Explorations in Theology: Spirit and Institution

By Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The fourth volume in von Balthasar's essays is built around the theme of Spirit and Institution, the two central features of the Church which Balthasar approaches from different angles. The third volume is built around the theme of the Holy Spirit as the Creator Spirit. The first volume was constructed around the mid-point of the Word become man, and the second volume around the Church which becomes configured to him.

The first part of the book looks at who man is, and then examines the distinctively Christian experience of God. Part two is a whole section on the Church which includes topics like celibacy and the priesthood today, how we should love the Church, and understanding Christian mysticism. The third and final part is an eschatology in which Balthasar gives a brilliant summary of heaven, hell and purgatory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781681491615

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

I did most of this translation while in Frankfurt, Germany, on a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, whose board of directors I would like to thank for the opportunity to do this translation in a setting where I could consult the faculty and students at the Jesuit Theologische Hochschule St. Georgen. Though too numerous to name here, they still deserve at least this generic nod of thanks for helping me resolve some knotty moments in von Balthasar’s prose.

I should also mention that whenever the author italicized a word, I stressed the English equivalent by using italics too. But German is rich in particle-words such as gerade, eben, dock, and so forth, that often have no exact English equivalent but which serve to stress certain neighboring words or concepts. And these I stressed using italics. Thus, all words von Balthasar stressed, I italicized as well, but some I stressed for reasons of context. Also, when the author makes his own insertion in a quotation from Scripture or some other source, I used parentheses; for my own insertions, brackets.

Finally, I would like to add that while I was in Germany, a professor at the Hochschule, himself a prominent von Balthasar scholar, told me that he thought this book, Spirit and Institution, represents the best one-volume introduction to most of the major themes that characterize von Balthasar’s theology, from the definition of form to such important burning topical issues as celibacy and loneliness. It is for this reason that I am particularly happy to have had the opportunity to translate this work for the English-speaking world, and I hope that the labor involved will lead it to have the influence it deserves.

Edward T. Oakes, S. J.

May 18,1993

INTRODUCTION

As with the previous volumes of Explorations in Theology, the general title of Spirit and Institution given to the essays in this volume should not be understood as one that intends to indicate a systematic treatment of its topic. Spirit and Institution indicates only a kind of leitmotif that echoes in a kind of free variation throughout most of the essays gathered here. Only one of them, the eponymous essay, explicitly develops the motif for its own sake; but even it makes no claim to have exhausted its inner possibilities. This is merely a sketchbook: all it tries to do is approach its main object from different angles. But perhaps in using this method we can catch sight of unexpected turns and shapes, seeing things afresh as if for the first time.

There is a central Light that illuminates everything, but we can glimpse it only from its different rays. Perhaps some eager soul thirsty for systematics would like to make something out of these fragments, putting the stones in order and assembling them into a mosaic. The author, however, mistrusts such undertakings. Such constructions merely try to yank the mystery from its seclusion and cast it into the glare of our light. But God dwells in inaccessible light.

Nevertheless, our theme is one that, if circled humbly and unpretentiously, directly affects Christians and the Church today. What most threatens Christianity today, and is the deepest source of its current anemia, is the splitting apart of these two features of the Church united in our title. And because it is very difficult to put back together again what has already been driven asunder, we prefer from the outset to contemplate them both at their point of origin: at the source where they both originate and mutually fructify each other.

Reform never takes place by reassembling and gluing back together pieces that have broken apart. Rather, a shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse; from its roots a branch will bear fruit (Is 11:1).

PART ONE

AT THE SOURCE

WHO IS MAN?*

An uncanny theme, this. For the title of our lecture puts a typographic and grammatical question mark behind that being who is already himself an existential question mark in every aspect of his existence: he is the question that all the sciences seek to answer. Can a theologian dare to have anything pertinent to say here in the few minutes allotted him?

In any case, in order to be able to say anything at all, the theologian will have first to appeal to the understanding—or, more precisely, the pre-understanding—of all who are asking about this question with him, so that in these reflections we can draw, as much as possible, on what we already know. Let us then begin by appealing to that joyous and bitter, that hopeful and that despairing experience we all have of our human existence. Nor must we forget that vague feeling we all have, which is yet so hard to specify exactly, of that wider space in whose silence our human life so noisily plays out its destiny.

But at the beginning of our reflections, we do not want to forget to call on the genius huius loci, the special spirit that reigns in this Academy. For where has this question been more seriously and strenuously argued than here, where Schelling, Görres, Baader, Deutinger, Lasaulx have taught, where not long ago Theodor Haecker delivered his own lecture called What Is Man?, where Erich Przywara wrote Humanitas and then his uncanny and titanic Man: A Typological Anthropology, where Romano Guardini first penned his World and Person and Concern for Man? Here is where Edgar Dacque wrote his Primal Form (which certainly is no less far-reaching in its vision than the writings of Teilhard de Chardin), where Alois Dempf, the tireless orderer of reality, composed his Theoretical Anthropology, Max Müller his Christian Image of Man and August Vetter his Outline of an Anthropognosis and Personal Anthropology, and where Helmut Kuhn received a Festschrift entitled Philosophy’s Concern for Man.

We could go on and on adding names to this illustrious roster, especially from the many names of artists, painters, poets and novelists associated with this Academy. But of the many names we could mention, such as George and Derleth, we shall emphasize only one, someone who asked over and over again with penetrating, almost tormenting urgency about man and the flickering flame of his reason: Karl Valentin.

Just a moment ago I spoke of the noise of existence in the midst of the wordless silence of the space surrounding us. We recall that the admonition Gnothi seauton: Know thyself was first inscribed above the temple entrance at Delphi. Now, people automatically always lower their voices when they enter a temple. Especially when the temple in question confronts one with such an inscription as this, which in its original intent can mean nothing other than: Go into yourself, let yourself be addressed by the god, let him tell you that you are only a man.

Next to this inscription stood another, Medén agan: nothing in extreme. The titan Oceanus advised that surhomme révolté, the Prometheus of Aeschylus: Know yourself! Turn around! Change your ways! You well know that over the gods there sits enthroned a new Lord. Let go of your grumbling, unhappy man, and stop kicking against the spur! Of course, Oceanus underestimated the depth of the discord between Zeus and the Titan. Only the no-longer-extant conclusion of the trilogy can bridge the abyss between them. Nonetheless, the din of lament that the suffering heroes hurl toward heaven in the great tragedies—Ajax, Philoctetes and, we should add, Job—is not affected by this warning. Their question still goes rolling up to a silent heaven: Who is man, who am I, that I must suffer so? And nothing in that din does anything to bring that question any closer to an answer.

Man carries with him, inscribed in his very being, these question marks and exclamation points, painted on him like some protest placard, carried aloft as if by some demonstrator out on strike, marching in protest through the whole of creation. And yet he knows all the while that the invisible party who is the object of this protest recedes all the more deeply into silence. No negotiations going on here! For when the one on strike turns himself completely into a question, he robs himself of a hearing, at least of a hearing from which he could hear an answer.

Put bluntly: If I am already entirely an enigma, does someone owe me a solution? Man gains nothing in the eager hasty grasp for an answer before it pleases the answer to make itself known. The impudent questioning at the beginning of Faust does not accomplish anything more than conjuring up the devil and, with him, the principle of dialectic: the principle of creative negation. The prophet Jeremiah bitterly wails at having been seduced and duped by God, yet he can speak of the good fortune of being considered worthy of any answer at all. But then the answer comes so harshly and incisively that it extinguishes this flickering pathos and restores, as it were, the zero point, the pure distance between God and man.

And so we stand once more by the Delphic inscription (which, according to Juvenal, came from heaven itself).¹ Supposedly at this point the Faustian West would have to betake itself in all simplicity to the school of the East, for whom the beginning of all wisdom consists in creating in oneself a space for silence in which something like an answer, however wordless, could be heard at all. Laying aside all petitions and complaints is the first step, then, for letting the mysterious principle of hope come into play. Gabriel Marcel has insisted over and over again:

At the roots of hope lies something that is literally offered to us; and it is given to us to respond to this hope as we respond to love. . . . If hope understands itself aright, then it offers itself as the answer of the creature to infinite Being, to whom we owe everything and before whom we cannot set even the least condition.²

Unfortunately, says Marcel, we encounter here some slippery transitions: it is all too easy to go from the expression I hope for to I am expecting and then to I am counting on and finally I have worked this into my plans and thus I demand. But when he does this, man has once more gone on strike, he has once more been parading past the Judge of Last Appeal with his protest placards.

Let us then assume that man remains essentially an enigma to himself and that it would thus be a contradiction if he were to solve that enigma on his own, for then he would of course cease to be this enigmatic being (who wants anything to do with a crossword puzzle that has already been filled in? Once solved, it is then thrown in the wastepaper basket). Let us assume further that no other being inside the world can offer him the solution (that goes without saying). But it would be no less meaningless to toy around with the idea that the very fact of being an enigma provides the solution. In other words, that the freedom to become whatever one wants—le diable et le bon Dieu—would itself be answer enough. If that were the case, then that Eastern beginning of all wisdom would for the moment be the best way to approach the solution; it would amount to saying that if we but pour the oil of indifference (the letting-be of what already is) into the open wound of our inherent questionability, our wound would be healed, no matter how burning and festering it might be.

But there is yet a final alternative: what Paul told the Greeks on the Areopagus, the very place where earlier the questioner Socrates had been condemned, might well be true:

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. . . . From one man he made every nation on earth that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from us (Acts 17:24-27).

The key word here is seek, closely linked with perhaps followed by the optative verb form for reach and find, which indicates that it has not been promised that the search terminate in a finding; nor is it even considered likely—the chances are left undetermined. But what does seeking mean here? Certainly not the following of clues leading to an already known object that has been accidentally mislaid. But also it is certainly not a totally blind wandering about without any awareness that there might be something out there to be discovered.

Let us then put ourselves for the moment in the position of that mythical Adam of paradise. Does he really know what he is looking for when he looks around him among the animals, recognizes and names them but yet finds no suitable helpmate among them who could be his fulfillment? We could reply: By extrapolating from his encounter with sexuality, which he knows from seeing the way the animals are sexually paired, he could notice his own male nature as one-half of a species-whole and make a demand for a complementary fulfillment. But that would be to miss the whole point of the story. This man cannot know what a human encounter is, nor can he postulate it. According to the tale, the answer lies dormant within him, next to his heart; but first the rib must be removed from him and placed over against him as a living Thou by God’s creative act. One could almost say: The answer to his search lies so close to Adam that he could never find it on his own.

But is his encounter with Eve, as Feuerbach claimed, the resolution of our whole question? Do these two enigmas, who are each the mirror to the other, provide the solution to the other partner? Who then can mediate between two human freedoms whose creative capacities for decision can in no way be exhausted by the decision to belong to one another? These times have witnessed an important trend that appropriately honors the dialogical principle, which in fact has only today been really recognized and appreciated. But we must nonetheless absolutely transcend it. Not only are most dialogues between people hopelessly superficial and full of misunderstandings, they can also silt up, break off, bog down. And in the very place where a person unfolds himself in a lifelong exchange of love, he must draw on the power of keeping his promise from the provisions of a silent and lonely fidelity that can be found only in the inner core of his self and not in the dialogical principle per se.

This self in some way feels constrained to find an answer to a confusing and inherently unsolvable question, one that cannot be answered from within the storehouse of his fidelity but which, on the contrary, continually surges up from within him because he has been loved. Namely: Why precisely do you love me? Is it perhaps pure coincidence? Could you just as well have loved someone else and bound yourself in fidelity to him? Does our covenant, then, which gives meaning to our lives, not rest on any kind of necessity at all; is it just pure chance?

But this question dredges up from below, perhaps for the first time in my life, another insane, almost scurrilous question: Who, then, is this person in me who says I? More pointedly: Why am I precisely I? Pure accident? Of course there are millions of people around me who blithely chirp out their I while never asking what lies behind that I or reflecting on the center of their sense of self. Such bandying about of the word I is a phenomenon of the species man. Only because man is a little more distinguished than mice or crows do we speak of him in terms of person rather than as a mere individual instance of the species. And now it turns out that, because of a rather comic but also immensely incomprehensible accident, this I has come to be: I am the product of a quite casual act of sexual intercourse that did not have me in mind at all. And this self not only says the word I—as every other I constantly does—but rather I say that I am: this I is now condemned to be, to exist in a lifelong prison. To be sure, it is a prison with many windows that look out on many people and things and tasks and world-altering plans. But through none of these windows can I crawl out and leave the prison of existence. . . in una noche oscura.

When I look into the deep pit of this question, I also see several ladders set before me that lead down to different depths. First there is the many-branched ladder of the anthropological sciences, with each one probing a different aspect of being human and thus contributing some indispensable stones for the building on top of which the self-expressive I is balanced. The whole of physics and chemistry, anatomy, physiology, psychology and sociology (encompassing the lower animals all the way up to man), the whole of the doctrine of evolution that man in his act of becoming recapitulates in his own way, genetics and the study of inherited personality traits: they all belong to this powerful substructure that in myriads of ways conditions, determines and colors the countenance of the person. But then again this person for his part is freely and unconditionally incarnated in this structure in a final point of identity.

In the first aspect, man is, according to Haecker’s metaphor, like a mirror-opposite image of God—for God presupposes absolutely nothing and creates everything, whereas man presupposes absolutely everything in the cosmos and creates nothing in it. In this first aspect, the self-identification of the I is becoming more and more questionable. Such analyses of self-consciousness are proceeding today with a stubborn insistence on paying attention to the empirical side, which is why, since Marx, Darwin, Freud and Jung, so many of their empirical confederates have grown beyond German Idealism. This aspect also makes clear to us why, for the I, no flight from the world, no concentration on the pure I-point, is possible, for this pure transcendental ego remains empty without having first undergone an odyssey into the fullness of the world formed and forming.

But it is also just as obvious that if man chooses to hold fast to this first aspect, he will never attain to a self-identification but will have to look on himself as the product of a prepersonal process of which—to his annoyance—he cannot maintain that he himself is the pinnacle. At best, he can try to identify his empirical I with the absolute I in some inconceivable point that would then be responsible for the whole upward movement of the process and indeed would (in Hegel) coincide with it. But that would once more represent the defeat of this determined I that / am and not you, it would mean its dissolution into a universal I.

That is why not only Plato and his school, not only dualistic Gnosticism and spiritualism, not only Scheler and Klages, but also the empiricists and the natural philosopher Aristotle insisted that the spirit is inserted (thyrathen) in man from above and outside of him and, even in this earthly existence, is not ultimately bound to the body. In man’s case, the soul does not arise from sexual conception as other souls do and thus is not affected by the corruption of the body at death.

This immeasurable tension within the midpoint of the human being is taken into account by philosophy: the spirit is in itself simultaneously actual and potential; it is realized in itself and yet realizes itself by ongoing experiences of the other and of itself. According to Aristotle, it is precisely this paradox that cannot be projected into the Godhead, for God does not need to proceed out into the world in order to be pure self-consciousness. This paradox stamps the nature of man all the way through the history of philosophy and marks him out for a chimera: his use of the word I is at the same time the object of investigation by the anthropological sciences and yet is, on the very testimony of the I itself, not subject to investigation. It is a candle in the wind, abandoned to all manner of storms and barely flickering in their high winds, yet inextinguishable.

The I can experience in rapturous astonishment how deeply its mysterious center is sunk into the organic and physical: as heart, power of imagination, mood, emotion, conviction, Eros—so much so that it would never want to be separated from this home of body and cosmos. And yet it can at the same time be convinced that it is no mere result of a subtle balance of these worldly forces but is a real center, one that possesses an ultimate freedom based on all its substructures and that can therefore plunge down into them with an ultimate light of truth and power, even into the darkness of the unconscious.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of everything, yet a feeble earthworm; repository of truth, the very sink of a doubt and error, the glory and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel such a tangle?. . . What then will become of you, man, you who seek to find your true condition using your natural reason? Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you.³

Pascal is seeking here a platform between scepticism (for there is real truth for Pascal in the sciences) and dogmatism (for all their truths must always be verified by experience, something that will ever elude science). Thus he is leading us through the labyrinth by a thread that issues out on the goal of our brief reflections. Our most painful question runs: Who am I? Why am I precisely I? Previously, the thought hovered about in the foreground, hidden in the generality of the problem: Who is man? And even here the question had to be answered with a paradox. There are certainly those who will content themselves with a purely psychological or sociological answer, but we will now have to leave them behind, regretting they are so content with such merely preliminary answers.

But we wish to hold fast to our question: Who am I? A man freighted with an irresolvable paradoxical nature but not identical with it either, and yet not simply fallen from it. I appeal once more to what I called on at the beginning of this lecture: the foreknowledge that tells me that none of the possible answers that emerge within my horizon as an asking being will ever give me satisfaction. I will not join the chipper and overly cheery role-playing and mask-wearing that recently has so marked our civilization. Out in the marketplace one can find all sorts of ready-to-wear or tailor-made definitions of man, today this one, tomorrow that one.

Perhaps the old Lessing was right, with his relentless attacks on all forms of Christian orthodoxy: if God were to give him the choice, he would prefer seeking to finding. No doubt Lessing held this opinion because to him the inner imperfectibility of man, as person and society as well, was so evident. In fact what good would it do us to have a Utopian hope for a total transformation of the world sometime in the future, since the only real issue for us hic et nunc is man as he is today, man as he was yesterday—and certainly also man as he will be tomorrow? Would that really answer in a stroke all the question marks? What can such a hypothetical rounding off of man settle, since, by the way, it is quite unimaginable in any event and thus could never even become a goal for us? It would be like an ecclesiastical tribunal declaring a failed marriage sanatio in radice: What does that do to bring back the past or undo the memories of all that time spent together?

Of course, we should work to heal the physical and spiritual roots of humanity with all our powers. But really, if we look at our prospects soberly, what else will that amount to but putting new patches on old clothes?

At this juncture (we have so little time) I would like to leap right into the thesis of Henri de Lubac as he set it out in his book Surnaturel, published in 1946. At first his thesis was roundly rejected, but he came back with a reworked version in two volumes in 1965, retracting nothing. Certainly the historical position he took is impregnable: the picture of man he outlined was without any doubt also that of the great Christian tradition: Augustine, Aquinas and even the best theologians of the Baroque.

It was rejected and cast from its throne only because of philosophical rationalism, which began with the Averroism of Padua and was introduced into Scholastic theology by Cajetan, and which in the nineteenth and twentieth century became an almost indispensable prerequisite for teaching theology. Only here do we first encounter the thesis that man is ordered to a natural goal corresponding to his nature like all other natural beings in the cosmos, a cosmos in which alone he must find his fulfillment and blessedness—or otherwise he would be a failure in nature’s or providence’s construction. In this view, the free call of divine grace to a higher goal, called supernatural, is thinkable as free and unearned only if that possible natural final goal, the finis naturalis, is thought of within the order of nature defined as a pura natura. Corresponding to this, this natural end of man would then find its—very real—fulfillment in the overarching supernatural order.

But in this view of things, grace necessarily becomes an added-on construction atop something that can be fulfilled on its own terms. And no theology of the world will now be able henceforth to cure non-Christians of the thought that the natural goal of man can be recognized by natural reason and, with the requisite effort (whether Buddhist or Marxist), even be attained, irrespective of original sin and the Fall.

It is quite clear that the Fathers and Augustine knew nothing of such a construction, for our hearts are restless until they rest in you (Confessiones 1, 1). The good consists in this: to gaze on the One who gazes down on us (Sermo de verbi Domini 10). Nor did the Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas think any differently. On the contrary, the Christian paradox—for that is what it is—is undergirded with Aristotelian phraseology, which in the Summa theologiae runs: A being is all the more noble, the higher its end be toward which it strives by the definition of its essence, even if it can no longer reach this goal by its own powers (la, Ilae, q 5, a 5 ad 2).

Let us leave to the pedants their unavoidable objection that the man who strives so naturally toward immediacy with God beyond all that nature could present would then have a claim to grace. This objection is overtaken by the biblical consideration that God has determined from the first, in the freest act of his freedom, from before the foundations of the world, to order man to himself and to create nature for the sake of grace. Let us rather draw the conclusion that by abandoning this superfluous and dangerous hypothesis of a natura pura, we have neatly dispensed with its corollary: man’s conceivable perfectibility inside the world’s terms (individually and socially). And now at last freed from a constricting straitjacket, we can suddenly breathe: the open horizon looms before us!

Of course Thomas knows, too, of a relative condition of happiness in this world, however he might describe its content. And, in place of the ancient contemplation of divine things, we can also posit a relatively satisfactory social and political order, a relative greatest happiness for the greatest number, or whatever. Thomas can concede this point because man very much has something like a nature or essence: for example, as one man among many in a social species, as the other in a sexual relationship, as a healthy person delicately balanced between the competing demands of body, heart and spirit. But none of this implies an order closed in on itself. It all remains a provisorium, a provisional reality before the inconceivable fulfillment in God.

The resurrection of the flesh very much belongs to all of this. For a man without a body is not a man. But no reflective person will want to say either that the resurrection, as it has already fundamentally been set in motion at Easter, is a natural, intracosmic phenomenon. For it is precisely what is impossible, preposterous to man that is that toward which he has been thought and formed and equipped—together with his whole cosmic substructures, but also with all of the efforts he expends in the world, his culture and his work.

He is meant to seek, to reach out, and perhaps find something. Someone Else reaches out to him and takes him by the hand, a hand that had seemingly been groping in dark, empty space. Adam, too, in the Genesis account gropes in vain when he is searching for some unknown correspondence among the animals. To be sure, in this sense Christianity is Utopian. But inasmuch as it knows of God’s promise, indeed, of the onset of the fulfillment of this promise in the apparently impossible resurrection, it is, as it were, a realistic Utopia. A hope into the void contains within itself a springboard, even where every direct crossover past the abyss of death remains absolutely invisible.

And here, finally, the ultimate absurd question at the very bottom of the pit finds an answer that no philosophy or other kind of world view can give. Why am I precisely I? Thomas hints at the answer when he says, Because the particular is neither science nor definition.⁴ The answer can only go: God has meant, willed, loved and chosen me. Outside of this answer, I am always merely the plaything of an absolute Subject, an exemplar for the universally valid law of human impersonality, perhaps even merely the hybrid tangle between a nameless id or libido and a personless superego. If that is so, then it would not be madness to do away with the existence of the I by killing oneself or plunging into forgetfulness or by drug-induced ecstasy.

But how does God come to the point of placing so precarious a being before himself that, because of its mysterious imperfectibility, can at most be a kind of scurrilous image and likeness of the One who dwells forever in the mystery of his unapproachable light in perfect harmony? At the farthest point of the horizon opened up by Christianity, a glimmer of light dawns that can satisfy the craving even of this question. God has so loved the world that he has given up his only Son (Jn 3:16). I live in faith in the One who loved me and has given himself up for me (Gal 2:20).

In other words, in the Absolute there is a counterweight of love that wills to transcend itself into the other. And that other is not only God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but even the night and the godforsakenness and the collapse into lostness.

We shall break off here with a word from the Letter to the Hebrews: Of this we have much to say, but it will be difficult to make it understandable (Heb 5:11). For at this juncture the question Who is man? points to the question no longer being asked these days: Who is God? It is enough if the nobility of man, who must remain a mystery to himself if he is to be God’s image and likeness, shines through. It is enough if man can only glimpse in the dark absurdities of his existence that God, too, is happy only when he is surrendering himself.

WHAT IS DISTINCTIVELY CHRISTIAN IN THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD?

I

For biblical man the axiom of all axioms runs: I am not God. With their gnothi seauton, the Greeks, too, began in the same way: Know thyself and realize that you are no god. But to their philosophers the saying was unexpectedly inverted to its opposite: Think on your true essence, your origin in God, on the divine in you.

But for biblical man the axiom prevailed from his first moment of thought to the last. The first step in biblical thinking began, in the language of the psalms: Come, let us bow down and worship, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker (Ps 95:6). He is God, he has made us and we belong to him (100:3). Augustine continued this thinking when he said, You have made us for yourself. Ignatius of Loyola is saying essentially the same thing in the First Principle and Foundation: Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

All three versions are identical in meaning. It is immediately evident from the power that marks them that this basic formula cannot be overtaken by any subsequent development, no matter how conclusive it purports to be. This holds true even for such later developments as the theology of divinization (theosis) in the Greek Fathers, which relied on Hellenistic philosophies with which they were in constant dialogue and whose ideal they were fully conscious of having matched and even overtaken. But they could outmatch Greek philosophy only by virtue of this first axiom.

The starting point for the biblical experience of God is truly an experience, which in the strictest sense of the word occurs under the influence (in-flowing) and impression (im-pressing) of the biblical Word. For nonbiblical man, the foundational experience of God could at best claim: I am not the absolute, not the whole, not the One, the Boundless; and what I know of myself, I know, too, of all other beings in the world. By having these elementary experiences, nonbiblical man can at the same time extrapolate to a complementary experience of an equally elementary longing to leave this bounded world of the nonabsolute and attain the One and the Boundless. Indeed, the two experiences are only two sides of the same experienced coin. And precisely because the two are so indissolubly interwoven with one another can nonbiblical man come to the notion that his nonabsoluteness might well be analogous to the way the part relates to the whole, the spark to the fire, so that the religious problem consists essentially in bringing the process of integration to full consciousness and translating it into action.

Let us still dwell for a moment with the presuppositions and consequences of such a conception. The presupposition is that there exists simultaneously the One (which by definition has nothing of the object in it) and yet (however secondarily and provisionally) the Other over against the One, of which I, too, am one part. This fact seems contradictory and is certainly, in its facticity, impossible to explain. For if the One is objectless [gegensatzlos], how can something be set over against it [entgegengesetzt]? There are three ways to solve this riddle, ways that occasionally complement one another. The first explains the relationship of the One to the not-One (which are the beings of the world) through the relationship of Being and Appearance. In that case, the religious way consists of seeing through the Appearances and coming to realize that I am not an Other at all in the deepest sense but rather the One itself.

The second way would like to explain the being of the Other with the category of guilt, of a Fall from being guarded and kept inside the womb of the One. But then the question remains: Who is responsible for this guilt, who committed the wrong, and why? And then, depending on the answer to this question, a way to purify this guilt is proposed.

The third way thinks of the One in such a way that the One contains all other beings as such in itself as something already superseded. In other words, the individual that I am has simply to understand itself as already contained and integrated in the Whole and thus existentially has only to behave accordingly.

These three ways all have their limits, their contradictions, which leave them in a cul-de-sac and which thus must point back to one of the other two ways. The first interpretation, that the not-One is mere appearance, destroys not only the I as an individual (that is precisely the point for the mystics of this way) but also every individual feature of the world, its individual’s. Thereby it declares that all historical events are devoid of meaning, at best a process that will lead to its own abolition (but even this concession is not thought through to the end).

As we already pointed out, the second view, the one that speaks of guilt, cannot allege a subject for this guilt, unless this subject got lost in gnostic speculation of the Eons. But this explains nothing, because from the very beginning it is unclear whether there can even be a limited number of Eons at all in the objectless One. Moreover, the question occurs why one of these Eons can fall from the Fullness and cause the material world. Therefore, already at the start, the Other is posited in the One, an Other which is able to counterpose itself in its own free will over against the One.

The same holds true for the third thought, which simply acts as if there is no contradiction, as if the individual is an individual and yet at the same time already integrated and superseded in the Whole. But this cancels itself out: what is, considered from its own point of view, underway is from the point of view of the One already there at its goal.

Whereas the third way would like to have the problem disappear that is posed so urgently by the question of fundamental experience, have it disappear, that is, as something that does not really exist, the second way sees the distance between the One and the Many as something that should not be, whose abolition, therefore, we must struggle to achieve. But that does not answer for us the still-pressing question of how such a distance (not supposed to exist!) came to be, so that I should look on my individual act of being I as a fault that I must exert myself to overcome.

Since these problems are insoluble, we are thrown back to the first way, which explains that the individual existent in the precariousness of its temporal Becoming and corruption does not really exist; in this way it transforms the religious way into a method for seeing through the Nonbeing of all appearances and for negating any meaning to variety, to multiplicity, to dialogue, to intrahuman love, to history as a whole.

Let us once more note that all these ways could arise only where the simultaneous juxtaposition of object-less Oneness (God) with that of an Other which nonetheless stands over against that One must appear as a contradiction, for the whole point of being Other is not to be identical with the One. But is this really a contradiction? If in fact it is not, as the biblical religion maintains, then we do not need to let ourselves get caught up in the snags of contradiction presented to us by the three ways of extrabiblical religious experience.

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In the Old Testament, religious experience encounters the Word about God the Almighty (who is omnipotent precisely because he is entirely free) in order that the Word might clarify that experience and bring it to its true self-understanding. We do not need to follow along the way by which this God removes himself from the partnership with the gods of the other peoples to become the one true God (a process in which the other gods become vassals, principalities of the world and angels): the thought was already contained in germ in the starting point. This free and almighty God thus assumed the place that in nonbiblical thought was occupied by the Absolute, Being as such. It is therefore inexact to say that the Hebrews were not capable of philosophic thought. Rather they thought of the Absolute, which the peoples considered to be free from the world, as free for the world. Such a statement also implies the first assertion but also much more. The Hebrews already knew from the time of Deuteronomy 6:8 (Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one) that God is who is one and not merely the One.

It is thus in no way required for the idea of a "creation ex nihilo" to have been expressly conceived as such from the very beginning. Such a doctrine is after all a relatively abstract notion that only gradually unfolds from the concrete premise of the almighty freedom of God. And this was what was there from the beginning, and, indeed, in a twofold consequence (and which certainly arose by reflecting on Israel’s election): the people knew that it was a reality willed, affirmed and called into being by God; their entire reason for existence was due to this affirming gesture by God to the people. They understood this call so radically that they looked on everything, even existence itself, as something they received from God.

To unfold this idea of their own election as being set apart from the other peoples, and ultimately from the world as a whole, demanded a long process; but it proceeded relatively effortlessly and was never really disturbed very seriously by other competing hypotheses. In many of the psalms, Israel can think both thoughts at once: that above all God is the God of his Chosen People among whom he has set up his throne on earth, and that he is at the same time the Lord of all peoples and the Creator of the whole of nature, from the heavenly bodies to the animals on earth, all the way to the Leviathan in the depths of the sea.

What is decisive here is that the thought of God’s omnipotent freedom—concretely experienced in his great deeds for his people, his liberation of Israel from Egypt, his promises, his efficacious deeds experienced ever anew in history—implies the thought of a space for his possible efficacious deeds that far transcends everything that already exists. In other words, the nothing out of which God creates the world in his power is not some mysterious negative Absolute as it occurred to nonbiblical thought, which conceived of the idea of free omnipotence as a deficiency that emerges out of the abyss of potentiality, out of matter from which the world was formed. Perhaps this nothing is nothing other than the infinite range of the possibilities that God can freely design in his Spirit. He remains just as free to realize these possibilities as he is to leave them be as mere possibilities.

It was precisely the idea of God as all-powerful (which corresponds to his divinity and thus to his all-ness: see Wisdom 43:27) that permitted Israel to realize, indeed compelled it to realize, that the existence of a nondivine realm was not a contradiction to God’s all-ness. Of course, the simultaneity of God’s fullness and the genuine being of the otherness of the world remained a mystery, the responsibility for whose existence and explanation had to be attributed to God alone. What nonbiblical thought considered to be a contradiction (which the three ways tried to untangle) remained in biblical thought a revealed mystery. This is because for Israel obviously neither end of the polarity could be denied: neither the free and omnipotent God nor the Israel that was formed and affirmed by him and therefore the Israel that truly existed. For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock of his hand (Ps 95:7).

Nonetheless, this contrasting polarity of the objectless God and the creature standing over against God remained for the Old Testament an abrupt paradox that was accepted in an unreflected faith but which also could be contested in bitter and perilous reflections. Israel (and, in Israel, the human race generally) was defined by its pure relatedness to the creating and electing God. The first commandment of the Law (Thou shalt love the Lord your God. . .) is the expression of this absolute relatedness in terms of preference, of love. On the other hand, there is naturally in the Old Testament a certain reserve in attributing the term love to the (objectless) One, in spite of his free preferential choice and his justice and fidelity to his covenantal partner. For that would obviously bring God into a necessary relationship to the Other, to the elected creature, thereby making God in a certain way dependent on the Other whom he had created.

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How will the New Testament dispel the remaining darkness in this outlook? It will obviously continue the line of Old Testament thinking by recognizing God’s free turning to the creature in his sovereign and almighty freedom. But it will heighten this turning by seeing it as an act of love that expresses and characterizes the essence of God beyond which no other love can even be conceived. God the Father’s turning to man in the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only an offering of his omnipotence from without but is the unveiling of his inmost heart. This gets perilously close, however, to the notion that God needs man for his self-unveiling, which would undercut his divine absoluteness. There is only one way to avoid this thought: to place God’s self-surrender (which expresses his very essence) in God himself, to understand the intradivine surrender that applies the attribute love to God’s essence as an infinite surrender of himself to himself. But this becomes real as love only when the act of divine surrender simultaneously calls forth one who receives himself in this surrender and replies to it, necessarily, as one whose essence is to receive being. This mutuality of surrender, in which all other acts of surrender get their meaning, is in God absolute surrender as such: this mutuality is the proper product of the divine process of giving and receiving: the Spirit of love, the quintessence, as it were, of God.

If such a notion is the condition for the possibility that God’s surrender to mankind in Christ does not become an essential determination of God (who would then be dependent on the creature in order to be love), then, conversely, only in God’s surrender in Christ can such a notion be elevated as the necessary presupposition for God’s self-gift to man. According to the final New Testament writings, the Christ event is described both as an entirely free initiative of God as well as an unveiling of his essence. This means that man’s free election in Christ is subsumed and presumed in Christ’s own eternal election, indeed, in the eternal generation of the Son from the Father. In order for the contingent event to be able to bear this burden of being the revelation of the hidden essence of God, it must maintain its place within an eternal event from which such a self-abandonment of God to the world can dare to be asserted despite all our anticipated reservations about so bold a move.

If, in the Old Testament, creation is primarily a manifestation of God’s free power, in the New Testament, it is—without ceasing to be a clear witness to this omnipotence—at the same time a revelation of God’s self-surrender. In other words, without ceasing to be power, it reveals itself as a willingness not to hold on to itself as a power: it becomes a powerlessness that characterizes God’s inner essence as that process of self-exchanging love that invests God’s essence with its all-powerful freedom in the first place.

If this is so, then we can come to see that God’s commitment to the sinful and lost world flows out of the commitment in which God the Father abandons his Son for the redemption of the world—to such an unlimited extent that it can lead the Son all the way to the godforsakenness of the Cross and the descent into hell. For these dimensions of God’s engagement with the world are so deep a part of God’s being that they are not merely an aspect of God’s ad hoc soteriological strategy but already lie deep in the intradivine dimensions of unlimited surrender. If God gives himself to God without reservation, this means he is already proceeding into himself, into the absolute Other of himself. Between the Father and the Son lies the infinity of God, and this infinity lies still more in their creative encounter, in the Holy Spirit, who is the farthest thing imaginable from a finite averaging out of two infinite encounters but rather is a new