Abstract
Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bernard Lonergan can seem to be quite at odds in their approach to trinitarian theology. However, there have been recent efforts to relate the two theologians favourably. The present author suggests such an effort on the basis of the First Vatican Council’s teaching on human understanding and divine mystery. Balthasar’s and Lonergan’s approaches to achieve some beneficial understanding of the Trinity can be related as complementary: Lonergan’s psychological analogy and Balthasar’s connection of the economic and immanent Trinity. Besides that, the two authors can be viewed as comparable even in areas that seem opposed, for example, the anthropological method of openness to the transcendent. Perhaps Balthasar might even be open to Lonergan’s later development of the psychological analogy. On the other hand, from the perspective of Bernard Lonergan’s theology, some nuances to Balthasar’s theology can be offered: (1) to the meaning of divine kenosis, (2) regarding the Father’s attitude toward his Son who descends into hell, and (3) in the matter of change, even suffering, in God.
Keywords
Hans Urs von Balthasar and Bernard Lonergan can be paired as two prominent 20th-century theologians of the divine Trinity in the Roman Catholic tradition. At the same time, the theological trajectories of the two theologians are distinctly different. Balthasar, for example, considers the psychological analogy of the Trinity to be particularly weak, at the least needing to be complemented with the social analogy developed by Richard of St Victor. Lonergan, on the other hand, employs the psychological analogy to develop his entire systematic theology of the Trinity. For his part, Lonergan is not congenial to any consideration of change in the immanent Trinity since God’s perfect simplicity does not admit of more or less. Thus, Balthasar’s entertainment of an inner-trinitarian kenosis stands, or at least seems to stand, in opposition to the trinitarian theology of divine perfection that Lonergan esteems and promotes. 1 Similarly, Balthasar contends that the Father and the Holy Spirit are affected by the economic activity of the human Jesus.
Still, some contemporary theologians have proposed that the theologies of Balthasar and Lonergan on the Trinity can complement each other. Robert Doran is of the view that Lonergan’s highly theoretical theology becomes more balanced if it is related to Balthasar’s aesthetic-dramatic approach to meaning. 2 Referring to Doran’s efforts toward complementarity, Anne Hunt also invites readers to relate the two theologies in a positive way, especially in the area of the psychological analogy. 3
In my book, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture: A Contemporary Theology of the Trinity, I also relate Lonergan and Balthasar positively to one another in the area of humanly accessible understanding of God. 4 Picking up on the First Vatican Council’s teaching that there are complementary ways to attempt to understand doctrine, I invite readers to value the understanding of the divine Trinity in terms of the processions of love and knowledge in human consciousness as a natural analogy ‘grounded upon the revealed word of God.’ 5 St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and Bernard Lonergan provide a magnificent trajectory of theological reflection in this manner. 6 Complementary to this natural analogy is the relationship of the mysteries of faith one to another developed by Balthasar in his writings on the paschal mystery and the kenotic drama of the immanent and economic Trinity. 7
What, then, are some of the issues that invite further reflection? There is the matter of Balthasar’s concern about the inadequacy of the psychological analogy of the Trinity. There is the Lonerganian position that would criticize a kenotic theology that might be mistakenly introducing change into the perfect immanent Trinity. This raises the question whether biblical imagery and more precise theological language are being confused.
Does God Change?
I start with the major issue of God’s infinite perfection, and whether this admits of change. Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that God, the immanent Trinity, is affected by what takes place in the created world. Thus, the Father is angry about sin since sin is a disavowal of fidelity to supreme goodness that God is, and God surely hates sin.
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The Word made flesh, though without sin, takes on the sin of all humankind and its accompanying death. The Father’s anger over sinful humanity in some sense impinges upon his Son when the Son abides in the realm of death where sin has triumphed. The Son, in turn, feels abandoned by the Father as he languishes in the realm of death, all because of human sinfulness.
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At the same time, the Father and the Son remain united in their infinite divine love in the Holy Spirit who unites them across the distance of sinful humanity. In this sense, Balthasar maintains, God does not change. Here is a clear, well nuanced, statement: It is not that God, in himself, changes but that the unchangeable God enters into a relationship with creaturely reality, and this relationship imparts a new look to his internal relations. This is not something purely external, as if this relationship ad extra did not really affect him: rather, the new relationship to worldly nature, which is hypostatically united to the Son, highlights one of the infinite possibilities that lie in God’s eternal life.
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The reason that God does not change even as God in the divine economy brings into being new realities is that the new realities simply bring about what God already is: ‘God is so divine that by way of the Incarnation, death and Resurrection, he can truly and not just in seeming become that which as God he already and always is.’ 11 Can it then be said that the utterly central events of the economic Trinity that are the crucifixion, death, descent into hell, and resurrection of Christ Jesus have some impact upon the divine life in itself? It seems that the challenge is to think of the timeless God acting to bring about new realities in time, something that time-laden humans will never be able to sort out to our satisfaction. Thus, Balthasarian commentator, Edward T. Oakes, highlights that in Balthasar’s theology this is the drama of all dramas.
But it all comes together here: trinitarian and christological themes all play essential roles in clarifying the Great Event of the Triduum and its saving significance. But if that were not challenge enough, in Balthasar’s thought, these themes all get transposed into dramatic terms, because, according to his interpretation, in the Triduum of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, something happens to God, and this is why this part of the trilogy deserves the title Theo-Drama in every sense of the word, being both a subjective as well as objective prefix.
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In other words, God is the author/poet (Father), the chief actor (Son), and the director/interpreter (Holy Spirit) of this central act in world history. This action takes place not only in the world, but, as an inner-trinitarian dynamic act, divine love overcomes anger, death, alienation, and all that sin entails, and the victory of divine love and life, truth and goodness, prevails. 13 Thus, for Balthasar, ‘[t]his vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of the Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way.’ 14 As for the urgent matter of immutability or change in God, Gerard O’Hanlon summarizes Balthasar’s thought by positing that ‘the incarnation does indeed change God but not in a temporal, mythological kind of way.’ 15
Bernard Lonergan and classical theology and philosophy have a different way of engaging this dilemma of the timeless and the time-laden. They would disagree that something happens to God in the work of the economic Trinity, whether that work be the creation of the world or the redemption wrought in Christ Jesus or the sanctification effected within the human world by the Holy Spirit. If something happens to God and in God that was somehow lacking in God before, then the God who is referenced is not really God at all. For the true God is Pure Act, there being no more or less in God. God is the utterly perfect, utterly complete Being. The phrase, Pure Act, is from Thomas Aquinas, who also expresses God’s being as a perfect union of essence and existence. 16 Since God is Pure Act there is nothing for God to become.
Related to the timeless from another perspective, what creates difficulties for the human mind is that we cannot get our minds around God’s utter simplicity, which also means that God is beyond time. God is the creator of time, not its subject. And so while creation, redemption, and sanctification happen within time, thus being characterized by before and after, and embodying change in the created world, God is not undergoing change as creation and redemption and sanctification happen. Yet, God is totally and actively present, since without God none of these realities could take place. God is their primary cause, to use another category of Aquinas. And God is lovingly, and within that love sometimes perhaps hatefully and angrily, very much engaged, since God is Pure Love. 17
Indeed, Lonergan writes, God’s very being as unrestricted act of understanding is inevitably personal and in loving relation to the world that God creates: As intelligibility without intelligence would be defective, so also would truth without affirming, or the good without loving; but God is without defect, not because the act of understanding is complemented by further acts, but by a single act that at once is understanding and intelligible, truth and affirming, goodness and loving, being and omnipotence.
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Admittedly, it is difficult to fathom how this paradox can be true, namely, that God is deeply involved in the world, so involved that not a single thing can happen in the world unless God, the primary cause, is active, even as God is not changed by the world as it unfolds. Yet, explanations are worth attempting. Thomas Weinandy offers this explanation: The conclusion to which all this leads is that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as subsistent relations fully in act, are immutable and impassible. They are immutable not because they are static or inert in their relationships, but precisely for the opposite reason. Because they are subsistent relations fully in act, because the terms ‘Father,’ ‘Son,’ and ‘Holy Spirit’ designate pure acts (and thus are pure verbs and nothing other than verbs), they do not have any relational potential which would need to be actualized in order to make them more relational—more who they are. As subsistent relations fully in act, the persons of the Trinity are utterly and completely dynamic and active in their integral and comprehensive self-giving to one another, and could not possibly become any more dynamic or active in their self-giving since they are constituted, and so subsist, as who they are only in their complete and utter self-giving to one another. Moreover, they are impassible not because they lack passion, in the sense of being fully loving and completely self-giving, but again precisely for the opposite reason. As subsistent relations fully in act, the persons of the Trinity are completely and utterly passionate in their self-giving to one another and cannot become more passionate for they are constituted, and so subsist, as who they are only because they have absolutely given themselves completely to one another in love.
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Bernard Lonergan offers an explanation of all this in terms of the analogy of contingent predication. By this he means that the divine persons truly act when they create, redeem, and sanctify. At the same time ‘nothing real and intrinsic is added to a divine person as divine’ on account of their action in the created world. On the other hand, something really does take place outside the divine Trinity. 20 It is similar to an artist painting a picture or sculpting a statue. The artist really creates. A new object comes into being because of the artist. But the artist does not become more or less Michelangelo than before. Admittedly, human ‘creators’ can be existentially, if not essentially, enlarged or diminished by their work. But in God, who is infinitely greater than any human creator, who already is complete and perfect Being, there is neither enlargement nor diminishment to be had. Thus, God can be the author, actor, and director of the great theo-drama, but no real change in God follows therefrom. Is this the same as saying that God is not affected by what happens to the Word made flesh and to God’s beloved creatures? No, because, as W. Norris Clarke writes, God is engaged with the created world in ‘a relation of intentional consciousness’ that is distinct from his infinite perfection in itself. 21 The next points come around to address this question.
How Is the Immanent Trinity the Ground of the Economic Trinity?
There is no doubt in orthodox Catholic theology that the immanent Trinity is both the precondition of and the guiding pattern for the activity of the economic Trinity, that is, of the action of the triune God in the world. Bernard Lonergan comments that ‘the mission of a divine person is constituted by a divine relation of origin itself.’ 22 Karl Rahner is famous for his recurrent insistence that the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity are one and the same, that there is an ‘identity of the economy of salvation and the immanent Trinity.’ 23 The Catechism of the Catholic Church confirms this position in its teaching on the intimate identity of the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity. It is one and the same Trinity, but considered from different perspectives, so that coming to an understanding of each focus of the Trinity provides important nuances in our appreciation of the triune God. ‘God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works.’ 24
Hans Urs von Balthasar undertakes to spell out quite specifically some of the particulars of this intimate relationship. First, as the Father generates the Son he does so by pouring his entire reality as God into the Son so that the Son receives the totality of the divinity from the Father. Likewise, the Father and the Son breathe the totality of their divine love into the Holy Spirit who is, then, the totality of divine love. Balthasar speaks here, in his last set of theological works, of self-expropriation (Selbstentäusserung): ‘The identity of the divine essence is found in the positive self-expropriation of the Divine Persons, which in all three is one, true, and good.’ 25
Since this Pure Act of the divine Persons is infinite, it stands to reason that the distinctions by relations in God are infinite. Although they are one infinite divine essence, in their distinctive reality as Persons they are infinitely separate from one another as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Next, this infinite distinction between the Persons of God because of their distinct relations finds economic expression in the distance of the Son from the Father in his death and descent into hell, in which he is abandoned by the Father, even as the Holy Spirit has been breathed forth by the Son on the cross, leaving the Son to face ‘alone’ the horror of hell.
Yet, even as the economic realities of separation and abandonment take place, divine perichoresis keeps the divine three intimately united with one another in a bond of infinite love. Here is one way in which Balthasar expresses this paradox: … the Son’s God-forsakenness is drawn into the love relationship within the Trinity. The Son ‘takes this estrangement into himself and creates proximity’: nearness between God and man on the basis of the union between the Father and the Son that is held fast through every darkness and forsakenness.
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It is the property of the Holy Spirit to maintain, through all the separation between them, the unity of the Father and the Son. Thus, what seems economically to be only abandonment is, at once, unity in eternal love.
Balthasar then highlights the eternal significance of the Son’s estrangement from the Father as he has taken on the sin of humankind and all its most awful consequences: When Peter says that Christ ‘died for sins once for all’ (I Pet 3: 18), this ‘once for all’ expresses both the eternal meaning and eternal content of this event, which loses nothing of its actuality down the ages and communicates its unique character to the Church and to faith. This is within the scope of our understanding insofar as the separation of the Father and the Son, made possible through the Incarnation, is an ‘economic’ expression of eternal life.
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In his own theological style Lonergan confirms the infinite distinction between each of the divine Persons, even as he insists, along with Thomas Aquinas, that the relations of origin are processions within the Pure Act that is the one God. ‘[T]he originating act and the originated act are really distinct with respect to relative existence.’ ‘And it makes no difference to this that the same act is originating and originated.’ 28
This infinite distinction between each of the three divine Persons co-exists with the perichoresis of the divine Three, by which each Person totally inheres in the others both ontologically and consciously. This is so because in God being and consciousness are identical. One way that Lonergan expresses this is in terms of love: … [A]lthough in us love effects only a quasi identification between the lover and the beloved, whereby a friend is said by the poet to be dimidium animae meae, ‘half of my soul,’ in God love involves a true and full identity between the lover and beloved, and according to this, God as loved is most truly said to be in God as loving.
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Since it is clear that each of the divine Persons inheres entirely in the others in divine perichoresis, both immanently and economically, even as there is infinite distinction between them by reason of their relations of origin, we can now turn to the knotty problem of kenosis and how it can, and cannot, be said to engage the divine Persons.
Is There Kenotic Activity in Each of the Divine Persons?
It is common Christian understanding that the hypostatic union of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is described in a hymn in the Letter to the Philippians 2: 6–11 as a self-emptying, a kenosis. Christ Jesus, who for all eternity is in the form of God, i.e., is a divine Person with a divine nature, at a particular moment in history joined to his divine Person a human nature and in this human nature, setting aside his divine prerogatives, not only lived an historically conditioned human life, but became a victim and endured death by crucifixion. There could be no greater action of leaving aside his divine prerogatives.
All this self-emptying Jesus did as an act of love in order to join himself with sinful humanity. Then having joined himself with sinful humanity he endured the cross and descended into hell to free humanity from the alienation of sin and bring about reconciliation of humanity with the triune God. Christ Jesus was especially suited for this mission since, as the Word become flesh out of love for humanity, he offers a healing restoration to humanity and then further a divinization of humanity. Furthermore, as fully human, and moreover as a sinless human being (who remains a divine Person), he accepts without remainder the need to acknowledge humanity’s painful, sinful alienation and accept God’s offer of restoration. Jesus goes all the way on behalf of sinful humanity. ‘For this reason, God highly exalted Christ Jesus and gave him the name above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord.’ The kenotic/self-emptying action of the Son of God is an act of love, a pouring out of the divine self in love, so much so that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity assumes a human nature to accomplish the salvation of the world, and does so with utter freedom. 30
What of the Father and the Holy Spirit? How are we to understand their activity in the divine economy? Clearly, neither Person enters into a hypostatic union with humanity as does the eternal Word. But both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit extend their infinite love to humanity and exercise their divine activity on behalf of humanity. John Haught suggests that God’s creation of a world characterized by evolutionary development indicates a self-emptying love by which God should not be expected to overwhelm the world either with a coercively directive ‘power’ or an annihilating ‘presence.’ Indeed, an infinite love must in some sense ‘absent’ or ‘restrain itself’ precisely in order to give the world the ‘space’ in which to become something distinct from the creative love that constitutes it as ‘other.’ We should anticipate, therefore, that any universe rooted in an unbounded love would have some features that appear to us as random or undirected.
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So, God is the creator and sustainer of created reality, but leaves the creaturely world to evolve according to its own inner dynamism.
The Holy Spirit’s work in the divine economy is also exercised ever so subtly and in hidden ways, never overwhelming in Its omnipotent power, but respecting human discernment and decision. For this reason, Sergius Bulgakov speaks of a kenosis of the Holy Spirit in the economic order that can be understood relative to the kenosis of the Son.
The Son’s kenosis is matched by the corresponding kenosis of the Holy Spirit, who restricts his power and communicates himself to the incarnate Word, as he also does in creation, in the form of finite gifts.
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And when it comes to sending the Son on mission to redeem the world, St John’s Gospel aids our understanding. The Trinity loves humanity so much that the triune God sends the Son into the human world as a human being ‘not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him’ (John 3:16). The Father is present as the Son goes through the horrible ordeal of his crucifixion and death and descent into the deepest alienation of human beings from their loving creator and redeemer. In this sense the Father enters into the travail of redemption, accompanying the beloved Son.
The Holy Spirit, as the Person acting within Christ Jesus to enable him to live out his human life in fidelity to the divine will, is also a partner in the humanity of the Son, in all the Son’s joys and sorrows, abasement and glory. In the case of both the Holy Spirit and the Father this outpouring of love is active at the very core of the human condition.
Still the Father and the Holy Spirit do not take upon themselves the human condition. They accept the human condition, including the suffering human condition, of the Son of God, for the created, finite reality that it is. And they ‘diminish’ their activity with humanity out of respect for the freedom of humanity, which freedom they create as a characteristic human trait. But they remain totally Pure Act, without any hypostatic union with human nature. Indeed, one has to be more in act, omnipotent even, to allow creatures such considerable freedom to act as they will, yet with full assurance that their most destructive acts will never ruin or even diminish the outcome of the divine plan, while the good acts of human and angelic creatures, without enhancing divine being, give glory to God. This is why Bernard Lonergan could so often remark: ‘Ultimately, we live in a friendly universe.’ God’s infinite love will always win out. We can be sure of it.
I suggest, then, that we understand divine kenosis in this way: The action of the Trinity is an infinitely lavish outpouring of love into the world. Additionally, this outpouring of love in the divine economy has its paradigm in the infinitely lavish flow of love by which the Father generates the Son, and the Son thus becomes the eternal, only-begotten Son, and by which the Father with the Son spirates the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit exists as infinite divine love loving the divine self.
Kenosis in the biblical sense of the hymn of Philippians 2, of course, does not strictly apply to the Father and the Holy Spirit. For in the activity of love in the Trinity, and indeed in human persons as well, loving another person does not empty the lover. The act of love increases the lover, at least in the case of humans. By love we become more fully human than if we do not love. In God, since God is Pure Act, even more the giving of love is not a self-emptying, nor does the act of love add, ontologically or existentially, to the being of the Persons, who are for all eternity absolute Love.
Anne Hunt provides a quote from Balthasar that could perhaps be considered to be congenial to this understanding of divine activity: We are saying that the ‘emptying’ of the Father’s heart in the begetting of the Son includes and surpasses every possible drama between God and the world, because a world can only have its place within the difference between the Father and the Son which is held open and bridged over by the Spirit.
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Indeed, I am convinced that Balthasar recognizes that this generation of the divine Son by the Father is at once a self-emptying and an overflowing of divine superabundance (Überschwang): We cannot say that God the Father, in generating the Son, has not ‘given him everything he can give’; on the other hand, says Bonaventure, he has ‘not yet given in every way in which he can give’, that is, together with the Son. To say this does not detract from the primary, all-grounding deed of the Father’s love whereby he gives all that is his to the Son (Jn 16:15); after all, this deed is simply the first, indispensable act of the divine superabundance without which the second, and necessarily last, act could not be performed.
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I suggest that Lonergan expresses the immanent action of the divine Trinity not exactly similarly, but in a somewhat comparable way, and then indicates the extension of that love into the economic action of sanctifying grace, but without in all this using kenotic terms or implying kenosis, when, starting with a statement about all love, he concludes: ‘since to give one’s entire love is the same as to give oneself, and since the Father and the Son give their entire proceeding Love, they also give themselves and therefore are said to come and dwell in the just.’ 35 And it is the Holy Spirit who, in sanctifying grace, brings the Father and the Son to dwell in the just.
Further Implications of the Death of the Son and of His Descent into Hell
Continuing to reflect on those events that are so prominent in Balthasar’s theology, several aspects invite consideration. A first deals with the economic implications of the distinction of the three Persons of God by reason of their relations of origin.
The Abandonment of the Son by the Father and the Holy Spirit
The infinite distinction of the Father and Son in the immanent Trinity, even though in their divine unity they remain one in love, is precisely what enables, indeed, requires the Father to abandon the Son in the economic Trinity, when the Son takes on all of humanity’s sinful alienation from God and then goes to the farthest reaches of abandonment when the same Son, in death, joins those who have most freely and radically distanced themselves from God. Christ Jesus, as at once human and divine, if he is really going to take on not only humanity, but humanity in its sinfulness, must enter into the utter separation from God that sin is. Nor can this just be figurative. Just the opposite, it is a graphic display of the horror of sin. 36
Does God Become Angry with His Son?
Clearly God hates sin because it is an affront to the divine plan of creation to bring humanity to its fulfilment in a relationship of love with the triune God. Since sin is an utter affront to divine love and a rejection of the enormous gift of happiness/divinization for which God creates humanity, when God hates sin it is actually an act of love on God’s part. God’s love, which includes hatred of sin, leads to the great lengths to which God goes to save sinful humanity from the heinous reality of sin.
Since Christ Jesus unites himself with sinful humanity and takes upon himself all the dreadful consequences of sin, descending even to hell, God the Father and the Holy Spirit hate the sinfulness which the Son, though sinless, embodies. It can be said, further, that in God’s love there is also anger at the stupidity and callousness of anyone who embraces sinful attitudes and behaviours, i.e., all of us human beings. 37 Here, however, I suggest that attribution of hatred and anger to God be nuanced. Since the Son is God, and, in his humanity, without sin, embracing sinful humanity with a love that is salvific, it is going too far to posit, as Balthasar does, that the Father’s anger extends to the Son. Just the opposite: the suffering and death of Jesus is the very act of the triune God’s love breaking down the alienation of sin.
Since the point of divine hatred and anger is intimately connected with the loving determination of the triune God to rescue humanity from the devastation of sin and bring about a restoration of justice and sanctity, the hatred and anger take place within the activity of Pure Love. 38 Indeed, conjoined with these negative sentiments within divine love is the compassion of the Father and the Holy Spirit, certainly toward the Person of God the Son who has taken unto himself humanity and its dire condition in order to reverse that condition, but divine compassion extends to all humanity in its horrific condition, and to each individual caught therein. God reaches out in love to fallen man and to the Son who has emptied himself of his divine prerogatives for the sake of saving fallen man.
All three Persons of God are fully present to the activity of the Son as he dies his redemptive death and descends into hell to search out those who have distanced themselves farthest from their loving God. Christ Jesus searches them out in order to assure them that divine reconciliation is available, even to the most alienated human sinner. We can perhaps say that God is compassionate/affected within God’s infinite love for humanity as the Word made flesh suffers out of love to reverse the dreadful effects of sin.
Emotions and/or Feelings; Change or Immutability
Let us keep trying to understand better compassion and hatred and anger and love in God. Is God vulnerable? Does God suffer? Is God subject to the changes of the emotions in the way that humans are? How can God be affected by all this pathos? And if God is affected, how can God still be said to be impassible? I move to the next stage in dealing with this important area of theology.
Bernard Lonergan offers an approach here that may respond satisfactorily to questions like these. Examining the human good in Method in Theology Lonergan distinguishes between two types of feeling, namely, feelings associated with non-intentional states and feelings associated with intentional states. We can name the first type of feelings emotions. Emotions are passing, ‘non-intentional states.’ Lonergan mentions fatigue as an example. One feels tired and searches for a cause. Sometimes anger or hatred or feeling sorry for someone are also emotions, feelings that arise spontaneously and in waves. Even love in some of its manifestations can be characterized in this way. Emotions come and go.
Lonergan distinguishes such emotions from feelings as intentional responses to values. Feelings relate to meaning and values as instances of what is good rather than passing emotions that might be caused by a physical or emotional or psychological state. Lonergan writes: ‘In general, response to value both carries us towards self-transcendence and selects an object for the sake of whom or of which we transcend ourselves.’ 39 Feelings in the intentional sense include commitment. An example would be the parent whose infant starts screaming in the middle of the night. Emotionally, the exhausted parent doesn’t feel like getting up, or maybe doesn’t even feel kindly toward the child at that moment. But for love of the child, a human being whom the parent generated and for whom the parent is responsible, the intentional response to value, he or she gets up and graciously cares for the child. God’s love and human love beyond a passing emotion are of this higher sort. In God’s case, such love, compassion, hatred, anger are perfect as genuine intentional responses to the good. 40 In humans the intentional response most often varies, sometimes more intentional and sometimes more emotional. That is why conversion to authentic living is so important for human beings.
Let the Approaches Complement Each Other
Now we return to the natural analogy. What about the psychological analogy? As Anne Hunt so well relates, Hans Urs von Balthasar rejects the psychological analogy as seriously inadequate to bring some understanding of the triune God because it fails to take adequate account of God as love, love which is demonstrated so dramatically in the paschal mystery. 41 In the second volume of the Theo-logic Balthasar highlights other concerns, focusing on Augustine’s version of the psychological analogy, pointing out Augustine’s own reservations, and then going on to add his own, namely, that the ‘one “I” with its three functions is thus ultimately only a weak image that fails to capture the essence of God’s triune life.’ 42 Because the analogy of ‘the self-centered subject’ is more one than three, Balthasar wants to place alongside it Richard of St Victor’s social analogy of the Trinity, which recognizes that love needs more than one to exist. Nevertheless, I not only reaffirm the validity of the psychological analogy, but I contend that the analogy, especially as developed by Lonergan in his later articulation of the analogy, coincides beautifully with Balthasar’s clear insistence that ‘only love is credible.’ 43 The difference is the analogical emphasis on the three persons in God loving the one divine self, which makes the psychological analogy especially apt.
At the same time, Balthasar’s exposition of the various aspects of the paschal mystery offers an understanding of the activity of the triune God, both immanently and economically, that expresses in more dramatic (biblical) terms the same triune Pure Act. Perhaps it is a matter of complementing ‘scientific theology’ with ‘affective theology,’ to use Balthasar’s phrases. 44 But I suggest putting it in terms of a complementarity between a natural analogy inspired by the doctrine of the Trinity and the interconnection by which the economic Trinity offers some understanding of the immanent Trinity, and vice versa. Isn’t this systematic theology at its best? However, there is more to be said about the complementarity of Balthasar and Lonergan.
The Anthropological Method
Lonergan and Balthasar may be closer in their approach to the psychological analogy than might be guessed from the expressed inadequacy of the analogy by Balthasar. For Lonergan it is the experience of ‘being in love in an unrestricted fashion,’ i.e., ‘without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations’ which opens human beings to the mystery of the gift of God’s love for them. This is actually the reality of sanctifying grace as God’s love floods the hearts of persons of faith through the Holy Spirit, making of these persons adopted children of God. 45 Lonergan goes on to say that ‘being in love with God is the basic fulfilment of our conscious intentionality.’ He then goes further to say that ‘faith is the knowledge born of religious love.’ 46
While Balthasar ostensibly rejects using ‘The Anthropological Method’ as a way into appropriation of divine revelation, in fact his approach to the recognition of God’s love for humanity is remarkably similar to Lonergan’s.
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Chapter five of Love Alone, ‘Love must be Perceived,’ begins with the following paragraph: If God wishes to make his love for the world known, it must be recognizable—in spite of, and because of, its being totally other. The inner reality of love is really only perceived by love. An egoist must have some notion of love if he is to understand the unselfish love of someone who loves him and not regard it as something which, though better than other things, he can make use of. In the same way, a critic must have an innate or acquired flair for the qualities of a great work of art in order to distinguish it from lesser forms or from the merely pretty (Kitsch). This preparation of the individual by which he is placed on the level of the thing revealed and attuned to it, is for an individual man that habit of mind (which may be called a trinity of faith, love and hope) which must be present, at least in germ, for a true encounter—and, moreover, can be present, because God’s love, which is grace, bears with it and communicates the necessary conditions for being recognized.
48
The Psychological Analogy in a New Key
As Lonergan reflected on unrestricted love as both God’s gift and human experience, he took the psychological analogy to a further articulation beyond Augustine’s which might make it more amenable to Balthasar, especially since, as demonstrated by the quotation above, there is a sort of confluence between their understanding of how the human person is open to the transcendent gift of God’s love, and how this is the heart of God’s self-revelation, and therefore the heart of Christian doctrine and theology.
Since the New Testament twice professes that God is love (1 John 4: 8, 16), an analogy of human love seems to cry out for development. In the human person’s consciousness there are three distinct loving actions: being in love; speaking the word of love in a judgement of value expressed, first mentally, and then either verbally or in gestures or both; and the ongoing loving acts that flow thence. In God there is a distinct conscious subject of each of these acts, and these three conscious subjects are active within one divine consciousness. 49 God who is Pure Act of Love is God as the one infinitely in love (Father), God as the judgement of value, the word of love (Son), and God as the love proceeding from the one in love through the word of love (Holy Spirit). 50 In humans it is one person who loves and speaks the word of love in an ‘I love you,’ from which flows love for another and even for oneself (since humans cannot love another genuinely unless we love ourselves; ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ [Leviticus 19:18]). In God it is three conscious subjects of one loving consciousness. 51
In the second volume of his Theo-logic, Balthasar discusses how God is love in a way that parallels Lonergan. Thus, the Father is ‘absolute love per se,’ the Son is a ‘logic of love, which ‘expresses the love of the ground and source that pours itself out in it,’ and the two then bring forth the Spirit of love in a ‘fruitful encounter of giving and receiving love.’ 52
The Theo-drama
While the psychological analogy offers a precise way to understand how within the one God there can be three distinct conscious subjects of one intentional consciousness who are distinct by the relations brought about by the processions within the one God, the theo-drama of the Trinity, both immanently and economically, fills out the implications of the triune God for active Christian faith.
Balthasar’s lively theology of the processions of love in God and then the way that those processions work in the divine economy of creation and redemption and sanctification keep the person of faith alert to the several dimensions and multiple ramifications of God’s love. Robert Doran puts it this way: Balthasar is correct in highlighting the beautiful as a transcendental dimension within which to express the dramatic form not only of God’s revelation but also of God’s life of glory and of the kenotic death in God that occurs on the cross of Jesus, a death decreed ‘from the foundations of the world’ and so a death constitutive of the eternal mutual self-mediation of the divine persons. This emphasis can be integrated with the theology of intelligible emanations grounding Lonergan’s systematics, by conceiving the procession of the eternal Word as the intelligible emanation of God’s work of dramatic art.
53
Another way to relate the two approaches, as Doran and Hunt suggest, is to identify Lonergan’s emphasis on the psychological analogy as a development deriving from the intellectual pattern of experience, while Balthasar’s emphasis on the eternal expression of love in the immanent Trinity and the unfolding of that love of God in the divine economy is a development of the aesthetic and dramatic patterns of experience. 54 Of course, both approaches are grounded in religious and Christian conversion to the God of love revealing the divine Self as the loving Father and Son and Holy Spirit, both economically and immanently.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
1
As we will see, Balthasar acknowledges that God does not change.
2
Robert M. Doran, SJ, ‘Lonergan and Balthasar: Methodological Considerations,’ Theological Studies 58 (1997): 61–84.
3
Anne Hunt, ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ Theological Studies 59 (1998): 197–218.
4
Peter Drilling, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture: A Contemporary Theology of the Trinity (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). See chapter 6.
5
Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Doctrines, translation by Michael G. Shields of De DeoTrino: Pars Dogmatica (1964), eds, Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour, Vol. 11 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2009), 589.
6
The treatment of the psychological analogy of the Trinity in chapter 6 of Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture is further developed in Peter Drilling, ‘The Psychological Analogy of the Trinity: Augustine, Aquinas, and Lonergan,’ Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2006): 320–37.
7
See the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith (Dei Filius) of the First Vatican Council, chapter 4, in Norman P. Tanner, SJ, English editor, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1990), 808–9, especially the final paragraphs. These volumes were originally compiled and edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and others. Also see Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990; originally published 1972), 336.
8
‘God is angry with the sinner on account of his sin,’ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. IV, The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1988), 339. ‘And a God who only loved and did not hate evil (“a plausible and appealing suggestion”) would contradict himself …’ (339). See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969): ‘The all-important fact is that the disclosure of the depths of divine anger is inseparable from the disclosure of the depths of divine love, revealed on the Cross and in the descent into hell,’ 76.
9
Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. IV, The Action: ‘Can we seriously say that God unloaded his wrath upon the Man who wrestled with his destiny on the Mount of Olives and was subsequently crucified? Indeed we must’ (345). ‘The Son bears sinners within himself, together with the hopeless impenetrability of their sin, which prevents the divine light of love from registering in them. In himself, therefore, he experiences not their sin, but the hopelessness of their resistance to God and the graceless No of divine grace to this resistance. The Son who has depended [sich verlassen] entirely on the Father, even to becoming identified with his brothers in their lostness, must now be forsaken [verlassen] by the Father. He who consented to be given [ver-geben] everything from the Father’s hand must now feel that it was all ‘for nothing’ [vergebens]’ (349).
10
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. III, The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1992), 523.
11
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. and intro. Aidan Nichols, OP (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990), 208.
12
Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994), 230–31.
13
‘The key to the understanding of God’s action lies exclusively in the interpretation which God gives of himself before man on the stage of human nature, by virtue of the identity of the divine “poet” and of the “actor”, who is both God and man, and of the Spirit present in both poet and actor; the Spirit interprets the action to the spectators, drawn into the drama,’ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone, 58.
14
Balthsar, Mysterium Paschale, 175. A few lines prior Balthasar states that ‘the “exploration” of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity.’
15
Gerard F. O’Hanlon, SJ, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 23.
16
See Thomas Aquinas, STh, I, q. 3, esp. a. 2 and a. 4. See further references in Drilling, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture, 133, n. 15.
17
Drilling, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture, 130–31. What could God who is love (John 4: 8, 16) hate? God hates the opposite of love, the rejection of all that is good. Such hate is an act of love on God’s part, as is God’s anger with sinners. It is not a destructive, irrational anger, but a healing, restorative anger, bringing about goodness beyond evil.
18
Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed., Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988; originally published 1957), 707.
19
Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2000), 119–20.
20
Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, translation by Michael G. Shields of De Deo Trino: Pars systematica (1964), edited by Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour, Vol. 12 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007), Assertion 17, esp. 456–57. See also Assertion 15, 439, and Assertion 16, 443.
21
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “A New Look at the Immutability of God” in Explorations in Metaphysics: Being – God – Person (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1994), 195.
22
Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, 457.
23
Michael O’Connell, CSSp, summarizes Rahner’s position in the entry on the economic Trinity in Trinitas: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Holy Trinity (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987), 94–96.
24
Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), art. 236.
25
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-logic: Theological Logical Theory, Vol. II, Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2000), 178.
26
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. V, The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1988), 261.
27
Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Vol. V, The Last Act, 310.
28
Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, 165. Lonergan demonstrates how this can be explained most lucidly on the basis of the psychological analogy.
29
Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, 419. See all of Assertion 13, 413–21, which is the thesis on perichoresis, and is articulated in terms of the psychological analogy.
30
Commenting on the theology of Sergius Bulgakov, Paul Gavrilyuk notes the freedom of the Son, not only to take on human nature, but even to act within it. ‘Unlike other human beings for whom death is inevitable Christ has the freedom to die or not to die. He chooses to lay down his life for the salvation and deification of the world,’ The Kenotic Theology of Sergius Bulgakov, Scottish Journal of Theology 58 (2005): 251–69, at 263. Moving beyond Bulgakov, Gilles Emery, OP, makes another point, namely, that the Son’s self-emptying in taking on a human nature does not in any way diminish the Son’s divinity: ‘The Kenosis of the Son in the incarnation (exinanitio) does not entail a limitation of his divine nature nor a self-diminution of his natural divinity, but rather the assumption of a human nature in its condition of indigence,’ ‘The Immutability of the God of Love and the Problem of Language Concerning the “Suffering of God”’ in James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, OP, eds, Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 73.
31
John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, Second Edition (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2008), 120.
32
Gavrilyuk, ‘The Kenotic Theology of Sergius Bulgakov,’ 263.
33
Hunt, ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ 204.
34
Balthasar, Theo-logic, Vol.II, 163–64. For the German text see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik, Vol. II, Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), 150.
35
Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, 471.
36
Balthasar discusses this at some length in Theo-Drama, Vol. V, The Last Act, in the section: ‘Kinds of Forsakenness,’ 311 ff.
37
See Aidan Nichols, OP, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2000): ‘Balthasar’s unwillingness to abandon the harsh language of much of Scripture and Tradition—unpalatable though this be to an age for which “goodness” is anodyne, not terrible—comes over clearly enough in his lengthy disquisition on the “cup of wrath”. With Lactantius—whom, he says, modern Catholic theologians, and Protestant ones too since Schleiermacher, would do well to read—a God who “only loved and did not hate evil would contradict himself”,’ 169.
38
Isn’t it true that anger and hatred can have their origin in someone’s intense love for the wrongdoer? Isn’t it equally true that hatred of and anger toward someone who is stupid and callous can easily metamorphose into compassionate love on the part of someone who is mature and realizes the immaturity of the wrongdoer?
39
Lonergan, Method in Theology, 30–31. See also Balthasar, Theo-drama, Vol. IV, The Action: ‘But God’s anger is not an irrational emotion (which in man’s case would have to be held in check): “he is not ruled by anger but directs it according to his good pleasure”’ (339).
40
See again W. Norris Clarke’s discussion of intentional consciousness in God, in ‘A New Look at the Immutability of God’ in Explorations in Metaphysics.
41
Hunt, ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ 198.
42
Balthasar, Theo-logic, vol. II, Truth of God, 40. See also 178–79, where Balthasar speaks of the psychological analogy as too abstract and too individualistic.
43
Hunt, ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ the whole article, but here especially 200.
44
Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 37. It should be noted, as well, that Lonergan has a highly developed theology of the paschal mystery, even if he does not name it that precisely. For a summary, see Drilling, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture, 168–74.
45
Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105–6. On Lonergan’s view that this experience of transcendent love is actually sanctifying grace, see 107. He repeatedly refers in his writings to Romans 5:5 to identify what is going on in the experience of unrestricted love.
46
Lonergan, Method in Theology, 115.
47
The second chapter of Balthasar, Love Alone, has for its title, ‘The Anthropological Method.’ In the chapter Balthasar reviews several expressions of methods rooted in the turn to the subject, ultimately rejecting each of them.
48
Balthasar, Love Alone, 61.
49
See Bernard Lonergan, ‘Consciousness and the Trinity’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964, Vol. 6 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988), 132.
50
Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ, ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections’ in A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, SJ (New York: Paulist, 1985), 93–94.
51
Anne Hunt refers readers to the efforts of Anthony Kelly, in his book, The Trinity of Love (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1989), to bring to greater development the psychological analogy in terms of intentional love as developed in the later Lonergan. See ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ 213–14. Since the publication of Hunt’s article, Anthony Kelly has published a short book on the meaning of divine love, God Is Love: The Heart of Christian Faith (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2012).
52
Balthasar, Theo-logic, Vol. II, 152–53.
53
Doran, ‘Lonergan and Balthasar: Methodological Considerations,’ 83.
54
Doran writes: ‘But it is the dramatic pattern of experience that is the pattern in which we live; the objectification of integrity demands a theological esthetics and dramatics to complement and contextualize Lonergan’s emphasis on cognitional process and intellectual conversion’ (75). See also, 82–83. See Hunt, ‘Psychological Analogy and Paschal Mystery in Trinitarian Theology,’ 208. For the original discussion of experiential patterns of meaning, see Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, chapter 6, ‘Common Sense and Its Subject.’