A Man and Three Women– Hans, Adrienne, Mary and Luce

Extract

This is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him against my charges.

Von Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work, and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their theological insights about the significance of sexual difference. John Roten writes that “The very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated into theological categories” to such an extent that von Speyr sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in neoorthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.