Adrienne von Speyr and the Mystery of the Atonement

Extract

Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) is this century’s most remarkable mystical theologian: a mystic, that is, become theologically articulate. Although her place in the history of Catholic theology is, thanks to her influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), entirely assured, her life and teaching—above all, her doctrine of the Atonement—are of considerable interest in their own right.

Adrienne von Speyr was bom at La Chaux des Fonds, in a Frenchspeaking part of Canton Berne, Switzerland, on 20 September 1902. Her father, an eye surgeon, came from a Basle family distinguished for doctors, (Protestant) clerics and businessmen. Her relation with her mother was bad, but, to compensate, she enjoyed what her biographer, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, calls ‘a totally childlike existence in God and for God’. On such matters as how to be with God in prayer, and the value of sacrifice and renunciation she was instructed by an angel. Though she lived all her life in an academic milieu and became herself, as we shall see, a professional person, and, moreover, had as her confessor and biographer the most learned Catholic theologian of the present century, we cannot make sense of Adrienne’s mysticism unless we accept that, to her awareness, angels and saints were constantly coming and going in her life, and behind these the Holy Trinity itself. She got on well with her father, who allowed her to go with him on his hospital rounds in order to visit sick children. Similarly, in the holidays, when she stayed with an uncle who was director of a psychiatric hospital near Berne, she was found to have a great gift for calming the patients, getting through to them, and cheering the depressed. From these experiences came her resolve to become a doctor herself. Her own health was below par. She was often ill, and had recurrent backaches caused by inflammation of the vertebrae.