Cyril O'Regan - Review of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses

Reviews 683 body’ of our social and political world, although the latter could never be ‘truly human’ without this super-addition. Milbank’s suggestion that we recover a concept of ‘mixed government’ that includes democratic, aristocratic and monarchic elements builds on a creative appropriation of the last thesis. And it goes without saying that this far-reaching suggestion needs further discussion – particularly in terms of his deconstruction of the modern mainstream distinction between ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ politics. In contrast to the Frankfurt School philosophers of the German postwar tradition, Milbank doubts that this distinction is still expedient. Yet, he does not simply abolish the ‘emancipatory legacy’ that inspired the ‘redemptive criticism’ of the enlightenment tradition in the wake of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and J€ urgen Habermas. Milbank’s ‘third way’ only questions the naive assumption that this distinction is self-evident. Unlike Habermas (‘Was links ist weiß doch jeder’), he insists that ‘both “truth to oneself” and the “truth to the witness of others” is a matter of constant discernment’ (264). Yet, he does not dispense with the ‘leftwards slant’ of a policy that aims at the ‘democratisation of virtue as love . . . and the expressive release and fulfilment of the entirety of human powers’ (269) His just published monograph The Politics of Virtue (together with Adrian Pabst) takes a further step on this path by going beyond a post-liberal rehash of a neo-Aristotelian ‘communitarianism’. In accordance with Habermas and the ‘counter-teleology’ of Augustine and Aquinas, Milbank’s ‘third way’ relies on our ‘emancipatory potential’ to transform our social, political and cultural life. Johannes Hoff Heythrop College Kensington Square London W8 5HN UK Email: [email protected] Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour, by Mark McInroy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xii 1 217 pp. Despite appearances, it would be a mistake to interpret this elegantly written and finely argued book as merely providing a study of a retrieval of a particular notion or trope of the premodern theological tradition, that is, “spiritual senses” by one of the great retrievalists of modern Catholic theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In itself, this would simply speak to Balthasar’s vast historical range in that he can manage to recollect arcane tidbits as well as the essentials of Christian faith such as the mystery of our salvation by Christ on the Cross and the triune God of love disclosed therein. Read in this way Balthasar would be the great antique collector for whom we can effect admiration, since it would never have occurred to us that he could make so much of so little. Of course, as he makes clear in his spirited introduction, McInroy neither thinks that retrieval in a theologian such as Balthasar is ever simply reproduction, nor does he believe that the notion of the spiritual senses is marginal to the understanding of Christian life either in the patristic or medieval periods, although he fully recognizes – as Balthasar does – that it is far from universal. McInroy understands rightly that Balthasar’s retrieval is interested. Balthasar alights on a notion which was widely disseminated in patristic thought and received exemplary expression in Origen (chap. 1) and later in Bonaventure (chap. 2), because, in his view, it answers to current theological needs. Indeed, on his account, the notion of spiritual senses sheds light on faith in itself and its relation to reason (chap. 6) and on the human capacity for God and what exceeds it (chaps. 4 and 5). We are not to suppose, however, that retrieving the notion of spiritual senses represents a solution to these deep and daunting theological issues. Rather we might consider that the deployment of the notion of spiritual senses helps to explicate more clearly each of these constitutive relations. McInroy is clear that retrieving an ancient notion involves more in a ressourcement theologian than simply reproducing a notion whose heyday is past. What applies in general to Balthasar’s work applies also to his retrieval of the notion of spiritual senses. As McInroy makes a point of underscoring, both the meaning and use of the notion is different in Balthasar than in the exemplary instances of Origen and Bonaventure. “Recasting” is the term C 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 684 Reviews availed of by McInroy on pages in which he expresses his debt to the work of Sarah Coakley (2-3). On McInroy’s account, Balthasar can be seen to both emend and repurpose the trope. We begin with the former. In his retrieval of the notion of spiritual senses Balthasar is careful to correct for the fact – or even possibility – of what we might call Platonic torsion, that is, that spiritual senses necessarily involve purely spiritual eyes, ears, etc. distinct in kind from the eyes and ears with which we human beings see and hear (100, 105, 174). In general, Balthasar is not especially interested in convicting predecessors such as Origen (20-5, 30-3) and Bonaventure (55-7) of Platonism. He is persuaded that their theologies as a whole do not illustrate metaphysical dualism. Still, the dualistic tendency does tend to express itself from time to time and when noticed, it should be corrected. McInroy is persuaded that Balthasar largely gets things right: the spiritual senses are not different senses, but rather the physical senses transformed in their capacity to see the really real in the phenomenal and to response to the invisible world as it declares itself in the visible. We are talking about our physical senses in a mode of sublimation. Needless to say, McInroy is not going psychoanalytic on us. He is theological all the way through in thinking of the spiritual senses as giving us “real apprehension” – to use Newman’s term – of the divine in its self-communicative form, which is the real definition of grace (178-83). McInroy also underscores what he understands to be a systemic democratization of the spiritual senses in Balthasar in general and Glory of the Lord 1 in particular. In the cases, for example, of Origen (346) and to a lesser extent Bonaventure (82), spiritual senses can be ascribed in fact only to a mystical elite, that is, to those Christians who have made great progress in the spiritual life well beyond that of hoi polloi. McInroy is rightly insistent that in the case of Balthasar the spiritual senses are ascribable to each Christian as such: the nexus is the order of faith itself rather than a specially developed form of faith, that is, contemplation or a kind of Christian gnosis. Despite then what might seem to be Balthasar’s elective affinity with the hieratic and the hierarchical, McInroy insists that in Balthasar faith is last as well as first and can never be left behind. For McInroy it is this democratic commitment that is at the base of Balthasar’s elective affinity for Ignatius Loyola (84-91), who though he cannot be said to correct Bonaventure’s articulation of embodied faith, can definitely be said to complement it. Another emendation related to the above is Balthasar’s correcting in advance for our own interpretive tendency to think of the spiritual senses exclusively in terms of experience. Balthasar fully realizes that there is an experiential element to the spiritual senses. Yet he wants to cut off the interpretation that granting discussion of them a hearing means that one has decided for an experiential foundationalism. McInroy brings out throughout the book that the spiritual senses respond and correspond to God given to us in the order of revelation and especially in Christ. Emendation is just one of the two operations performed by Balthasar on the rendition of spiritual senses when that tradition tends in the direction of a dualistic deformation. The other is that of repurposing the traditional patristic and medieval renditions. There are a number of different but related features to the repurposing. (i) Balthasar attempts to articulate a philosophical anthropology of the unity in difference of soul and body intended to prevent the notion of spiritual senses being a carrier of dualism. He insists that the whole person rather than a spiritual element in human being comes in contact with God. For McInroy, Balthasar’s unitive anthropology is broadly Thomistic, a structural feature reinforced in and by Balthasar’s appropriation of a modern Thomist thinker such as Gustav Siewerth (111-16). (ii) Balthasar does something that was not done by any premodern Christian thinker, that is, link the discussion of spiritual senses with discussions with the transcendentals in general (134-43 inter alia) and with beauty in particular. This is neither to say that there are not intimations of this linkage in Origen and perhaps especially in Bonaventure. Nor is it to say that Balthasar has yoked two hoary topics together and succeeded in precipitating out the small amount of contemporary theological relevance either might enjoy. In a situation of profound skepticism and nihilism, there is nothing jejune about retrieval of the transcendentals. And in the case of beauty – which throughout the Christian Neoplatonic tradition is intimated rather than explicitly declared a transcendental – Balthasar thinks that giving it its rightful place helps immensely in contemporary apologetics since beauty provides a more obvious motivational structure than unity, being, and even goodness. I suppose the greatest compliment that one can give Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses is to insist on the importance of the complex thesis it presents and acknowledge the way in which it allows the self-evidence of the thesis to emerge. This after all is the raison d’^etre of McInroy’s book. C 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Reviews 685 More specifically, McInroy not only knows his way around Balthasar’s sprawling oeuvre, but has a keen sense of who Balthasar’s more important modern interlocutors are. He keeps Barth close at Balthasar’s side throughout (95-105), and in his truly fine chapter 3 he shows how Romano Guardini (105-11), Gustav Siewerth (111-16), and Paul Claudel (116-20) are usefully enlisted by Balthasar in his elaboration of the responsiveness of the human to the shock of revelation and in his exposition of the conditions of the possibility of human responsiveness to God’s self-disclosure in creation and Christ. If Guardini is a solid choice, the other two are inspired choices, and make different kinds of contribution, Siewerth to the articulation of a Thomist philosophical anthropology, Claudel to the general human responsiveness to beauty as an analogy of faith’s responsiveness to the glory of God in the world and in other persons. McInroy makes two related contributions to Balthasar’s theological anthropology with respect to which the spiritual senses function as a kind of synecdoche: first, Balthasar articulates a personalism that insists on the unity in difference of the spiritual and corporeal dimensions of the self and, second, Balthasar demonstrates that one is only entitled to speak of person in the context of relation to the other, whether the human other or the totally Other. Barth, of course, is someone from whom Balthasar learned an important lesson here, although the outlines are there in Guardini, and Siewerth can provide the notion of person with a philosophical heft present in neither. It would do a disservice to McInroy’s book if one did not mention that threaded through his book is reflection on the relation and difference between the retrievals of the patristic and medieval traditions of spiritual senses enacted by Rahner and Balthasar. If the bulk of discussion occurs in the first two historical chapters, McInroy also recurs to this relation later. If the general advantage is given to Balthasar, who is the more cataphatic of the two Catholic magisterial theologians and also more conspicuously insistent on embodiedness, McInroy refuses a definitive decision in the way that Stephen Fields does and the way in which more generally the early Rowan Williams does. This speaks to a judicious temper. Perhaps it is also the case that decision is not quite so urgent in a non-Catholic theological context. Although not necessarily in detail, in temper at least McInroy seems to be following the lead of his mentor Sarah Coakley. McInroy is brave in making Balthasar’s discussion of the spiritual senses relevant both to the great theological debates within and without Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century and also with respect to articulating a third way beyond Neoscholastic retrenchment and Modernism (174-75). Although it happens all the time, it is bad manners to ask of a book to answer questions that the book does not deal with. Nor can or should we expect a book – and especially a fairly short book such as this – to address every relevant aspect of the topic and also every possible interlocutor. Nonetheless, one might ask, for example, at particular points whether Erich Przywara might have come in for some discussion as well perhaps as Ferdinand Ulrich (180-81) for a more explicit treatment? Respect for its accomplishment imposes the responsibility of interrogating the book and asking whether it might have gone further and cut somewhat deeper. The following questions seem apropos. First, while Balthasar’s commitment to the unity in difference of the Christian subject is wonderfully articulated, does McInroy adequately address a tension between a broader view of this unity in difference of the personal subject, which would allow for a non-dualistic form of Platonism and Neoplatonism, and a more narrow view which is Aristotelian-Thomistic? Second, there is the issue of the role Heidegger plays in Balthasar’s thought in general and in Glory of the Lord 1 in particular. I raise this question because, as with Rahner, Balthasar can see in Heidegger a thinker who, on the one hand, makes an argument against anthropological dualism and insists on the intrinsic relationality of the human subject (Mitsein) and, on the other, links beauty with truth in and through lighting and appearance. Even if Heidegger would not play a constitutive role in Balthasar’s recovery of the spiritual sense, it seems evident that at the very least Heidegger’s thought has the capacity to reinforce the Neoplatonic aesthetics that Balthasar repurposes in Glory of the Lord 1. This is not to gainsay Balthasar’s relativization of Heidegger in Glory of the Lord 5 in which Balthasar argues that the creator-creation difference and the Trinitarian difference take priority over the ontological difference, nor to set aside Balthasar’s express worries about Heidegger’s nihilism in Glory of the Lord 1. Third, and finally, what role might a deeper analysis of Theo-Logic 1 than is attempted in Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses play in explicating the unity in difference C 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 686 Reviews of the personal subject, bringing out the exteriority of givenness, and the ways in which a Christian metaphysics both allows Heidegger’s assistance and refuses it? Cyril O’Regan University of Notre Dame Department of Theology 130 Malloy Hall Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA Email: Cyril.J.O’[email protected] The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics by Wendy Farley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2015), xi 1 169 pp. The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics introduces the theology of medieval female thinkers for both the general practitioner and the academic. Farley points out that the ways we teach the history of theology tend to rely on institutional voices; by focusing on beguines and similar women’s movements, Farley provides us with a non-central look at how women came to understand God. The beguine tradition was one that insisted on a view of God based not on hierarchy but on love. It was also a movement that was socially situated in multiple medieval social orders. In order to understand women’s views of divine love, Farley shows us what these women were doing in their lives – creating decentralized communities that served the poor, healing the sick and teaching one another. It is in this context that the book provides a glimpse of the program of each of the three women – Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich – in order to see how their witness and wisdom can provide healing balm to the church and its practitioners today. The book is set up with a range of readers (the interested person in the pews as well as the student or theologian looking to know more about medieval theology) in mind, in short chapters that each unpack one aspect of one writer’s work. After an introduction, the book then is divided into two parts. The first part gives a chapter each to the women, introducing us to their style, their concerns, and their times. It also includes a chapter on the beguine movement, from its beginnings to its height and later persecutions and suppression. In the second part, Farley offers clusters of chapters on each woman theologian, allowing us to explore their ideas more deeply. At the heart of Farley’s book is the belief that the middle ages have something to teach today’s believer or theologian. The middle ages as a background for today makes sense, Farley says, because it was a time marked with creativity, much in the same way today’s society rapidly changes and adopts new ideas and practices. It was an era of vast social change, and institutions were created that were new while older institutions either tried to adapt or to resist change. As such, it parallels the rapid social change and questions of our current day. One such group to challenge institutions were the beguines, who were women who came together first in small houses, then in larger communities that were centered in the newly formed urban areas. As social hierarchies and structures changed, new opportunities for service, teaching, and prayer were created even within the realm of religious expression. Not all new opportunities were welcomed by the central powers, however. Women’s religious lives were quite varied even within established monasteries, and it’s no surprise that their lives within the new beguinages were, too. We see this in Farley’s first two examples. Some women brought with them educations, and established ways to educate other beguines. Among the emphases of the beguines were service towards others, asceticism, and shared meditation and learning. These women lived both active and contemplative lives, and these mixed lives permeated the theology they espoused and the writing their members did. The spiritual lives of these women combined concern for their immediate communities of women, the communities of the cities they served, and a desire for contemplation which would lead to resting in the divine word of scripture. Visionary culture in the middle ages used as its basis the Incarnation told in the stories of the Bible – people imagined themselves as present C 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V