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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is about the good. Its conception of Christian moral life is set ‘after Christendom’ and directed to a ‘post-Christian’ culture. If the Theo-Drama becomes central to the way that Christians live in the post-modern world, what will their ethos be like?
‘Christendom’ is Christianity as an achieved political strategy: at the end of the game, the board should look like Aquinas’ On Princely Government. Aquinas’s natural law theory is embedded in Aristotle’s idea of the city as directed to a common good by its ruler. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics are authoritative for him. Von Balthasar has very little to say about Christendom. The ethics of the Theo-Drama does not hinge on an idea of natural law.
According to von Balthasar, pre-Christian cultures found the sacred in the cosmos. With the Incarnation, he says, the sacred is relocated to the person of Christ. Mediaeval Christendom assimilated cosmic religiosity into a Biblical framework. But the footprints of God in the cosmos did not lead all the way to Golgotha. Luther was not in error when he brought this “crisis to consciousness”. Von Balthasar claims that post-Christian culture is desacralised: Great Pan is dead, and the Piper at the gates of dawn cannot now be invoked even by Van Morrison. Post-Christian man has to make a choice: either the physicist’s universe and a technocratic state or the person of Christ. This is not a matter of cultural progression or regression: after the Incarnation, God makes himself less clearly present in nature.
1 Von Balthasar, Glory I, pp. 90‐94, 463. But he does not rule out in principle the interpenetration of state ‘beauty’ and theological ‘glory’: see Glory VI, pp. 122‐123.1 will cite The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics (I‐VII) (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1982‐1987Google Scholar).
2 Glory IV, p. 320.
3 Cf. Theo‐Drama II, p. 417; Theo‐Drama III; p. 25; Theo‐Drama IV, pp. 64‐65; Glory TV, p. 319. I will cite Theo‐Drama (I‐IV), translated by Harrison, Graham (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1988‐1998Google Scholar).
4 Hauerwas, Stanley, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1989), p. 98Google Scholar.
5 Sacks, Jonathan, The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age, (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1991) p. 15Google Scholar.
6 Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, pp. 77‐78 & p. 101.
7 Theo‐Drama I, pp. 76,432; Theo‐Drama 11, p. 46.
8 Theo‐Drama I, pp. 455‐456.
9 Ibid., pp. 636‐645.
10 Theo‐Drama III, p. 201.
11 Theo‐Drama TV, pp. 324‐327.
12 Ibid., pp. 151,163; on original sin, p. 189‐190,200‐201.
13 St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, translated by Bettinson, Henry (Penguin, 1972, 1980)Google Scholar, Book XIV, 13. (p. 571‐572).
14 Man in History: A Theological Study, (Sheed and Ward, London, 1968), p. 107Google Scholar.
15 Theo‐Drama I, p. 256.
16 Theo‐Drama II, pp. 83‐87.
17 Theo‐Drama IV, pp. 187‐188.
18 Ibid., p. 477.
19 bid., pp. 67 & 210.
20 Theo‐Drama III, pp. 263 & 281.
21 Ibid., p. 282.
22 Theo‐Drama III, pp. 417‐418.
23 Theo‐Drama IV, pp. 221‐229.
24 Augustine, City of God, Book 1,35 (p. 45); Book XVIII47 (Were there any citizens of the Heavenly City outside the race of Israel before the Christian era?) (yes, p. 829).
25 Theo‐Drama TV, p. 67.
26 Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae, Qu. 96, Art 5: “Law has two essential characteristics: the first, that of a rule directive of human action; the second, that of power to compel.”
27 Ibid., Qu. 90, Art 4.
28 Ibid., Qu. 90, Art 1.
29 Ibid., Qu. 94, Art 2.
30 (bid., Qu. 91, Art 2.
31 Von Balthasar engages with Hegel's idea of the theatre as requiring a public and political medium. So his ethic is not entirely unpolitical. Theo‐Drama I, p. 75 & Theo‐Drama II, p. 392.
32 Theo‐Drama I, 550‐551.
33 Theo‐Drama II, 207‐210.
34 Ibid., pp. 388‐389.
35 Theo‐Drama III, pp. 457‐459.
36 Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, 28, (p. 593).
37 Theo‐Drama II, p. 240.
38 Ibid., p. 228.
39 Theo‐Drama IV. pp. 116 and 142.
40 The ‘three stages’ in relation to Abraham: “Nine Propositions on Christian Ethics”, Principles of Christian Morality, by Schiirmann, Heinz, Ratzinger, Joseph and Balthasar, Hans Urs von (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986), pp. 89‐91Google Scholar.
41 Theo‐Drama III, p. 422.
42 Augustine, dry of God, Book XIX, 17 (pp. 877‐878).
43 Theo‐Drama TV, p. 151.
44 Ibid., pp. 154 & 155.
45 Ibid.
46 Theo‐Drama II, p. 366; Theo‐Drama IV, p. 482.
47 Theo‐Drama IV, p. 484‐485.
48 Ibid., pp. p. 86,91 & 46.
49 Theo‐Drama IV, p. 485.
50 The scourge of Gaudium et Spes encourages us to be pessimistic about the success of these initiatives: Ibid., pp. 442,481‐482.
51 City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 17 & 27.
52 Ibid, Chapters 21 and 24.
53 Infant baptism turns this sacrament into a “quasi‐natural”, or cosmic “fact”: Glory I, pp. 579‐580.
54 Ibid, p. 494.
55 Sacks, Jonathan, One People? Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity, (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), p. 31Google Scholar.
56 Ibid., p. 210, quoting Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, p. 239.
57 Ibid., pp. 83,92,101‐104,215.
58 Theo‐Drama IV, p. 125.
59 Hauerwas, Stanley, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame University Press, 1995), pp. 19‐20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 Ibid., p. 31.
61 Theo‐Drama II, p. 409 and Theo‐Drama I, p. 39.
62 Theo‐Drama II, p. 87.
63 Rahner, Karl, On the Theology of Death, (Herder & Herder, New York, 1961) p. 27Google Scholar.
64 Ibid., pp. 71‐72.
65 Marcel, Gabriel, Homo Viator: An Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, translated by Craufurd, Emma (Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass. 1978) p. 147.Google Scholar
66 Von Balthasar, , Dare We Hope 'That All men be Saved?: with a short discourse on hell, translated by Kipp, David & Krauth, Lothar (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1987), pp. 81‐82Google Scholar.
67 Theo‐Drama III, p. 272.
68 Ibid., p. 152
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