Bulgakov and Apollinarius
by Henry Karlson
The Catholic University of America
Back in 1952, Hans Urs von Balthasar had some rather shocking words to say about Christology: “And what a dryness there is in the doctrine about Christ, which likewise has made scarcely any progress since Chalcedon, where an abstract formula has to answer for the central mystery. Once again the formula is excellent, but only if it is a skeletal structure that enables the living flesh of the word of revelation to stand and walk.” Not many years before, Sergius Bulgakov made a similar point. While Chalcedon must be recognized as normative, it should not have ended Christological discussion. Its declaration was mostly negative: it stated who and what Christ was not, but left much room as to who and what Christ is. The expectation was that there would be theological development. To be sure, there were few theological developments at II and III Constantinople, but they were minor, and beyond them, there really has not been any significant development in Christology. It was not meant to be this way.
Bulgakov believed that Christian theologians have far too long neglected this dogmatic problem. Christology, as it is today, provides answers which no longer satisfy the questions brought to it by believers and skeptics alike. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 4′
David began the von Balthasar blog conference last night over at The Fire and the Rose with the following introduction:
In a world where we are bombarded by seemingly endless amounts of information, I trust this conference will offer something distinct and interesting. While blogs have been disparaged (often rightly) by academics, I hope this experiment demonstrates that theo-blogging can be a place for academically rigorous and theologically sophisticated work. More importantly, in a conference examining the interrelation between theology and exegesis, I hope most of all that these essays provoke us to return to the text anew for a fresh hearing of God’s Word. May we gain a greater appreciation for what von Balthasar accomplished, and, following his example, learn to cultivate a faith that always seeks understanding.
My contribution will be posted tomorrow. In the meantime, definitely head on over and read the inaugural posts, here and here. Lois Miles has a great piece on von Balthasar’s reliance upon the contemplative mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr. The essay gives a nice biography of their relationship, including a bit on the creation of von Speyr’s commentaries on Scripture. Cynthia Nielsen, in her usual exemplary style, helps us understand Balthasar’s insight that aesthetics and hermeneutics can not be separated without comprising the wholeness of the Scripture – “a recovery of theologico-aesthetic sensibilities that had been lost with certain modernist interpretive currents.”
By all means, please engage these authors by commenting. I think this format of blog conference is a unique opportunity for scholars around the globe to extend the theological conversations that just aren’t (unfortunately) getting air time in places like AAR and the like. Additionally, the kind of interaction that has already begun exhibits a kind of charity that is as rare in the larger, more established venues. As David mentions, the blog medium hasn’t garnered the best reputation among the academic elite. Hopefully our fellowship will help change that perception.
Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is an explosion of cultural throwbacks and cinematic contortions, not to mention Beatle’s hit after hit, “like endless rain into a paper cup”. But it’s not simply vintage nostalgia. Buried in the plot is a power struggle between two deep human urges that bears theological fruit in its reflection of Love as a pole averring, mediating factor that ultimately funds the best of human efforts.
Early in the film, Taymor appears to squarely pit social and militant activism and artistic creation against each other, and gives the impression that the infamous Love will side with the latter. It’s only an impression, and one that many on both sides mistakenly take to as the final word for better or ill. On one side, there’s the declaration of fealty to an ambiguous and numinous Love, the great fictional panacea. On the other, there’s the concession that Love is indeed ambiguous, impotent to effect change; the there’s an argument for the need for something else, something more jarring, even violent. And thus we have the polarization of the 60s set before us: the peaceful, inward, even insular arts culture on one side (Woodstock par excellance); and the boisterous and often violent activist movement concomitant and strangely akin to the oft harsh and violent government (Kent State/Vietnam). And then, in wake of this “revolution” there’s the late 70s and 80s, perceived by many, and certainly portrayed in the film, as the waning of Love and meaning – “You know, it’s gonna be alright, yeah”. Continue reading ‘Is All We Need LOVE? A prolegomena to future discussions on Love and Being.’
If the Enlightenment and subsequent periods of modernity have done anything to alter what it means to be human, they have set humanity at a distance from the world, positing a radical degree of separation between the created order and Aristotle’s rational animals. Where God factors into this rift, and how one structures the dialogue between Philosophy and Theology, depends largely on how one schematizes God in relation to Being. It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who adroitly drew out the ramification of the human mind’s prodigality when he said, “[T]he human person himself would stand as the synthetic element, not only between [Church and world/Faith and Reason], but secretly above both.”
Continue reading ‘Cosmic Aesthetics: Begbie, von Balthasar, and some musings on modernity’s implications for theological aesthetics’
Introducing our very first podcast. <hold the fanfare, please>
We’re trying something new today. Some of you asked me to post the introduction to Balthasar I did earlier this year at St. Marks. So, here it is, although I must first make the following disclaimer: the file is rather large (32.4mb), the sound quality is poor, and I say “um” a lot… really, I can’t believe that I talk like that. The sound quality we can address in the future, but I think I may be doomed as a public speaker. I can only hope that my secondary students have been so enrapt by the content of my lesson plans that they haven’t noticed me stumbling over my ums.
An audio introduction to von Balthasar. Right click to download
For future podcasts and our regular feed please subscribe in your reader and/or iTunes here.
The following is a response by Jefe G, a fellow resident of the DC area, to the series of posts on Balthasar’s Love Alone and Fathers Day. Jefferson agreed to let us share it here as a guest post – hopefully not his last! Thanks, Jefe. – DWM
I didn’t have the best experience with the first Balthasar book I read, so [the recent series of posts on The Land of Unlikeness] convinced me to give him another chance.
I was surprised that when I was about half halfway through Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible, I started to feel something like a heaviness of suffering in the text. I was flipping to the title page to see the publication date for its proximity to WWII, when I noticed the description of the 
cover photograph. The cover of my edition has a picture of an etching from a wall at a cell in Auschwitz of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I was almost relieved that I wasn’t the only one who saw in Balthasar’s slim book something absolutely ludicrous. Because just as scratching Jesus into a Nazi death camp cell wall is ludicrous, so is maintaining a belief that we remain ordered toward love, and that we are welcomed into that love, despite being absolutely aware of the enormity of human suffering today. Continue reading ‘Response to Love Alone’
I wanted to draw attention to a comment made last week. Because it pertains to a post made several months ago, I fear many of us might miss it – I would probably miss most comments if I didn’t have them emailed to me – and I would hate to see it forgotten. Go here and here for the original posts. I hope Tony, the author of it, won’t mind me posting a snippet of it here. Oh, and, Welcome and Thanks for the contribution, Tony! Send me your email address if you see this.
Continue reading ‘Neo-scholasticism and Reno, redux’
Sunday I’ll be walking the parishoners of St. Marks’ through some rudimentary tidbits of Balthasar’s scheme, such as the analogia entis and his book Love Alone as a bitesized version of his Herrlichkeit, The Glory of the Lord. I photocopied a couple pages and the conclusion today in preparation for the class. As I did so, I was struck, as so often before, by the sheer volume of Balthasar’s corpus, and briefly by the futility in presenting Balthasar’s project in 45 minutes. But what I like in time and comprehensiveness, I believe I’ll make up in ambition and excitement.
Love Alone itself is nicely structured and lends itself to a quick presentation; although, maybe not 45 minutes-quick… The layout is simple:
I. What is the core, essential aspect of Christianity? “What is specifically Christian about Christianity?”
A. Not its cosmology
B. Not its anthropology
C. Rather, “God’s message is theological, or better theo-pragmatic. It is an act of God on man; an act done for and on behalf of man–and only then to man, and in him. It is of this act that we must say: it is credible only as love–and here we mean God’s own love, the manifestation of which is the manifestation of the glory of God.” (7-8) And so, Balthasar here inextricably links soteriology and aesthetics via Revelation. Continue reading ‘Love Alone: the marriage of Theology and Aesthetics’
Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you’re new to this blog, and even if you’re just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you’ll stay for the content, which I’ll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark’s. Yesterday, AD presented Auden’s Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion – maybe he’ll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!
I’m up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar’s opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I’m really interested in Balthasar’s turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).
Today, Matthew Milliner, an Art History student at Princeton Univ., posted a reflection on Reno’s article, which I wrote about yesterday. Milliner begins by recounting the recent art conference, Retracing the Expanded Field, at Princeton’s School of Architecture. The conference included art critic legends like Hal Foster, who seem now to be arguing the same thing about the practice of Art Criticism as Reno does about Theology, namely that revolutionary movements in art, Post-modernisms namely, have been great for shaking up the paradigms, but they’ve done so to the extent that Criticism has yet to find a unified machinery from which to continue to assess art. Like the Heroic Generation, figures like Piet Mondrian and Andre Malraux (to use Milliner’s examples), gained enough momentum to attract a following, but failed to provide a stable “baseline” from which others could grow or rebel. Now, many are without enough of a tradition or background to converse gainfully with others in the field, resulting in a kind of Babel experience. Milliner goes on to conclude that as with the supposed break of the Heroic Generation with the 2 centuries of theological neo-scholasticism before them, so the “post-moderns” broke with those before them, like the New Criticism group (Clement Greenberg, et. al.). Continue reading ‘The Heroic Generation and Art Criticism’s Tower of Babel’
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