Talk about synchronicity - not long after I posted the piece about COMMUNIO above, I find that stupor-mundi has posted a beautiful article from today's Il Foglio about Hans Urs von Balthasar and how Communio was founded and what tied Balthasar and Ratzinger together... And if you haven't checked it out, two days ago, I posted on READINGS an exchange between two theologians about Balthasar's unorthodox interpretation of Jesus's descent into Hell...
Here is a translation of the Foglio article:
THE SYMPHONIC THEOLOGIAN
Balthasar has been called 'the wisest man of the 20th century'
and he said of Ratzinger: 'He's the decisive man on theology'
By Luisa Gandini
They are walking under the sky of Basel in a painting by Franco Vignazia. The 'most learned man of his time' is followed by a heterogeneous group of disciples, in this 1968 iconography, among them a red-bearded student of theology.
It is the mid-1960s. Soon after the Second Vatican Council, Hans Urs von Balthasar, "the wisest man of the century', as his mentor Henri de Lubac called him - 'started to bring together friends to build with them an effective way to realize a genuine renewal [called for by Vatican-II] as opposed to all falsifications."
That was how he became "the father of the great family of
Communio, which is active today in all the continents - and which, while remaining a small seed, synmbolizes the power of community. Of life, of transformation, and of renewal."
The words are from an emotional Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at the funeral of Balthazar in 1988. he too was a founder and moving spirit behind
Communio, an international theological journal. hE WAS A friend and admirer of Balthasar, that symphonic genius in whose works converge poetry, music, literature, philosophy, theological reflection and mysticism.
Balthasar's bibliography is impressive, under the sign of Herrlichkeit, or glory - Christian theology in the light of the third transcendental value 'pulchrum' (the beautiful), which opens us to the consideration of 'verum' (the true) and 'bonum' (the good).
Years later, that red-bearded student, Elio Guerrero, his beard now hoary, who was editor of tHE Italian edition of
Communio for quite a time and is now deputy editorial director at Edizioni San Paolo, says: "The connection between our magazine and Cardinal Ratzinger goes back to the very beginning. In the mid-60s, some disciples of don Giussani [founder of the movement Communione e Liberazione], among them Eugenio Corecco, Angelo Scola [now Patriarch of Venice], and Sante Bagnoli [now editor of Jaca Books] approached Balthazar and offered to publish the new journal in Italy. Balthasar told them explicitly - 'You should speak to Ratzinger. He is today the decisive man for theology, as far as
Communio is concerned.'"
Communio was not only the attempted answer to the betetr-known
Concilium, or at least, it wasn't meant to be just that. It was born out of the concrete theological perception that communion is created out of the presence of God as a gift to man.
Guerriero, who recently published a new monograph, "Hans Urs von Balthasar", says: "Both Balthasar and Ratzinger were members of the International Theological Commission and of the editorial board of
Concilium. They were both concerned at the time about the unconcealed intention of so many theologians - some of whom had taken part as experts in Vatican-II - to go beyond its intentions, to go on some sort of continuous assembly line of changes. Their reaction (Balthasar and Ratzinger], if we may call it that, was in behalf of a theological conception according to which Christianity is above all, the participation of God in our life, or better said, an acceptance of God as He gives Himself to us in communion. Therefore, it is not the faithful who gather and 'perform' the Eucharistic sacrament, rather it is God's call itself that results in the gift of Communion in the Spirit of love, that constitutes the Christian life. Therefore, communion is received through the mediation of the Holy Spirit and renders fact all that Jesus Christ has said."
The new jounral was infused with enthusiasm through the enormous intellectual drive of Balthasar and his two collaborators, Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, leading exponents of a rebirth of ecclesial theology, controversial and risky, whose central concern was the unmediated study and deepening of the faith.
Balthasar's own formation, asystematic and characterized by disputing neo-scholasticism, was itself an example. He says in one of his autobiographical notes: "In Vienna, I did not study music only. I also learned Germanistics...which teaches the value of seeing, evaluating and interpreting form - let us call it, the synthesizing look (as opposed to Kant's which was merely critical or that which is merely analytical in the natural sciences). I owe this attention to Goethe who, emerging from the chaos of the Sturm und Drang period, never stopped seeing, creating and appreciating living figures."
From this concept of Gestalt, the concrete figure, it was possible not to get lost in the abstractions of metaphysics, it was possible to speak of the destiny of man from the vision of individual writers and thinkers, from their heroes, myths and poetics.
This was an idea that Balthasar, also called the theologian of beauty, had cultivated from his youth, which was dedicated to a study of patristics, on the advice of Henri de Lubac.
Dionysus the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor so impressed Balthasar that he planned (and eventually wrote) a book about them. But the lightning bolt was his encounter with Origen's work. There are four parts to the anthology "Spirit and fire' in which he proposed to reconstruct the thouight of that eminent Alexandrian based on available fragments of his work.
The basic idea was the rediscovery of Logos as the image of the Father in eternity - the archetype for the creation of the world. All creation therefore acquires sense from the moment when adherence to the Word goes from being objective and indiscriminate to being subjective and voluntary.
The link to Tradition - polar star of
Communio's commitment - was another trait-d'union between the thinking of the future Pope and that of the theologian of beauty.
Balthasar had taken part, even if tangentially, in the 'nouvelle theologie' of whom his mentor Henri de Lubac was the vanguard. The 'new theology' had recourse to Tradition in order to overcome the immobility of scholasticism in the period between the two world wars, in order to show that there were not two orders which were super-imposed on each other - the natural and the supernatural - but rather that there was only one order, the natural which is open to the supernatural.
Ratzinger, explains Guerriero, read the workds of de lubac in the 1950s. He became impassioned with his great theological work. He adopted the concept of
Revelation not as a concentration of truth but as God himself, Logos which makes a gift of Himself and makes Himself known. This is the concept of Revelation that Ratzinger brought to Vatican-II.
Revelation (and Ratzinger verifies this in his work on St. Bonaventure) is not a collection of revealed truths, it not even Luther's 'sola Scriptura', it is God revealing Himself. For this, the concept of tradition is fundamental.
Revelation has followed a course over the centuries in which the Word makes itself known. Therefore,
it is not enough to look at revealed data or Scriptures alone; one must put oneself in the attitude of someone who receives something from God - through the saints, through Scriptures, through reason. That is an aspect that cannot be eliminated in this concept of Revelation as opposed to manufactured 'truths.'
This vision also led Balthasar and Ratzinger to fight against yet another post-Conciliar reductionism: the so-called de-Hellenization of the faith. It was a process launched by some exegetes and which now occupies so many Biblical scholars. But de-Hellenizing Christianity would mean impoverishing it.
Christian doctrine was not born from Pericles's Greece, but in the context of Hellenism, a confluence of Greek thought, Jewish thought and Roman order.
Cardinal Ratzinger, before becoming Pope, returned to these themes in his recent books about Europe, in which he concerns himself with individual freedom and the organization of society, the rules of democracy and the contributiion of Christianity - convinced about the importance of its positive input, the possiblity of its participation in constructing the 'polis' by being the voice of reason and of truth, especially where sheer will and arrogance threaten to dominate.
[The rest of the essay is a recapitulation of Balthasar's theological work, in which I find the words easy to translate, but not the concepts.]