Tragedy Under Grace by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898705553
Published: 2013-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Insight

It is a thankless task to give a sketch of Reinhold Schneider’s critical achievement here; all one could offer would be a scaffolding of judgments and evaluations, and the effect of such an assemblage would inevitably be pedantic. One should read the work and see for oneself the weight of his words, above all Dämonie und Verklärung.1 One thing is astonishing: that we find nowhere in Schneider’s total oeuvre a thorough confrontation with Luther and the Reformation, which had been the starting point for Hugo Ball in his “Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz” and the “Folgen der Reformation”. In the early years, this is the tragic counterweight to the Roman ordering of the empire; in the later years, he always begins with the “consequences” themselves, in the age of Weimar and Idealism. Schneider himself begins here; he has deep and indelible experience of the “consequences”. But the historian Schneider has good reasons for paying so much attention to literature, for it was here that the point of deviation lay that drew the spirit away from its responsibility within history. The author who would have had to utter the innermost element of history2 landed alongside it in the Weimar era.3 For Kant, the historical is “something quite indifferent, which one can treat as one wishes”.4 And Fichte says: “Only the metaphysical gives blessedness, not in the least the historical—all it does is to make one intelligent.”5 Thus this whole epoch passes by the historicity of Christ and of his Church too, diverting their essential substance into a suprahistorical ideality. Lessing already does this, introducing the Faustian ideal, “the unease of the eternal process of becoming”, with the ideal of eternal seeking, because he cannot accept the absoluteness of the truth of Christ within history. Lessings Drama6 fills out the picture by showing that there is no more place in this worldview, with its explicitly bourgeois character, for a king and for the divine ordering that is posited with him, for genuine tragedy, or thereby for a reconciliation that is more than compassion. “The drama presupposes a total decisiveness in relation to the last things.” “It is strange how this mighty, clear spirit ends up in indeterminate, vacillating contradictoriness.”7 The subsequent effects are fatal: “an onward rush of that which is essentially bourgeois, of the moral as opposed to the ethical, of demands made by a political class, a refusal to be open to the totality of the powers of earth and of heaven—this is what is communicated to the historical drama of the German classical period.”8

There does indeed live a feeling for the transcendent in Weimar and in Königsberg,9 “the belief that our Being and action must be determined on the basis of the spirit”; but the genuine transcendence is missing, as we see most clearly in the lack of a serious concept of evil (something that remains present in English and Spanish drama and in the English and the French novel).10 Thus man no longer genuinely stands between heaven and hell.

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