Challenging A Giant

In any intellectual discipline, there are those whom we call giants. A giant is someone so big you can’t get around him. In the recent history of theology there are, for instance, the Protestant Karl Barth and the Catholic Karl Rahner. A person who has not come to terms with, or at least taken a position with respect to, Barth and Rahner can hardly be taken seriously as a theologian. No more than someone ignorant of or indifferent toward Einstein or Planck is a serious physicist. In the last twenty years or so, Hans Urs von Balthasar has been widely hailed as another such theological giant, with Catholics, Protestants, and, to a lesser extent, Orthodox thinkers producing numerous monographs on his prodigious corpus. Balthasar plays a large part in, for instance, David Hart’s recent and justly acclaimed The Beauty of the Infinite.

Balthasar was a Swiss thinker who died at age eighty-three in 1988 and was created a cardinal by John Paul the Great (although he did not live to receive the red hat). The most invitational introduction to Balthasar’s great enterprise is Edward T. Oakes’ Pattern of Redemption. It is an excellent summary, and a very frisky summary at that. Balthasar’s own writings, filling a very long bookshelf, are usually anything but frisky. He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one’s effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counterintuitive nature. One spends pleasurable hours reading Balthasar not so much in an analytical mode as in surrendering oneself to the beauty of how his mind works and its adventurous probings of theological imagination. Reading Balthasar is in large part a meditative exercise bordering on the contemplative.

But now comes along a young scholar of a determinedly no-nonsense disposition with a five-hundred-page indictment of Balthasar for being at serious odds with cardinal teachings of Scripture and the consensual tradition of Christian orthodoxy. Lux in Tenebris: The Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Theological Opinion of Hans Urs von Balthasar is a dissertation, by Alyssa Helene Pitstick, accepted by the prestigious University of St. Thomas (better known as the Angelicum) in Rome. The title may suggest a limited critique of Balthasar’s argument that—contrary to the tradition of liturgy, iconography, and teaching, both East and West—the Holy Saturday descent into hell was not triumphant but was the completion of Christ’s redemptive work in his absolute alienation from God in the state of the damned. Far from being an arcane academic dispute, Pitstick contends, this “theological opinion” of Balthasar’s entails grave departures from orthodox teaching on the two natures, human and divine, in the one person of Christ, and indeed raises fundamental questions about the co-equality of the Son in the Holy Trinity.

Alyssa Pitstick gives no quarter. Along the long way of her argument, she notes instances in which Balthasar, in her view, misrepresents scriptural, patristic, and magisterial texts and simply ignores aspects of the tradition inconvenient to his argument. I confess that at first I thought she was being terribly ungenerous, even nitpicking, but she finally convinced me that, on the descent into hell and some other signature themes of the great man, there are, at least implicitly, possible incompatibilities with the received structure of faith. It is an audacious thing for a doctoral student to take on a thinker of the stature of Balthasar, but Alyssa Pitstick has thrown down a gauntlet that other theologians should not ignore.

Her critique notwithstanding, I continue to admire and delight in the mind of Hans Urs von Balthasar. At his funeral, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, described Balthasar as perhaps the most learned man in Europe. That John Paul created him a cardinal for his contributions to Catholic theology cannot lightly be dismissed. His restoration of the categories of beauty and drama in contemporary theological reflection is a singular achievement. His book on Karl Barth and the relationship between nature and grace is, if one may be permitted the term, magisterial. I recommend reading Father Oakes’ introduction and then going on to some of the Balthasar texts. Anyone with a healthy theological curiosity risks being hooked in short order. And yet, like the third-century Origen, to whom Balthasar was deeply devoted, Balthasar may end up with a somewhat ambiguous reputation in the history of Christian thought. There is no doubt he is a giant, albeit a flawed giant. Thanks to Alyssa Helene Pitstick, a new and lively debate over his achievement is almost certainly underway. It is hoped that her thesis, revised in book form, will be out from Eerdmans later this year.