Introducing our very first podcast. <hold the fanfare, please>
We’re trying something new today. Some of you asked me to post the introduction to Balthasar I did earlier this year at St. Marks. So, here it is, although I must first make the following disclaimer: the file is rather large (32.4mb), the sound quality is poor, and I say “um” a lot… really, I can’t believe that I talk like that. The sound quality we can address in the future, but I think I may be doomed as a public speaker. I can only hope that my secondary students have been so enrapt by the content of my lesson plans that they haven’t noticed me stumbling over my ums.
An audio introduction to von Balthasar. Right click to download
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Nicely done introduction with decent sound quality overall but fair in handling the readings and the discussion.
Fred, You’re too kind. I’ve enjoyed your work at Deep Furrows and Nouvelle Théologie.
Cheers,
Dan
’supercessionism’ = isn’t this is position that God’s ‘presence’ is no longer in the Jew’s synagogue, but in the Christian life? I think Tertullian used the image of an hen sitting on her eggs, and someone coming along who takes the eggs from the hen and takes them elsewhere. Eggs = God’s grace/presence, Hen = temple. So, I wouldn’t equate Christ as the fulfillment of the OT, with Christ as the fulfillment of pagan poetry. I’d say they are similar, but not identical sorts of fulfillment. Anyways… sorry for nit picking. I’m having a good time hearing your chat.
No, it’s broader than simply grace and the synagogue, but you’re getting there. Extend it now to encompass anything Jewish as being valuable or not valuable for understanding the essence of Christianity and if you said it’s not valuable, then you’d be on the right track. it’s a form of academic anti-semitism.
Glad you’re listening. Thanks. As a co-{our grad school} alum, maybe you can understand my wish that they would have given us more public speaking experience to prepare us for conferences and this sort of thing, eh?
A quick thought: near the end of your presentation you discussed how God’s love exceeds our knowledge of that love. Would it be fair to say that God’s love for us is beyond our knowledge precisely b/c there is no sufficient reason for God’s love for us. God freely wills to love us and we can’t get ‘behind’ that act of will (love), as a gnostic methodology might aim for? As Anselm once wrote about the will, ‘the will wills’ (near the end of _On the Fall of the Devil_). There are particular ends that the divine will aims to fulfill in human life, but there is no sufficient reason for why God wills this, other than that God wills for that particular aim to be fulfilled. This nicely leads into a Christian account of the contingency of the world, based on the contingency of God’s ad extra acts of will.
That would be one way of understanding God’s love for us, but not what Balthasar means here. He’s working strictly from the pattern of the major dissimilarity and the analogia entis as understood through Przywara. I think you’ve read Hart’s _Beauty of the Infinite_ so you’ll be familiar with this use of the term. For those who aren’t, to paraphrase Balthasar, for every similarity we can draw between ourselves and God, there will always be an even greater dissimilarity. In other words, this concept serves to always remind me that I am not God. In this sense, you’re right, we can never understand God’s acts in terms of necessity and contingency. But it’s also much larger than that. And I’d think that the Doctrine of Love, in a Christian theology, should subsume such categories as contingency and necessity.
Re: analogy, is this the proper proportionality analogy theory (one to many), or the proportion analogy (one to another)? I’d think it would be the latter; but I just don’t know the details of how Przywara amends Aquinas’s two accounts of analogy. If x is similar btwn. A (creature) and B (God), but simultaneously x is _even more_ dissimilar btwn. A and B, how is this not a contradiction?
But even Aquinas wouldn’t just say his theory of analogy disqualifies us from trying to understand and offer an explanation of God’s love for us. Given his distinction secundum rationem a parte rei, which is what he uses to explain e.g. God’s (ad intra and ad extra) act(s) of intellect and in distinction from God’s act of will. In other words, even Aquinas would try to offer an account of God’s love by means of this sort of distinction. But, tell me if I’m wrong, you are saying VonB. isn’t trying to offer an account of God’s love? I thought that was what was going on?
I think I might’ve been mis-understood; I was saying that God’s acts toward creatures are contingent, and this explains something about our understanding of God’s love, namely, that there is no sufficient reason for why God loves (and creates) creatures; God just does decide to love these ‘little goods’. I would tend to think that if you render ‘love’ as prior to necessity and contingency you’ll run into serious problems. For example, if ‘love’ is neither necessary nor contingent, then you might have a hard time explaining that creatures are ‘real beings’, rather than, say, just (universal) ideas (cf. Avicenna’s account of universals, ‘horse qua horse’ is neither necessary nor contingent). If love is not understood in terms of necessity or contingency, then you also couldn’t distinguish btwn. e.g. God the Father’s love for God the Son, and God’s love for a creature—they’d have equal ontological standing, neither being necessary nor contingent. I’d perhaps even push this and wonder whether this would lead toward Plotinus’s acct. of emanation, but different, in that it isn’t a ‘necessary’ emanation (Neo-Platonism), nor ‘contingent’ emanation (classical Christian theism), but just there, God being God, and creature being creature–perhaps this is an Bishop Berkley sort of thing, yet even God is ‘just a thought’ equally with a creature.
I know you wouldn’t want to draw any such of the above conclusions from what you’ve said. And I’d very much like to hear how you’d get around such plausible implications–it is just that I think you should consider the importance of ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’ before tossing them aside as some sort of onto-theological rubbish. I agree with Bonaventure that there is disjunction of necessity/contingency, and with Duns Scotus that this disjunction is a transcendental disjunction applicable to all substantial entities and certain other (Aristotelian) categories.
Also, I’d be curious to see what you make of my recent post on the beatific vision…
Without getting mired in a vocabulary war, since we’re coming at this from two very distinct perspective I think, all I’ll say is that I’m not throwing necessity and contingency on any rubbish heap. Rather, I’m saying that in the arena of Christian theology (not philosophy, mind you.. i’ll get there later this week) Love holds the place of pre-eminence. In other words, there is a doctrine of love, not doctrines of contingency and necessity. They may be philosophical doctrines, indeed. moreover, they may inform the way we understand love, although I doubt much good can come from understanding love as either necessary or contingent, for what would love be if it were necessary.. not love, i imagine. As such, it seems almost tautological to say that love, true love, is contingent. Nevertheless, it is still Love that holds the doctrinal place of pride.
I would agree with you regarding the place of Love in terms of the perfections of God. I certainly agree with this!! I just happen to think that to gain a clearer understanding of this, we need to join it up with this disjunct of necessary and contingent. Anyways, I happen to think that the love shared btwn. the divine persons is necessary, b/c I think it metaphysically/ontologically and logically impossible that they might not love one another.
Interestingly, if you think love just by definition is contingent, then I’d wonder whether you are actually closer to Scotus’s own view of the blessed in heaven who, logically speaking, could not love God, but metaphysically speaking will love God b/c of the object of that love, namely Godself. But, if (all) love is by definition is contingent, then I just can’t see how you get away from saying it is possible that the Father not love the Son, and vice versa. And, further down the line, this acct. of love would render Richard of St. Victor’s account of divine love which explains why there are three divine persons null and void. For Richard explains the _necessity_ that there be three persons based on _necessarily_ perfect love. If it were contingently the case that the Father loved the Son, then nothing more could be said about a necessary mutual love that necessarily spirates the Holy Spirit.
Anyways–all this to show that Christian theologians who are thick biblical scholars (e.g. Richard of St. Victor) do employ ‘necessity’ in their theological arguments, in this case for why there are three and only three divine persons.
But, you don’t have to like Richard’s program, so I can see that you don’t have to use necessity and contingency to give an account of God’s love. It is just that at some point in your explanation these will pop up, if you want to uphold the contingency of creatures, and the non-contingency of the Triune God. But hey, I suppose if you are an open theist, or a passibilist (as VonB. might be in some sense), the game is shifted entirely… and well, that’s ok too. Maybe then our difference is that I’m more sympathetic to classical theism than you are at this point?
You ask, “If x is similar btwn. A (creature) and B (God), but simultaneously x is _even more_ dissimilar btwn. A and B, how is this not a contradiction?”
In this case, I don’t think we’re dealing with a contradiction, primarily because if we say x is Love, then talking about my Love and God’s Love, even analogously, is still talking about two different kinds of Love, no matter how similar.
Regardless, even if it were a contradiction, and I think this may be the crux of the issue here, would that somehow reduce it to literary truism and not rigorous theology? Paradox and Mystery are legion in the theological classics - Balthasar and von Speyr certainly make abundant use of them, very much in line with the mystics and spiritual masters of the catholic tradition. Even CS Lewis has a hand in the craziness: “”Only the Greatest of them all can Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend - man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.”
If theological logic can not accommodate the Mystery of the Gospel, then it’s not that it should be thrown onto “some sort of onto-theological rubbish” heap, but rather that it needs to grow by immersing itself deeper into that mystery until it finally transforms that language and logic into something useful for extending the kingdom.
I wonder, Scott, if necessity and contingency don’t come together and cease to be opposed to one another in the notion and reality of Genuine Freedom? God is Free because God is utterly realized and fulfilled as God, but as utterly realized and filfilled, God acts in accordance with his Goodness and Beauty and Truth, and is full of Grace and Magnaninmity. We aren’t dealing with a deterministic machine here (necessity), vs arbitrariness of choice (contingency).
In this context, isn’t God being God to the fullest to create and then to redeem these “little goods”? For Aquinas, there is no necessity for God to make all things, it is a free act of Grace, but it certainly isn’t contingent either. It comes from the nature of God. God does have a purpose for all things, to fulfill their natures. Goodness is an active principle, hence, “God is Love.” God brings the beings into existence and gives them natures in order to exchange love with them and make more goodness. God wills their existence and their highest good, for the sake of communion and exchange. (Loves broadens and deepens and takes otherness into itself in order to go out from itself — isn’t that what the Word in the heart of the Trinity means?)
In the same way, the Thomistic Dante says that the mark of Christian freedom (which is synonymous with maturity) is that the pilgrim (at the top of the Mount of Sanctification) is “crowned and mitered,” becoming a king and priest who can act from the center of personal autonomy and yet spontaneously be in accord with God’s will, because as a person the pilgrim’s soul has grown to be in accord with God’s nature. (This can only be absorbed well by us humans as a truth if it is balanced by a healthy appreciation of how inconstantly and imperfectly we acheive this, and only through always prevenient Grace.) Freedom IS a paradox that swallows necessity and contingency into itself, it seems to me.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, so I’ll be back soon, when I have absorbed that offering from Dan on von Balthasar and then this discussion more fully….
One other brief point — I’m uncomfortable with you idea, Scott, that God’s love for us is utterly contingent, unless it is balanced with the deepest truth of all — that in our very being we are related to God as the source of our being. Relationship is what makes God’s love prior to all questions of contingency and necessity?
It’s the old conundrum, Is God free if God must act in accord with God’s own nature? Yes, said the Thomists! No, said the later Reformers…there is nothing “outside of God” that is greater than God. From them, Power trumps Goodness and leads to arbitrary election (in only its most extreme form, in hyper-Calvinism, I should say, in all fairness to Calvin).
Janet, thanks for your comments. The reason I said creatures are ‘little goods’ is because God (acc. to Aquinas and Scotus) contingently willed to make these ‘real little goods’. The purpose for creating these is a real end; I am not proffering the view that an act of God’s will has no object to which it aims. Rather, I am saying that God has reasons for creating creatures (God’s goodness, God’s wisdom, God’s love for possible creature–divine ideas), it is just that these reasons are not sufficient causes for God’s action toward creatures. These reasons are necessary, if God were to will the existence of creatures, but they are not sufficient. And that is the only point I’m trying to make. But what is the sufficient reason for God deciding to create and in turn love a creature? There isn’t one, precisely b/c God’s will with respect to possible creatures is a free power, which mean there is no sufficient reason for a certain act of the divine will to occur. There are, to be sure, necessary reasons–otherwise put, there need to be see features that God is/has in order to say acts freely by God’s will, and these are certain divine perfections, that the divine essence has intellect and will, and that there are divine persons who do the willing.
So, on this classical theist view, talk about God creating some creature in order to X, is to talk about a contingent order of things. And in this order, we can and should certainly talk about divine love for creatures, scripture and tradition would have us do no less!
RE: the claim that ‘freedom is a paradox’-could you say more about this? I would rather try to understand this claim, and if all else fails, then concur and say it is paradoxical. But I need to go through the discussion before holding up the paradox card.
You could, say, take up Aquinas’s distinction btwn. absolute necessity and relative necessity. The former is what I’ve been talking about when discussing ‘necessity’ (i.e. metaphysical necessity). But the latter is based on a certain end, e.g. suppose God did create a creature, given this creature how would God interact with him or her? Well, since God is love (necessarily) and given this (contingent) creature, God would (contingently) love this creature. There is a sense in which the word ‘necessity’ can be used to say ‘God loves a creature’, but this presupposed God’s own necessary perfections and the contingent creation of the creature. To put this another way, suppose you want to walk over to a bookstore which is across the street. If you in fact will to go in the bookstore, you necessarily must cross the street. Given an certain contingent end in mind, there is a certain necessary activity in order to fulfill it. It is this sort of necessity that I think makes good sense of God’s love toward creatures. I think even Calvin makes use of this sort of distinction when he distinguishes btwn. compulsory acts (absolute necessity) and necessary acts (relative necessity); I think he made this distinction in the context of the fallenness of human nature and the relative necessity of human sin (given the fall).
But to just say necessity and contingency don’t actually explain anything re: God’s love toward creatures, I find this a more unhelpful move than if I were to employ this transcendental disjunction in giving an explanation of God’s love for creatures. To say love subsumes these is a bit baffling to me. Is the point that love as a basic notion, can occur in either necessity or contingency, but itself isn’t defined/understood by either of these? I could go along with that.
Scott: “…no sufficient reason for a certain act of the divine will to occur….”
Isn’t the whole notion of “sufficient reason” a twenteith-century analytical invention?
I think that all medieval explication of Christian theology from Augustine on is based on paradox, in the sense that doctrines are in dialectical relationship with one another, and are learned more deeply by the back-and-forth motions of dialectic…. Christ is God. Christ is Humanity. We must die in order to live, and lose our lives to save them. Law and Grace. Old Covenant and New. I have come to fulfill the Law. I have come to abolish the Law. Faith — Works. It goes on and on…. Immanence-transcendence is the fundamental paradox on which they all rest, and it is there in Greek thought as well as in Christian thought….
I think that paradox is the mark of divine truth because of the limits of finite rationality in Augustine’s mind and he passed this on.
I don’t know what current scholarship says about this and I suppose I ought to publish my understanding of this.
Scott it seems to me you are working here cognitively, when at a certain point here you need to move over into a more existential dimension. Relationship is not cognitive. We can’t think relationship. Relationship gives you your being. The being that is from and by and towards another. It is a constitutive reality and it is what that enables intellect to come into being and do it’s relatively petty-fogging little operations in the first place! (Okay, I’m not giving the beauty of thought it’s dialectical due right here.)
Scott: “Is the point that love as a basic notion, can occur in either necessity or contingency, but itself isn’t defined/understood by either of these? I could go along with that.”
I think I can agree to this as a starting point. I’d want to say so much more… but it’s late…
Thanks for the great discussion. I hope others feel so inclined.
I listened to the Balthasar talk and I loved it! I’m really tired, too, and must sleep. But I still want to urge that for most medievals Love is not “a basic notion.” It is not even a notion at all. Love is the blindingly whole act of a free person.(fn)
And freedom isn’t a notion either. It’s much more like a way of being, entered only in the fully realized and harmonious state of personal beings.
(fn) Isn’t this why Augustine could choose Christ in the Garden (after tolle et lege) only because, in the theological scheme of things, prevenient Grace gave him a moment of pure and unearned essential freedom, in which he could recognize AND EMBRACE what he most deeply wanted? But only the Augustine that God had brought along, all the way to that moment in the Garden, could want that most deeply, not Augustine at any moment before that moment. (Talk about paradox and dialectic.) How could “Augustine” choose Christ, until he was Augustine.
So, Dan raises a nice question. Is the beatific vision (just) a vision of the risen Jesus? And, what sort of vision would this be? I think any ‘mediated account’ when giving a precise acct. of the BV (at least as Aquinas and co. argue) would commit a grave theological error b/c it would equate the finite with the infinite, or as Scotus says, it would say that some creature, some created thing (a concept which is a quality inhering in the created human intellect) is equal to God, which is idolatry.
Janet:
I couldn’t let the following statement pass by without commenting on it.
“Scott: “…no sufficient reason for a certain act of the divine will to occur….” Isn’t the whole notion of “sufficient reason” a twenteith-century analytical invention?”
First, this distinction btwn. necessary and sufficient is in Aristotle; and in turn, it is also in Aquinas, and many many other medievals. Further, I believe Leibnitz made much of this as well. So, I hardly think it is a 20th c. ‘analytic’ invention. If some history of philosophy actually asserted this claim, it’d be quite a revisionist history. What perhaps bothers me about this comment is that it is related to a similar point: medievals made real arguments that either succeeded or failed. It is not rhetoric all the way down. Aquinas did in fact try to prove God’s existence, as did other medievals. I tend to think that this feature of medieval theology is embarrassing to ‘enlightened’ postmodern thinking, and so such attempted demonstrative proofs are re-interpreted as something more ethereal than a rational demonstration of God’s existence. Take or leave it, if we want ‘mystery’, read the mystics — these Aristotelian Christians were something like analytic philosophers, and (gasp) might even be called foundationalists.
I apologize if the above comes across in an insensitive way. It is just that such revisionist history does us no good for seeing what resources we actually have for Christian theology, it does injustice to our medieval theologians in question, and it obscures the fact that in our world today, perhaps medieval theology is not as helpful as we might like it to be, if we’ve taken the linguistic turn, or some such other pomo turn.