Thomas G.

Dalzell

The Enrichment of God in Balthasar’s

Trinitarian Eschatology
For those who fear or suspect that the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar may represent
a version of Hegelianism for Catholics, or high-powered intellectual play-acting, or sheer
mystification, this article offers an alternative interpretation. By differentiating among the
various levels of language — metaphysical, analogical, and metaphorical — that he deploys,
the author attempts to show how Balthasar, while conscious of the traps that ensnare the
less wary, has striven nevertheless to breathe new life into the seemingly intractable prob-
lem of how to relate the world to God.

Introduction

of Hans Urs von Balthasar is regarded by many as overly

The theology
conservative. This is not helped by the fact that some reactionary
groups in the Church today are claiming Balthasar for themselves and
interpreting his theology in the light of their own interests.’ While one
can be critical of certain inconsistencies in his vast œuvre,è this paper

intends to recognise one aspect of his theology which can be considered

a genuine achievement and even termed ’progressive’.’ Despite Aquinas’s
ruling out the possibility of a mutual relationship between God and the
world, Balthasar constructs a credible theological framework which, on
the one hand, protects the transcendence of God and, on the other,
allows for a the world and God in which the world
relationship between
not only receives but gives, and God’s receiving
amounts to an enrich-
ment of God. Such a view of encounter with God is not unproblematic
for it would seem excluded by metaphysics from the start. Yet we will see
that Balthasar’s method of combining concept with image and metaphor
allows him to safeguard God’s transcendence without reducing eternal life
to a ’beatific vision’. Firstly, however, we need to investigate his idea of
the immanent Trinity since he understands encounter with God as an
active participation in the encounter in God between the divine person.
1. On this see Werner Loser, in Brian W. Hughes and Werner Lower, Karl Rahner and
Hans Urs von Balthasar. An Interview with Wemer Löser’, America (October 16, 1999),
16-20 at 20.
2. See Ben Quash, ’Drama and the Ends of Modernity’, in Lucy Gardner, David Moss, Ben
Quash and Graham Ward (eds.), Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1999), 139-171 at 159f.; Gerald E O’Hanlon, ’May Christians Hope fora Better World?’,
in ITQ, 54 (1988), 175-189; Thomas G. Dalzell, ’Lack of Social Drama in Balthasar’s
Theological Dramatics’, in Theological Studies, 60 ( 1999), 457-475.
3. I am grateful to Nicholas Madden, ODC, Declan Marmton, SM. John Sherrington, and
Eamonn Conway for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
3
4

1. Balthasar’s Conception of the Immanent Trinity

(a) The Economic Realisation of an Eternal Play
Balthasar’s conception of the inner life of God is based on God’s self-
revelation in the economy of salvation. Borrowing categories from the
world of the theatre, he understands the history of salvation in terms of a
play which reveals an eternal play: the inner life of the trinitarian God.
The claim of Jesus - the leading actor in the economic play - about him-
self, his experience of Godforsakenness on the cross, and the bridging
over of that distance by the Holy Spirit in the resurrection allow

Balthasar to think of the inner life of God in terms of separation and

unity; from all eternity God has an ’Other’, the Son, and the distance
between them is held open and bridged over by the Spirit as love.’ Hence,
for Balthasar, the drama doesn’t begin with the economy of salvation.
God does not create the world out of need, as if God were lonely and
needed a dialogue partner. Nor does God enter the world for God’s own
sake, as if without the world God would be incomplete. Rather, there is,
in his view, an eternal drama between the Father and the Son and this is
thought to open up in the economy for the benefit of human freedom.
Salvation is a matter of the world’s unholy or sinful distance from God
being taken by the incarnate Son into his eternal distance from the
Father, and that distance being bridged over in the resurrection.’ But if
Balthasar rejects the notion that God needs the world, he does believe
that the world’s being drawn into God’s play amounts to an enrichment
of God. To be in a position to pass judgement on this claim - that God
can gain from the finite world - we need to examine his idea of the imma-

nent Trinity as such.

(b) The Immanent Trinity as Eternal Exchange of Love

Like Jurgen Moltmann, Balthasar sees the cross as a trinitarian event.
However, he contends that Moltmann’s understanding of that event
reduces God to a tragic, mythological God. For Moltmann, the historical
event of the cross represents a radical tearing apart of the inner life of
God as the decisive moment in God’s becoming a Trinity.’ Balthasar, on
the other hand, while he believes that the cross reveals the distance
between the Son and the Father, will not accept that the cross first
brought the immanent Trinity to its completion. In such a notion, he
detects Hegel’s assimilation of the process of the world to the inner
4. ’Wer ist Jesus von Nazareth für mich?’, in Heinrich Spaemann (ed.), Hundert zeitgenös-
sische Zeugnisse (München: Kösel, 1973), 17; Theodramatik, III (Einsiedeln: Johannes,
1980), 301.
5. See ibid., 326; 337.
6. See Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981), 117-121; The
Crucified God (London: SCM, 1974), 246.
 5

history of God., Against such a lumping together of the two processes, he

argues that God does not experience radical separation for the first time
in the cross event. Rather, he understands the drama of the immanent
Trinity which, to his mind, eternally includes separation and unity, to be
the ultimate ground of the world process - including the separation of the
cross.’ While Nioltniann cannot think of the trinitarian God existing
without the world, Balthasar perceives the eventfulness of the immanent
trinitarian event to be so infinite that it already includes the possibility of
the world and every event in it, and is therefore the eternal presupposi-
tion of the Godforsakenness of the Son on the cross.
Balthasar’s idea of the immanent Trinity also contrasts with that of Karl
Rahner. In his monograph, The Trinity, Karl Rahner found a way to pre-
sent the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystery of salvation by means of his
famous axiom: ’the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice
versa’.c) Holding that the Incarnation is not the incarnation of God ’in
general’ but of the Logos as such, and that grace is not a communication
by efficient causality of the one divine nature but rather a self-communi-
cation by ’quasi-formal’ causality of the three persons in their particular-
ity, Rahner found a way to exclude economic Sabellianism.&dquo;’ Yet,
Balthasar suggests that Rahner’s conception of the immanent Trinity
leaves itself open to the charge of Sabellianism. The problem is that while
Rahner’s idea of God’s economic self-communication means the world
can have proper relationships with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Rahner is less keen to speak about interpersonal relationships within the
immanent Trinity. He will not speak about three ’persons’ in God because
’person’ in the modern sense of the word means ’centre of consciousness
and activity’. For this reason, he prefers to refer to the hypostases as three
’distinct manners of subsisting’. This leads Balthasar to think that Rahner
gives too much weight to the economic Trinity; the real drama, for
Rahner, takes place in the economy while the immanent Trinity is
reduced to a mere precondition of a true and serious self-communication
in the economy. Self-communication within Rahner’s immanent Trinity,
he argues, remains purely formal because the ’distinct manners of subsist-
ing’ are unable to say ’You’ to each other and there is no mutual love in
God.
Against this undramatic conception, Balthasar will try to develop an
idea of the self-communication process in God which is a more credible
prototype of God’s self-communication in the economy. As we will now
see, in his own schema, the Father not only communicates himself eter-
nally in the Son, but communicates himself to the Son, gives away his
divinity to the Son as a distinct divine person. The Son is not only the
7. See Theodramatik, III, 297, 299-301.
8. Theodramatik, IV (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1983), 218-222.
9. Rahner, The Trinity (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), 22.
10. Ibid., 24-33; 34-38.
6
.. ~~~..~. ~ . ~ .L.~L~_.~~~ ,~.
&dquo;’<.’--’..L 1..1.’-..1...L....,..L’’’’’’’’’’’’

Word spoken but is the Word who speaks. His response to the Father is
understood as an eternal saying thanks (Danksagung) for the divinity he
has received.&dquo; And finally, for Balthasar, the Holy Spirit is the mutual
love and fruitfulness of the love between the Father and the Son, the per-
sonified love which holds apart the distance between two divine persons
and bridges it over.’2 In short, Balthasar posits an interpersonal exchange
of love in the immanent Trinity as the ground of God’s economic involve-
ment with the world and, since that love is understood to be perfectly
realised from all eternity, it avoids making God into a tragic, mythologi-
cal God whose process of separating and uniting is completed in this
world.
The abandonment of Jesus on the cross by the Father is, for Balthasar,
and here he agrees with Moltmann, an event which reaches into the
inner life of God. However, he will not accept that the implied distance
between the Father and the Son comes about for the first time in the cross
event. Rather it is for him an eternal distance inside of which all possible
distances as they appear in the finite world are ever included and
embraced.&dquo; This infinite distance is thought to come about inside God
when the Father eternally generates the Son as the infinite other of him-
self. Following Bulgakov, 14 Balthasar characterises this generation of the
Son by the first person in God as an original and all-grounding divine
kenosis. In it the Father expropriates himself completely of his divinity -
without ceasing to be God - and makes it over to the Son. Rather than
the Father simply sharing his divinity with an other in bringing forth a
Son, the Father is understood to communicate all that he is to the Son (er
teilt sie nicht ’mit’ dem Sohn, sondern teilt dem Sohn alles Seine ’mit’) .15 In let-
ting the Son be, the Father is thought to give himself away to the Son.
Indeed, the Father is said to be this ’giving up movement’, holding noth-
ing back for himself. There is then, according to Balthasar, an absolute
renunciation in the first divine person of being God alone, a letting go of
being God and in that sense a divine Godlessness (Gott-losigkeit) out of
love which, he proposes, pre-eminently lays a foundation for the very pos-
sibility of worldly Godlessness - that of those who have abandoned God
but also the ’Godlessness’ of the one abandoned on the cross.&dquo;
Furthermore, since this is not something the Father does but what he
substantially is, since each of the divine persons is identical with the
divine essence, Balthasar concludes that the whole divine nature has to
be spoken of in terms of self-gift. In other words, to be God is to give

11. See Theodramatik, III, 303, 308; ’Pneuma und Institution’, in Pneuma und Institution.
Skizzen zur Theologie, IV (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1974), 201-235 at 224.
12. Theodramatik, III, 308, ’Pneuma und Institution’, 201-235 at 224-225; Theodramatik,
III, 301.
13. Ibid., 297, 301.
14. See Bulgakov, Le verbe incarn&eacute;: Agnus Dei (Paris: Aubier, 1943), cited ibid., 291.
15. Balthasar, ibid., 300.
16. See ibid., 301.
 7

oneself away. The Father doesn’t cease to be God in expropriating him-

self, for it is precisely in that self-expropriation that the Father is God.
Consequently, if the Son is to be God, he cannot possess the divinity
except in the form of self-gift. Yet, as will be important for our under-
standing of God’s receiving from the world, Balthasar thinks that the Son
cannot possess the divinity except in the mode of reception,17 since he has
it from the Father. Nevertheless, if each of the divine hypostases possesses
the divine nature each in his own way, the Son’s reception of the divin-
ity must, it is argued, include self-gift and this is understood in terms of a
readiness to affirm his own being God as a loving response to the original
kenosis of the Father. 18 Balthasar will even go so far as to suggest that the
Father ’only’ (but eternally) receives himself as Father when the Son
’agrees’ to be the Son. It is this dramatic giving and receiving of love in
God that leads Balthasar to characterise the Holy Spirit as the ’corre-
spondence’ of fathering gift and filial answering gift. As the identity of
giving gift and thanking gift, the Holy Spirit is said to be self-gift in the
form of an absolute ’We’, which not only holds open the infinite differ-
ence between the ’I’ and the ’Thou’ in God, but eternally bridges it over.

This use of ’1-thou’ language brings us to one of the more controver-

sial aspects of this conception of the immanent Trinity. In Balthasar’s
trinitarian ontology, God is not primarily absolute substance or Being, but
absolute love which has been specified in Jesus Christ as interpersonal.
Basing his reflection on the revealed relationship between the incarnate
Son and the Father, Balthasar proposes that God’s love is best understood
not only as perfectly realised but as a dynamic exchange between the

hypostases. This is why he thinks the psychological analogy based on the

’faculties’ of an individual human subject,&dquo; must be complemented by
employing an intersubjective analogy&dquo; if insight into God’s inner life is to
be gained. Hence his positing, like Heribert Mühlen,èl an ’1-Thou’ in God
which is analogous to interpersonal relationship in the human sphere.
But it is one thing to use an ’I-Thou’ analogy to understand the love in
God and another to describe that love, as Balthasar does, in terms of suf-
fering, surprise, and increase. How can he justify this when he is so keen
to avoid making God into a mythological figure?

17. See ibid., 303.

18. Ibid., 301, 303.
19. See Augustine, De trin., 10, 11, 18; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 27, a. 1-
3 ; Bernard Lonergan, ’Christology Today: Methodological Questions’, in Frederick Crowe
(ed.), Third Collection. Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan SJ (NY: Paulist, 1985), 74-99 at 93-
94.
20. The analogies of the common work of two friends as the fruit of their ’we’ and the love
of two parents for their child allow Balthasar to speak about the Holy Spirit as the fruit-
fulness of the divine ’I-Thou’. See ’Der Herlige Geist als Liebe’, in Spiritus Creator. Skizzen
zur Theologie, III (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1967), 106-122 at 115; Theologik, II (Einsiedeln:
Johannes, 1985), 54-57; 149-151, 154 note 37.
21. See M&uuml;hlen, Der Heilige Geist als Person in der Trinit&auml;t, bei der Inkanation und im
Gnadenbund: Ich-Dit-Wir (M&uuml;nster: Aschendorff), 1967.
8

When Balthasar talks about the trinitarian event in terms of an eternal

‘I-Thou’ relationship, he is clearly speaking analogically. But when he
starts to describe the dynamism of that ’I-Thou’ in terms of suffering, sur-
prise, and increase, ’ 2- he is using properly metaphorical language. He
argues that concepts alone fail to tell us much about the mystery of God’s
love and must be combined with metaphor and image. To his mind, this
way of paradox yields more knowledge than conceptual thought alone,
and is closer to the approach of the Scriptures. 21 Yet, if this use of
metaphor means suspending the objections from negative (apophatic)
theology, Balthasar does recognise that metaphorical language can be
stretched too far and needs a corrective. Hence if he thinks ’the meta-

physical without the metaphorical is empty’, he does accept that ’the

metaphorical without the metaphysical is blind’ .2’ How this method oper,
ates will become clearer, if we examine his understanding of suffering, sur-

prise, and increase in God.

(c) Suffering, Surprise, and Increase in God

The first thing to be said about Balthasar’s conception of divine suffer-

ing is that it excludes this-worldly suffering from the life of the transcen-
dent God. 25 It avoids what he calls ’all fashionable talk of the suffering of
God’ which suggests that God suffers in the way that we do. Yet, if finite
suffering in God is ruled out, Balthasar proposes that there is something
like suffering in God. He is not talking here about suffering as an evil, the
suffering we experience when we lack something. Rather, what he has in
mind is the suffering involved in kenotic love. The emptying of the
Father’s heart in letting the Son proceed, is taken to be the eternal pre-
supposition and pre-eminent instance of possible separation, alienation
and pain in the world. From all eternity, therefore, something like suffer-
ing is integral to the trinitarian drama. The Godlessness of God - out of
love - in letting another be God is, for Balthasar, an event of divine suf-
fering, and all that can become suffering in this world, including the Son’s
suffering on the cross, is thought to have its ground in it. 26 Here we can
see Balthasar’s ’razor’s edge’ method at work. On the one hand, it protects

the transcendence of God by ruling out worldly suffering from the imma-
nent Trinity and yet it dares to imagine an event in God which lays the
foundation for all possible suffering in the world and the participation of

22. See Theodramatik, II/1 (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1976), 231-235 ; IV, 84-86, 470-471.
23. See Herrlichkeit, I (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1961), 314-316; III/2.2 (Einsiedeln:
Johannes, 1969), 189f. For a fuller analysis of Balthasar’s complementing the analogical
with the metaphorical, see O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs
von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 141-144.
24. For Balthasar’s acceptance of Gottlieb S&ouml;hngen’s adaptation of the Kantian dictum,
see Theologik, II, 248, note 3.
25. Theodramatik, III, 302.
26. Ibid., 305; 302; IV, 218-222.
 9

God in it. What negative theology alone would forbid is thought to be

demanded by the cross event. Rather than simply saying that the cross
reveals that God is love, he maintains that faith is obliged to say some-
thing about that love and to imagine (erahnen) something in God like a
suffering out of love which is the groundless ground of worldly suffering.----
As for surprise in God, the suggestion that the Father could be sur-
prised at the Son’s response would appear, at first sight, to compromise the
omniscience of God on the one hand and the unity of the divine essence
on the other. How could God be surprised if God knows everything? How

could the Father be surprised with what the Son does with his freedom if
there is only one freedom in God? Yet Balthasar’s description of the ’I-
Thou’ relationship in God includes the possibility of surprise. But once
again, finite experience is ruled out. The surprise in question is not
related to a privation of knowledge; nor does it imply the existence of
essentially different freedoms in God. Rather, divine surprise is conceived
by Balthasar as a perfection related to the experience of joy and delight
associated with our experience of interpersonal love. If his soteriology
allows for divine anger to be understood as a modality of God’s love, the
attribution of surprise as another modality is an attempt to go beyond the
limitations of negative theology in order to say something positive about
the liveliness of trinitarian love. Again, it is not as if Balthasar thinks the
Father does not know what the eternal Son will do with the freedom he
has received, for he accepts that the Son could hardly be consubstantial
if he were not in fact self-gift like the Father His recourse to metaphor
to speak about the Father’s surprise at the Son’s response is an attempt to
say something about the Father’s joy at the extent of the Son’s self-gift.
He will even state that within the ’1-Thou’ between the Father and the
Son, it is possible to imagine that the Son loves the Father back more
than the Father had ever expected ’in his wildest dreams’ (kuhnsten
Erwartungen).’-’ If this seems to stretch the analogy with created love too
far in the direction of metaphor, Balthasar believes that this description
of the event in God does more justice to the greatness of that event than
any concepts which speak about the divine life merely in terms of
absolute but undramatic perfection.
With regard to increase in God, the exchange of love which is consti-
tuted by the divine processions has not, in Balthasar’s view, happened
once and for all. It is thought, rather, to be eternally taking place. But he
does not think of this merely in terms of an ongoing ’backwards and for-
wards’ of perfect love for all eternity as the Father gives the Son to him
self and the Son returns himself to the Father. That would not do justice,
in Balthasar’s view, to the infinite life of God which, to his mind, is full of
drama. He imagines the exchange, rather, to be an ever-greater intensity
27. Theodramatik, III, 302.
28. Ibid., 308.
29. Theodramatik, IV, 69.
10

of mutual loving&dquo; and contends that the infinite love between the Father
and the Son cannot be adequately expressed by a superlative; hence his
claim that their love is not only ’ever-greater’ than we can understand
but, even though God is fully transparent to God, ‘ever-more’ than God
expects.3’ So if it is accepted that God’s love is ever perfect, Balthasar
imagines that that love can grow and develop. Of course, he is not posit-
ing here a type of worldly becoming in God as if God could move from
potency to act. 3: Yet, if such a process of self-development in God is ruled
out, he does think it possible to conceive of a process of divine love which
is ever perfect and yet forever coming to be.3J Hence his preference for
Gregory of Nyssa’s analogy of the ’fountain’ to understand the inner life
of God rather than the image of an overflowing crater which Plotinus
used to understand the process by which the One realises itself.34
Balthasar applies Gregory’s analogy to the dramatic giving and receiving
of love in the immanent Trinity. On the one hand, that love is perfect and
so devoid of worldly becoming. Yet, on the other hand, just as the foun-
tain is apparently ever-new as the water returns to its source, there is in
God an ongoing circular dynamic of love which, Balthasar proposes, is
ever increasing in intensity.
already been seen that, in this idea of the immanent Trinity, the
It has
Holy Spirit is understood as the mutual love of the Father and the Son
and as the fruitfulness of that love.35 It is this fruitfulness that accounts for
the ’ever-greater’ character of the love in God. If the Son’s loving
response to the Father amounts to bringing his willing into line with the
Father’s prior is what Balthasar calls ’a lov-
willing so that what emerges
ing agreement between God and God’,36 this is not taken to be some life-
less undramatic coincidence of two willings. What emerges (eternally) is
not just a common decision to love but something much greater, some-

thing characterised by increase (and surprise) and which corresponds to

the liveliness of interpersonal love. Hence, for Balthasar, the Spirit rep-
resents not only a concretising of the common decision of the Father and
the Son, but at the same time a divine ‘ever-more’, an eternal exuberance

30. See ibid., 80-83, 367.

31. See Theologik, III (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1987), 146.
32. Hence his speaking about the eternal process in God as ’timeless’ in order to stress that
there is an absence of worldly time in God and therefore an absence of worldly’becoming’.
Yet, it should be noted that Balthasar does in fact speak about a ’supra-time’ ) &Uuml;ber-Zeit of
(
God which is neither the absence of time nor eternal duration but, analogous to what is
positive in created time, the medium for action and love (see Theodramatik, IV, 80-83)
which allows for a liveliness and an ever-greater intensity of giving and receiving of love
in God (see Theodramatik, III, 91; IV, 24, 25, 101, 225, 367).
33. Ibid., 63.
34. See Balthasar, Pr&eacute;sence et Pens&eacute;e. Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Gr&eacute;goire de Nysse
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1942) 123-132; Theodramatik, IV, 67. For a critique of Plotinus’ use of
the crater image, see Gregory Nazianzus, Or. theol., III, C 2 (PG, 36, 76 A).
35. See Theodramatik, III, 303, 308; ’Pneuma und Institution’, 201-235 at 224.
36. Theodramatik, IV, 77-78; 83-84.
 11

(Uberschwang) and ’surplus’ (Oberschuj3) of loving.~ He will even go so far

as to imagine that in the conversation between the Father and the Son,
the Spirit is forever showing to each new possibilities for their self-gift to
each other and so further delight as expectations are surpassed.&dquo; As we
will see in the next section of this paper, it is only within this ever-greater
fulfilment of expectations in God that Balthasar thinks any receiving
from the world can find its place.

II. Encounter with God as Participation in the Encounter in God

(a) Inclusion in the Divine ’I-Thou’

If Balthasar sees the final destiny of humankind
as participation in the

trinitarian process of life in

God, he maintains that this is a matter of the
world as something ’different from God’ (Anders-als-Gott) becoming more
itself within what is ’different in God’ (Anders-in-Gott).3y Just as finite
Being is understood by Balthasar to be a participation in the Being proper
to the eternal Son, since both types of Being have been received, he con-
tends that the world’s taking part in the ’1-thou’ in God can only be from
its place of participation in the otherness of the eternal Son. Hence one
can never, in his view, dissolve into the love in God but always has one’s

proper place - as a finite other - in the otherness of God’s infinite Other

-

the Son. But access to the exchange of love in God, according to

Balthasar, is only possible through the work of the incarnate Son and,
above all, his exchange of places with sinful humanity. In virtue of his
’topological’ otherness within the Trinity he enters into solidarity with
the otherness of finite freedom, especially the freedom which says ’No’
and distances itself from God. This is how Balthasar understands the work
of Jesus on the cross. He who did not sin identifies with sin (2Cor. 5:21)
on Good Friday to the extent of experiencing Godforsakenness, and his
restoration to intimacy with the Father on Easter Sunday draws the world
into that unity as well. He becomes so much one with humanity and,
above all, sinners, that when he returns to closeness with the Father he
brings the world with him. We saw before that the Son’s return to the
Father in the resurrection is understood by Balthasar to be the economic
realisation of his eternal return, his giving himself back to the Father
within the ’1-thou’ of the immanent Trinity. But Balthasar’s point is that
the opening up of that event of love in the economy is for the benefit of
human freedom. When the incarnate Son returns to the Father, he takes
the world with him - without overpowering anyone’s freedom - into the
exchange of love in God.42 The natural movement of the finite towards
37. Ibid., 68, 78; Theologik, III, 218-219.
38. ’Pneuma und Institution’, 224-226.
39. Theodramatik, IV, 92.
40. ’Eschatologie im Umri&szlig;’, in Pneuma und Institution, 410-455 at 424.
12

God is gathered into God’s eternal supra-movement ( Uber-bewegung)

in
virtue of the cross and resurrection of Jesus .41 So, for Balthasar, if the cre-
ated person is to have any meaningful part in the ’1-thou’ in God, it can
only be by sharing in the incarnate Son’s relationship with the Father.
One is enabled not only to say ’Yes’ to one’s mission but, in and with the
Son, Balthasar proposes, to send the Holy Spirit to God the Father. 42 As
we will now see, this is because he holds that admission to the trinitarian
drama does not make the human party a spectator but an active partici-
pant in the streaming life of God.

(b) Beatific Vision or Dramatic Mutual Encounter?

In Balthasar’s view, heaven is not about watching the trinitarian play.

For that reason, he thinks that talk about participation in the divine life
in terms of a ’vision of God’ alone is an inadequate and one-sided attempt
at describing what, to his mind, has more to do with a dynamic encounter
of two freedoms, divine and human.&dquo; The human freedom in question is
not the freedom of humankind in general but of the individual subject.
What is important to Balthasar is whether or not the individual will
’choose God’s choice’ (after Ignatius), proportion himself or herself better
to Christ as the analogia entis in person (after Przywara), take on the role
for which he or she has been scripted (Theodramatik).4~ Just as a person’s
life has many twists and turns and is characterised by dramatic tension, so
eternal life, in his view, cannot be reduced to something merely contem-
plated. In the first place, he argues that God is not an object to be looked
at, and secondly, while the language of vision implies that God gives
God’s self to be gazed at,45 he thinks that God cannot be fully and com-
prehensively captured by any such gazing. Because God remains ever-
more mysterious and because the trinitarian event remains ultimately

’why-less’, he concludes that it is unable to be grasped completely.46

41. Theodramatik, IV, 475.
42. See ’Das unterscheidend Christliche der Gotteserfahrung’, in Pneuma und Institution,
26-37 at 35-36.
43. See Theodramatik, IV, 361-476.
44. It has been argued elsewhere that the preservation of Balthasar’s interest in the anal-
ogy of proportionality gives rise to an interpersonal model of the Trinity in Theodramatik
rather than a social one and a corresponding emphasis on the individual’s relationship with
God to the neglect of social issues. See Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and
Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997).
45. It can be objected that this is a one-sided depiction of the beatific vision; more than
looking, it can be understood to involve an active contemplation and communion with
God. Yet, Balthasar’s point is that a fuller understanding of the dynamic nature of eternal
life is to be had by employing dramatic categories. This reflects his claim that the aesthet-
ics of Herrlichkeit is only a prelude to the central event studied in Theodramatik (see ’Noch
ein Jahrzehnt’, in Mein Werk
- Durchblicke, Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1990, 77); just as God’s
revelation in the world is not an object to be looked at, but God’s action which calls for a
response in terms of action (Theodramatik, I, 15), participation in the divine life is thought
to be no less dramatic than the play of human existence (see Theodramatik, IV, 375-376).
46. Theodramatik, IV, 373.
 13

Moreover, his argument eschatological encounter of divine

is that the
and human freedom cannot evolve around vision alone. While he does-
n’t reject the notion of a t>Ïsio altogether, he judges it inadequate to
describe participation in the liveliness of the trinitarian event. While the
’beatific vision’ has traditionally been understood to refer to something
qualitatively richer than mere looking, Balthasar still thinks that even
active contemplation of the divinity would not do justice either to the
liveliness of the trinitarian event or the dynamism of the human spirit. To
his mind, eternal life is about taking part in the drama of the trinitarian
life.
He seeks support for his position in Gregory of Nyssa and Eriugena.&dquo; It
was noted earlier that Balthasar refers to Gregory’s image of the fountain

which combines the elements of rest and movement, in order to seek to

demonstrate the compatibility of God’s Being and becoming. Now he
employs it to explain the human inability completely to capture God in
gazing, since God’s self-revelation is simultaneously grasped and forever
new. He also draws on Eriugena’s conclusion that the derivation of Theos

from theoreo (I see) and theo (I run) means not only that God sees and
runs, but also that human knowledge of God is both a gazing (Schauen)
and a running (Durchlaufen). For Balthasar, the dynamic event of love in
God must be thought of as providing ’room’ for creatures in such a way
that they are not merely spectators but active participants. If there is an
eternal liveliness in God and something like an ’ever-more’ in the sense
of an increase of love and the surpassing of expectations, he argues for an
active part in that increase for those taken into the trinitarian drama. Just
as Jesus promises the Samaritan woman that the water he gives will turn

into a source springing up to eternal life (Jn 4:14),~~ Balthasar imagines

that when one is taken into the circle of love in God, one not only
receives but is a source in the sense of having something to contribute to
the conversation. Hence his thinking that, like ’eternal rest’, the notion
of a ’beatific vision’ is inadequate to describe the ultimate end of human
freedom. In his view, that end is a matter of created freedom being
allowed to move about and develop inside the infinite ’space’ in God .4&dquo;
Nor is such a movement an aimless enjoyment of bliss. On the contrary,
it is understood to have the form of the three-in-one life in the sense of
an active giving and receiving of love. The relationship with God which

begins in this world is thought to continue to grow and develop when the
person is accepted into the divine excess of life; for Balthasar, this is a
matter of the theological virtues continuing in heaven So, in this con-

ception, being taken into the drama of the immanent Trinity has little to
do with vision. More than vision - or even contemplation - it is a matter
47. In Cant. hom., 11 (PG, 44, 1000 AB); De Div. Nat., I, 11 , PL 122, 452C): cited
(
Theodramatik, IV, 363-364.
48. ’Eschatologie im Umri&szlig;’, 429.
49. Theodramatik, IV, 367-370; ’Eschatologie im Umri&szlig;’, 427.
50. Theodramatik, IV, 374-376; 445, ’Eschatologie im Umri&szlig;’, 426-428.
14

of answering God’s gift with an inventive counter-giving so that human

participation in the ever-greater event in God can be understood as gen-
uinely dramatic.
(c) A Mutual Relationship?
There is good biblical support for understanding eternal life in terms of
a mutual relationship between the world and God. Balthasar pays partic-
ular attention to the images of ’meal’ (Lk 24:30; Rev 19:9) and ’wedding’
(Eph 5:32) since they suggest mutual intimacy.’1 The Eucharist and the
post-Easter meals of Christ with the disciples are thought to imply a feast
between heaven and earth. As for the wedding image, the transitory mar-
ital relationship spoken of in Ephesians is interpreted as a symbol of a last-
ing nuptial union between the divine and human realms. Of course, for
Balthasar, the mutual give and take implied in such a union between the
world and God can only have its place within the give and take between
the Son and the Father. In that relationship, as we have seen, the Son’s
reception of himself is not thought to occur without his agreement, his
willing self-gift. So, Balthasar contends, the created person’s being nour-
ished by the meal shared with God and involvement in the marriage
between heaven and earth will not be without his or her active agree-
ment. The latter, he concludes, makes for a mutual relationship. If the
biblical images were not taken to imply a genuine mutuality, they would,
in his view, be emptied of meaning. 51
All the same, what seems possible at the level of image would appear
to be ruled out at the level of concept. It is one thing to point to biblical

support for the idea of mutuality and another to argue how it could be
possible for the Absolute to receive anything from the finite world. Does
this recourse to image not, once again, reduce God to a mythological fig-
ure ? Did Thomas Aquinas not hold that there can be no ’real’ relation-
ship between God and the created person and that God cannot be
affected by the world due to a lack of passive potency?’3 How the tran-
scendent God could be affected and enriched by the response of the con-
tingent world is the question to which we now turn.

(d) Can God Receive from the World?

Balthasar agrees that there can be no worldly passive potency in God.
Once again, however, his method allows him to imagine ’something like’
it in God.’54 This amounts to a type of passivity within the trinitarian

51. See Theodramatik, IV, 432-442.

52. See ibid., 435; 440; 442.
53. See Aquinas, De pot., 7, 8-11, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 13, a. 7; Summa contra gentiles,
II, 25.
54. See Theodramatik, IV, 74-80.
 15

eventin which one person stands in relation to the activity of another.

Hence, for example, his speaking about a passive ’generation-potency’ in
the Son which indicates the Son’s ability to be generated by the Father. 55
The fact that this is only analogous to finite passive potency makes it pos-
sible for Balthasar to think of God being affected by the world without
making God into a mythological figure.
The effect the world has on God is understood in terms of the world
adding something to the divine conversation. The choice of finite free-
dom not to take part in the divine ’I-Thou’ is judged to be a loss not only
for the human party but also for God.’6 Conversely, salvation is thought to
include God’s gaining something. Despite the objection that the all-per-
fect God cannot receive anything from the finite world, Balthasar claims
that such receptivity on God’s part is made possible by the eternal recep-
tivity in God, the Son’s receiving from the Father and the Father’s receiv-
ing from the Son. However, he has to avoid the conclusion that God’s
receiving from the world implies that God is not already the fullness of
Being but needs the world in order to be fully God. On the other hand,
he wants to make a case for the world’s being able to add to that fullness.
The solution to the apparent contradiction lies in his conceiving of God’s
love not only as something already perfectly given and received, but as
including an eternal increase. Again, the metaphysical corrective in his
method will not allow that increase to be understood in terms of worldly
growth. It cannot be a movement from potency to act as in worldly
becoming. Nevertheless, this does not prevent Balthasar from positing
’something like’ worldly becoming in God. He does not think of God in
terms of pure act perfection only, but in terms rather of an ever-greater

dynamism of love constituted by the divine processions. The perfection of

love in God is not only understood to express itself in the Father’s com-
plete self-gift in communicating the divinity to the Son and the Son’s
complete self-gift in agreeing to be the Son. Rather, a fuller appreciation
of God’s love is thought to be had by imagining it to be ever-more intense.
It is this positing of an excess (ÜberfiuJ3) of loving in God that allows
Balthasar to save the world’s gift to God from being regarded as superflu-
ous. While God’s love is ever complete, its ever-greater dimension is per-
ceived as making room for the world’s contribution. Rather than the latter
being understood as adding to God’s love so as to complete it, it is thought
to find its place in the ever-greater dimension of that love in such a way
that what comes about can even be spoken of as an enrichment
(Bereicherung) of heaven, a becoming ever-richer (Je-reicher-Werden) of
the Trinity and an embellishment (Ausschmickung) of the Father’s richness.&dquo;
55. Ibid., 75; Theologik, III, 218.
56. While it is important to Balthasar that God takes created freedom seriously, it could be
argued that his idea of Christ’s descent into hell to accompany those who have damned
themselves makes it doubtful that God could lose the human response forever (see ’Abstieg
zur Holle’, in Pneuna und Institution, 387- 400).
57. See Theadramatik, IV, 470-471.
16

III. Metaphorical Discourse

Despite appearances to the contrary, Balthasar is very much aware of

the analogous nature of theological discourse and the need to recognise
that statements about an ’I-Thou’ relationship in God or about inner-
divine kenoses properly belong between inverted commas .5’ He believes,
however, as we have seen, that if an attempt is to be made to say some-
thing of a positive nature about the mystery in question, recourse must be
had not only to analogical but also to properly metaphorical language. In
the notion of enrichment which we have been examining, there is no
suggestion of the world adding to the divine exchange of love something
that was lacking. But this is not to say that his idea of the world giving
God something is simply meaningless. The increase which is said to result
from the world’s giving is situated by Balthasar in the eternal increase he
imagines to exist in God. Such talk of an eternal increase of love in God
is metaphorical. But Balthasar’s point is that metaphorical discourse is the
proper way to say something positive about that love in that it allows one
to come closer to the truth than the use of concepts alone. As we have

seen, his talk of an ’1-Thou’ in God is properly analogous discourse and

his description of that ’1-Thou’ in terms of wonder and surprise and
increase as expectations are surpassed, is metaphorical. Few will object to
his using the interpersonal analogy to say that there is something like
finite loving in God. Nor is there anything new or objectionable about
using metaphor to talk about God. The difficulty arises when his use of
metaphor to say something about that love threatens to go too far in the
direction of similarity between the human and divine realms. Yet it has to
be conceded that Balthasar’s use of metaphor in attempting to do justice
to the liveliness of God’s love - rather than speaking about it merely in
terms of absolute perfection - is in fact kept in check by the metaphysi-
cal corrective built-in to his method. The said increase is thought to be
over and above the perfection demanded by negative theology and so has

nothing to do with deficiency.

All the same, an increase resulting from one divine person being loved
by another is one thing and an increase resulting from the world being
taken into the trinitarian event is another. However, Balthasar is not say-
ing that the world’s self-gift to God can add to God’s eternal fountain of
love. While in opposition to Platonism he argues for the positivity of the
finite as a real being, he does realise that the world participates in Being
without adding to, or detracting from, its fullness. Hence, while the real-
ity of finite freedom might allow him to think of its giving as real, what
is given, if it is to add anything to God, has to be thought of as exceeding
the finite. So when Balthasar claims that the risen Son returns to the

58. See Thomas Krenski, Passio Caritatis. Trinitarische Passiologie im Werk Hans Urs von
Balthasars (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1990), 140-141.
 17

Father ’richer’ than before the Incarnation,’ he is saying that what is

received by God is not merely the world’s self-gift but an additional gift
which is the love the world has received in taking part in the divine con-
versation.~2 Since this additional gift, the Holy Spirit, is in fact a divine
gift, it can add to the divine conversation and any increase implied can
be situated within the eternal fruitfulness in God, and specifically within
the increase due to the Son’s ever-greater return to the Father. Hence his
claim that in and with the risen Son, the created person can blow the
Holy Spirit back to the Father
If talk of an increase in love between the divine hypostases beyond all
expectations can be said to be more metaphorical than analogous dis-
course as such, the suggestion of an enrichment of God due to an addi-
tional gift from the world is certainly metaphorical. Nevertheless, despite
the objection that God cannot be affected by the response of worldly free-
dom, it can be argued that Balthasar’s hypothesis does greater justice to
the world’s heavenly existence than eschatologies which employ
metaphors connected with vision. His conception of the world’s creative
participation in the exchange of love in God would seem to be required
by both the dramatic character of earthly human existence and the
dynamic nature of that eternal event itself. If Aquinas was attempting to
protect the transcendence of God, then inasmuch as Balthasar’s hypoth-
esis of God being able to receive from the world has its ground in a con-
ception in which increase in no way detracts from God’s pure act
perfection, it is perhaps no longer necessary to avoid talk of a mutual rela-
tionship, since God’s transcendence is in no way threatened by such a
hypothesis.
Conclusion

In the fourth and most explicitly eschatologicalvolume of

Theodramatik, encounter with God is understood as a in the
participation
encounter in God. That participation is not thought of only in terms of a
beatific vision. It is conceived of more as a sharing in the drama consti-
tuted by the ongoing divine processions. For Balthasar, that sharing is an
active one and in no way eliminates the creativity and inventiveness of
human freedom. While there is good biblical support for the implied
mutuality, it would seem to be ruled out by metaphysics. Yet, this is where
Balthasar’s idea of the event in God - as eternally perfect but containing
in itself an increase of love - is helpful in providing a framework for
understanding the possibility of a meaningful gift to God from the world.
On the one hand, it will not allow God to be reduced to a mythological

59. See ibid., 470.

60. Ibid., 476.
61. See ’Das unterscheidend Christliche der Gotteserfahrung’, 35-36; Theodramatik, IV,
392-396.
18

figure who needs the world for completion and, on the other, it saves the
positivity of the world from being relativised and its response regarded as
superfluous. If it is objected that talk of God receiving from the world is
merely metaphorical, Balthasar’s understanding of that reception man-
ages to do more justice to the dramatic nature both of created freedom
and the trinitarian event than is achieved by eschatologies which rely on
metaphors associated with vision. It supplies a theoretical basis for the
mutuality taken for granted not only by the Bible but also by Christian
mysticism. 62

62. See, e.g., John of the Cross, Llama, I, 29-30; C&aacute;ntico (Version A), Strophe 37 (cited
Theodramatik, IV, 395-396).