Explorations In Theology III: 003 by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898704372
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

The law of the communication of the spirituality of Jesus

If one returns from the peak of the spiritualities united in Jesus to their multiplicity in the Church and in humanity, there follows automatically from what has just been said the principle that the spirituality of the gospel does not enter a “synthesis” with anything else, as if it were only the partial aspect of an all-embracing whole. It cannot therefore be a question of needing to bring the spirituality of the gospel into a synthesis with, for example, the spirituality of “cultural progress” or of the “age of technology”, a synthesis that would have to be discovered by myself, this “man of the twentieth century”, and whose point of unity I would have to be. In a Christian perspective, the synthetic point between God and the world, and the concrete integration of the world in the direction of God, always lies with Christ.

This, like every saying of the gospel, is a “hard saying”; in order to make it comprehensible, it must be transposed back into the existential context of the gospel. Were the gospel a philosophy of religion for Everyman, or an abstract ethics for Everyman, then this hardness would be inappropriate. But the inherent form of the gospel requires that man follow Jesus by staking everything, with ultimate decisiveness, on the one card and abandoning the rest of the card game: “leaving everything” without looking back, without laying down as a precondition a “synthesis” between Jesus and saying farewell to those in one’s home, between Jesus and burying one’s own father, or between Jesus and anything else at all. “To take one’s cross upon one” means the same absolute preference of the holy will of God to all one’s own plans and preferences and affections: father, mother, wife, child, field, etc. The criterion, the “canon”, is that one does not make a synthesis. Where someone understands this and does it, where one is not only “called” but also “chosen” through the Yes he utters, his life becomes “canonical” in the Christian sense. He is this, thanks to the indivisibility of his Yes (or of his existential faith) and of his existence, and (whether canonized by the Church or not) he is a canonical Christian, a “saint”. The saints, however, are the criterion for all the others: even now, they are the judges of the world, and a fortiori in the last judgment (1 Cor 6:1f.), They are the Analogatum princeps (since they bear in themselves the “form of Christ”) in terms of which, as the perfecta ratio,1 the statement about the other anahgata is made. The existence of the saints “excuses” the existence of the others who make compromises; this is the only possible way for an (analogous) universal concept of Christian existence to come into being. But since the Analogatum princeps becomes the criterion on the basis of the Christian decision (to stake everything on the one card), this criterion cannot lie primarily in the neutrality of the

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