merely extrinsic relation between the intellect and the will and at the same time not simply reducing them to each other. He puts the question concretely: What is the 386

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relationship between grasping reasons (the proper act of the intellect), and giving one’s assent (the proper act of the will)? If we think of these as wholly separate acts, we remove the dynamic aspect of the will from the intellect and thus cannot avoid conceiving of knowledge as so many discrete bits or “objective” items. However, according to Rousselot, not only is this a betrayal of Aquinas, but it also fails to account sufficiently for the facts of experience.113 The act of knowing, he says, always has a dynamism “built into it”; it is always the grasping of a part in the context of a greater whole. This means that the movement beyond the part to the whole is intrinsic to the grasping of the part itself. To illustrate, he offers a few examples. Two scientists or two detectives may be investigating the same situation when they are both presented with a new fact. For one, the new fact may become a “trigger” that so to speak releases, like a lightning flash, the meaning of the whole, while the other is left completely in the dark, even though the clue itself is the same in both cases. On closer inspection, however, we see that the clue in a significant sense is not identical in both cases. It is only the first scientist or detective who has really grasped the clue as a clue, that is, has grasped it in terms of its significance for the whole. Thus, the moment of insight turns out to be a fairly complex event. On the one hand, the whole cannot be seen except on the basis of the manifold elements that constitute it, while, on the other hand, these manifold elements can be grasped as elements only on the basis of the whole: We should also consider the reciprocal priority between the affirmation of the law and the perception of the fact that serves as a clue. Recent theorists of the logic of discovery have highlighted this peculiarity. We do not first perceive a proof as such, and only then what has been proved. Rather, we see both conjointly, grasping the general law as it subsumes the particular case. Depending on one’s point of view, the particular is both cause and effect, proof and application, clue to and consequence of the law. The law is seen through the clue, but it is only in seeing the law that the clue is seen as clue. The fact cannot be known as a clue unless we affirm the law.114 Rousselot refers to the movement beyond the specific objective content of the clue as the affirmation of a whole in order to show that it requires something more than what already belongs to the order of the intellect itself taken in isolation. 113. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 27. 114. Ibid., 29–30. The Transcendentals

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Now, it is significant for us, especially in the light of arguments in chapter 3, that Rousselot characterizes this paradox in terms of the relation between a whole and its parts. As he illustrated, the whole and the parts are not simply identical; there is, so to speak, a gap between them, a kind of discontinuity. But, to put the problem baldly, it is not the case that one grasps the whole first by getting a firm hold on one side of the gap, and then on that basis reaching over to grasp the other side. In other words, one does not first grasp the discrete parts intellectually, and then, through an additional spontaneous act of the will, posit the whole that embraces them; nor does one blindly posit the whole through an act of the will, and only then put together the parts. The first case would be rationalism, and the second would be irrationalism, but they are clearly two versions of the same problem. In order to get beyond these false alternatives, Rousselot says, we have to affirm that “perceiving the connection [among the parts and therefore seeing them as parts] and giving one’s assent are one and the same thing.”115 Rousselot here associates the grasping of the whole with the giving one’s assent, that is, with an act of the will. He does not explain the reason for this, except by alluding, in a note appended to this text we cited, to the scholastic distinction between predicamental being and the act of the intellect that composes and divides, that is, judgment. As we saw in chapter 3, because a whole is not simply reducible to its parts, but rather transcends them, a certain spontaneity is required to perceive it: to grasp a whole, a person must go out of himself toward the whole. Doing so is an act of freedom—an act of the will—which we described as committing oneself in judgment. It is important to see how this act concerns the will. As we saw in Aquinas’s (and Aristotle’s) notion of the “circle” of the soul’s relationship to being, the order of the good represents the motion of the subject toward the object. The point Rousselot makes here is that such a movement cannot simply be a matter of goodness alone, but it must belong in some analogous sense to the motion of truth itself precisely because the grasping of the meaning of anything is grasping a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The notion that there could be a positive movement of the subject toward the object is generally reserved to acts of the practical intellect alone,116 but Rousselot insists we must assert something analogous for the speculative intellect as speculative.117 Rousselot’s insistence, in fact, confirms two points I have already made. First, I said that an intrinsic relation between intellect and will requires 115. Ibid., 30. 116. See, for example, Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 273. 117. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 50–51. 388

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the movement of the will to be analogously contained in the movement of the intellect. Specifically, when the subject takes the object into himself in the act of knowing, it must, if it is to avoid a collapse into immediacy, include a movement of the subject to the object, which is the movement proper to the will. In Rousselot’s terms, the assent, the movement of the will from subject to object, is shown to be essential to the speculative intellect itself once we see that a true speculative grasp cannot avoid making a (spontaneous) judgment. Second, I noted at the beginning of this chapter that the transcendental paradox requires that there not be a simple separation between the speculative and practical intellect in relation to the truth of being.118 Having shown that there is an intrinsic relation to the positive causality of the will that belongs to the intellect as intellect, Rousselot shows in the second part of his essay how the intellect proves to be a principle for the will as will. If, in the first case, he explained how perception and assent go hand in hand, here Rousselot seeks to show that there is no contradiction between certitude and freedom.119 Now, Rousselot says much less about this issue than about the previous one.120 Rather than elaborate how freedom and certitude are connected, such that an increase in certitude means an increase in freedom and vice versa, Rousselot deals at greater length in this second part with the question of having the “freedom to turn away” from assent given what he had said in the first part of the essay. Indeed, he articulates this issue itself in the specific form of being mistaken in one’s assent. I will, in a moment, suggest why his presuppositions would seem to lead him to shrink this issue to such a limited form, but it is first worthwhile to see the great importance of the point that Rousselot is indicating here. To common sense, and particularly to modern common sense, there seems to be an opposition between how compelling the evidence is and the freedom of the assent to that evidence: the more compelling the evidence is—or perhaps the more the object by its very nature makes a claim on me—the less free I am in my accepting of it. Although it lies outside the scope of our discussion to pursue this notion at length, this opposition seems to depend on the definition of freedom in the first place as “freedom to - (creativity) and truth 118. Balthasar describes these two aspects, truth as poi esis - (contemplation), as subsisting inseparably within a polarity: TL 1:43. as theoria 119. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 45. 120. We might account for this fact by Rousselot’s self-avowed “intellectualism” (the aim of his “big thesis” was to prove Aquinas an intellectualist): his interest is primarily directed toward seeing how the will can be included in the intelligence. As we will see, this one-sided emphasis may be due to an inability to sustain an ultimate tension between the two orders. The Transcendentals

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choose,” which Balthasar rejects if it is isolated from a deeper understanding of freedom.121 In any event, the opposition presupposes that the order of the will lies outside the order of the intellect, since the intellect is ordered to a grasp of the truth of the object. From this perspective, truth positively does not make one free; to the contrary, one’s freedom diminishes precisely to the extent that things are “clearly defined.” Whatever other problems such an understanding of freedom may present, we can at least see that it excludes the notion of freedom as transcendence, such as we have been using the term in this essay, inasmuch as transcendence is by its character “other”-related, and so it is not hindered but helped through the inherent claim the object makes on the subject. Moreover, in terms of Aquinas’s understanding, we could say that the view that sees an opposition between certitude and freedom dissociates the will from the good to the extent that it dissociates it from the intellect. As Aquinas always says, the good presupposes the true because some form or another of cognition always precedes appetite.122 This becomes especially clear if, with Balthasar, we take truth to be related to the “in-itself” aspect of a thing. A good cannot be good for me if it is not already good in itself (i.e., to some extent is truly good). Without such a rootedness in the objectivity of a thing, the motion of the will could not be a movement of subject to object. But this means that the basic structure of the will cannot be the unilateral movement from subject to object alone; that is, it cannot be pure spontaneity. Rather, in its very roots, it must first be receptive to the object—precisely to the extent that the true has a priority over the good. Thus, if, above, we saw that the intellect must include within its motion the “opposite” movement of the will, here we see that the will, as movement of subject toward object, must include the opposite movement of the intellect—of object toward subject—in order to be will. This means, then, the true, in its trueness and not just in its goodness, must represent a kind of principle, and thus an effective causality, within the order of the will itself. Again, Rousselot does not make this argument explicitly as such, but he implies something like it in the examples he chooses and in his use of the term reciprocal causality in talking about the relation between the intellect and will.123 Why reciprocal causality? What is the significance of the reciprocity? A kind of reciprocity is, as we have seen at many stages of this book, a mark 121. TD 4:150. 122. Although Aquinas assigns a “relative” priority to the good, he says that, absolutely speaking, the true is prior: ST 1:16, 4. 123. See, for example, Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 30, 32, 50, etc. 390

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of real tension, since both reciprocity and tension express the fact of an inward mutual dependence of two things that cannot be reduced to each other. Through the course of this discussion, we have seen a number of possible ways of conceiving the intellect-will relation emerge. In the end, there are in fact only two: either reduction or tension. The reduction can take two different forms. It can be, on the one hand, a sheer extrinsicism, in which the two orders are related, if at all, only extrinsically or “accidentally” (i.e., not as a matter of their essence). On the other hand, it can be a collapse of the two orders into a single one. An example of extrinsicism would be Aertsen’s formulations. His interpretation of Aquinas is characterized precisely by a lack of tension. To be sure, he recognizes that the orders cannot be separated, insofar as they are transcendental and therefore infinite, and he admits that the two orders must include one another, but he does not see this inclusiveness as a matter of dependence that does not reduce difference. When the good is included within the order of the true, for Aertsen, it is taken as true (and not paradoxically in its goodness), and vice versa. When it comes time to explain what the circumincession of the orders means in Aquinas, Aertsen thus concludes: “From this mutual inclusion it follows that the different formal objects of the two faculties . . . include each other. . . . The true is some good, or it would not be appetible; it is the object of the will under the aspect of the good. The good is something true or it would not be intelligible; it is the object of the intellect under the aspect of the true.”124 Although what Aertsen asserts here is no doubt true in some sense, it misses the heart of the matter: in order to show that they are inwardly related, one must say that the true is good or it would not be intelligible; the good is true or it would not be appetible. Aertsen neglects the paradox that inescapably emerges the moment we say that the good and the true include each other, and he instead “disarms” it by breaking it down into its two parts (the true includes the good and then the good includes the true), happy to affirm each, but only at a safe distance from the other. By contrast, Czapiewski collapses the two orders into one. Although he goes much further in elaborating the complexities of the interrelationship between these two orders, in the end he rejects the ultimate tension implied in reciprocal causality, and he chooses instead to integrate the two orders into each other in a final synthesis (identity). Although this seems the opposite of Aertsen’s extrinsicism, both problems are due to the same lack of tension.

124. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 288. The Transcendentals

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It is in Rousselot that we see an embrace of reciprocal causality and thus a refusal to defuse the paradox. Once we see the mutual interrelationship, he says, we have to affirm that a person is not free in his assent to an object “until” he grasps its truth, and yet at the same time, he cannot grasp that truth until he assents: “It is because man wills that he sees the truth. It is because man sees the truth that he wills.” If either of these is affirmed without the other, we run into error; the point is to show “that both statements are simultaneously true.”125 Clearly, it is not possible to start with one affirmation, and then proceed to the other, because in that case they would simply be contradictory. However, if we simply take this contradiction as the final word, we lose a genuine mutual dependence of the two orders—and thus, we lose tension, and finally, we lose the transcendentals altogether. To avoid contradiction, Rousselot insists, we must therefore see the two “parts” as aspects of a single, irreducible, paradoxical act, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,126 in which “each brings the other into reality as a condition of its own realization.”127 Rousselot sees this single act as the simultaneity of love and knowledge, two irreducible aspects that make up a complex unity: “Love arouses the faculty of knowing, and by the same stroke knowledge justifies that love.”128 But Rousselot’s understanding of reciprocal causality is, itself, not without difficulties. If we affirm that the intellect and the will have a certain dependence on each other in their difference, within a single “paradoxical” act, we are brought to the crucial question, What is the nature of this act and is it adequately conceived? If we are to avoid compromising the integrity of the intellect and will within their union, this act itself cannot be merely an act of the intellect alone (which would reduce the good to the true), nor an act of the will alone (which would reduce the true to the good). In order to have each include the other analogously within itself, there must be a distinct third in which they are both united and distinguished. But here we run up against the limitations of Rousselot’s proposal. He brings the orders of the intellect and will together in what he calls an “active power of synthesis.”129 Although he says little about this “active power” as such in this essay, it seems to belong strictly to the intellect. This

125. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 48. 126. Ibid., 70: “The synthesis cannot be reduced to the synthesized elements” (emphasis Rousselot’s). 127. Ibid., 48. 128. Ibid., 50. 129. Ibid., 27; see also 70. 392

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interpretation is confirmed by his other writings.130 For Rousselot, in fact, the intellect is made to “do duty” for both orders: the intellect’s power of seeing (i.e., the motion of object to subject) wholly and reductively includes the “active” or spontaneous movement toward the object, which belongs strictly speaking to the will. Thus, Rousselot defines the intelligence ultimately as love (understood specifically as appetite): “reason itself is nothing other than a pure love of Being.”131 Now, the point is not to reject the notion of reason as love of Being. Rather, it is to reject absolutizing of the converse notion that love of Being is nothing other than reason. The problematic consequences of Rousselot’s attempt to ground a reciprocal causality in one of the powers of the soul alone are just what one would expect, given the logic of his terms. He cannot avoid binding freedom to the intellectual order in a restrictive way. It is significant, as we mentioned above, that he treats the question of freedom, not for its own sake, that is, how freedom becomes free in relation to truth, but in the negative and strictly intellectualist sense of how the freedom of mistaken judgments is possible. Indeed, this question becomes extremely urgent for Rousselot because of his presuppositions. If intellect and will do not have a third that both frees and unites them, then there will be a certain “automaticism” in which comprehension automatically means assent and assent automatically means comprehension. But this makes it difficult to distinguish, for example, truth from conviction or even conviction from appetite. The least compelling part of his essay is the final series of arguments and examples that try to show how mistaken judgment is possible, and how assent to truth is different from common varieties of fanaticism. The point is that the room for argument in these matters disappears the moment we try to account for the whole—the paradoxical reciprocal causality of the intellect and will—in terms of one of its parts. But, if the intellect is “nothing but pure love of Being,” it gets paradoxically reduced to the will. If the will is the “spontaneous” movement of the subject toward the object, then the reduction of the intellect to the will eliminates all receptivity from this movement. This logic confirms what we saw in Rousselot in chapter 3: his “active power of synthesis” is not an act reciprocally shared by subject and object insofar as the act has no room within itself to receive from the object, but it is instead “projected” wholly and spontaneously by the subject. In short, if we view the mutual dependence of intellect and 130. See his The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, as well as the other articles by Rousselot listed in the bibliography. 131. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 52. The Transcendentals

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will as a matter to be worked out between these two faculties alone, we end up reducing each to the other, and thus lose precisely the reciprocal causality that Rousselot sought originally to secure. To affirm Rousselot’s extraordinary intuitions without getting pinned by either arm of an unnecessary dilemma, we have to find a third that is really “other” than the two.

Beauty and Reciprocal Transcendence It is in light of this problem that we begin to see the great significance of beauty. A great many of the recent commentators who have discussed the meaning of beauty in Aquinas, whether or not they finally accord it “transcendental” status, view it as having a special relationship with both the true and the good. Aertsen, for example, views it as the “extension” of the true to the good.132 We have seen Czapiewski’s argument about beauty as the synthesis of goodness and truth. From very different perspectives, Kovach and Günther Pöltner come to conclusions quite similar to those of Czapiewski.133 Others see beauty as comprehending all of the transcendentals.134 What is particular about Balthasar’s understanding is that, as we have seen, the beautiful marks the appearance of the whole of being in the particular instance, which, in its wholeness, moves the whole of the person. And because it is simultaneously a wholly objective and wholly subjective experience (in the philosophical sense of the term Balthasar elaborated in GL 1, namely, as “insight acquired through traveling”), it can include the whole scope of the orders of the intellect and the will in their relatively opposed movements without foreshortening or reducing them. There are a number consequences that follow from this understanding of beauty. First of all, in relation to Czapiewski, we see a powerful reason

132. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 357–58. He also notes (356) that Aquinas explicitly states that the beautiful adds to the good (addit supra bonum) a relation to the intellect (De divinis nominibus, 4, lect., 5), but he insists that such a relationship already belongs to the good as good since the good follows upon and therefore presupposes the true (354). 133. Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, esp. 237–60. Günther Pöltner comes to the conclusion that pulchrum must be thought as “die Einheit der transzendentalen Seinsbestimmungen,” since it “occurs” in the fundamental convenientia (fittingness) between the soul and being, which is articulated partially by goodness and partially by truth: Schönheit, 76. 134. Jacques Maritain voices this opinion in Art et scolastique (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Catholique, 1947), 225. See also Mark Jordan, “The Grammar of Esse: Re-reading Thomas on the Transcendentals,” Thomist 44 (1980): 1–26, in which he shows how each of the other transcendentals represents an aspect of the “shape” of being that is included in Aquinas’s understanding of beauty. 394

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to affirm the existence of a “third” faculty “next” to the intellect and the will, namely, “the heart,” understood in its full sense, as we saw in the last chapter as the imagination, the seat of the person, of consciousness, and of drama. Czapiewski’s primary objection is that positing a third faculty would undermine the attempt to see beauty as the unity of truth and goodness. However, this is the case only if mediation makes unity impossible. But we have seen that mediation, far from undermining unity, is indispensable for its preservation, inasmuch as a merely immediate unity does not unite truth and goodness but swallows them whole. The second consequence can be drawn in light of our discussion of Rousselot. In his understanding of reciprocal causality, what is missing is once again the mediation of beauty. Thus, the subject-object relationship breaks down in the name of a subjective dynamism, which rests the wholeness of the whole on the sheer force of the “active power of synthesis.”135 But if this relationship breaks down, what follows is the final closing of the “difference” between intellect and will, which is necessary to prevent an “automaticism” between love and knowledge, that is, to prevent a collapse into “intellectualism.” Once we begin with a third that ensures both the unity and difference of intellect and will, they both acquire a certain relative freedom with respect to each other, which nonetheless does not imbalance the reciprocal causality or turn it into a fruitless dialectic. Lacking any “third,” the perception that is the condition of possibility for the activity of the will cannot be anything other than an intellectual grasp of truth, the same truth that depends in turn on the will’s movement. This problem, in fact, arises already from an ambiguity we find in Aquinas’s ordering of the transcendentals. In general, Aquinas presents the desire for the good as following upon a grasp of truth.136 But if the truth is grasped completely in itself before the movement of the will, then the movement of the will, and therefore the order of the good, cannot be said to be intrinsic to the truth. Thus, in other places, Aquinas asserts that the movement of the will precedes cognition,137 and so truth depends in some intrinsic sense on the good. Czapiewski has shown that the mutual priority would seem to entail an endless regress if it did not have a basic ground. The problem is that Aquinas says at one point that this

135. After affirming the importance of Rousselot’s insights, Balthasar makes precisely this same critique: “For him . . . the synthetic power remains one-sidedly a part of the subjective dynamism.” GL 1:176. 136. Aquinas, ST 1:16, 4, ad 2. 137. See Aquinas De ver., 22, 12, where he argues that there is a way in which the intellect moves the will, and another way in which the will moves the intellect. The Transcendentals

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“circular” movement ends in the intellect and another point in the will.138 Czapiewski tries to overcome the problem by having the whole end in a sort of third, that is, the soul itself, but since this is the sublimation of the two, it eliminates rather than solves the problem. Pöltner has argued that in order for Aquinas to “end” the regress of reciprocal causality in the intellect, he has to neglect in this context the transcendental status of goodness, and reduce it to an ontic-categorial determination that can be finally comprehended by the true.139 Mark Jordan, who speaks at length about the “reciprocal causality” between intellect and will in Aquinas, short-circuits the problem by introducing a (reductively) theological solution: the otherwise closed circle of intellect and will is initially set in motion by the activity of God’s grace, which moves the will to desire happiness.140 Rousselot tries to resolve the circularity in an intellect that is “nothing other” than will. It seems that we can resolve this problem nonreductively only if we can avoid positing a unity of the orders of the intellect and will that is identical to one of the orders in itself, or in something else in which they are simply “fused” together. What we need is a third that mediates the two to each other in a way that preserves their relative autonomy and the integrity of their order. It will be helpful to review the basic ordering of the transcendentals that Balthasar proposes in light of the problem at hand, and, conversely, this problem will allow us a deeper insight into the significance of that ordering. The various difficulties of extrinsicism and reductionism cannot fail to persist if we attempt to work out the relationship between the orders of the intellect and will in terms of these two orders alone. We then have to begin with one or the other, and once we thus begin we can bring in the “second” only as an extrinsic addition. If we start with truth, and we understand truth as ending in the mind, the subject starts as it were in full possession of the object, at least in terms of its intelligibility. But this means that the subsequent movement toward the object, the subject’s first step outside of himself, has nothing to do with truth, which has so to speak already been finished in itself beforehand. If truth is the “receptive” movement of the object to subject, then this second movement, lacking all truth, lacks all receptivity. It is therefore purely spontaneous, and this means

138. Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 109. The two texts from Aquinas are ST 1:82, 4, ad 3, and De ver., 22, 12, ad 2, respectively. 139. Pöltner, Schönheit, 161–62. 140. Jordan, “Transcendentality of Goodness,” 147. My criticism is not that Jordan’s solution is incorrect, but only that it requires a philosophical mediation, which he does not provide. 396

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purely “arbitrary.” If we begin, instead, with the good alone, we are inevitably presented with the same series of phenomena; it is just that, in this case, the order has changed. We recall from chapter 3 that Balthasar refused to begin either with the intellect alone or with the will alone. The event of the mother’s smile, the child’s self-moving in being moved, was a simultaneous knowing and willing. This insight is, for Balthasar, closely connected with the “epiphany” of beauty. The event of beauty—as we will begin to unfold it in the following pages—involves the intellect and will at once. However, it does not do so in a way that “preempts” their own distinct movements and thus the integrity of their own order. Beauty is not the synthesis of the good and the true in their formal completion, such that, after beauty comes to pass, truth and goodness have nothing more to do. Instead, it is their “seed.” It contains them both implicitly, not explicitly. In other words, it includes them both simultaneously under a formally different aspect. If beauty contains both the true and the good, it does so as a distinct third, and it thus allows the latter two to remain in a certain way distinct both from itself and from each other. Beginning with beauty as the union of truth and goodness has profound consequences. It allows for a kind of priority of cognitive perception or grasp, and therefore a receptivity to the objectivity of the object, over the spontaneous activity of the will, even as this grasp has always already “set the will into motion” in a primitive way. (We will soon see how the experience of beauty is necessarily both receptive and spontaneous.) The beautiful draws the subject toward the object, which is what “frees” the subject to assent, to commit himself willfully in a certain way, to the object. And yet, since this initial act is not yet the fully mature act of the will in relation to an explicit good, that assent is not compelled. It does not have to be already complete in itself. Because Rousselot had only the good and the true, and no third term, he so to speak could not allow a grasp of any sort until the assent was given and the commitment sealed. It is thus precisely the distinction of the beautiful from the good and the true that permits us to affirm, with Rousselot, the necessity of a kind of ek-stasis for the perception of an object, without forcing that movement to become a kind of automatic commitment. At the same time, it avoids precisely the opposite danger of requiring the subject to have a total, “full-blown” intellectual grasp of an object before he can move toward it. If the movement toward the object is the subject’s relation to the concrete order, where not only the will but also the senses come into play, and where what is of concern is not only the universal form that this object has but what it shares with countless interchangeable others, The Transcendentals

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then an insistence that truth must be grasped in a formally complete sense before something is pursued as a good is the condemnation of truth to vapid abstraction. Beginning with beauty, Balthasar is able to affirm a first “grasp” that is not truth in the formal sense, but is as it were an invitation to truth. For the truth to be had, the subject must commit himself; he must go toward the object to find out its meaning, on the object’s terms: we recall Goethe’s observation that we cannot properly judge a person who has come to visit us, but only when we have been invited to come see him where he lives, at his home. Thus, in contrast to the two-dimensional “circle” that Aquinas posits as the soul’s relation to being in its basic acts, Balthasar has a “three-dimensional,” concrete event that arises from the triad of transcendentals: First, the subject is “inspired” by and brought over to the object in beauty; then the subject, in full freedom, can reject or give his assent (and in the rich dramatic sense of the good, he can strive, fail, sin, misjudge, surrender, suffer loss, and so forth); finally, then, as a result of the mutual acts of object and subject, truth is born. At the beginning of this section, I spoke of the necessity of an inward relation of relatively opposed movements in order for the relationship between the soul and being to be an organic whole consisting of tensions. We now can see how such a whole requires the “interplay” of not only two, but three distinct transcendentals. Moreover, if we take transcendence to mean an experience or event in which the subject is truly “beyond himself” and the object is likewise reciprocally beyond itself, then we can see why this interplay of the transcendentals is necessary for the very possibility of transcendence. The tension that arises from the fact that there are three is what keeps any one of them, at any moment, from slackening into immediacy (mere self or mere other). It is not only the fact of having a triad, but indeed the inner ordering of the three, which has a special significance when viewed in light of the question of transcendence. There can be no doubt that, in one respect, the most transcendent of the transcendentals is the good. In TL 2, in fact, Balthasar approvingly cites a passage in which Siewerth claims that the good is “more transcendental than being and truth.”141 This is so because it is precisely the object qua good that moves the subject beyond himself, toward what he is not, what he does not yet possess, in comparison, for example, to the true, which seems 141. TL 2:162: “So aber ist das ‘Gute’ transzendentaler als das Sein und das Wahre.” Siewerth, Grundfragen der Philosophie, 112. The question of the good being “beyond being” is a crucial one, and we will turn to it in the concluding section of this chapter. 398

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to represent precisely “possession.” If the good is the place of desire or - it is also the place of kenosis or expropriation. Indeed, there is an eros, inalienable negativity associated with the good. I cannot address this issue here, but it is interesting to observe that there seems to be a relation between the privileging of goodness and the privileging of apophasis or the via negativa as the most fundamental mode of the philosophical act. 142 Nevertheless, Balthasar reveals that precisely the “beyondness” of the good threatens to get lost if we do not see it as posterior to the beautiful on the one hand and as finding its completion in truth on the other. First of all, as we have just seen, the separating of the good from any kind of prior “positive” cognitive grasp, and thus receptivity to the object, makes the good arbitrary. It does so because, in this case, the motion of the will becomes pure spontaneity. But this means that the subject merely posits himself, and to that extent does not manage to get beyond himself, that is, does not transcend. The pure “negativity” that refuses an initial grasp reduces to the pure “positivity” of the subject’s “self-positing.”143 However, there are some who affirm the subject’s initial grasp of an object, but make goodness rather than truth ultimate. There is something initially appealing in this approach, since the openness, the infinity, or the “beyondness” implied by the good seems the most appropriate place to “end.” However, in such a conception, the initial grasp gets reduced to the dialectical opposite of this infinite beyond; it becomes a closed finitude that needs to be “passed beyond” through the infinity of striving or the infinity of kenotic self-gift. I noted earlier the dangers of absolutizing the kenosis of the good and the negativity it entails, which Saint-Pierre and Gilbert both pointed out. In addition to the fact that this affirmation falsely “immanentizes” the initial, positive “given,” rendering it finite in a closed sense and juxtaposing it dialectically to an infinite “more” of one sort or another, there is a more subtle problem: self-gift cannot be the “last word” in the subject-object relationship implied in the transcendentals. The good concerns the subject’s active movement beyond himself. If this movement is made ultimate, even if it seems to be a movement ordered to the other as other, we cannot avoid a kind of Faustian tyranny of the subject, 142. Balthasar does not reject the via negativa by any means, and yet he insists that this negativity can in fact itself fall into another kind of positivism if it is not rooted in a more ample context. Part of the meaning of this insistence will come to light in the present treatment of the ordering of the transcendentals. For a more thorough discussion, see Balthasar’s discussion of the via negativa in TL 2:80–113. 143. In TL 1:22, Balthasar talks of the importance of having the aesthetics come before the dramatics in terms of the priority of theoria over praxis. The Transcendentals

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or a dynamism in the manner of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in which the striving itself takes precedence at every turn over any goal. In this case, transcendence once again gets lost. To put it oversimply, if the last word is the gift of self, the final accent falls on the self. In other words, making the negativity of the good ultimate leaves the subject standing out into the nothing, and thus alone. Terminating the movement ultimately and reductively in the self can be avoided only if the movement terminates in something that is itself more than the self. This is, in our interpretation, the reason Balthasar ends the ordering of the transcendentals with the truth.144 Since truth in this case comes last rather than first, it does not have to be understood as an abstract grasp, but it can be seen more fundamentally as the union of subject and object, as well as the fruit of that union. The transcendence of the transcendental relation—its being in every moment an event that is “more than self”—requires that the gift of self in the end be subordinated to the objective fruit of that gift. And here we see another way of understanding Balthasar’s observation that the last is in a sense the first: since truth is ultimately fruit in the sense of a Gestalt, or concrete whole (and not just the formalism of abstract propositions), it ends precisely where beauty begins. The tension in the subject-object relationship is thus, as it were, stabilized in that the orders of the good and the true are both united and “freed” in their difference in beauty. It is crucial to see that beauty can perform this function only if it is a transcendental in its own right, in distinction from the others, and only if it “calls” to a particular faculty in the human being, that is, the “heart,” which is the concrete center of the person, the Realsymbol that contains the whole. At the same time, it is crucial to see that if the union of truth and goodness were merely a third phenomenon lying beside the other two, that is, lying exactly within the same order they comprise, it would fall into line simply before them or simply after them, and, in either case, it could not be said to be their union. To this extent, then, Czapiewski was right to want to posit beauty as a “transcendental” of a wholly other order. Because it is not within 144. Pascal Ide criticizes Balthasar in the end for his Augustinianism, i.e., for the importance he attaches to the good rather than (Thomistically) privileging the true. The result, he claims, is a kind of endless restlessness that seems to render the finitude of creatureliness suspect, making it something that constantly needs to be overcome. Although it is true that Balthasar attaches a central importance to the good, Ide does not seem to have considered the significance of Balthasar’s making truth “ultimate,” and of his ending the trilogy not with the Theodramatic but with the Theologic. 400

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their order, he reasoned, it can be the place where they are joined, even while they can remain distinct within their own order. We have seen, however, that conceiving the relation thus cannot avoid making the multiplicity of the orders of the true and the good a sign of imperfection, that is, a fall from the “higher” unity. There is only one way to avoid these two impossible routes, and it is a way we have seen many times before: for the “third” term to be really the unity of the two, it must be both transcendent to them and immanent to them. In other words, this third term must itself have an irreducible polarity. It is precisely here that we see the great importance of unity for Balthasar. If beauty is the unity of truth and goodness within the order of the true and good, unity itself is the transcendental that comprehends the whole. Once again, we see that an organic whole—in this case, the circumincession of the beautiful, the good, and the true, and the irreducible tension that results from it—is “crystallized” in the surpassing of that whole into a “radically other” order. If we wished to “sketch” this complex interrelationship, we could use the diagram we have used in different (though related) contexts:

Unity

Goodness

Truth

Beauty Figure 4.

There are three further comments to make about the relationship between unity and the other three transcendentals. The first is to note that there is no symmetry at all among the transcendentals, which might misleadingly be suggested by the diagram. Goodness and truth are united to each other in beauty, but because they are inwardly related, each gets subordinated to the other, at any given moment according to whatever order is primary. The Transcendentals

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At all events, they never run simply parallel to each other.145 Beauty itself has a general primacy over the other two; it has this primacy because it is the concrete appearance of unity, the comprehensive unity of the whole. It is therefore not accidental that commentators often note a particular relationship between the transcendental of unity and of beauty.146 Nevertheless, because beauty is not so to speak responsible for the unity of the whole alone, but is itself a manifestation of a unity that transcends the whole, its general primacy, as we will see more thoroughly later, is not something that it has to insist on at every turn in relation to the others, but rather, the transcendence of unity itself “frees” it to be subordinate to the other orders in a way that enriches both the true and the good. Once we see that the order is an organic whole, and therefore a complex, manyfaceted order of parts in tension, it becomes impossible to bring these parts into a final, systematic order. The second comment is to note the importance of the fact that Balthasar tends to speak of unity only indirectly. If he elaborated unity itself first, as it is “in itself,” it would be impossible to see its own irreducibly polar character. Because of its polarity, it is both what undergirds the others (and thus what precedes them) as well as being what the concrete of the others in their complex circumincession in fact explicates (and thus comes after them). Unity cannot be understood in itself, but only in relation to the other three. The third comment, then, is to see that though we cannot view unity in itself, we can consider it from the other perspective, namely, as the selfsurpassing of the three transcendentals into the wholly other order. In the Epilog, Balthasar closes the section on the transcendentals by showing that the polarity that cuts through each of them opens each spontaneously to the divine unity, the absolute One, True, Good, and Beautiful.147 Recalling our discussion of the divine identity in chapter 1, we must say that the polar nature of the unity we see implied by the transcendentals keeps us 145. It is interesting to note that both Czapiewski and Pöltner, who share Rahner’s presuppositions that the faculties are produced out of the soul’s unity for the sake of its own actualization, make the argument that there is no (mutual) subordination of the intellect and will but that they are both equal (see Czapiewski, Das Schöne bei Thomas von Aquin, 104, esp. n. 291; Pöltner, Schönheit, 165–70). The insistence on “equality” of the faculties seems to be a function of a notion of unity as immediate identity, such that, in order to preserve distinctness on one level, the faculties have to be separated from one another. They thus cannot be in any ultimate sense intrinsically related. Intrinsic relation means genuine inclusion, and genuine inclusion means mutual subordination. Any time there is a real unity that is not reductive, but complex, the relation of parts is always asymmetrical. 146. See, for example, Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, 202. 147. E, 65–66. 402

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from absolutizing a single pole of the unity; instead, because we cannot synthesize the poles themselves or project the two lines into an infinite horizon in order to grasp their intersection, the way the whole comes together in God cannot be deduced but can only be received as a gift. The deepest meaning of the unity of the transcendentals is, thus, the expectant openness to the Ever Greater. We will return to this at the end. At this juncture, however, it is appropriate to spell out further what it means for the good and the true to have their unity in beauty.

Circumincession and Transformation Beauty is the unity of the true and the good, not as their mere sum but as their perfection, as Kovach points out.148 In other words, as was said in chapter 2, there is no unity without transformation: the fact that beauty mediates the true and the good to each other changes the nature of each, by virtue of the “new” nature of the whole. The question raised at the beginning of this section with Aertsen concerning the transcendentality of beauty, namely, whether beauty adds anything to being, finds here its most decisive answer. In a certain respect, what it adds is precisely everything; not only does it add something new, but it is what grounds the nature of the true and the good as they are in themselves.149 To see this, we must first consider the nature of the “new whole” itself. Kovach himself elaborates the nature of beauty through texts in Aquinas, both from the perspective of the true (aesthetic knowledge) and, at far greater length because of the more ample resources in Aquinas, from the perspective of the good (aesthetic enjoyment [Gefallen]). On the one hand, beauty “connects” the cognitive power with the senses (and in particular the “finer” senses: hearing and vision).150 While the activity proper

148. Kovach, Die Ästhetik, 212; cf. Pöltner, 173: “Wo immer Einheit sich als Einheit ereignet, geschieht Schönheit. . . . Das Wesen der Einheit, das bei Thomas in der kategorial-negativen Formulierung der indivisio in seipso verharrt, findet seine positive Auslegung in der Schönheit.” 149. If we recognize that the beautiful does not “add” anything to the true and the good by mediating them to each other without simultaneously bringing them thus to be what each most properly is, we get beyond a dilemma that Kovach introduces. According to Kovach, Aquinas at one point says that being ordered to the true belongs to the nature of the good as good (De ver., 21, 4, corpus), while in another place he says beauty adds precisely this ordering to the good (ST 1–2:27, 1 ad 3). Kovach argues one has to deny the former in order to make room for the latter (Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, 206–7). Our argument, by contrast, affirms both by affirming that the relation to the true that the beautiful adds to the good is what makes the good essentially good. 150. Ibid., 238. The Transcendentals

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to the intellect considered in itself, Kovach says, is the abstraction of intelligible form from matter, aesthetic knowledge is the seeing of the intelligible form in matter: “the apprehensio pulchritudinis secundum se ipsam is by no means a complete intellectual abstraction, but rather the rational perception of aspects that are recognizable only by the intellect in the concrete-individual material object, which is beautiful.”151 Such a perception, Kovach observes, is essentially contemplative, intuitive rather than discursive, although it is no less a matter of the intellect. Kovach’s definition of aesthetic knowledge recalls a stunning sentence Balthasar wrote in his first essay, “The Development of the Musical Idea,” published when he was twenty: “When truth, which is thought, is found in matter, it is beauty.”152 Although Kovach does not give an argument why the beautiful connects the intellect with the senses, our previous discussion of Gestalt in chapter 3 presents a possible reason. Without elaborating further, it seems that, because the beautiful is the “constellation” of the good and the true, it is necessarily a concrete whole, and that means in some respect it is material. If the perception of beauty, therefore, is the coincidence of the intellect and will, the act of perception must itself be concrete and therefore sensible. In this respect, beauty connects the intellect to the senses precisely because it mediates the good to the intellect. On the other hand, beauty is not only a kind of intelligibility; it is also, and perhaps more immediately, related to the “rational appetite,” that is, the will. Whereas the good indicates the order in which the subject moves to the object, and rests in the “having” of the object, beauty is likewise a “delight” in the object, but it is a delight taken so to speak from a contemplative distance. This is why, with respect to the five senses, beauty relates more directly to vision and hearing, while goodness is more directly related to the other three senses, which require an immediate contact. As Kovach explains, beauty signifies the perceiving of the goodness of the object, and a taking joy in that perception, without having to possess that goodness.153 Aquinas anticipates the later aesthetic notion of the essential disinterestedness of beauty, and also the connection between beauty and ek-stasis, since it is the very essence of the experience of beauty that one essentially forgets oneself. To the question whether the delight in beauty is, for Aquinas, 151. Ibid., 241: “die apprehensio pulchritudinis secundum se ipsam [ist] keine totale geistige Abstraktion, sondern das rationale Erblicken der nur geistig erkennbaren Aspekte in dem konkret-individuellen materiellen Objekt, das schön ist” (emphasis mine). 152. Balthasar, Die Entwicklung der musikalischen Idee (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1999), 42: “Die Wahrheit, ein Gedanke, wird im Materiellen zur Schönheit.” This passage is presented and discussed by Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 96ff. 153. Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, 255. 404

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an act of the intellect or an act of the will, Kovach shows how it is simultaneously both.154 But this simultaneity reveals one of the most extraordinary aspects of beauty. According to Kovach, and also to the nineteenth-century aesthetic philosopher J. Jungmann,155 beauty is the only “transcendental” (assuming that it is one for Aquinas) that represents a relation with, not one, but two termini. Not only is the notion of a relation with two termini without precedence in the transcendentals, but it seems to be unique in the whole thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.156 The importance of this “duality” cannot be overstated. It is, in a certain sense, the insight that the whole study thus far has been seeking. As we have seen, for Aquinas, the true, “abstractly” considered, represents a movement from object to subject; that is, it is a relation with its terminus ad quem in the subject. The good, by contrast, represents a movement from subject to object; that is, it is a relation with its terminus ad quem in the object. What can it mean to have two termini? Here, we have to interpret. If beauty “contains” the movements of the true and the good, then, because these movements are “opposed,” its own movement is a paradoxical one, indeed: it is a single movement that ends in two places at once, in both the subject and the object!157 But this means that though beauty has a wholeness and unity in itself, it cannot have a single principle of motion. The only way of conceiving it is as one act with two principles, which are, as we have seen, not unrelated to each other but have a mutual interdependence. It is one act with two sources. Thus, another way of expressing that beauty is a relation with two termini is to say that beauty is reciprocal causality itself. Not only is it, then, the simultaneous unity of the intellect and the will, but if we take the intellect and the will in their full scope of movement without falsely subjectivizing or falsely objectivizing the movement, we can say that beauty is the union of subject and object in a whole that does not reduce them to each other. And, finally, since the union of the two wholly different “parts,” the subject and object, occurs through reciprocal causality and therefore in a manner in which each

154. Ibid., 249. By means of an analogy with what Aquinas says about beatitude (Quaestiones quodlibetales, 8:9, 1, corpus), Kovach says it is “originally and substantially” an act of the intellect and “formally and finally” an act of the will. 155. J. Jungmann’s Ästhetik (1884) is mentioned in Kovach, 213. 156. Ibid., 212–13. 157. If truth in some sense has its “locus” in the subject, Pöltner argues, and goodness has its locus in the object, the beautiful has its locus in the convenientia of the two: Schönheit, 135. It is thus the simultaneity of the two movements implied by the other transcendentals. The Transcendentals

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aspect depends on the others for its own meaning, we could say that beauty is the core of drama. To say that beauty mediates the true and the good to each other means, at bottom, that it communicates all of these aspects in a certain analogous way to each. Before turning to look at each of these in particular, it is worth pointing out how the notion of beauty as reciprocal causality itself helps to bring together some of the characteristics that Balthasar has given beauty in various places in his work. First, we saw that, in TL 1, Balthasar described beauty essentially as groundlessness. When we speak of “ground” in philosophy, we mean “reason” and “foundation,” that which accounts for a thing by answering its “why” (this is suggested in the English word ground but is even more clearly expressed in the German Grund). If, from this perspective, a final ground can be found for an event or a thing, it means that not only the necessary, but also the sufficient conditions are met, and the whole of the thing can be reduced back to its cause.158 The point is that if we have merely two terms, or have as it were only a linear or unilateral relationship, we are left with only two alternatives: either there is a sufficient reason to which an event can be reduced—and in this case we embrace a windowless, wonderless rationalism—or there is something in the event without any ground whatsoever, in which case we have a chaotic irrationalism. To avoid both rationalism and irrationalism, we have to affirm an inner relationship between the two terms, A and B, which is not unilateral but reciprocal and which is thus nonreductive without being the superficial addition of (senseless) novelties. By means of a third term, then, A and B are held in a meaningful relationship together (i.e., an intelligible unity) even while an ultimate difference is never removed.159 The term Balthasar chooses, groundlessness, seeks to express precisely this reciprocal relationship. It is not meant to oppose being groundless to being grounded, as the term might suggest at first glance; rather, it is groundlessness in the sense of mutual groundedness, a “miracle of meaning” that can never be traced back to a single cause, in which to come to a final (static) rest. The difference between the good and the true in their mutual relation, which is held open in the groundlessness of beauty, is strictly analogous to the “wonder” that is born in the fourfold difference. Wonder is related 158. See Heidegger’s discussion of Leibniz’s principium rationis or Satz des Grundes in The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 11–33. 159. To be sure, this third term, in order to play such a role, must be simultaneously immanent and transcendent. The “order” of the triad beauty-goodness-truth is possible only in transcendence into a wholly-other order. This movement, as we saw earlier, is one of the aspects of Balthasar’s understanding of unity. 406

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to surprise at the way things happen to be. But fundamental wonder is surprise that things are at all. Such wonder is possible only if one can be surprised at the ground one “stands on,” rather than merely indifferently presupposing such a ground, “forgetting” it, and marveling at what follows from it. But if beauty is precisely a nonirrational freedom from a “linear” groundedness, it is precisely the experience of beauty that enables profound questioning, questioning of the depths. In TL 1, Balthasar talks about how beauty gives the beholder access to truth at its foundations so that one wonders, in the experience of beauty—not only at the essence of truth but at its very existence—at the fact that there is truth at all.160 The same might be affirmed in relation to goodness. But it would be too much to say that such a questioning is possible because beauty brings one beyond the good and the true; the “more” character of beauty is nevertheless not to be detached from its being the union of the good and the true. If the good and the true imply a positive or determinate relation between subject and object, the difference between the good and the true—and therefore between the subject and object—is not simply a negation of their union. Even though, in the sovereign freedom of this difference, there is room for “untruth” and for evil, and the ugliness they imply, the negation does not contain the positivity. Angst and its negativity are therefore, once again, not the final word, even if they are in some fashion indispensable. Greater than Angst is joy: and joy is especially tied to beauty, because joy is the ek-stasis and surprise of genuine mutuality.161 Joy, in other words, is itself another word for reciprocal causality. Finally, and what is hardly to be separated from these aspects, there is the “grace” character that Balthasar says is attendant on every instance of beauty: “A moment of grace lies in all beauty: it reveals to me more than I had a right to expect, and therefore inspires wonder and admiration.”162 The fact that, as reciprocal causality, beauty takes all reductive explanations by surprise, it is always essentially an event. It does not connect aspects piece by piece but, even in a gradual unfolding, it shows that what comes unexpectedly later was in fact always needed. As the antithesis of reduction-deduction, without being in the least bit irrational, beauty is of its essence something that cannot be tamed. When Balthasar calls it that which “dances as an uncontained splendor around

160. TL 1:223. 161. In RT, 3, Balthasar explicitly connects beauty with joy. We saw this as well in GL 1:244. 162. E, 51: “Ein Moment der Gnade liegt in aller Schönheit: es zeigt sich mir mehr, als ich zu erwarten ein Recht hatte, daher das Staunen und die Bewunderung.” The Transcendentals

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the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relationship to each other,” he is not merely indulging in lyricism, but is speaking in truth and precision about this “primal phenomenon.” Toward the end of the previous section I pointed out that Balthasar, on the one hand, accords a certain primacy to the beautiful and, on the other hand, seems to relativize the transcendentals among themselves with a certain freedom. We are now in a position to enter more deeply into this matter. Although beauty for Balthasar is the place where truth and goodness come together, it is not the case that beauty relates in a simple and unilateral manner to the others; it is not so that truth and goodness depend on beauty, while it has no dependence on them. For one thing, we have often seen that any whole has a reciprocal dependence on its parts. Furthermore, and more specifically in this case, what we are speaking of is reciprocal causality itself, which is the general phenomenon of the triadic structure of the transcendentals, which is brought about, as it were, in beauty. In other words, once we have secured the “mediated immediacy” of the two in a third in principle, we are freed to see it everywhere. There is therefore an important sense in which, as we saw explicitly in Balthasar, goodness contains both beauty and truth, and truth contains both goodness and beauty—precisely because beauty contains goodness and truth. The “event-like,” “grace-like” phenomenon of reciprocal causality belongs in an analogous way to each of the transcendentals in themselves. In other words, each of the transcendentals is in some respect a relationship with two termini, and therefore each of the transcendentals is essentially dramatic. It cannot be the case, then, that truth is simply the movement from object to subject, a movement that ends simply in the mind; nor that the good is simply a movement from subject to object, ending simply in the existing thing. Rather, they must both end in different ways in the subject and object, and in this way form the reciprocal movement of circumincessive, dramatic encounter. Each of the transcendentals is a single act with two sources. In a certain sense, we have seen this from the beginning, but the reflection on the transcendentals in themselves has brought this fundamental phenomenon to light with a surprising clarity. We may thus point briefly to what follows from saying that each of the transcendentals has the character of reciprocal causality. As an instance of reciprocal causality, beauty can be seen to embody the paradox spoken of in chapter 3 in the relationship between “vision” and “rapture.” We see an analogy to this paradox in Aquinas, which helps to illuminate the point that Balthasar himself makes. According to Kovach, the “two termini” character of beauty leads to an interesting phenomenon when Aquinas raises the question of the relationship between beauty 408

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and love. On the one hand, love is an effect of beauty, but, on the other hand, love is the cause of the experience of beauty.163 In other words, beauty is an effect that is the cause of its cause. In order to avoid seeing a contradiction here, we have to interpret this in terms of the paradoxical relationship between truth and goodness. Beauty is the whole that allows each to be dependent on each other. Thus, in Balthasar’s aesthetic analyses, as we have already seen, vision, the cognitive grasp of an object, cannot occur unless the subject is drawn out of himself toward the object in rapture (i.e., the “object-orderedness” of goodness). As Aquinas puts it, love is the cause of beauty. However, the rapture is not possible unless the subject has caught sight of the luminous object; vision (truth) is what makes rapture (goodness) possible. As Aquinas puts it, beauty is the cause of love. Neither aspect of this phenomenon needs to be denied if we consider the whole as the unfolding of a “triadic” event. And, because this triad means that the subject and object are caught up with each other— without either separation or confusion—such that each awaits the other for its own meaning and helps produce that meaning, beauty is seen to be essentially a drama. As an instance of reciprocal causality, goodness can be seen to be the simultaneity of desire and self-gift. If we separate the transcendentals from each other, we cannot avoid a kind of subject-object dialectic, which could be described, on the one hand, as a dialectic between self-centeredness (good-for-me) and other-centeredness (good-in-itself) or, on the other hand, as a dialectic between spontaneity and receptivity in freedom. In either case, at issue is an understanding of goodness and truth as “beginning” simply outside of each other. The “subjectivity” of the good and the “objectivity” of the true, however, have their home in the subjective-objectivity of the beautiful Gestalt. This can be interpreted with an analogy to the Urgestalt of marriage, the phenomenon of the mother’s smile, or the form of drama. What we see in these various instances is a mutual causality 163. Kovach, Die Ästhetik des Thomas von Aquin, 257. See the whole concluding section on love and beauty, 256–66, in which Kovach says: “Während nämlich die erste Relation [i.e., in which beauty inspires love, which Kovach had just described] die Schönheit zu ihrem principium (als causa efficiens) und die Liebe zu ihrem Terminus (als causatum) hat, hat die hier zu analysierende Relation die Liebe als ihr principium und die geliebte Schönheit als ihren Terminus” (261). One of the key texts from Aquinas that Kovach uses to explain this affirmation is “illud enim quod summe diligimus, convenientissimum aestimamus,” Aquinas, In IV. Sent. 49, 4, 5, sol. I.c. While Kovach ends up arguing, somewhat reductively, that love does not “cause” beauty in an objective sense, but merely the experience of correspondence that makes up the experience of beauty, a more ample elaboration of the notion of reciprocal causality would allow a far stronger interpretation. The Transcendentals

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between the two aspects. In love, what one desires is to give oneself, and what one most deeply gives is one’s desire for the other. One loves best in revealing the other as supremely loveable. We are forced to set these aspects in opposition to each other, or to reduce one to the other, only if we deny that goodness is a relationship with two termini. If, by contrast, we see goodness as “containing” beauty and truth, we see that neither aspect excludes the other, but rather each has an inward dependence on the other. They both unfold within the “event” of an encounter between subject and object, an encounter that is once again, because of the reciprocal causality, essentially dramatic. As an instance of reciprocal causality, truth can be seen to embody a paradoxical relationship between union and fruit. We saw aspects of this paradox already in chapter 3, but we are now in a position to bring it more clearly into focus. If union (which we might see as truth in relation to goodness) is severed from fruitfulness (which we might see as truth in relation to beauty), we end up with an immediacy in opposition to mediation. But, if union essentially means the coming together of two and not the solitude of one, then union in fact cannot occur without the mediation of an objective third. As we saw at some length, mediation of this sort is what allows for an identity that is nevertheless not exclusive of difference. It is therefore necessary to say that fruit—the objective third—is the cause, or the condition of possibility, of union. Yet, it cannot be simply the case that the fruit comes first, and only then the union. Obviously, it is not fruit at all if it is not fruit of union. If it does not have its inner source there, it will be merely extrinsically related to the union, and this means that it would not in any event be able to mediate that union. Union is the cause of fruit, and fruit is the cause of union, and these two objects do not simply follow one after the other. Such a paradox is possible only if we see truth as “containing” goodness and beauty. This paradox, in fact, sheds a decisive light on what I suggested was the core of the mystery of truth, namely, the event of knowledge as a life-giving exchange. We addressed in that context the question of whether the object (and the subject) were changed in knowing, which would seem to make knowledge impossible to the extent that knowledge is properly of what is, or whether nothing changes, in which case it would seem to make knowledge impossible to the extent that knowledge is a concrete event. To see truth as the simultaneity, mutual implication, and reciprocal priority of these two aspects is to see truth as a relationship with two termini. And such a relationship is conceivable, as we have seen, only in the context of the “circumincession” of the transcendentals. Thus, the creativity of knowing in no way undermines its objectivity; what one knows objectively is the 410

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object transformed in the knowing. The reason we can maintain the objectivity in fact is that the “transformed” object is what makes the knowing, and the spontaneity it implies, first possible. The creativity of knowing, as it were, takes place wholly within the objectivity of the subject-object union. In this encounter, truth becomes an event in which both the subject and object await the other for their meaning, even as they both in asymmetrical ways give rise to that meaning. Because of its intrinsic relation to beauty and goodness, truth is essentially dramatic.

The Transcendentals and the Meaning of Being We now turn to recapitulate what we have unfolded in terms of the meaning of being more generally.

Being beyond Being The mystery implied by the notion of the transcendentals, as we elaborated it in the beginning of the chapter, amounted to a single, strange fact: the transcendentals do not represent mere “redundancies” but genuinely add something to being, and, at the same time, what they add was always already “anticipated” by being. Looking at the mystery from the converse perspective, we could say that in the transcendentals, the meaning of being is already given in advance, and yet it is given as something that awaits an affirmation that is indispensable to it. Where have we arrived with this problem? What I wish to argue in conclusion is that the notion of reciprocal causality as the essence of the transcendental relation, once we interpret it ontologically, is the best way to view the mystery of the transcendental paradox. To see how this is the case, we return once again to the problem implied by the notion of transcendentality as a question concerning being itself. We saw at the beginning of the chapter the fruitless contradictions and the equivocations that arise when we attempt to escape from the paradox by means of a purely “rational” relation, which says that the transcendentals are not an unfolding of being itself, are but merely an unfolding of our thoughts about being. But this does not mean that, instead, we are compelled to embrace the opposite notion of a “real” relation, where both sides of the relationship—being and the soul—are unilaterally affected by each other. Such a relation presupposes a simple difference between the terms (which already represents a difficulty to the extent that the soul exists and is therefore included in being); it implies that the terms are defined overagainst each other, and therefore in a finite manner. But the moment we The Transcendentals

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speak merely about finite modes and finite relations, we are no longer speaking of the transcendentals. It is possible to say that a particular thing is good in a particular respect without paradox (at least initially); it is another matter altogether to say that being as a whole is good—particularly because the one who says so is necessarily a part of that whole. And we can wonder whether it is possible, in fact, to affirm the goodness even of a particular thing in a fundamental way without making a decision about the whole of being. We saw in chapter 3 that truth conceived merely as a relation between two particular things, subject and object, quickly reveals its inadequacy, and thus shows the need any particular instance of truth has for an ontological grounding. In other words, even particular instances of truth must be seen in relation to truth as a transcendental. The same can be said for the other fundamental attributes of being. Parts cannot make up a whole unless the whole is already given. There must be something “deeper” than the parts that allows them in the first place to relate to each other as parts; that is, they must presuppose a whole as that in which they themselves are rooted, and so a whole as something that is not merely dependent on them. However, having said that, it remains the case that the whole that the parts presuppose is constituted from particular beings, although in a way that includes them nonreductively, and that means in all of their particularity and historicity. This affirmation returns us to the point at which we began our exploration in the philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar; namely, it brings us back to the fourfold difference. We are now in a position to view this ontological difference from the perspective of the transcendentals. The question of whether and how the transcendentals reveal some addition to being, and thus represent a more with respect to being, places us before the “ancient and new” issue of the good “beyond being.” Balthasar’s position on this question is complex. On the one hand, he affirms this “Platonic” insight in a basic way in several places.164 On the other hand, he does not do so without certain qualifications. The best way to understand his position is in relation to the question of the transcendental paradox. Clearly, the possibility of there “being” a “beyond being” is directly related to the possibility of the transcendentals in general, inasmuch as they imply in some respect a more than being. Usually, when the question is raised, it is addressed primarily in terms of the God-world relationship, that is, as God lying “beyond” created being. Such a way of posing the question inevitably identifies created being with finitude, which then must be juxtaposed to God’s inconceivable infinity.

164. See, for example, E, 70, and TL 2:163. 412

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Seeing the question first in relation to the transcendentals, however, saves us from the dialectic such a juxtaposition necessarily implies. If the transcendentals are possible, there is a more that already belongs to created being as such, and this means that created being does not represent a mere negative with respect to God. So the question, once again, is: How are the transcendentals possible? As Fabro has argued in his essay on the matter, the key to how the transcendentals can be ontological without being merely synonymous with being is that Aquinas roots them, not in a univocal or essentialist notion of being (as Kant thought), but in the inwardly complex reality of ens: “ens is not simply essentia or esse; rather, it is the self-givenness of their synthesis.”165 The reason for the importance of this inward complexity is that it implies a difference that belongs to being as being. If there can be an “addition” to being that is part of being, it can only be because “being added to” belongs to the very meaning of being. This is precisely how Balthasar adjudicates the question of the good “beyond being”: the good is both more than being and being tout court. If this simultaneity is possible, it is only because to be “more than oneself” is what it means to be. In an important footnote in TL 2, to which Emmanuel Tourpe has called attention,166 Balthasar contrasts Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of “beyond being”167 with Siewerth’s interpretation of Aquinas on this

165. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Ens-Esse,” 404. Fabro is referring to the real distinction between essence and esse, which Aquinas introduces into the discussion of the transcendentals already in the first question of De ver.: see 1, 1, ad 3. 166. Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 215. According to Tourpe, the subtle distinction that Balthasar elaborates in the footnote marks the far-reaching difference in the end between love without being, which Jean-Luc Marion affirms, and Balthasar’s central affirmation of being as love. 167. Balthasar refers specifically to Marion’s works L’Idole et la distance and Dieu sans l’être (Paris: Fayard, 1982). Having initially been critical of Aquinas, particularly in the latter book, Marion later tried to articulate a more nuanced interpretation of the Thomistic “esse”: see “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue Thomiste 1 (1995): 31–66. In this article, he argues for a kind of “esse sans l’être,” i.e., an understanding of being on the basis of the incomprehensible God rather than an understanding of God on the basis of the comprehensibility of being: see esp. 58–63. An argument that such an understanding remains all too dialectical and represents primarily a semantic development could find support in the fact that Marion’s more recent book, Reduction and Givenness, once again shows an attempt to get “beyond being” in a simple sense. Here, he argues for a “third reduction” (after those of Husserl and Heidegger), which founds even Heidegger’s fundamental ontological question on a more radical “ground” that lies wholly outside of being. The argument turns on an anthropology that sees man as capable phenomenologically of putting Being (and not just beings) as a whole out of play through the experience of boredom, rendering him purely receptive to a “call” that comes itself from beyond being: see especially the book’s final essay, 167–205. The Transcendentals

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point: “Marion seems . . . to have failed to notice the places in which Siewerth and Thomas himself describe the good as the inner ‘self-transcendence’ of esse, which nonetheless does not require us in addition . . . to leave esse (properly understood) behind as something penultimate, which in any event is something impossible for thought.”168 In terms of the fourfold difference, being itself is beyond being insofar as an unbridgeable difference gapes wide within it, without compromising its unity. The wonder we spoke of at length in the beginning of chapter 1, as being essential to the structure of the being of the world, gets reiterated in a new way here: all the drama that is implied in goodness—the striving, desire, and self-gift, and in a particular way the engagement with death, the pursuit of the elusive good, and the attempt to give one’s life a definitive shape, which we saw in the last chapter—for all of its surprise and novelty, is not something that comes “after” being, but is the expression of the deepest meaning of being. Chapter 1 reached its climax in the affirmation of “being in action” as the way in which being is received, inasmuch as being given is the way to receive the gift of being. Here we see that the transcendentals are the “crystallization” of that action. Perhaps we might see them as the paradigmatic ways in which being is given. This paradigmatic action is possible, once again, only if there is within being itself a space “wide” enough for drama, which means only if being subsists in difference. While Siewerth calls the good “more transcendental than being,” as we saw in the previous section, he continues in the same passage by saying “and in such manner it is the coming-to-presence [Hervortreten] of the ultimate depths of being itself.”169 But conceiving the transcendentals in light of the ontological difference has many implications, and I will touch on some of these by way of conclusion. We note that the phrase “beyond being” is typically associated exclusively with goodness. Viewing it, instead, more broadly as a transcendental phenomenon in general entails something that is of enormous consequence for one of the basic arguments we have been making in this essay. Reserving “beyondness” for goodness, as we earlier observed, tends to assume that being and truth are strictly finite. Because they are finite, they

168. TL 2:125–26, n. 10: “J.L. Marion scheint . . . die Stellen nicht zu beachten, wo Siewerth und auch Thomas das Bonum als den innern ‘Selbstübersteig’ des Esse kennzeichnen, was aber nicht dazu nötigt . . . , das (recht verstandene) Esse als ein Zweitletztes hinter sich zurückzulassen—was auch kein Denken kann.” 169. Siewerth, cited in TL 2:162: “und solchermaßen das Hervortreten der letzten Tiefe des Seins selbst.” 414

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cannot be ultimate; instead, they must “ultimately” be left behind in some way or another. Such a presupposition is even culturally quite common: Last year in Strasbourg there was an advertisement that depicted a woman with a wild look in her eye. Underneath, the billboard read: “L’amour n’est pas raisonnable.” There is an association of truth (and reason) with lifesmothering control, and it is usually regarded with a certain claustrophobia. Where, however, does this assumption lead? If truth is merely finite, it is not a transcendental; it does not possess transcendence in its very structure. If this is the case, however, one cannot be with an other as other as a matter of truth. Transcendence means being more than oneself, having gotten beyond oneself, and if such transcendence is lacking to truth itself, the logic of truth locks one in immanence, in a sheer immediate identity. When one has attained the truth of an other, therefore, one cannot fail to be disappointed: the otherness of the other evaporates instantaneously in the grasp, and one is left embracing only oneself. Despite the difficulties inherent in this assumption, it strikes us as odd to think of truth as possessing an inward infinity, and thus to be essentially transcendent (i.e., a transcendental). Perhaps this is because we tend to think of transcendence primarily subjectively, as a matter of the (human) spirit, in the dynamism implied in the order of the good. But we have seen that for Balthasar, there is an analogous self-transcendence that belongs to the object as such, in every case, no matter what the object might be. This is what makes truth a relation with two termini, a single event that requires the reciprocal positive acts of two irreducibly different “members.” Such is, in fact, in different ways what happens both in goodness and in truth, because it happens in beauty. It is therefore not only the good that is in a certain way “beyond being,” but truth itself is also in a certain way “beyond being,” precisely to the extent that it is a transcendental. In other words, the experience of truth is an experience of transcendence; it is a genuine event, and therefore an occasion for wonder, without for all of that being any less a matter of being. If we can affirm this without implying endless contradictions, it is because there is a certain sense in which being itself is “beyond being,” that is, because transcendence is the inner meaning of being. And this is what we mean when we speak of the transcendentals as fundamental attributes of being. Pointing out the inward complexity of being, as Fabro describes it, is not yet in itself to give a response to the problem of the transcendentals. Fabro himself shows that if the complexity of ens allows us better to understand the possibility of the transcendentals, the same inward complexity makes it more difficult to see how the soul can have an initial grasp of being—a notio entis—which is the foundation, sine qua non, The Transcendentals

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of everything else.170 In a word, if being is itself self-transcendence, then why does it not simply transcend every grasp and leave the mind in every case with nothing more than an abstract representation? Since the notio entis is a notion of being in its complexity, that is, of both essence and the actus essendi, Fabro explains, it cannot be attained either by abstraction (first act) or by judgment (second act), but it must arise in some much more fundamental way.171 Fabro himself does not offer an answer to this problem, only to indicate that the initial grasp of the notio entis must be in some basic manner both a grasping of content and a concrete experience. But this is precisely what we saw in the discussion of the fourfold difference. The key, once again, is to see how the whole of being— not just in an abstract formal sense but in a concrete totality—can be manifest in a particular experience. And when we consider the transcendentals as I have been elaborating them, we see they are what brings us to the heart of the matter. In chapter 1 (and 2), we said that the child’s initial experience of the world was the foundation of everything else. At the end of his life, Balthasar said that the essence of that experience is the transcendentals: “The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter the horizon of all unlimited being opens up for him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with his mother, even in being other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good, therefore all being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all being is beautiful.”172 To understand how this experience is the manifestation of the whole of being, we need to return to the notion of the event of reciprocal causality that lies embedded in each of the transcendentals. Reciprocal causality is always an event; it is precisely the opposite of something that can be constructed out of the “materials” that are ready at hand. An attempt thus to construct the experience reduces the whole to the sum of its parts. A “constructed” meaning would be something that I myself

170. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Ens-Esse,” 423–27. Fabro remarks on page 423 that Aquinas himself “says almost nothing on how the human mind grasps such a notion.” 171. Fabro shows that abstraction misses the “actuality” character of ens, and judgment, which seems to reach precisely this actuality, that is, existence, nevertheless already presupposes a particular essence to which existence is attributed. The problem, of course, is that the notio entis cannot presuppose any essence, but it is in every case already the presupposition for any grasp of any essence whatsoever: see ibid., 425–26. 172. RT, 3. 416

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make. The event of a whole, with the paradox it cannot fail to bring with it, is by contrast something that avoids reduction to what is “already there,” and so it can be received only from an irreducible other. It occurs structurally as a gift. The child’s first opening of his eyes, which is his reception of existence—or better, his being invited, being received into existence—is far more profound than the gift of some particular thing in the world, but is a gift of his being in the world. It is the most total gift, because it is the never-to-be-repeated gift of everything. Now, Balthasar describes the content of that experience in terms of the transcendentals. Each of the transcendentals, as a relationship with two termini, is a genuine unity between two beings that nevertheless preserves an irreducible, and therefore in a real sense infinite, difference between them, or we could say it is an experience of two completely different beings that are nonetheless embraced in a perfect unity. Being as such in its concrete totality emerges right in the center of the event of the transcendentals, since it shows itself to be the ground of both the unity and the difference of the beings: it is by being that I exist, and it is by being that you exist, and it is therefore by being that we have communion without having to merge into an abstract identity. This, then, is the manifestation of the ontological difference as a whole without reduction. And if the ontological difference comes to light, then the whole of being comes to light, not as an abstract concept but as a dramatic event. In a nutshell, then, we could say that any real experience of the transcendentals is an irruption of the whole of being, insofar as the transcendentals are instances of reciprocal causality, which is the unity of parts that remain really distinct, and such a unity in difference and difference in unity is an entry into the ontological difference.173 If we deny any part of this connection, we lose the whole. Reciprocal causality, as manifesting the totality of being that comprehends it, is dramatic because it is ontological, and it is ontological because it is dramatic. The notio entis that Fabro sought as the foundation for the transcendentals (and thus, as he shows, the foundation of the philosophical act in general) is shown here to be given not before the transcendentals, but simultaneously with them, because it is given concretely, and the transcendentals are the concrete experience of the totality of being.

173. From a very different perspective, Pöltner arrives at a similar conclusion in relation specifically to beauty. For him, beauty, since it has its locus in the convenientia between the soul and being (which we might interpret as reciprocity), discloses the “onto-logical” difference, i.e., the unity of the difference between being (ontos) and thinking (logos): Schönheit, 170. The Transcendentals

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- ousias and conversio ad rem (The recollection of being Anamnesis tes and the turning back to the real) But the child’s first experience, though “fateful” for everything that follows, is by no means where the drama ends. It is the nature of the transcendentals that the “matter” they express can never cease to be a matter of concern. To say that being is good, true, beautiful, and one—because of the transcendental paradox—is not a mere truism that refers only to being in general, and not to the specific case at hand. If the transcendentals are ontological, they say something about being in its transcendent totality, but also about the historical unfolding of being in time. That is why it is impossible to speak “dispassionately” about the transcendentals. To detach oneself from them is to falsify them. I cannot say that being is good and true without making a concrete judgment about my particular historical situation. There lies, then, an inalienable tension within the transcendentals, which is implicit in the ontological difference discussed above. They are both universal and (mercilessly) particular. Both aspects receive attention from Balthasar. On the one hand, as Saint-Pierre has shown at length, Balthasar approaches these fundamental attributes of being in an uncompromisingly concrete manner.174 Whereas Heidegger seems always to push past the “factical” instances of truth (the truth of the subject-object relation) in his concern for the Wahrheit des Seyns (Truth of Being), Balthasar insists that we cannot say that being as being is true (or good, or beautiful) unless being is also true right here, in an irreducible way: No metaphysics of being qua being and of its transcendental determinations is separable from concrete experience, which is always sensuous. The truth and the openness of being as a whole will be seen only where a judgment is made about some precise thing that is true; the goodness of being will be experienced only where something that is good meets one, something that simultaneously brings near the good and (through its finitude, fragility, lack of goodness) takes it away again. It is from the experience of the senses that we know that the beautiful exists: this experience makes it present to us and takes it away from us again, discloses it and conceals it in various layers of depth, freely and incomprehensibly—first of all as the individual attractive form or a particular mood and capacity to receive; 174. Saint-Pierre says that a concrete approach to the transcendentals is one of the most remarkable characteristics of Balthasar’s first dealings with the subject (Beauté, bonté, vérité, 109), and it is an approach he never abandoned. 418

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then in a more hidden manner, where something unremarkable . . . suddenly betrays a secret beauty; most intimately, when what is crude, what is explicitly ugly, what is painful to the point of meaninglessness, the experience of being handed over to what is vulgar and humiliating, can appear as assimilated into a totality which can and must be accepted positively—without artificial sweetening, just as it is.175 On the other hand, though it may seem simple enough to make a judgment about a particular thing as good or true, without having to judge the whole as such, it is not in fact the case that one avoids such a judgment. Rather, if one does not make it explicitly, one makes it implicitly. The severance of particular instances of truth, beauty, and goodness from the meaning of being as a whole would in some degree be a rejection of their “transcendental” status. But this means that they are removed from their ontological depth, and by the very same stroke, they are removed from their circumincessive relationship with one another. We have seen how the transcendentals flatten, dry up, and turn cold when they separate from each other. If in fact they have not done so in a particular case, it is because their relation has been preserved implicitly: not that one has avoided a judgment about the whole but that one is “living off of the capital” of the judgment that has been made in fundamental experiences. This is what gives rise to the inalienable tension in the transcendentals, which is an echo of the ontological difference itself. The truth, goodness, and beauty of any particular being can be judged so only in light of the meaning of the whole, and yet if such is to be the meaning of being as a whole, it requires that I—part of that whole—make a judgment right here and right now. It is not uncommon to find the claim in commentators on Balthasar that the ultimate mystery of the meaning of the whole of being dwarfs all attempts at grasping it, and that the greatest truth we can grasp is the humble knowledge that we do not know.176 This is not altogether false, but the situation in Balthasar seems more paradoxical, and therefore more dramatic. The real humility is not only this willingness to open oneself to the greater mystery of being, beyond all one’s grasping, but simultaneously the receptivity to the task of affirming that meaning in a responsible way in history: “The incomprehensible coincidence [in being] of 175. GL 4:28–29. 176. See, for example, Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 341–42, who argues for a reductio ad mysterium (reduction to mystery) in Balthasar. This is in one sense legitimate, but it is so only if we deal with the paradox that, for Balthasar, it is only the case that truth is mystery because at the same time mystery is truth. The Transcendentals

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fullness and emptiness . . . demands, as the irreplaceable foundation of any metaphysic, a constant active humility which neither gives up all claim to the truth nor in any sense whatever makes itself master of ultimate, quasi-divine truth.”177 The tension implied in the concrete “living out” of the transcendentals leads us to a final point: namely, that the transcendentals entail a risk. There are two aspects to this risk. The first aspect is that, along the lines of what we saw above, to affirm the transcendentals is to affirm a meaning that embraces all things, and this means that it must include not only whatever may come in the future and whatever there was in the past, but also all of the concrete realities that seem to contradict that meaning, sometimes in ways that seem absolute, ways that seem irremediably swallowed up in boredom, and ways that are painful. What Balthasar says about beauty could be said about all the transcendentals: Let us be clear about what the intellectual decision in favor of such a supposition, that being as a whole is beautiful, presupposes. Is such a supposition not contradicted a thousand times each day by the shrillness of all that is ugly, that is warped, that is hopelessly mediocre and vulgar? And is not there an act of transcending, a quality of transcendence, in this limitless supposition, which has something utopian, heroic or indeed something of faith about it? For this is a commitment to that which exists as a whole, no matter how it presents itself to the individual.178 The affirmation of the transcendentals is inseparable, then, from committing oneself to the meaning of the whole, which is in some respect an act of faith, and in many cases an act of heroism. Insofar as being in its totality cannot be made manifest except in terms of its concrete meaning, the overcoming of Seinsvergessenheit (forgetfulness of being) and the recovery of the deep source of metaphysics, which Heidegger never tired of insisting on, are possible only through such an act. To be “guardians of being,” as Balthasar puts it, means standing for the meaning of being: its beauty, its goodness—and its truth. The subjective correlate, as it were, to the transcendentals is the soul’s “readiness for anything,” a kind of a priori assent, which I have touched on in, for example, the concluding section of chapter 2.179 At this point, we see that this assent is not in the first place an achievement of something that was never there before, 177. GL 4:404–5. 178. Ibid., 20. 179. Balthasar makes this point in relation to the transcendentals in GL 5:608. 420

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but is more profoundly a recollection (anamnesis) of the original gift, an experience that will never cease to be new. The second aspect follows from this. Whoever is open to the meaning of being must remain open to the meaning of history. Since the meaning of being is transcendent and comprehensive only if it at the same time includes all the concrete particularities that are here and that are to come, standing for the meaning of being requires a certain vulnerability to the events of history, and endless patience in exposing one’s heart in openness to the truth, beauty, and goodness of whatever may arrive, in whatever guise. It is easy, in difficult situations, to “detach” oneself from the truth or goodness of particular instances because of a general affirmation of the truth or goodness of the whole, to think that, because one has affirmed the meaning of the whole, one does not need to “take the risk” of receiving the truth or goodness that lies even here, in a form that is perhaps fraught with painful ambiguities. For Balthasar, this vulnerability falls as a special task particularly to Christians: “Christianity by its own nature possesses the power and the responsibility of arming the spirit against this kind of abuse of detachment and to disarm the heart so that it becomes purely receptive—even, and precisely, to pain and deprivation.”180 This task belongs especially to Christians because, in Christianity, God is not the being that is sought in abstraction from beings, but is different from the difference itself between being and beings. God is thus free to be revealed in the “poverty and wealth” of the mystery of being in itself, but is also free to enter into the particularity of beings and the vicissitudes of history. And, moreover, he is free in this movement to call those who wish to follow him there. The paradox of the transcendentals is the opening up of being, in man’s dramatic engagement in the world, to the God who is the lord of unity, beauty, goodness, and truth, because he is Trinity—in other words, because he himself is drama.

180. Ibid., 632–33. The Transcendentals

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Conclusion The Dramatic Structure of Truth

The question that has been driving this book’s thesis from beginning to end, as its accompanying measure and judge is: How do we get to the heart of things? The question is the question concerning the structure of truth, insofar as truth expresses the most profound relationship between the cognitive soul and reality. There is no other relationship that a human being has to anyone or anything at all that is not mediated by a conception of truth. The nature of that conception, thus, brings itself to bear on all areas of existence, even, and perhaps especially, on those in which the question of truth receives the least explicit attention. The argument of this book can be summed up simply: The structure of truth is a set of relations. To the extent that those constitutive relations are not conceived as dramatic, the members of those relations will inevitably find themselves reduced. When they are so reduced, the relations are compromised and truth ceases to be truth. In other words, to the extent that a conception of truth is reductive, it has the logical form of the forgetfulness of being and the forgetfulness of man. If violence is the fracturing of relationship, the rejection of the integrity of a relationship’s members, then truth so conceived is a subtle and yet profound form of violence. A dramatic model of truth avoids reduction because it designates a complex whole, a Gestalt. Drama is the inward relation of parts that resist one another, and at the same time a resolving union that releases into ever-greater difference. In a dramatic model of truth, no aspect of the known object remains a matter of indifference to the knower, and no aspect gets merely 422

assimilated to the knower in the cognitive act. The object, in its integrity, calls on the subject, in his integrity, and so the event of the relation comes to pass only through an inspiration, a decision, and a bearing of fruit. The dramatic resources in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar have possibilities that extend far beyond the problems that have been addressed in this book. But there are three aspects of his understanding of drama that are significant for an adequate conception of truth. First, Balthasar expresses drama philosophically as the mutual implication of the two metaphysical principles, esse sequitur agere and agere sequitur esse. Action both gives rise to and follows upon ontological depths. If action is engagement and relation, the coincidence of these principles means that subject and object are both cause and effect of each other in a way that cannot finally be reduced to a single beginning or end. Instead, they are both embraced in an event that has the essential character of gift. Second, the encounter itself and its result must be accounted for in terms of both the subject and object together, and so cannot occur finally in only the one or the other, but must occur in both, which means the encounter and its result have their place in a mutually transcendent third. Because this third transcends both subject and object, each can transcend the other even in their union. Moreover, because the whole transcends the subject, it must involve not only the subject’s “theoretical” reason, but his will, his committing himself in action. The place of truth, conceived dramatically, is the realm of concrete action, the stage on which ideas are unfolded in space and time. Third, because truth is not concrete in the reductive sense, that is, not in the conventional sense of particularity as opposed to universality, it involves an intrinsic relation between transcendence and immanence, between absolute, definitive meaning and shifting, partial, and unpredictable circumstances. It thus requires a dramatic decision that embraces definitively the transcendent meaning and embodies it immanently. This must occur not in a way that removes one from the gravity and ambiguity of historical circumstances, but in a way that exposes one all the more vulnerably to them. It is perhaps useful to point out explicitly how the preceding chapters have developed a concept of truth that is dramatic along these three lines. 1. For truth to be dramatic, there can be no element whatsoever involved in the truth relation that has a final completion “already,” merely, and statically in itself. Rather, each part must indeed find final completion in itself, but only in relation to the others. This relation to others cannot be a temporary means to its own completion; it must subsist in the permanent tension that arises from mutual self-reception and -gift. For each element, then, the other remains prior within a simultaneity of self and other. This Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth

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is what this book has called reciprocal causality. Often, the problem of truth is dealt with only after having already conceded a “static” understanding of the component members of the relation. The first task of a dramatic sense of truth is therefore to bring the basic components to life. Thus, in chapter 1 we began with the inner and irreducible difference that is constitutive of Being in general and all beings in particular. If we look at the fourfold difference particularly in the light of the transcendentals discussed in chapter 5, as an event of reciprocity that is both dramatic and ontological—dramatic because it is ontological, and vice versa—we can see that the otherness implied in the difference is primarily a perfection of being. Affirming a permanent and irreducible difference is what allows us to avoid Hegelian dialectic even while making “external” relation a matter of internal significance. Because of the “gift” character of the fourfold difference, then, action is not a subsequent, external addition to being, but the manifestation and in some sense the achievement of its very meaning. It follows that what is involved in any concrete instance of truth is not (only) the “ontic” or phenomenal surfaces of things, but the heart of objects, their ontological depths. Correspondingly, we saw in chapter 2 that it is the whole of the person who is put in play from the beginning of conscious life. The person, and in particular his unity of consciousness, is constituted in the event of mutual giving and receiving in love. Such an event marks the birth of consciousness, and it therefore forms the inner character of every subsequent intentional act. As the source, so the fruits. Because the whole person is involved in this comprehensive activity, it is artificial to separate the intellect and will (chapter 5), or even the intellect and senses (chapter 4). Rather, the intellect itself always already has its own, distinct integrity only within its concrete relation with the will and senses. This means that the resultant “unity” of consciousness is always given simultaneously from above and from below, a priori and a posteriori. Consciousness, then, is the gift of being to the soul and the gift of the soul to being. 2. In chapter 3 we saw that the event of these “reciprocal gifts” constitutes a single, fluid whole that is greater than their sum. This is, as it were, the kernel of the dramatic conception of truth. It is dramatic because the subject must first await, and be receptive to, the spontaneous epiphany of the object. Such epiphany occurs, however, only in the context of the subject’s ek-static judgment and committing of himself. Because the union of the subject and object happens where they both transcend themselves, it can never be reduced simply to the one or the other. Rather, it is (necessarily!) creative. The whole that is greater than the sum of its parts is what brings life to those parts—makes their relation a life-giving exchange— 424

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and involves them both in a fruitfulness that surpasses and surprises them horizontally and vertically. Thus, truth is never an immediate union that can dispense with an abiding mediation; it is never intimacy without a simultaneous distance. To say that truth ultimately is a Gestalt, then, is to say that it has its essential locus in the concrete realm, which is as it were the intersection of vertical and horizontal transcendence. Because of this twofold transcendence, truth cannot come to pass without action, and without the patience of space and time. In fact, what makes truth a gift is what makes it a matter (also) of action in time and space: if it is not something one simply already has, something reduced to one’s inner structures, then one must go outside of oneself to receive it. 3. To insist that truth must be, in every case, concrete, however, does not mean that we reduce it to a mere “ontic” occurrence. In order for truth to be truth, indeed, it must be the manifestation of the ontological depths of things, the appearance of their ultimate inner ground. How is it possible for being to appear without being reduced to appearance? We cannot answer this question by means of a static approach, which would inevitably place being and appearance next to each other as two different “phenomena,” two things of the same order. Nor can we say that the nonappearing ground, the depths of the being of things, is something that the knower infers or merely posits on the basis of a thing’s (mere) appearance. Rather, the unity-in-difference and difference-in-unity of ground and appearance can be revealed only by means of a dramatic event. I described this event in the last two chapters as the ultimate human act correlated to the ultimate act of being. In both “sides” of this event, it is the joining of the transcendent and immanent, or absolute and relative, by means of an excess that is given in a particular act. Thus, the foundational act that both reveals the ontological dimension of truth and invites the knower into those depths is the grasping of a whole that is both in and beyond the particular through the act of a subject that gives himself as a whole in and beyond the particular instance. In chapter 4, we viewed this gift of self in terms of the dramatic task of meta-anthropology: one can give oneself as a whole only if one gives more (meta-) than oneself, and such can occur only in the definitive commitment to a whole larger than oneself. If it is only through such a deed that a person fully appears to himself as he most fundamentally is, and if a grasp of self in self-presence is required in order to grasp anything else at all in its ontological truth, then the drama of meta-anthropology is the real foundation of epistemology. It is, in this respect, the fulfillment of what I took to be the form of self-consciousness in chapter 2. We have Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth

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seen that, for Balthasar, the paradigmatic instance of the meta-anthropological task is the definitive decision for the Urgestalt of a permanent state of life. It is the epistemological role played by Being unto death in Heidegger and martyrdom in Plato that first reveals the philosophical implications of drama and the states of life in Balthasar. This choosing of a state of life, in turn, reveals the depths of the analogous forms in Plato and Heidegger, and moreover it gives the clearest interpretation of the indispensable role Balthasar assigns to art, and especially the theater. In every case, what is at issue is the revelation of the whole of man in his irreducible tensions (body and soul in particular) by being at the same time a revelation of what is more than man, and thus of being itself. There is an excess in metaanthropology; it is that excess that makes it essentially communal, and relates it directly to ontology. A definitive decision about existence as a whole, insofar as such a whole must always be a “more” than the whole, can be made only against a greater horizon. Meta-anthropology is thus in turn dependent on the ultimate meaning of being as revealed in the transcendentals, which is the theme of chapter 5. Against the tendency to reduce the intelligible aspect of being to an inert finitude, and to juxtapose to that finitude (which one calls “truth”) an infinite striving in the good, which lies beyond being and therefore beyond truth, we saw that being is itself dramatic to its core, that its very meaning is self-transcendence. The excess that is the meaning of being is what allows the excess of meta-anthropology. This insight connects the end with the beginning: existence is the gift of being given. The key notion of this last chapter is reciprocal causality, a notion that serves in a succinct way to synthesize the whole inasmuch as reciprocal causality represents the inner logic of both Gestalt and drama. If we see truth as having its essential place within the event of beauty, and thus goodness, then truth itself acquires the character of being an instance of reciprocal causality. This has three immediate implications. First, it is reciprocal causality that makes truth a relation with two termini, which is what most clearly establishes its dramatic structure. The alternative is to posit truth as a relation with a single terminus, presumably in the mind or soul, a conception that cannot avoid various forms of false immediacies and reductions, and in the end falling into a kind of abstraction. Second, if reciprocal causality is what frees truth from becoming sheerly abstract, it is because it makes it concrete: truth, precisely because of its transcendent depth, can occur always only in the particular encounter between subject and object, in which they each await the other for their own meaning and thus grow together (con-crescere). Third, it is this reciprocal causality that most deeply secures the gift character of truth, what makes 426

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it an event, and therefore something that of its very essence inspires wonder. It does so by being the manifestation of the ontological difference, the becoming-real of the meaning of being. In contrast to Heidegger, who affirms that Being reveals its truth most properly in negativity—the experience of the withdrawing of all beings—Balthasar affirms that Being is most properly revealed in the joy of mutual, and thus dramatic, relation between beings. Reviewing the various aspects of a dramatic, as opposed to reductive, conception of truth, we can say in sum that truth, in its fullness, requires as its point of departure not a skeptical distance or a parceling out of finite conditions of possibility, but an a priori yes to the whole, that is, an infinite positivity that allows all relative instances of truth to show their ontological depth. Furthermore, it requires a refusal to set the absolute aspects of truth in opposition to its relative aspects, a refusal to divide the transcendent from the immanent or the ontological from the ontic. Instead, it insists that truth is just as much a matter of becoming as of being: As Balthasar puts it, “both being and becoming belong with equal justification to the full image of truth.”1 Finally, a whole can be affirmed only by a whole. If a dramatic sense of truth requires on the objective side an affirmation of the whole of truth, the affirmation itself cannot be made in indifferent detachment in an abstract sense, but must be understood as the total commitment of one’s being, body and soul, to a task, a readiness to stake one’s life for what is needed for the truth of the whole. In conclusion, looking for the point of intersection of these three requirements for a dramatic conception of truth, we return once again in the end to the child, whose heart alone is small enough to comprehend everything. In one of his earliest essays, Nietzsche spoke of the triumvirate of persons most responsible for the renewal of culture: the saint, the philosopher, and the artist, whom we might see as the “guardians” of goodness, truth, and beauty.2 Almost by miracle, we find individual testimonies from each converging precisely on this same point. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, was presented with a basket of various items and asked which of them she would like most. As one who had decided definitively to be in the world in the mode of a child, she answered, “I choose all.” In the Sophist, Plato raises the question of whether the ultimate intelligible reality has to be immutable or mutable (i.e., a matter of being or becoming). After 1. TL 1:175. 2. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as educator (1874),” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), sec. 5, 156–61. Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth

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showing why each possibility would have to be affirmed in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other, Plato says that the philosopher “has to be like a child begging for ‘both,’ and say that that which is— everything—is as many things as are unmoved and moved.”3 Finally, the artist, Claudel, presents the child Doña Seven Swords as the fruit of the great love and the great suffering of The Satin Slipper’s protagonists Rodrigue and Doña Prouhèze. Amid the waters (of the world’s mystery and truth) that flood the entire series of scenes for the duration of the last act, the fourth day, she is the only one that this immense sea does not threaten or overwhelm. Quite to the contrary, made light by the water, she swims effortlessly across the sea to join the armies of John of Austria, where she is needed: There’s only one thing necessary, and the rest doesn’t matter. What use is it to look idly around, to dawdle eternally like an amateur with a paint brush in hand, adding a little color here and there? And when you’re done, to pack up your re-finishing gear and go doodle somewhere else? There’s only one thing necessary, and that is having someone who asks everything of you and to whom you are able to give everything. Onwards! En avant!4

3. Plato, The Sophist, 249d (translation modified; emphasis on the phrase “like a child” is mine). 4. Claudel, Le soulier de satin, 381. 428

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Bibliography

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trilogy For the works listed below by Balthasar that have been translated, the English is given first (except in the case of Theologik volume 1), and the German (or French) is given in brackets. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. 7 vols. Translated by Erasmo LeivaMerikakis, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, Oliver Davies, Francis McDonagh, John Saward, Martin Simon, and Rowan Williams. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982–91. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. 3 vols. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961–69.] Vol. 1: Seeing the Form. [1. Schau der Gestalt.] Vol. 2: Theological Styles: Clerical Styles. [2,1. Fächer der Stile: I. Klerikale Stile.] Vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles. [2,2. Fächer der Stile: II. Laikale Stile.] Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity. [3/1,1. Im Raum der Metaphysik: I. Altertum.] Vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. [3/1,2. Im Raum der Metaphysik: II. Neuzeit.] Vol. 6: Theology: The Old Covenant. [3/2,1. Alter Bund.] Vol. 7: Theology: The New Covenant. [3/2,2. Neuer Bund.] Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. 5 vols. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988–98. [Theodramatik. 4 vols. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1973–83.] 429

Vol. 1: Prolegomena. [1. Prolegomena.] Vol. 2: Dramatis Personae: Man in God. [2,1. Die Personen des Spiels: Der Mensch in Gott.] Vol. 3: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ. [2,2. Die Personen des Spiels: Die Personen in Christus.] Vol. 4: The Action. [3. Die Handlung.] Vol. 5: The Final Act. [4. Das Endspiel.] Theologik. 3 vols. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1985–87. [Vol. 1 has been published in an English translation: Theologic: Theological Logical Theory. Vol. 1: Truth of the World. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000.] Vol. 1: Wahrheit der Welt. [Originally published as Wahrheit: Ein Versuch. Bk. 1: Wahrheit der Welt. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Verlagsanstalt Benziger, 1947.] Vol. 2: Wahrheit Gottes. [Not published in English, but translation of title is The Truth of God.] Vol. 3. Der Geist der Wahrheit. [Not published in English, but translation of title is The Spirit of Truth.] Epilog. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1987.

Other Works by Balthasar Cited in the Present Study “Abschied von Gustav Siewerth.” Hochland 56 (1963): 182–84. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. 3 vols. 3rd ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998. Vol. 1: Der deutsche Idealismus. Vol. 2. Im Zeichen Nietzsches. Vol. 3. Die Vergöttlichung des Todes. “Auch die Sünde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel.” Stimmen der Zeit 69 (1939): 222–37. The Christian State of Life. Translated by Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983. [Christlicher Stand. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1977.] “Dank des Preisträgers an der Verleihung des Wolfgang Amadeus MozartPreises am 22. Mai 1987 in Innsbruck.” In Elio Guerriero, Hans Urs von Balthasar: Eine Monographie. Translated by Carl Franz Müller. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1993. Der Christ und die Angst. 6th ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1989. Die Entwicklung der musikalischen Idee: Versuch einer Synthese der Musik (1925), Bekenntnis zu Mozart (1955). Freiburg, Germany: Johannes Verlag; repr. Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1999. 430

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“Die Metaphysik Erich Przywaras.” Schweiz. Rundschau 6 (1933): 489–99. “Evangelium und Philosophie.” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 23 (1976): 3–12. “The Fathers, Scholastics, and Ourselves.” Communio: International Catholic Review 24 (Summer 1997): 347–96. [“Patristik, Scholastik und wir.” Theology der Zeit 3 (1939): 65–104.] “Geist und Feuer: Ein Gespräch mit Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Interview. Herder Korrespondenz 30 (1976): 72–82. The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Das Weizenkorn. Lucerne, Switzerland: Räber, 1944.] “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus.” Stimmen der Zeit 137 (1940): 1–8. “Jenseits von Kontemplation und Aktion?” Internationale Katholische Zeitschrift Communio 2 (1973): 16–22. Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners. 2nd ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961. Love Alone: The Way of Revelation. Translated by Alexander Dru. London: Sheed and Ward, 1968. [Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1963.] Martin Buber and Christianity. London: Harvill Press, 1961. [Einsame Zwiesprache: Martin Buber und das Christentum. Cologne/Olten, Germany/Switzerland: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1958.] “Movement toward God.” In Explorations in Theology. Vol. 3: Spiritus Creator. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993. [“Bewegung zu Gott.” Skizzen zur Theologie III: Spiritus Creator. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1967.] My Work: In Retrospect. Translated by Kelly Hamilton, et al. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993. [Mein Werk: Durchblicke. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1990.] “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time.” Translated by Brian McNeil. Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 147–87. [Von den Aufgaben der Katholischen Philosophie in der Zeit. 2nd ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998. Originally published in 1946.] Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings. Translated by Robert J. Daley. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984. [Origines, Geist und Feuer: Ein Aufbau aus seinen Werken. Salzburg, Austria: Otto Müller, 1938.] Parole et Mystère chez Origène Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1957. “Persönlichkeit und Form.” Gloria Dei 7 (1952): 1–15. “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism.” In Explorations in Theology. Vol. 2: The Spouse of the Word. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. [“Philosophie, Christentum, Mönchtum.” Skizzen zur Theologie II: Sponsa Verbi. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1960.] Bibliography

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Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa. Translated by Mark Sebanc. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Présence et Pensée: Essai sur la Philosophie Religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Beauchesne, 1942.] “Regagner une philosophie à partir de la théologie.” Pour une philosophie chrétienne: Philosophie et théologie. Namur, Belgium: Culture et Vérité, 1983. “A Résumé of My Thought.” In Hans von Balthasar: His Life and Work, edited by David Schindler. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. [Prüfet alles: Das Gute behaltet. Ostfildern, Germany: Schwabenverlag, 1986.] Theological Anthropology. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. [Das Ganze im Fragment. Aspekte der Geschichtstheologie. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Benziger, 1963.] The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation. Translated by Edward Oakes. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. [Karl Barth. 4th ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1976.] “A Theology of the Counsels.” Pt. I: Cross Currents (Spring 1966): 213–36; pt. II: (Summer 1966): 325–37 [“Zur Theologie des Rätestandes.” Wagnis der Nachfolge. Edited by Stephan Richter. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöning, 1964.] Unless You Become Like This Child. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. [Wenn ihr nicht werdet wie dieses Kind. Ostfildern, Germany: Schwabenverlag, 1989.]

Select Books, Articles, and Dissertations on Themes in Balthasar Related to the Present Study Bauer, Emmanuel. “Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988): Sein philosophisches Werk.” In Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 3: Moderne Strömungen im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Emerich Coreth, Walter M. Neidl, Georg Pfligersdorffer. Graz, Austria: Verlag Styria, 1990. Bieler, Martin. “The Future of the Philosophy of Being.” Communio: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 455–85. ______. “Meta-anthropology and Christology: On the Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 129–46. Brugnoli, Andrea. Hans Urs von Balthasar: La spontaneità delle cose. Rome: Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci, 2001. Campodonico, Angelo. “La filosofia di Tomaso d’Aquino nell’interpretazione di Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Medievale 18 (1992): 379–401. Capol, Cornelia. Hans Urs von Balthasar: Bibliographie 1925–1990. Freiburg, Germany: Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, 1990. 432

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Chantraine, Georges. “L’épilogue de la trilogie: ‘Une bouteille lancée à la mer.’” Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 24–36. Daigler, Matthew A. “Heidegger and Von Balthasar: A Lover’s Quarrel over Beauty and Divinity.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 375–94. Danet, Henriette. “Le concept de figure dans la gloire et la croix de Urs von Balthasar.” Photocopy. Institut Catholique de Paris, 1979. Disse, Jörg-P. “Liebe und Erkenntnis: Zur Geistesmetaphysik Hans Urs von Balthasars.” Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift 54, no. 3 (1999): 215–27. ______. Metaphysik der Singularität: Eine Hinführung am Leitfaden der Philosophie Hans Urs von Balthasars. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996. Faber, Eva-Maria. “El ‘Apocalipsis del alma alemana’ de Balthasar como desvelamiento mítico de la verdad.” In Homenaje a Hans Urs von Balthasar. Buenos Aires: Centro Salesiano de Estudios “San Juan Bosco,” 1998. ______. “El ‘Universale Concretum’ en Balthasar.” Proyecto 30 (May–August 1998): 223–37. Fares, Diego Javier. “Fenomenología de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar: Una guía de lectura de ‘Verdad del mundo’ desde la perspectiva de la verdad como desvelamiento y velamiento del ser.” Stromata 51 (1995): 181–259. ______. “Fenomenología de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (2).” Stromata 52 (1996): 173–219. ______. “Fenomenología de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (3).” Stromata 53 (1997): 45–117. ______. “Fenomenología de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (4).” Stromata 53 (1997): 277–307. ______. “La configuración de la verdad como desvelamiento y velamiento del ser en los primeros escritos de Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Stromata 51 (1995): 89–122. Faux, Jean-Marie. “Un théologien: Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 10 (1972): 1009–30. Gabellieri, Emmanuel. “Ontologie de l’image et phénoménologie de la vérité (à la lumière de H. U. von Balthasar).” Theophilyon 93 (1971): 225–44. Gadient, Lorenz. “Wahrheit als Anruf der Freiheit: Hans Urs von Balthasars theodramatischer Erkenntnisbegriff in vergleichender Auseinandersetzung mit der transzendentalphilosophischen Erkenntniskritik Reinhard Lauths.” Ph.D. diss., Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich, 1997. Gardner, Lucy, and David Moss. “Something Like Time, Something Like the Sexes—An Essay in Reception.” In Balthasar at the End of Modernity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999. Gilbert, Paul. “L’articulation des transcendantaux selon Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Revue Thomiste 86 (1986): 616–29. Grätzel, Stephan. “Der philosophische Hintergrund von Balthasars Theodramatik. In Theodramatik und Theatralität: Ein Dialog mit dem Theaterverständnis von Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Volker Kapp, Helmuth Kiesel, and Klaus Lubbers. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2000. Bibliography

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Index

Action, 13, 30, 74–77, 217; as disclosing Being, 19, 127, 414, 424; as key to analogy, 144; as unity of Being, 88–93, 163–64; as dramatic, 314–15, 319; as place of truth, 423, 425; and judgment, 225 Actualism, 25n75, 76 Aertsen, Jan A., 151n159, 233n156, 352nn5,7, 353, 354, 355n27, 356, 357, 358, 359, 374–76, 378n88, 380, 388n116, 391, 394, 403 Aeschylus, 258n5 Agent intellect, 41, 130, 148, 150, 150n154, 154n167, 182, 190, 240–41, 352n10 Ameriks, Karl, 102n17, 103n19 Anaxagoras, 148 Andia, Ysabel de, 336n197 Analogy of being (analogia entis), 9, 48–49, 49n63, 53n71, 54–55, 72, 152–53, 244, 313, 361n44 Angst, 37, 45, 45n50, 87n172, 296–99, 305–307, 322, 328, 407 Aquila, Richard, 103, 104n26 Aquinas, Thomas, 11, 28, 29, 36n23, 40, 47n58, 56, 59, 60, 61n91, 66n104,

69n110, 71, 75, 78n142, 98n7, 107, 116n64, 126, 132, 133n115, 149–51, 166, 167, 171–72, 173, 174, 180, 181, 184n52, 191, 192–93, 195, 198, 201, 211, 218, 219n130, 220, 229, 233n154, 234n157, 249, 250n196, 251, 261, 267n28, 268, 269, 272, 273, 278, 315n147, 341n207, 344, 350, 351, 352, 353–54, 356, 357–58, 360, 362, 364n51, 366, 374–83, 388, 390, 391, 394–96, 398, 403, 404–405, 408–409, 413–14 Aristotle, 17n45, 27, 59, 70n113, 75, 83, 92, 108–10, 116–17, 136, 148, 150, 160, 164, 166, 167, 168, 175, 191, 192–93, 198, 201, 206, 211n110, 228, 234n159, 237, 238n167, 240n171, 241, 248, 254n203, 261, 266, 268, 272, 273, 277n50, 287n75, 320, 323, 353, 356n32, 358, 378, 388 Artist, 427–28 Attunement: of consciousness to being, 122–23, 123n83, 199 Augustine, Saint, 29, 192 (epigraph), 213, 216, 269, 291, 350 (epigraph) Authenticity, 211n110, 236, 300, 304

447

Baader, Franz Xaver von, 133n117 Bacon, Roger, 147 Balzac, Honoré de, 216n121 Barth, Karl, 279–81, 286, 290, 291 Bauer, Emmanuel, 28n3, 173, 200n87 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 169n15 Beauty: as transcendental property, 124–25, 188, 234, 354–55, 355n27, 361–65, 368–70; and call to decision, 328–29; as union of goodness and truth, 397, 401, 407; as reciprocal causality, 405; as core of drama, 406; as groundless, 406; as “beyond being,” 414–15 Beck, Heinrich, 239n169 Being: and action, 19–20, 76; and history, 30, 52; as esse / actus essendi, 30, 40, 47n58, 75–76, 82, 93, 172, 222–23, 267, 341n207, 416; as analogia entis, 49; as united to consciousness, 110, 132; as non-subsistent, 140 Beiser, Frederick, 103n22, 154n167 Bieler, Martin, 35n22, 53, 58n83, 259 Blondel, Maurice, 3, 10n22, 75, 91, 93, 122, 138–39, 158–59, 242–43 Body, 262–63, 265–72, 310, 329, 334–35 Boethius, 353 Bonaventure, Saint, 96n1, 176, 281, 355n27 Boredom, 413n167, 420 Bowie, Andrew, 106n34, 119n71 Brentano, Franz, 24n72, 96, 205 Brock-Sulzer, Elizabeth, 255 (epigraph), 260 Buber, Martin, 99n9 Cabada Castro, Manuel, 71n115, 89n180 Caputo, John, 34n20 Categorial imperative, 94 Categorial intuition, 166, 231 Causa sui, 68 Certitude, 389–90 Chantraine, Georges, 44n47, 59n86 Cherniss, Harold, 251n199 Chesterton, G. K., 70 Child, 36–39, 45, 50, 55, 57, 230–31, 344, 345, 416, 418, 427–28 448

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Index

“Christian distinction,” 258n5 Circumincession, 350, 368–74 passim, 410 Clarke, Norris, 71n119, 173n26 Claudel, Paul, 12, 74–75, 143, 164, 242, 243–44, 249n194, 255 (epigraph), 279–81, 286, 331, 336n197, 428 Cogito, 110, 133 Cohen, Leonard, 334n194 Communication, 63–66 Community (communion), 91–92, 120, 142, 227, 252–54 Co-naissance, 243 Confinium, 260 Consciousness, 41, 62, 96–162 passim, 292n85, 333, 343–44; and God, 121, 131–36; and Being, 121–22; as joy, 127; as rooted in the heart, 290; as pre-reflective, 144 Contemplation: and action, 46, 115, 223, 250 Continental philosophy, 1, 8 Conversio ad phantasmata, 151 166, 181, 183, 188–91, 205, 275n47, 286, 289–90, 293, 339 Crates, 197 Crawford, David, 330n188, 335n196 Creation, 41, 94, 354, 354n20, 360 Creativity, 95, 203, 228; of the Gestalt, 185; of space, 247; and objectivity, 214; of speech, 236; of knowledge, 410–11 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 173 Czapiewski, Winfried, 355n25, 360n41, 375, 376, 379, 380–86, 391, 394–95, 400, 402n145 Daigler, Matthew A., 34n20 Danet, Henriette, 15–16 Death: of the “I,” 106, 108n40; and truth, 11, 263–64, 296–97, 300–303, 306–308, 316–17, 414 Decision, 14, 87, 94, 166, 193–94, 201, 225, 242, 246, 249, 257, 259–60, 314–15, 315n147, 317, 319, 321, 325n174, 341n204, 423; and claim, 196–97 Deconstruction, 294, 339n203

Derrida, Jacques, 81n153, 145, 230, 339 Descartes, René, 57n81, 110, 131n110, 133, 135, 147, 155–56, 157, 200n86, 246, 293, 299, 325, 340, 352n11 Desmond, William, 3n3 Dialectic, 48–49, 49n63, 51, 54, 70, 134, 143–44, 184, 220, 239nn169, 170, 244, 311, 340–41, 380–83, 413 Difference: in knowledge and truth relation, 1–6, 11, 26, 206, 215–16; in being, 11, 30–50, 165, 298; as “ontological difference,” 35, 44, 46–47, 52, 56, 73, 176, 296, 303, 307, 326, 329, 345, 414, 417, 417n175, 419, 427; as four-fold, 31–58 passim, 135, 162, 168, 187, 217, 232, 244, 303, 345, 412, 414, 424; and identity in logic, 238; between goods and men, 258n5, as différance, 230 Diogenes Laertius, 197n80 Dionysius the Areopagite, 28, 40n33, 68, 89n178, 95n192, 99n8, 174, 176, 336n197, 353–54 Disinterestedness, 157, 218, 345, 404 Disse, Jörg, 30n10, 59n83, 141n131, 153n161, 159n180 Divine ideas, 76–77, 88–92, 89nn178, 180, 121, 245, 249, 295, 295n87, 360 Drama, 11–27, 168, 226, 226n140, 243, 260, 263, 293, 296–97, 300, 308, 311–25 passim, 351, 409, 421; as theme for philosophy, 8; and structure of being, 10–11, 26; as dramatic engagement, 191–92, 257, 288, 291, 294; as dramatic event, 307, 326, 417, 425; as dramatic foundations, 340–41, 347; of the transcendentals, 408–11 Dreyfus, Hubert, 296n92 Dualism, 40–41, 51, 79, 105, 116, 122, 129, 155, 175, 178, 182, 185, 233–34, 243, 279, 340, 371; of subject and object, 112 Duns Scotus, John, 147, 200n86 Ebner, Ferdinand, 99n9 Eckhart, Meister, 28 Ehrenfels, Christian von, 24, 168, 170

Ek-stasis, 39, 50, 90, 95n192, 98, 118, 127, 127n98, 160, 164, 174, 193–94, 245, 247–48, 272, 284, 292–93, 300, 317, 372, 388, 397, 404, 407, 424 Eliade, Mircea, 295 Energeia, 92 Entelecheia, 92–217 Ent-fernung, 246 Epic poetry, 21, 23n67 Epoch e,- 157–58 Erigena, John Scotus, 261, 262n18 Erlebnis, 157 - 206, 208, 304, 311, 320n165, 399; Eros, and agape, 336, 336n197 Erschlossenheit, 199, 200n86 Euripides, 317 Event: -character of being, 13, 15–16, 18, 25, 30, 63, 116, 125, 152, 155, 186, 211, 222, 234, 259; -character of Gestalt, 16–17; of consciousness, 121, 123, 137, 153; of reciprocity, 126, 407, 416; of unity, 137, 139, 292, 372; of being-called, 137; of mother’s smile, 141; of truth, 27, 164–65, 426–27; of expression, 178; of love, 231; of logic, 240; of space, 247; of encounter, 350, 410 Evidence, 146, 155, 158, 161 Experience, 123, 297–99, 394 Existence: and essence, 13, 13n29, 16n39, 66–69, 77–88, 78n142, 234 Extrinsicism, 391, 396 Fabro, Cornelio, 40n32, 79n142, 81n152, 151n159, 153n162, 350, 354n20, 413, 415–416, 417 Faith: in Kant, 103; and knowledge, 130, 130n105 “Family resemblance,” 79 Faux, Jean-Marie, 79n142 Feeling, 2, 108, 119n71, 123–25, 383; of dependence, 105 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 147 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104n25, 105, 108, 111, 115–16, 117, 125, 135, 137, 147 Finance, Joseph de, 75–76, 98n7, 107, 198n81, 206n101, 233 Index

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449

Finitude, 77n141, 201, 218, 221–22, 299, 300n107, 312, 380, 383, 386; of reason, 101; and form (Gestalt), 173–74, 173n27, 188; of freedom, 321 Forest, Aimé, 65n102, 66n104, 116n64, 206 Form: as eidos, 77–78, 80, 82, 84, 172; as morphe,- 77–84, 172 Foucault, Michel, 23, 339n203 Foundation: of truth, 256–57, 294, 308, 339, 342–43, 349 Frank, Manfred, 119n71, 144–145, 245n184, 292n85 Freedom, 32–35, 43–45, 48, 73, 97, 118, 125, 127, 194–206, 234, 236, 236n165, 237, 255, 267, 267n28, 309, 325, 325n174, 331–33, 368; as nature vs. as choice, 198–99; and certitude, 389–90, 392 Fruitfulness, 7, 69, 120n74, 121, 160n183, 178, 185, 186, 191, 226–27, 231, 233n153, 235, 246, 254, 331, 338, 369–70, 410, 425; of death, 264–65, 366; of truth, 347 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 81n151 Gadient, Lorenz, 112n52, 151n158, 161n184 Gardner, Lucy, 24n69, 35n21, 152n160, 264n21 Geistmetaphysik, 131, 168n10, 208 Gentile, Giovanni, 74 (epigraph) German Idealism, 29, 37, 42, 101–109, 154n167, 156, 229, 294, 362n46 Gestalt, 10, 12–27, 51–52, 100, 124, 163–254 passim, 255–56, 266, 279, 285, 324, 365, 400; as unity of form and content, 187–88; as primal form, 326–27, 331, 337, 426; as Lebensgestalt, 334, 341, 343; and motion, 163–67, 174–75; characteristics of, 167–75; as revelatory, 169; and being, 236; and spherically-curved space, 247, 247n190; and drama, 323–24, 343 Gift: of being, 29, 71, 82, 86, 94, 114, 116, 118, 120, 129, 155, 211, 231, 450

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Index

249, 317, 322, 338, 345, 369–70, 417, 423–25; of self, 117, 119, 122, 160–61, 179, 185–86, 206, 208–209, 212, 220, 265, 332–34, 344, 365–66, 399; as donum doni, 74, 141, 145, 345, 424 Gilbert, Paul, 176, 209n106, 355n25, 369n69, 399 Gilson, Etienne, 40n32, 41n35, 151n159, 193n168, 202, 205, 226 (epigraph), 232–233, 277, 354n20 Givord, Robert, 99n8 Gnosticism, 243 God: and being, 43–44, 47–50; identity and difference in, 67–74; as Trinity, 70–71, 421; implicit knowledge of, 57, 133, 133n115, 143; as different from the world, 67, 244, 412; as knowing things into being, 245, 249; as drama, 421 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 13, 14, 112, 113, 168, 172, 173, 176, 247, 398 Goodness: as transcendental property, 124, 234, 354, 357, 361–66, 368–70; as the Idea of the Good, 173, 304–307; in relation to intelligibility, 210; as principle of drama, 316, 318–22; as “more transcendental” than being or truth, 398, 414–15 Grätzel, Stephan, 8n19 Gregory of Nyssa, 13n29, 68, 361 Greisch, Jean, 99n8 Guardini, Romano, 279, 282–83 Guerriero, Elio, 12n23 Haas, Alois, 13n30 Hamann, Johann Georg, 169n15 Hammer, A. E., 123n85 Heart, 125, 127, 263, 288–94, 394–95, 400 Hebbel, F., 74 (epigraph) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 22, 23, 28, 29, 54–55, 70, 93n190, 98n5, 99n9, 106, 108, 119n71, 120n74, 121, 135, 143, 147, 166, 176, 180, 184, 186n56, 198, 205, 221, 222, 227, 237, 238n167, 239, 241, 242,

243, 252, 258, 287n75, 312, 323, 340–41, 343, 357n33 Heidegger, Martin, 4–6, 10, 11, 28, 29, 31, 33–36, 37, 38n27, 39, 43, 45–46, 52, 58, 61n89, 68, 77n141, 79n142, 81, 84–85, 99n8, 114n57, 125n92, 127, 144, 146, 166, 176–77, 199, 200n86, 210n108, 223n135, 234, 245–46, 263, 272, 278, 283n66, 287n75, 296–307, 310, 316–17, 320n165, 322, 325, 328, 335, 348, 352n11, 357n33, 406n158, 413n167, 418, 420, 426, 427 Henrich, Dieter, 103n19, 116n65 Henrici, Peter, 8n19, 13, 16n41, 28n3, 93n190, 257n3, 362 Heracleitus, 47, 70n113, 176, 253, 342 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 168n10 History, 30, 52, 74, 88–89, 93n190, 156, 254, 282, 335, 342, 421 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 106, 108n40 Holzer, Vincent, 15–16 Homer, 258n5, 348, 353 Humility, 419–20 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 11, 29, 46, 96, 112, 137n125, 145, 146, 147, 156–59, 166, 184n52, 198, 211n110, 231, 235, 283n68, 352n11, 413n167 Ide, Pascal, 7, 99, 159n80, 177n135, 400n144 Ideality: and reality, 56n79 227, 237, 241, 243, 252–53, 273, 311, 338, 342 Identitarianism, 1, 225, 252, 279 Identity, 1, 2, 345, 379; and difference, 5–6, 221, 238–39, 313, 410; as divine, 67–69; of child and mother, 119, 121; between thought and being, 122, 131–34, 140, 142, 148; of divine and human intelligence, 149;, of subject and object, 211; of goodness and truth, 382–83 Imperatori, Mario, 28n3, 301n108, 317n153 Image, 131n106, 131n107, 173n27, 179–88, 190, 209, 228, 282–83, 311 Imagination, 125, 191, 263, 289–90, 395 Imago Dei, 62, 63n95

Inauthenticity, 235–36, 300 Inspiration, 98, 98n4, 155, 290 Intellect, 116, 124, 158–59, 199–200, 231–32, 265n23, 272; and senses, 273–85 passim, 403–404, 424; and will 360n41, 376–411, 424 Intellectual: dynamism, 3–4, 6, 151, 207, 387, 395; intuition, 105, 137 Intentionality, 96, 112, 118, 126, 150, 210n108, 211n110, 231, 247, 272, 333, 358 Interiority, 60–62, 94, 98n5, 168n9, 232, 282, 294 Intersubjectivity, 72, 131, 350 Irrationalism, 2, 108, 386, 388, 406 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 175 Jaeger, Werner, 348n216 John of the Cross, Saint, 99n8 Jordan, Mark, 354, 379n91, 384n110, 394n134, 396 Joy, 118, 126–27, 374, 407, 427 Judgment, 2, 194–206, 224–26, 226n140, 233n153, 290, 290n79, 306, 319, 388, 419, 424; of spectators, 323 Jungmann, J., 405 Kairos, 84, 87–88, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 85, 95n194, 99n8, 100–106, 108, 113, 116, 125, 134, 135, 136, 138, 144, 150, 154n167, 156, 159n180, 168nn9,10, 169n15, 190, 196, 198, 207, 218, 245, 252, 258n7, 279, 285, 290n79, 293, 340, 352, 356, 362, 413 Kehre, 4 Kennen and erkennen, 212n111, 248 Kierkegaard, Søren, 2, 30–31, 55n76, 96 (epigraph), 148–49, 154, 260, 264, 288n76, 296n91 Kitto, H. D. F., 17n45 Klemm, David E., 105nn30–31 Kneller, Jane, 106n35 Knoepffler, Nikolaus, 352nn8–10 Knowledge: as union, 206, 212; as requiring difference, 208, 212; as life-giving exchange, 206–26 Kobusch, Theo, 367n65 Index

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451

Kockelmans, Joseph J., 352nn9,11 Kovach, Francis, 351n4, 354n24, 374n84, 376n86, 383n106, 394, 402n146, 403–405, 408, 409n163 Kuhn, Thomas, 99 Language, 110, 231, 234n157, 235–37, 254, 309, 347, 367; as doxological, 3n3 Lebenswelt, 158n178 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 154n167, 406n158 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 218, 400 Liberum arbitrium, 198 Liturgy, 236n164, 295, 301n109, 339 Logic, 20–21, 21n52, 121, 167, 186n56, 186; as triadic, 237–39; as quadratic, 241–42; of love, 242; of fruitfulness, 242; and principle of non-contradiction, 242–43 Lotz, J. B., 355n25 Love, 71, 73, 366, 424; parental, 111, 114–19, 121; as ultimate human act, 158; and knowledge, 159n180, 159n181, 207n103, 214, 392, 395; as co-extensive with Being, 209; between sexes, 330; and beauty, 409, 409n163; as ground of language, 231 Lubac, Henri de, 288n76 Lull, Raymond, 147 Lyric poetry, 21, 23n67 MacDonald, George, 251 (epigraph) MacKinnon, Donald, 95n194 Maimon, Salomon, 154n167 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 154n167 Manifestation, 75, 96n1, 169, 176–77, 179, 181, 185, 191, 216–17, 249, 253; as desire, 208–209; and beauty, 364–65 Marcel, Gabriel, 302n113 Maréchal, Joseph, 3, 149, 150–51, 154n167 Marion, Jean-Luc, 68n109, 156–57, 246n187, 413–14 Maritain, Jacques, 212, 394n134 Marriage, 291, 327–31, 333–38, 342, 344, 347–48, 409 Martyrdom, 263, 304, 306, 308–11, 327, 332, 335–36, 347–48 Marx, Karl, 147, 252 452

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Index

Mathesis universale, 147, 246n189 Mauriac, François, 311 (epigraph), 324 Maximus the Confessor, 59n83, 261n13, 361 Maxsein, Anton, 290n81, 290 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 226 (epigraph), 265 Mediation, 105–06, 149, 250n196; and immediacy, 108, 114, 119, 137, 142–44, 153–54, 196, 208, 216, 220–22, 227, 333, 373, 379; of senses and intellect to each other, 274–77 Meinong, Alexius, 24n72 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 230n149 Meta-anthropology, 257, 257n3, 258–60, 294, 308, 325, 337, 339, 346–47, 425 Metaphysics of presence, 1, 3n3, 81–82, 81n153, 148, 178 Millbank, John, 81n153 Mimesis, 254n203 Mind. See Intellect Modo, Aldo, 79n142 Monism (or monologicism), 3, 6, 10, 79, 122, 129, 145, 182, 185, 239, 248, 340 Monophorism, 138–39, 138n126, 152 Moss, David, 24n69, 35n21, 152n160, 264n21 Mother’s smile, 37, 101, 110–17, 129, 135, 141, 143, 152, 198, 211, 231, 283n68, 287, 293n86, 303, 333, 344, 397 Mounce, H. O., 33n15 Mozart, Wolfgang, 92, 187, 188 Mystery, 31–36, 72; of consciousness, 96–97; of being, 6, 13n31, 28, 58, 97, 128, 421; and truth, 176n34, 177, 188, 219–20, 343 Nebel, Gerhard, 311 (epigraph) Necessity, 32, 34, 43 Neoplatonism, 40, 42, 61n89, 148, 173–74, 211, 354n24 Notio entis, 153n162, 416–17 Neuhouser, Frederick, 105n28, 116n62 Newman, John Henry, 216n122 Newton, Isaac, 168n9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 149, 215–216, 235, 236, 313n142, 322, 427

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 106, 108n40 Objectivity, 4, 112–13, 123n82, 127–30, 210, 213, 227, 235–36, 244, 246–47, 252, 297, 306, 308, 332, 334, 336, 348, 409; and creativity, 409 O’Hanlon, Gerard F., 74n128 Onians, Richard, 87n175, 281n60 Ontotheology, 46n55, 56, 68 Origen, 361 Ouellet, Marc, 90n182 Paradigm shift, 99, 99n9 Parmenides, 148, 251n199 Participation, 89–93, 139 Pascal, Blaise, 174–75, 216n122, 294 “Pathos of distance,” 215–16 Paul, Saint, 253n200 Péguy, Charles, 130, 341n207 Pérez-Haro, Eliecar, 7, 13n31, 36n23, 78n142, 88n177, 114n57, 122n79, 259n9 Perl, Eric, 173n27, 206n98, 336n197 Person: as mission, 90; Persons in God, 71–72; as mediating being, 57–58 Personality, 14 Personalism, 99n9 Philosopher, 427–28 Pickstock, Catherine, 3n3, 24nn69,71, 81n153, 147, 156n168, 236n164, 295, 301n109, 310, 339n203 Pieper, Josef, 40n32, 76n136, 113n55, 199, 200n86, 211n109, 244–245, 315n147 Plato, 3, 11, 68, 70n113, 73n124, 92, 95, 98n4, 115n58, 117, 146, 148, 152, 154, 160n183, 166, 168n10, 175, 198, 206, 210, 212, 225, 226n140, 227, 235n161, 258n5, 263, 266, 287, 303–10, 312, 316, 317, 320n165, 323, 325, 327, 328, 329–31, 332, 335, 346, 353, 426, 427–28 Plessner, Helmut, 272 Plotinus, 42, 70n113, 138, 173, 174, 272n39, 353 Polanyi, Michael, 282n62 Polarity, 10, 15, 66–69, 201–202, 255, 261, 264, 285, 287, 293, 308, 310–11,

324, 326, 329, 333, 346, 356, 364–65, 371; as dramatic, 262 Pöltner, Günther, 355n28, 357n33, 384n109, 394, 396, 402n145, 405n157, 417n173 Ponticus, Evagrius, 295 (epigraph) Positivity, 33, 38–39, 39n29, 44, 48, 54–55, 71, 73, 86, 97, 114–15, 239, 244, 399 Potworowski, Christophe, 112n53 Poverty: of divine being, 48–49 Pouillon, H., 355n27 Presence 81, 95, 128, 157, 161, 248–49, 297; and absence, 128, 254. See also Metaphysics of presence Proclus, 40n33 Prufer, Thomas, 67n107, 121n75, 189n61, 229 Przywara, Erich, 7, 29, 49n63, 78n142, 80, 98n5, 116, 216, 361 Quash, Ben, 8n19, 13n32, 21–24, 25n74, 38n26, 81n153, 226n140, 343 Rahner, Karl, 37n25, 151, 153n162, 363n47, 381, 384, 402n145 Rapture, 194–95, 196, 198, 200n86, 201, 208, 246, 290, 332, 408–409 Rationalism, 386, 388, 406 Realism, 122n82, 212, 215, 215n119. See also Idealism Real distinction, 52, 84, 267 Reason: as identical to love, 206, 393; as open to mystery, 3–4, 26 Receptivity, 114–18, 125–26, 137, 144–45, 153n161, 160, 190–91, 208, 247, 279, 289 Reciprocal causality, 11, 65n102, 185, 188, 214, 351, 375, 380–94 passim, 396, 417, 424, 426; and transcendence, 246; of temporality, 248 Reciprocal mediation, 276–77 Reciprocity, 126, 129, 152, 182, 192, 208, 211, 221, 254, 374n82, 381; of unity and difference, 4 Recollection, 146, 148, 154, 420–21 Reditio completa, 38, 280 Relation: rational vs. real, 358–60, 411; as transcendental, 360, 400 Index

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453

Repetition, 148–49 Res: as fruit, 227, 229 Richardson, William J., 296n95, 296 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 197 Rioux, Bertrand, 234n157 Rosenzweig, Franz, 99n9 Rousselot, Pierre, 3, 97n3, 124, 159n181, 183n51, 207–208, 210, 211, 214, 218–219, 229, 233, 375, 380, 386–390, 391–394, 395n135, 396, 397 Russell, Bertrand, 145 Saba, Umberto, 163 (epigraph) Saint, 427 Saint-Pierre, Mario, 7, 361–362, 363, 364n51, 369, 399, 404n152, 418, 419n176 Salto mortale, 175 Sapientia, 281, 281n60 Sara, Juan Manuel, 6, 29n5, 49n63, 71n115, 79n142, 259n9, 327n180 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19n50, 144 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 236 Secondary causality, 250n196, 360 Seinsvergessenheit, 420, 422 Self-movement, 108–10, 116–17, 128–29, 137, 164, 199, 208, 287 Self-possession, 107, 111–12, 293, 339; as self-expropriation, 160 Senses: and intellect, 125, 230–31, 262, 273–85 passim, 291–92; and world of images, 179–80 Separatio, 40, 52 Scheler, Max, 314 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 55, 70n113, 73n124, 105–106, 108n40, 111, 119n71, 126, 147, 176, 239, 340 Schiller, Friedrich von, 176, 324 Schindler, David L. (Sr.), 282n62 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 105, 119n71, 123, 124n87, 125, 126, 136 Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard, 134n119 Schmitz, Kenneth, 47n58, 48n61, 55nn76,77, 81n152, 98n5, 108n40, 193n68, 341n207 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 2

454

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Index

Schrijver, Georges de, 7, 49n63, 247n190 Scola, Angelo, 58n83, 257n3, 259n9 Seifert, Josef, 302n112 Sertillanges, 211n109 Shakespeare, William, 334 Sicari, Antonio, 120n73 Sidney, Phillip, 254n203 Siewerth, Gustav, 7, 29, 34n20, 38n27, 39, 40n32, 44n46, 52–54, 56, 67n107, 70–72, 78n142, 89nn178,180, 121n75, 131n106, 153, 279, 282, 284, 290, 291, 357n33, 398, 413–14 Slade, Francis, 22n64 Socrates, 304–308, 323, 326 Sokolowski, Robert, 96n2, 258n5, 315n147 Solipsism, 150, 155, 302–303, 347 Sophocles, 314n144 Soul, 109–10, 154, 160, 262–63, 265–72 passim, 310, 329, 334–35, 337, 361, 376, 380, 382, 384, 422 Spinoza, Benedict de, 68, 154n167 Spirit, 65, 262–63, 265n23, 267–68, 291–92, 367 Spiritual senses, 279 Splett, Jörg, 7, 195n74, 343n209 Spontaneity, 114–18, 125–26, 144–45, 153n161, 155, 181, 190–91, 193, 208, 217, 247, 279, 289 Stambaugh, Joan, 297n97 State of the counsels 327, 330, 337n198 Steiner, J., 8n20 Stilpo, 197 Structuralism, 237 “Subjectification,” 245n184 Subjectivism, 122n82, 157, 200n86, 372 Subjectivity, 1, 96, 98–99, 113, 123–27, 127n98, 139, 213, 245, 297, 308, 332, 336, 409 System, 147–48, 155, 157, 251, 256, 289, 343 Tauler, Johann, 50 Temporality, 24, 78, 84–88, 248–49, 299, 335; of Gestalt, 169–70

Tensions, 203, 212, 260–61, 390–91, 398; of drama, 23, 23n66, 312–13, 313n142; of Gestalt, 167–68, 171n22, 255–57 Thérèse of Lisieux, 427 “Third,” 34, 57, 80, 118–21, 124, 124n88, 133, 165–66, 178, 183–84, 188, 205, 209, 214–15, 220–21, 226–31, 234–35, 240, 285, 288, 292, 334, 337, 392–94, 401, 410, 423 Thomism, 7, 11, 40, 52, 55n76, 113–14, 171, 175, 180, 198, 203, 207, 234, 249, 341n207, 352n10, 367; existential Thomism, 151n159; transcendental Thomism, 149, 151n158, 352 Thrownness, 114n57 Tourpe, Emmanuel, 28n3, 44n46, 70–72, 93n190, 413 Transcendental: method, 15; unity of apperception, 65, 100, 101–108, 135–37, 141–42, 154n167, 190, 205, 217, 18, 293, 327, 339; ego, 46–47, 104, 325, 352n11; vs. empirical ego, 104; imagination, 85, 85n164, 125n92 ; ideas, 102, categories, 102; subjectivity, 111, 113, 137; center of the Gestalt, 170 Transcendentals 11; history of, 351–56; and categories, 353–54, 356, 356n32 Trinity, 362–63, 363n47, 421 Truth: as transcendental property, 124, 128, 354–55, 357, 361–64, 366–70; as concordance or adequatio, 5, 164, 210–11, 216, 223n135, 358–59; as dramatic, 6–8, 226, 422, 423; as disclosure or revealedness, 5, 169, 176; as ontological, 244–45, 350, 358–60, 415, 425; as “beyond being,” 414–15 Ulrich, Ferdinand, 7, 29, 40n32, 44n46, 45n48, 47, 48, 53–54, 59n83, 64n100, 78n142, 87nn172,174, 95n192, 123n84, 154n166, 212n111, 229n145, 248, 341 Unity: as transcendental property, 354, 361–64, 368–74; of consciousness, 100, 129, 131–45, 164, 424; and being, 286, 232; of self and other,

116, of subject and object, 379, 400; as a priori, 138, of Gestalt, 170–71, 222; in diversity, 37, 172, 240; and difference, 256; of soul and body, 270, 280, 285; of senses and intellect, 275–76; of person, 285–95. See Transcendental unity of apperception Van de Wiele, J., 358n35 Velkley, Richard, 106 Verbum mentis, 140, 142, 229, 233 Verendlichungsbewegung, 53, 53n70 Via negativa, 56, 399, 399n142 Virgil, 353 Vision, 194–95, 196, 198, 200n86, 201, 332, 408–409 Voegelin, Eric, 3n3, 304n115 Vows, 11, 327–28, 330n187, 334–35, 337–38, 341–42, 344, 345n211, 347 Waldstein, Michael, 12n23, 16–17, 24n73, 168n9, 169, 170–71, 173n24, 183n51, 184n52 Waxman, Wayne, 102n14 Wilder, Thornton, 119n69 Wilhelmsen, Frederick, 41n35, 233n153 Will, 2, 93, 116, 124, 128, 158–59, 199–200, 375–411, 424. See also Intellect Williams, Rowan, 34n20, 37n25, 40n35, 151n158 Wippel, John, 40n35, 358n35 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 33n15, 79, 137n125, 195n175 Wonder, 32–33, 57–58, 97, 162, 297, 299–300, 306, 342, 370, 373–74, 406–407, 414 Word, 230–37, 344 Work, 90, 254 World stage, 226n140, 317 Yeago, David Stuart, 8n19, 19n48, 20–21, 23, 320 Zeits, James V., 49n63, 79n142 Zeno, 164–165, 197, 275 Zöller, Günter, 105

Index

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455

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, series editor

1

John D. Caputo, ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

2

Michael Strawser Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification.

3

Michael D. Barber Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation.

4

James H. Olthuis, ed. Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality.

5

James Swindal Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth.

6

Richard Kearney Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition.

7

Thomas W. Busch Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation— Essays on Late Existentialism.

8

Edith Wyschogrod Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition.

9

Francis J. Ambrosio, ed. The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.

10

Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

11

Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds. Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.

12

Trish Glazebrook Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science.

13

Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy.

14

Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition.

15

Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricœur Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

16

Karl Jaspers The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

17

Jean-Luc Marion The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson.

18

Jeffrey Dudiak The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

19

Robyn Horner Rethinking God As Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology.

20

Mark Dooley The Politics of Exodus: Søren Keirkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility.

21

Merold Westphal Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith: Overcoming Onto-Theology.

22

Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds. The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice.

23

Stanislas Breton The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter.

24

Jean-Luc Marion Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

25

Peter H. Spader Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise.

26

Jean-Louis Chrétien The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl.

27

Don Cupitt Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays.

28

Jean-Luc Marion In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud.

29

Phillip Goodchild Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.

30

William J. Richardson, S.J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought.

31

Jeffrey Andrew Barash Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning.

32

Jean-Louis Chrétien Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

33

Jean-Louis Chrétien The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport.