Here is Balthasar scholar Fr. Oakes's rebuttal to Ms. Pitstick, from the same issue of FIRST THINGS:
Baltazar, hell and heresy
By Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
Hans Urs von Balthasar is a disturbing theologian. Even among some of his most vocal enthusiasts, he seems “not quite right.” Nor has this diffidence been much assuaged by John Paul II’s evident admiration for the theologian, shown most incontrovertibly when the pontiff named him a cardinal in 1988.
Nor are the anxiously orthodox much allayed by Pope Benedict XVI’s praise of him in October 2005, on the occasion of the hundreth anniversary of his birth.
And surely the central reason for that uneasiness is — despite his self-proclaimed orthodoxy — Balthasar’s claim that Christ descended into the depths of hell in order to rescue, at least potentially, all those “spirits in prison who disobeyed God long ago” (1 Pet. 3:20).
Alyssa Pitstick claims that this thesis directly contradicts the limpid and always consistent teaching of the Magisterium on the mystery of Holy Saturday, which perhaps finds its clearest and most univocal formulation in this sentence from the recently promulgated Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.”
To be sure, this version of the Catechism was published after Balthasar died, and so he cannot be blamed for dissenting from that particular sentence, at least as formally taught. But that is not much of a defense, for the sentence was evidently formulated with him in mind.
We know this because Christoph Cardinal Schönborn (archbishop of Vienna and chairman of the drafting committee of the Catechism) said so: “The brief paragraph on Jesus’ descent into hell keeps to what is the common property of the Church’s exegetical tradition. Newer interpretations, such as that of Hans Urs von Balthasar (on the contemplation of Holy Saturday), however profound and helpful they may be, have not yet experienced that reception which would justify their inclusion in the Catechism.”
Admittedly, Schönborn does provide here a certain amount of room for discussing Balthasar’s apparently revolutionary theology of Holy Saturday, and he even leaves open the possibility that it might later become part of the Church’s orthodox teaching.
This is a prospect that the Catechism itself seems to point to, for it asserts that “the Church prays that no one should be lost. . . . If it is true that no one can save himself, it is also true that God ‘desires all men to be saved’ (1 Tim. 2:4) and that for God ‘all things are possible’ (Matt. 19:26).”
With that passage, Balthasar would certainly agree, only adding that it is both a logical and a psychological impossibility to pray for something for which there is antecedently no hope — a hope that for him can be justified only in the love of Christ that is victorious even over hell.
I do not know if Pitstick holds with St. Augustine that hope for universal redemption is antecedently impossible, but she certainly insists that Balthasar’s own way of providing theological grounds for that hope contradicts Church teaching.
In her reading, the Church has recognized only a glorious entrance by Christ into hell, and since glory is antithetical to darkness, Christ therefore did not — or rather could not —suffer in true hell, the place of the damned, where only darkness reigns. Thus Christ descended into hell solely to redeem those located in the so-called limbo of the fathers.
Frankly, I dispute her tendentious reading of the tradition. Back in his days as Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict wrote a book called
Eschatology, where he faced this issue directly:
God himself suffered and died. . . . He himself entered into the distinctive freedom of sinners, but he went beyond it in that freedom of his own love which descended willingly into the Abyss.
Here the real quality of evil and its consequences become quite palpable, provoking the question . . . whether in this event we are not in touch with a divine response able to draw freedom, precisely as freedom, to itself.
The answer lies hidden in Jesus’ descent into Sheol, in the night of the soul which he suffered, a night no one can observe except by entering this darkness in suffering faith. . . . It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night. One draws near to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness.
The parallels with Balthasar’s theology here are more than obvious, which Ratzinger makes even more explicit in the afterword to the English edition, written in 1987 during his tenure as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In this afterword, he praises Balthasar’s trilogy as a “great triptych” and singles out for special laudation the last volume of Theo-Drama (the one specifically devoted to this theme) for “its profound analysis of the essence of Christian hope, the pain of God, judgment and consummation.” Indeed, he goes further and raises the large claim that this final volume “makes a foundational contribution to a deepening of the theme of eschatology.”
I am not trying to give retroactive infallibility to these lines simply because they happen to have been written by a future pope. But they certainly do show that
Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s descent into hell has entered into the thinking of the highest reaches of the Church’s Magisterium.
Pitstick, however, labors under the impression that Balthasar’s views are so outré and bizarre that they even call into question the honesty of his professed desire to be regarded as an orthodox Catholic theologian.
Of course, his views are not right just because they have more theological warrant than Pitstick wants to grant. Balthasar’s theology is not without problems.
When one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s graduate students allowed how much he regretted the Church’s condemnation of Origen’s doctrine that God would eventually abolish hell and redeem the whole world (including the devils), the philosopher shot back: “Of course it was rejected. It would make nonsense of everything else. If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.”
And in his book
A Rumor of Angels, the sociologist and Lutheran writer Peter Berger insists that “the argument from damnation” points to a world beyond this one: We all feel, Berger argues, that certain crimes are so wanton that no punishment, not even execution or life in prison, could suffice for justice to be done.
In other words, there can be no theodicy without hell, no genuinely transcendent justice without eternal damnation. If the drama of salvation is to be a divine comedy, and not just a hollow, sick, and empty existentialist joke, it has to include an inferno.
But such objections, worries, and demurrals are one thing; Alyssa Pitstick’s full-bore attacks on Balthasar quite another.
To start with, her reading of the tradition insists that Sheol (the vaguely conceived underworld of the Hebrew imagination) was pre-differentiated, so to speak, into various regions. Ancient views of the underworld, whether from the Old Testament, Homer, or other pre-Christian sources, were undoubtedly vague. But that vagueness for her was due to the darkness of minds that had not yet received the fullness of revelation.
That, however, is an epistemological point. The various regions had already been divided up into impermeable sections, however unbeknownst to pre-Christians.
In her view, before the coming of Christ on earth, the underworld already consisted of (1) a hell of the damned, to which Christ did not go; and (2) a limbo of the just ones, where Christ went to free these antecedently just souls from their (presumably unjust?) captivity.
Indeed, in her forthcoming book, though not in her article here, she actually goes so far as to identify this pre-Christian limbo with the Catholic concept of purgatory — a strange innovation on the tradition coming from such an über-traditionalist as herself. (With the exception of Cato the Younger, all the denizens of Dante’s Purgatorio are baptized Christians, and even Cato is placed in what Dante called “ante-purgatory,” from which he never ascends into purgatory proper.)
Because Pitstick’s reading of the tradition is so monochromatic, she is forced to trace the provenance of Balthasar’s apparently recherché views not to the Bible, and certainly not to tradition, but to such figures as German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.
Because she seems to regard that genealogy as probative merely by mentioning it, I gather she disapproves of Protestant influence on Catholic theologians — and we have already learned that a theologian’s status as a cardinal clearly cuts no ice with her.
But in response to her implied accusations of Lutheran and Calvinist influence, I will up the Protestant ante even further. In my reading, the strongest Protestant influence on Balthasar was not Luther or Calvin but Karl Barth, who gets no mention in either Pitstick’s article or her new book.
In Balthasar’s view, Barth was the first theologian in the history of Christian thought who found a way of reconciling St. Paul’s theology of the atonement with Luther’s and Calvin’s (and Augustine’s) theory of predestination.
He did this by showing that the entirety of God’s foreordained decree for the human race — whether to save or to damn — came to focus first and above all on his Son, who submitted himself to God’s reprobation. And since reprobation is what brought hell into being in the first place, Barth is led to this conclusion:
It is a serious matter to be threatened by hell, sentenced to hell, worthy of hell, and already on the road to hell. On the other hand, we must not minimize the fact that we actually know of only one certain triumph of hell — the handing-over of Jesus — and that this triumph of hell took place in order that it would never again be able to triumph over anyone. We must not deny that Jesus gave Himself up into the depths of hell not only with many others but on their behalf, in their place.
Pitstick would no doubt regard this passage as equally dubious —and certainly at least as much in conflict with previous Church tradition — as anything that Balthasar might have written. To which I think he would respond: If one is going to object to Barth here, one is not so much objecting to the Reformers as to St. Paul.
As anyone who has read his influential book on Barth knows, Balthasar did not subscribe to Luther’s notion of a merely forensic justification, whereby we gain access to heaven by faith alone, a faith which tells us we have been acquitted in God’s courtroom, as it were, by a kind of legal fiction, even while we continue to stay stuck in the same mire of sin as before.
But for Balthasar, even if the Reformers went awry here, at least they took St. Paul seriously, and ecumenical discussion will go nowhere in his view unless both sides return to a serious reexamination of Paul on his own terms.
In other words, the whole point of Balthasar’s book on Barth was not to make Luther or Calvin canonical authorities for Catholic theology (nor, of course, to rule them out of bounds either, in the manner of Pitstick, just for being Protestant). Rather,
he wanted to bring Paul’s doctrine of atonement back into the center of Catholic debate, especially these verses: “For our sake God made him [Christ] to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21), and “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by being cursed in our stead” (Gal. 3:13).
I think I can explain Balthasar’s interpretation of these passages by citing a remark from St. Anselm, the medieval Benedictine who became the archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. He shocked his fellow monks at a colloquy one day when he told them that he would rather God condemn him to hell, even if he had committed no sins, than that he be allowed into heaven with the soil of sin still staining his soul.
No doubt Anselm was speaking here, as was his wont, of what God “has to be” by definition: that is, the All-Holy, who by nature cannot admit sin into his presence. But, however unawares, he was also making a christological point.
For could the persons of the Trinity be less willing to follow such a logic than was a medieval monk? Has not Anselm inadvertently expressed the Trinity’s own reasons for the incarnation? Do we not now see why a merely forensic view of justification will ultimately break down logically?
In the face of this logic, and above all in her studied refusal to come to terms with Paul’s theology (even quite independently of Reformation theology), Pitstick has only one option left, and she takes it: In her book, she says quite openly that “tradition” (meaning of course her tradition) trumps all of Scripture, and not just St. Paul:
Although little attention has been paid to ascertaining the original intentions of the human authors [of the Bible], and developments in theological precision have not been discussed, as [is] typical in contemporary Scriptural exegesis, the premise for this procedure is simple: All the authors considered desired to speak the truth God has revealed and confided to His Church.
They themselves would have been the first to desire their words be used and interpreted in accord with the faith of the Church, especially in those cases where they did not see the truth as fully or clearly as those who followed them. This having been said, the texts employed for this chapter were selected for their clarity and orthodoxy.
This procedure is an example, I believe, of what is called the argument from desperation. For one thing, it contradicts Church teaching. Vatican II’s decree on revelation,
Dei Verbum, explicitly asserts that
the “teaching office of the Church is not above the word of God, but serves it,” and Pius XII solemnly taught that the inspired meaning of the sacred text is located in the original intent of each author, which can be determined only by looking at each author’s unique historical context.
One is left to wonder if Pitstick has pre-selected her passages because she suspects other passages of their unorthodoxy. Granted, some passages in the Bible might lack clarity — but orthodoxy too? She avoids Paul’s Letter to the Romans as if it were radioactive — and no wonder, because nearly every line of that epistle can be brought in to refute her thesis of a pre-Christian purgatory. For
it is precisely Paul’s point in Romans that no one is just in the sight of God after the first sin of Adam.
Presumably the denizens of the Pitstickian purgatory would be Jews who obeyed the Mosaic law or pagans who kept the natural law — or, if they failed in their legal duties, somehow managed to repent before death, though they would had to have done so without benefit of knowing the cross of Christ by which those sins would have been known as sins.
But for Paul, obedience to either law is irrelevant, since Jew and pagan are equally guilty, and precisely because their knowledge of obeying the law brings knowledge of their true sinfulness: “All men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin. . . . For no human being will be justified in God’s sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:9b, 20).
As to Pitstick’s odd notion of a pre-Christian purgatory, one must recall Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that
mortal and venial sins are not two different species of the genus “sin” the way birch and beech trees are equally trees. For St. Thomas, only mortal sin is sin in the true sense.
This means that if Christ went down solely to purgatory (where only venial sins are purged, along with the lingering effects of forgiven mortal sins), then his atonement for sin — real sin —has been “emptied of its power” (1 Cor. 1:17).
If I might put the matter in John Milton’s mythological terms, what could prove more pleasing to Satan than to hear reports of a newfangled theology that claims his realm has been left intact, not invaded or broken into by the ruler of the universe? As Lucifer says of his new abode in the dungeons of Tartarus in book 1 of Paradise Lost:
Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
My chief worry about Pitstick’s position is not her totalizing attack on Balthasar. We are, after all, dealing with Christian theology’s most crucial issue: God’s intentions for the world.
What worries me instead is that she seems to have an alternative vision of the gospel that would, in time, turn Good News into bad, hope into despair, trust into anxiety, and love into fear — and this despite John’s admonition that “there is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18).
The Beloved Disciple is obviously not encouraging sentimentality or moral laxity here, for two chapters earlier (at 2:1–2) he grounds that fear - expelling love not in wishy-washy liberalism or an avuncular indulgence of sin but in the entirely objective fact of universal redemption: “My little children, I am writing this to you so that you do not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Just One. He is the expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”
Copyright (c) 2006 First Things 168 (December 2006): 25-31.