AN INTRODUCTION TO HANS URS VON BALTHASAR by Pope Benedict XVI

source: COMMUNIORome, October 2005.
MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION ON THE OCCASION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF THE SWISS THEOLOGIAN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Lords Cardinals, venerable Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood, distinguished ladies and gentlemen:

It is with great pleasure that I join you spiritually in celebrating the centenary of the birth of Hans Urs von Balthasar. I had the joy of knowing and associating with this renowned Swiss theologian. I am convinced that his theological reflections preserve their freshness and profound relevance undiminished to this day and that they incite many others to penetrate ever further into the depths of the mystery of the faith, with such an authoritative guide leading them by the hand. On an occasion like this I could easily be tempted to dwell on personal memories, based on the sincere friendship between us and on the numerous projects that we undertook together, in response to the many challenges of those years. The founding of the review Communio, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, remains the most evident sign of our common commitment to theological research. Yet it is not memories that I intend to speak about, but rather the richness of von Balthasar’s theology.

He had made the mystery of the Incarnation the preferential object of his studies, and he saw in the Mysterium Paschale–as one of his works in significantly entitled–the most expressive form of this descent of God into human history. Indeed, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the mystery of God’s Trinitarian love is revealed in its fullness. The reality of the faith finds here its unsurpassable beauty. In the drama of the Paschal Mystery, God fully lives out his act of becoming man, but at the same time he makes man’s action meaningful and gives concrete form to the engagement of the Christian in the world. Von Balthasar saw in this the logic of revelation. God becomes man so that man might experience communion of life with God. In Christ is offered the ultimate truth, the definitive answer to the question that everyone asks himself about the meaning of life. Theological aesthetics, dramatics and logic make up the trilogy in which these concepts find ample room [for development] and principled application. I can testify that his life was a genuine search for truth, which he understood as a search for the true Life. He looked everywhere for signs of the presence of God and of his truth: in philosophy, in literature, in religions, always managing to break through the circuitous reasoning that often holds the mind a prisoner of itself, and opening it up to the horizons of the infinite.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a theologian who placed his research at the service of the Church, because he was convinced that theology could be defined only in terms of ecclesiality. Theology, as he conceived of it, must be joined with spirituality; indeed, only in this way could it be profound and effective. Reflecting on precisely this aspect, he wrote: 

"Or did scientific theology only begin with Peter Lombard? Yet none dealt more adequately with matters of theology than Cyril of Jerusalem, Origen in his homilies, Gregory of Nazianzen and the Areopagite, the master whose works are so full of the spirit of awe and wonder. Who would be so bold as to say of any of the Fathers that his works are ‘full of unction’ in the modern sense? In those days, men were clear as to how theology should be written: it should reflect both the unity of faith and knowledge and an attitude of objectivity allied with one of reverence and awe. Theology was, when pursued by men of sanctity, a theology at prayer: which is why its fruitfulness for prayer, its power to foster prayer, is so undeniable" (The Word Made Flesh: Explorations in Theology vol. I, Ignatius Press 1989, pp. 207-208). 

These are words that prompt us to reconsider the true position of research in theology. The demand for scientific method is not sacrificed when theological research is carried on in a religious spirit of listening to the Word of God, when it is alive with the life of the Church and shares in the strength of her Magisterium. Spirituality does not attenuate the work of scholarship, but rather supplies theological study with the correct method so that it can arrive at a coherent interpretation.

This concept of theology led von Balthasar to a profound existential reading. Accordingly, one of the central themes that he liked to dwell on was demonstrating the necessity of conversion. The change of heart was a central point for him; indeed, only in this way does the mind free itself from the limits that prevent it from drawing near to the mystery, enabling the eyes to fix their gaze upon the face of Christ. In a word, he had grasped profoundly the fact that theology can develop only with prayer that recollects the presence of God and relies upon him in obedience. This is a road that is worth traveling to the very end. It allows us to avoid one-sided approaches that can only lead away from the goal, and it safeguards against following fashionable trends that fragment our interest in what is essential. The example that von Balthasar has given us is, rather, that of a true theologian who in contemplation had discovered a consistent course of action for giving Christian witness in the world. We remember him on this important occasion as a man of faith, a priest who, in obedience and in a hidden life, never sought personal approval, but rather in the true Ignatian spirit always desired the greater glory of God.

With these sentiments, I encourage all of you to continue, with interest and enthusiasm, your study of the writings of von Balthasar and to find ways of applying them practically and effectively. I implore the Lord to send abundant gifts of understanding upon you and upon the work of the Convention, and as a token of the same I impart to all of you a special Blessing.

Vatican City, October 6, 2005

POPE BENEDICT XVI An Introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar

  SORRY THAT THE VIDEO BELOW IS IN FRENCH, BUT WORTH LISTENING TO THIS IS AN EXCELLENT TALK BY JOHN MILBANK (WELL WORTH REPEATING) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY IN THEOLOGY ACCORDING TO HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

SERMON FOR THE 30th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

One of my favourite books of the Bible is the Letter to the Hebrews which has given us the second lesson.   It is really about the Mass.   Let me give you an understanding of the Mass which is based on this.

In the Mass, we approach Mount Sion, just as Moses approached Mount Sinai, and we are brought into the company of the risen Christ, together with countless ranks of angels and saints. Christ the Teacher speaks to us through the readings, as God spoke to Moses; and Christ the Priest accompanies us in the liturgy of the Eucharist; and he leads us through the veil which is his own flesh into the presence of God the Father in the inner sanctuary or Holy of Holies. We are able to enter safely because of the sprinkling of Jesus' blood in the Father's presence , in contrast to the Jews who could not even touch the mountain on which Moses conversed with God without dying. We are brought up into heaven. We rub shoulders with Our Lady and the saints. We sing and pray with angels. We become one body with Christ. We are showered with God's love which is the Holy Spirit. 

Yet we look at our watches!! We think about the cooking of Sunday lunch. We long to be out and about!   Anything but this! Why is there such a contrast between what we believe is happening, and our attitude towards it? Why to we think of other things only moments after receiving the body and blood of the Christ? Why does being more closely united to Christ than the apostles were in Christ's life time on earth, because we live in him and he in us, make so little difference to our lives? Why are we not simply gobsmacked by the experience of sharing in the Mass?

The reason is that we are blind, just as Bartimaeus was blind. The Father had invited all kinds of wonderful people to his Son's wedding feast, but they made their excuses and stayed away. So the Father told his servants to go into the highways and byways and round up the sick, the lame, the deaf and the blind, and to bring them into the marriage feast of his Son; and that is us. 

St John Chrysostom tells us that, during Mass, the church is filled with cherubim and seraphim, bowed down in adoration; but we don't see it. In the Mass, we are as near to Our Lady as St Bernadette ever was at Lourdes, because Mary is always with her Son; but we are unaware of it. In each single host is contained all the sanctity of all the saints everywhere, from the beginning of the world to its end,, enough holiness to turn each one of us into the greatest saint in history; and the event hardly makes an impression. There is no better place than Mass to discover how blind we are.

However, we are not just blind at Mass. Our faith reveals to us that, in every moment of our existence, our life is intense with meaning. We meet Christ in every circumstance, in every person, in every duty, in every moment of rest. As de Caussade wrote, each moment is a sacrament which God has packed full of grace, and all we need to do is to do is tap it by going beneath the surface to find Christ's Presence. “ Raise the stone, and there you will find me; cleave the wood, and there I am." (says Jesus in the Gospel of St Thomas) But we are blind and do not notice.

In a way, we are lucky that we are blind because, if we were not, we would not have received the invitation to the wedding feast. The important thing is to know what to do about it; and we learn the answer in this passage from St Mark's Gospel about St Bartimaeus. What does he do? Where lies his secret? because he is us.

The first thing we notice about Bartimaeus is that he doesn't simply accept his blindness as normal. He is desperate to be cured; and , once he knows that Christ can cure him, he calls out again and again.  He is not discouraged by the fact that Christ passes by without apparently paying attention to him, nor by the attitude of those around him.

The next thing we notice is that his prayer is a prayer of faith. He calls out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me.” We have already had Peter's confession of faith, which flesh and blood had not revealed to him, and now we have a similar confession of faith in the cries of this blind begger. Bartimaeus is calling Jesus the Messiah. Therefore we can say that the depth of his desperation is matched by the depth of his faith. Like Bartimaeus, our prayer should be persistent and it should express our faith.

Of course, we are unlike Bartimaeus in one important way: this is not the first time we have encountered Jesus. In fact, for many of us, Jesus scooped us up in his arms at Baptism as children, and we have had at least an intermittent relationship with him ever since. Therefore we are not completely blind. We have our moments of illumination. Nevertheless, until we meet him face to face in heaven, at best, we see through a glass darkly. There are also the ravages of sin, the sins of the society of which we are part and our own sins, so that God and the things of God cease to be as real to us as Sunday dinner and our other occupations; and there are times, too often, when we don't see at all.

In this situation, we become accustomed to darkness we do not realise how blind we are, how weak we are, how utterly dependent we are on Christ. We are tempted to rely on our own powers; but, in the end, it will only lead to darkness.

 Christian life begins when we begin to say, with Christ himself, "Not my will, but yours be done;" and, with Our Lady, " Behold the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your Word." As St Paul says in Galatians, " I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." To live a Christian life, we need Our Lord to take over; we need to accomplish the Father's will and live in harmony with the Holy Spirit ,so that people will see in what we do the face of Christ. THAT is our vocation, and nothing less. But our blind, or at least, myopic condition needs the continuous mercy. forgiveness and pity of Christ before we can become channels of his grace. My weak little soul needs to cry out with Bartimaeus, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me," before it can employ Christ's own strength to fulfil its Christian mission. We will not be able to help other people in a fully Christian way if we fail to recognise our own radical need for Christ. If we forget our need for God's mercy, we will forget how to be Christians, and people will not see Christ in us. Lowliness was the only qualification that the Blessed Virgin gave for why she had been chosen for her exalted position as Mother of God. Lowliness is the only qualification for living a Christian life.

If we are constantly and humbly seeking Christ's mercy, we will become more and more conscious of meeting him in the Eucharist, together with Our Lady, the angels and the saints as we share in the Liturgy of heaven by taking part in the Mass. We should be able to exit from Mass with a sparkle in our eyes, with a spring in our step and love in our hearts. It should be clear to all that we have been to Mass.

At Mass, in holy communion,we receive Christ into the centre of our being, just as we are received into the very centre of his being as members of his body. Thus our heart will become a temple, a place where heaven and earth meet, a place where, with Bartimaeus, we can continue to call out to him, "Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!" With Christ in our heart, we shall become more and more conscious of how he continues to meet us in every person and situation. Finally, the more we see Christ in others, the more will people see Christ in us, even if we don't know it.

How can we bring this about?

Persistence and faith, We need a proper campaign of prayer. In Medjugorje, Our Lady started the children off with seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and seven Glory Be's. They then were moved on to the whole rosary of fifteen mysteries. Finally, Our Blessed Lady urges the ideal of constant prayer, so that their conscious relationship with God  would become an essential dimension of their very being.

 We pray as we can, not as we can't. The rosary, the Jesus Prayer, a campaign of short, sharp prayers, having a room or a corner of a room dedicated exclusively for prayer, as peasants in Peru and as Orthodox do, anything that can give space during the day for God. In difficulty, choose a spiritual director. Have a regime of prayer that you stick to, with all the determination of Bartimaeus.
   
"Jesus, Son of David, Have pity on us all!" 

THE LIFE OF POPE JOHN PAUL II (over 3 hours)

A SPIRITUAL SON OF FATHER NIKOLAI : FATHER ANDREI OF ST ELIZABETH'S CONVENT IN MINSK

I have already said something about Father Andrei in another post.   He was born in 1956 and grew up an agnostic.   As a young man, he shopped around, looking for the Truth, a truth that would give meaning to his life.   He became a kind of hippy and, after school, he went to drama school  with the intention of becoming an actor.   However, he found the Truth in Orthodoxy.   He dropped out of drama school and became watchman in a parish church.   He also became church cleaner and reader and, of course, slept in the church.  In those communist days, the authorities made sure there were not enough priests to go round, and, between Mass celebrations,  baptisms and marriages, there was usually no resident priest: hence, people came to him with their problems.   This was an admirable preparation for his vocation.   Eventually, he left his work as watchman and went to the seminary to study for the priesthood.

I don't know when he made the journey from Minsk to the island of Zalit, and asked Father Nikolai to be his spiritual father.   In a certain sense, you hand over your freedom to your spiritual father, confess to him your most intimate thoughts and failings, and do nothing without his blessing.   He is to his disciple what an abbot is in the Rule of St Benedict, and for exactly the same reason: a Christian life begins when we leave aside our own will to do the will of God in all things.   The abbot or spiritual father given to us by Providence is the one who teaches us through obedience not to do our own will.    Thus, it was probably with Father Nikolai's blessing that he gave up his job as watchman in a church and went to the seminary, and it was probably with his blessing that he married and started a family.   He would also have received a daily programme of prayer from his spiritual father.

Once ordained, Father Andrei began his priestly service in the cathedral.   The rest you know: how he became spiritual father of many people, especially women; how a couple of female parishioners of the cathedral came to him with the suggestion that a group of women should be formed, a sisterhood that would visit the sick and prisoners and put them in contact with the love of God through the teaching and sacraments of the Orthodox faith. They would be "Sisters of Mercy", modelled on those who followed the royal martyr, St Elizabeth, grand daughter of Queen Victoria and worked with her in the slums, before the Russian Revolution brought everything to an end. The idea took off after the blessing of Father Nikolai Gurianov who said to him, "You will be saved through the prayers of the sick".  

The white sisters are now three hundred.   In 1999, about twenty white sisters  decided, under his spiritual direction, to become nuns, and now the monastic community of "black sisters" has grown to over one hundred.   You know that, beside the sisters, black and white, who form the Minsk community under the joint protection of saints Nicholas of Bari (Father Christmas) and St Elizabeth, the royal martyr, there are also a number of young men who are serving God by participating in the prayer life and work of the community; and, from among them, there is now a growing number of monks.

MY INTERVIEW WITH FATHER ANDREI

I was having a wonderful time as a guest of St Elizabeth's Convent.   The sisters, both black and white, could not have been kinder, and Fr Andrei's smile could not have been warmer on the occasions when I met him.   

As for the Divine Liturgy, it was quite simply wonderful.   Of course, it is the same Mass as ours, and, when I returned to Belmont, I found I appreciated our Mass more for having been there.   Heaven on earth is not an exaggeration when the Byzantine Liturgy is celebrated in its own setting.

I was invited by one of the sisters to have an interview with Fr Andrei after the Liturgy one day.   It had been celebrated in a room in the mental hospital on a temporary altar, with icons of Christ and the Mother of God in window sills on either side and a triptych of icons in a corner. The majority of the congregation were long-term mental patients.  I was then led into a room in the convent to await  Fr Andrei.

After his usual warm greeting, he went straight into a kind of little sermon.   He wasn't aggressive, he wasn't attacking me.   It was as though we couldn't waste time just chatting or making small talk when the kingdom of God is among us.   When a nun came to see me, she too gave me a little talk and then waited expectantly for me to reciprocate.   Fr Andrei said how the modern spirit of consumerism is subtly distorting the Gospel because people expect from the Church in general and from God in particular an increase of material happiness for their Christian faithfulness.  It is as though God exists to serve them, rather than the other way round.  They serve in the Church for what they can get out of it, and even some Orthodox priests adapt their message to meet these false expectations.   Both sides forget the Cross and that Christian life begins only when we leave our own will and ambitions and adopt as our own the will if the Father, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"   Even if we do not go as far as this, we can so adapt our way of life so that it is as pleasurable as possible within Christian parameters, seeking pleasure rather than the will of God without breaking any important commandments except the law of self-sacrificing love.   "It must be worse in your country," he half-asked with raised eyebrows

This work here is the result of self-sacrificing love.   Every brick was in place because someone somewhere has made a little sacrifice.   Some of the money has come from Britain and from other countries.   However, it all began with the blessing of his staretz, Father Nicholas Gurianov.   When he blessed the project it was absolutely impossible. "We had no land, no money, no influence, no support from the government, nothing; and now look at it!."

"Are there still many elders like Father Nicholas nowadays?" I asked.

"Of course there are!" he said.   The Holy Spirit is always with the Church, never more nor less from generation to generation, from the time of the Apostles till now; and the staretz is a work of the Holy Spirit.  There are always people and places where heaven is really close and where ordinary people can touch eternity.

We chatted a little more before he went into the convent and I went to lunch in the monastic refectory. 

 Introduction to my visit to St Elizabeth's, Minsk (click)

FATHER NIKOLAI GURYANOV (click) 

 



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