International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 13 Number 2 April 2011

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2010.00550.x

The Aesthetic Collision: Hans Urs von

Balthasar on the Trinity and the Cross ijst_550 154..169

DAVID LUY*

Abstract: The relationship envisioned by Hans Urs von Balthasar between the
Trinity and the events of Christ’s passion and death has elicited concern from
various theologians that he has muddled the important distinction between
God’s eternal life ad intra and his interaction with the world through the
economy of his actions. This article argues that such a reading of Balthasar’s
theology is ultimately a serious misconstrual of his work since it overlooks the
aesthetic categories established early in The Glory of the Lord through which
his narration of the cross-event must ultimately be interpreted. By interpreting
Balthasar in this manner, this article clarifies the content of what is perhaps
Balthasar’s most important theological contribution, and provides a creative
alternative for how best to situate the relationship (oft-discussed in twentieth-
century theology) between the Trinity and the crucifixion.

‘To the very shattering of the image of eternal life on the Cross, through and beyond
all paradox, it remains revelation, indeed a revelation which is intensified to the
utmost; it remains the supreme self-expression of this eternal life.’1 This quotation,
taken from the first volume of Balthasar’s seven-volume theological aesthetics,
encapsulates in succinct fashion what is simultaneously one of Balthasar’s most
central theological insights and the dimension of his thought that has evoked perhaps
the greatest confusion (and sometimes consternation) of his interpreters and critics.
Embedded in this statement is the affirmation, never dimmed in Balthasar’s
subsequent theological development, that the horrific event of the crucifixion, the
agony of Jesus through his passion and death, represents at once the paradigmatic
expression of the divine, and the apex of God’s glory shining in the world. Despite
the obvious Johannine overtones that undergird this twofold contention, it may
plausibly be asked of Balthasar why such a vile and scandalous event is thought to

* 1489 Evergreen Drive #103, Palatine, IL 60074, USA.

1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, A Theological Aesthetics, trans.
Joseph Fessio and John Kenneth Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983) (hereafter
Balthasar, GL1 ), p. 440.
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The Aesthetic Collision 155

be exemplary of the divine life in a way, for instance, that the transfiguration or
resurrection is not.2
Statements in Balthasar such as the one cited above are suggestive, for many, of
an immanentizing trajectory, so prominent in contemporary theology, in which such
classical distinctions as the immanent and economic Trinity (God’s life ad intra and
his actions ad extra), and the important distinction between God and the world are
blurred or conflated.3 By identifying the revelation of God so closely with the cross,
Balthasar seems to risk entangling the divine into the realm of the economy. But
is this indeed the intent of Balthasar’s crucicentrism? Does he cross the boundary
traversed so often in twentieth-century theology from cross as divine self-expression
to cross as divine self-constitution? If we allow Balthasar to speak for himself, we
shall see that nothing could be further from his intentions.4
Thus, assuming that the door on this interpretation (stated as such) has been
closed, the original question with respect to Balthasar’s language may be redirected
in at least three ways: (1) why does Balthasar narrate the crucifixion in the way that
he does?; (2) what about his broader systematic framework can help us to understand
the factors that prompt him to move in this direction?; and, finally, (3) in light of
these systematic considerations, what are we to make of the ‘problematic’ portions
of Balthasar’s writing in which he ‘seems’ to risk the dangers mentioned above? In
this article, it will be argued that Balthasar’s account of the crucifixion must be

2 This is not to deny that Balthasar fails to attach revelatory significance to either of these
events, nor to assume that he separates cross and resurrection. Nevertheless, as reflected
in the opening quotation, Balthasar does insist upon viewing the crucifixion as a supreme
event of divine self-disclosure, unveiling something unique about the intra-trinitarian life,
and this insistence has complicated the reception of his theology in certain quadrants of
the contemporary theological community. What follows is an attempt to address potential
concerns prompted by Balthasar’s crucicentrism through a careful exposition of the
actual content of his trinitarian theology of the cross.
3 One classic statement of this concern is to be found in an interview with Karl Rahner in
which he argues that Balthasar and Moltmann (with whom Balthasar is closely associated
in Rahner’s estimation) unhelpfully entangle God into the ‘predicament’ of human
suffering. See Karl Rahner, Paul Imhof, Hubert Biallowons and Harvey D. Egan, Karl
Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965–1982 (New York: Crossroad,
1986), pp. 126–7. Thomas Weinandy voices similar concerns with respect to Balthasar’s
treatment of divine impassibility. Although he is aware that Balthasar does not wish to
endorse fully divine suffering, Weinandy still argues that Balthasar’s position is that God
suffers ‘in his relationship to the created order’. Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 13 n. 38.
4 Balthasar argues against the legitimacy of this option in various ways throughout his
vast corpus. For present purposes, one representative quotation will suffice. Hans Urs von
Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4, The Action, trans. Graham
Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994) (hereafter Balthasar, TD4 ), p. 323:
The immanent Trinity must be understood to be that eternal, absolute self-surrender
whereby God is seen to be, in himself, absolute love; this in turn explains his free
self-giving to the world as love, without suggesting that God ‘needed’ the world
process and the Cross in order to become himself (to ‘mediate himself’).
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156 David Luy

situated within the aesthetic framework with which he begins his massive trilogy. It
is through the language of aesthetic correspondence between earthly form and divine
splendour (always filtered through analogia) that the underlying framework of
Balthasar’s proposal is disclosed and justified. This ‘aesthetic correspondence’
provides the governing substructure throughout Balthasar’s treatment of God’s
actions ad extra (the economy), and achieves paradigmatic expression in the passion
and death of Jesus. In other words, it is crucial to recognize and take into account the
perdurance of Balthasar’s aesthetic lens when interpreting his descriptive statements
regarding the crucifixion.

The aesthetic lens

In the first volume of his theological aesthetics, Balthasar offers a formal treatment of
‘beauty’ as it applies to theological discourse. Beauty (often identified closely with
‘glory’) is not a univocal category, but encapsulates both a theological account of
beauty (characterized by transcendence – vertical) and a worldly account of beauty
(the aesthetic concepts of human existence – horizontal). Turning to a historical
overview of ‘beauty’ as conceived throughout the progress of theological inquiry,
Balthasar isolates two extremes that may result from a failure to recognize this
twofold dimension of beauty. On the one hand, he admits the risk of collapsing the
transcendent account of beauty into the immanent categories of worldly beauty.5 Such
a move is, for Balthasar, tantamount to a denial of the Creator / creature distinction.
On the other hand, Balthasar notes that many (particularly in the Protestant tradition)
have risked the opposite extreme by emphasizing the transcendence of God to such
an extent that no correspondence of any kind remains between the two dimensions
of beauty.6 This exchanges the univocity of an aesthetic theology for an equivocity of
sheer dialectic.
Balthasar wishes to fall into neither of these extremes, and the means he invokes
to avoid them is the principle of analogy. Analogy is a multivalent concept whose
range of application is equally diverse.7 For Balthasar, the concept communicates an
underlying continuity that exists between transcendent beauty and worldly categories
of beauty. This continuity is not one of identification, however, but exists within
the context of an ‘ever-greater dissimilarity’. By invoking this principle, Balthasar is
able to steer a middle path between the pitfalls referenced above.

5 Balthasar, GL1, p. 41.

6 Balthasar, GL1, pp. 45–6.
7 The concept of analogy is nowhere absent in the first volume of the aesthetics. For a
specific discussion, see Balthasar, GL1, pp. 450–1. Helpful secondary literature on
Balthasar’s use of analogy includes Nicholas J. Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs
Von Balthasar: Being as Communion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.
19–90; and Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An
Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995),
pp. 67–124.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Aesthetic Collision 157

Although the source and nature of this correspondence will be further developed
in subsequent discussion, it should be noted at the outset that the idea of an ‘aesthetic
correspondence’ emerges as a significant component of the relationship Balthasar
envisions between God’s being and the economy of his actions in the world. Just
as genuine ‘forms’ of earthly beauty bear an intrinsic correspondence with the
transcendent splendour of divine / transcendent beauty, so also do authentic ‘forms’
of the divine glory (that is, forms that possess a truly revelatory character) reflect an
underlying ‘aesthetic correspondence’ with the infinite depth of their content.8
Thus, in every act of divine self-disclosure, it may be observed that the particular
mode in which this disclosure takes place must retain a ‘correspondence’ between at
least three ‘tethers’ or ‘indices’ that preserve the aesthetic distance between form and
splendour without collapsing it (univocity) or tearing it apart (equivocity). The first
‘tether’ is the divine splendour itself – which provides the fundamental content to
which all aesthetic ‘forms’ must authentically point. Unless the form of expression
is in some fashion a genuine ‘modality’ of this reality (albeit partial since the divine
splendour is infinite in character), it does not possess a revelatory character. The
second ‘tether’ refers to the categories of finite existence that comprise the world
in which and from which ‘forms’ of divine glory take shape. Although we shall have
occasion in subsequent sections to explore why such a continuity between God and
world is possible, suffice it here to say that, for Balthasar, any form of revelation
that does not ‘intersect’ with this finite reality is deficient. It remains less than a true
‘correspondence’ since the content of divine glory has not yet been really expressed
in the concrete language of finitude. Finally, the third ‘tether’ refers to the particular
modality of sin and guilt that afflicts the post-lapsarian world. Here again, unless
divine self-disclosure intersects with this reality in the depth of its negativity,
it remains a ‘form of self-disclosure’ that passes overhead, so to speak, with no
genuine contact or correspondence effected. In order for ‘form’ to be ‘form’, this
correspondence must attain, according to Balthasar. To say less than this would be to
deny the principle of analogy for the sake of an inscrutable dialectic of equivocity.
It should be emphasized again that the very concept of analogy that provides
Balthasar with a grammar through which to stress the fundamental continuity
between divine beauty (splendour) and worldly beauty (with which divine splendour
is coordinated in the coalescence of form) is the reason why he insists with an
equivalent persistence that this continuity cannot overshadow the ever-greater
discontinuity that separates infinite beauty from finite form. The first ‘tether’ cannot
be snapped or stretched any more than the other two with which it coordinates in the
event of genuine self-manifestation. God remains the ‘ever-greater’ throughout
the economy of salvation – there is no possibility of a collapse into divine
entanglement with the world.
With a formal outline of Balthasar’s aesthetic lens now in place, we shall turn in
the remaining sections to a more nuanced discussion of each tether, as it manifests

8 For Balthasar’s discussion of ‘form’ and ‘splendour’, see Balthasar, GL1, pp. 117–27.
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158 David Luy

itself in the process of salvation history. It will be shown that the economy of God’s
actions in the world reflects (among other things) an ongoing process of
‘intensification’ through which the three trajectories (indices, tethers and so on)
draw nearer and nearer to one another towards a culminating nodal point in which
each tether is perfectly preserved and expressed – thus creating the ‘primal’ or
‘archetypal’ form. This convergence (often described by Balthasar in terms of
‘collision’) takes place in the cross-event where the transcendent reality of God’s
internal life (the divine splendour) is perfectly ‘translated’ or ‘transposed’ into the
modality of the post-lapsarian world.
What follows therefore is a description and analysis of how Balthasar sets up
this overall trajectory of intensified correspondence throughout his work. Each
‘tether’ will receive its own separate treatment in which key aspects of Balthasar’s
theological framework will be distilled and elucidated. Finally, in light of this more
developed discussion, we shall attempt to peer through this ‘aesthetic lens’ at the
cross-event and explicate the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of Balthasar’s account more
clearly.

The intensification of convergent trajectories: Balthasar on the three

tethers of salvation history

Tether 1: divine splendour

Fundamental for Balthasar’s theology is the immanent existence of God, conceived

as the underlying precondition for all that takes place in the economy of his actions.
To understand God’s acts is to see in them a reflection of the eternal reality to which
they point. This reality, the glory of God’s ineffable being, is, for Balthasar, primarily
defined in terms of intra-trinitarian life. Thus, in order to understand the ‘tether’ of
divine ‘glory’ or ‘splendour’ with which all ‘form’ must correspond, one must grasp
at least partially the interrelationships of the triune Godhead.9
Two important disclaimers are in order with regard to this point, both of which
will serve to reinforce the overall thrust of this article. First of all, it should be
acknowledged that by beginning with a discussion of the immanent Trinity and then
turning to the economy, we are reversing the order in which Balthasar himself
approached this relationship. Although he is quite clear about the ontological
primacy of the immanent Trinity, Balthasar consistently insists that it is only through
the tangible and concrete manifestation of the economic Trinity that human beings
can attain some measure of access to God’s eternal being. In other words, it is to the

9 The category of divine glory is, for Balthasar, a multifaceted one; and we do not mean to
suggest in this section that the doctrine of the Trinity exhausts all that he intends by this
term. Nevertheless, it does seem fair to say that the eternal glory of divine existence is
closely linked with the trinitarian relationships in Balthasar’s work. See, for instance,
Balthasar, GL1, pp. 158–9.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Aesthetic Collision 159

economic Trinity that he accords sole epistemological primacy. This, in and of itself,
reveals quite a bit about Balthasar’s convictions regarding the relationship between
God and the world, and between the immanent and economic Trinity, as we shall
have occasion to explore more explicitly in subsequent sections of the argument.
For now, we shall simply observe that Balthasar begins with the assumption that,
whatever takes place in the economy must express a reality that exists eternally
within the immanent life of the Trinity. One of the central convictions that drives
what could be called Balthasar’s ‘retroactive method’ of theological predication is
his commitment to God’s unchangeability.10 Along with Barth, Balthasar insists that
‘by acting as he did, [God]: “proves to us precisely that he is capable of this, that to
do such a thing lies absolutely in his nature” ’.11 Whatever we may think of such a
maneuver, it should be clear that Balthasar does not intend to collapse the immanent
Trinity into the economic Trinity. To the contrary, by insisting that everything in
the economy is enabled by an eternal precondition established by the internal life
of the immanent Trinity, he believes he has found a way to talk about a real
‘correspondence’ without entangling God in the world. We shall return to this theme
with greater detail in our discussion of the second and third tethers.
The second disclaimer, similar to the first, is the fact that Balthasar denies
the possibility of unmediated knowledge of God’s being.12 It is for this reason that
Balthasar adamantly insists that theology must never ‘move beyond’ the humanity of
Jesus in a desire to attain knowledge of ‘naked divinity’, or a perception of the divine
splendour that is not mediated through form. Incidentally, this also helps us to
understand one of the reasons why the hypostatic union represents, for Balthasar,
the archetypal form – a form that is never to be surpassed because it represents the
zenith of correspondence between the infinite and the finite. Christ is the ‘point
of intersection of historical words and the words of Being precisely as the unity of
eternal Son and temporal man’.13 By beginning our overview of Balthasar’s
application of the aesthetic lens in salvation history with the nature of God’s
immanent life (in abstraction from the economy) we are therefore departing in

10 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2, The
Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1990) (hereafter Balthasar, TD2), pp. 277 and 284; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-
Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 5, The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998) (hereafter Balthasar, TD5), pp. 90–91 and 513;
Balthasar, GL1, p. 453; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of
Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990) (hereafter Balthasar, MP),
pp. viii–ix. This is not to insist that Balthasar simply repeats a classical account of divine
immutability without his own qualifications. For a more nuanced discussion of this topic
see Gerard F. O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
11 Balthasar, MP, p. 81. Balthasar is quoting in this section from Karl Barth, Die kirchliche
Dogmatik: die Lehre von der Versöhnung, Teil 1 (Zollikon: Verlag der Evangelischen
Buchhandlung. 1953), pp. 202–4.
12 Balthasar, GL1, pp. 251 and 302.
13 Balthasar, GL1, p. 435, my emphasis.
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160 David Luy

several respects from the method Balthasar followed in his own theological inquiry.
Nevertheless, for the sake of demonstrating the intensifying interrelationships of the
three ‘tethers’ isolated in the introduction, there is usefulness in assuming the order
that we have. In the brief overview of the immanent Trinity that follows, however, it
should be recognized that Balthasar’s theology is never the result of detached or
abstract speculation, but has been forged with the concrete events of the economy in
the forefront of his mind. Thus, in one sense, the full import of our description here
can only be understood once the subsequent ‘tethers’ of creation and sin have been
adequately unpacked.
Balthasar’s account of the intra-trinitarian life is characterized primarily by an
emphasis upon an internal dynamism that is rooted in the mutual self-giving of the
divine Persons. Although filtered through the principle of analogy so as to avoid any
connotations of ‘divine becoming’,14 Balthasar argues that it is appropriate to apply
the language of ‘event’ to the internal life of God in eternity: ‘What happens in the
Trinity is, however, far more than a motionless order or sequence, for expressions
such as “beget”, “give birth,” “proceed,” and “breathe forth” refer to eternal acts in
which God genuinely “takes place.” ’15 These eternal acts refer to the infinite
self-giving that takes place between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this exchange of
love, each Person surrenders all that he possesses to the other two. Thus, although
perfectly united in the mutuality of this self-expropriation, there arises a kind of
‘distance’ or ‘space’ within the Godhead that simultaneously distinguishes each
Person from his counterparts and binds them together in inseparable concord. This
immanent self-giving, or self-emptying of the divine comprises Balthasar’s account
of intra-trinitarian kenosis. Although this account is expounded and developed in
multiple sections of his work, a particularly clear representation of it is offered in the
following statement taken from the fifth volume of the Theo-Drama:
In giving himself, the Father does not give something (or even everything) that
he has but all that he is – for in God there is only being, not having. So the
Father’s being passes over, without remainder, to the begotten Son; and it would
be a mistake to suggest that he, the Father, becomes or develops as a result of this
self-giving . . . This total self-giving, to which the Son and the Spirit respond by
an equal self-giving, is a kind of ‘death’, a first, radical ‘kenosis’ as one might
say.16
Thus, the emerging picture of intra-trinitarian life (which comprises to a large extent
Balthasar’s account of divine splendour) is one of radical self-giving – a self-giving
that implies internal distance, albeit not a distance of separation, but a ‘kenotic
positive distance’ of infinite love. It is to this picture of divine glory that all events of
the economy (including specific forms of divine revelation) must correspond,
including, indeed paradigmatically, the supreme revelatory event of the crucifixion.

14 Balthasar, TD5, p. 507.

15 Balthasar, TD5, p. 67. See also Balthasar, MP, p. 24.
16 Balthasar, TD5, p. 84.
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The Aesthetic Collision 161

As we shall soon see with greater clarity, Balthasar’s account of intra-trinitarian

‘distance’ provides the hermeneutical key necessary to understand how modalities of
human distance (largely negative) can become genuine ‘forms’ of divine revelation
when filtered through Balthasar’s aesthetic lens of intensifying correspondence.17

Tether 2: creation and finite freedom

Like so many theologians in the Christian tradition, Balthasar situates the concept
of creation within trinitarian categories.18 The Trinity provides the ground, source,
orientation and destiny of all finite reality. In fact, since the act of creation takes place
in correspondence with God’s eternal nature, the world is, in one sense, ‘a reflection
of the eternal “happening” in God, which . . . is identical with the eternal Being or
essence’.19 The language of ‘reflection’ is important for Balthasar, for he does not
mean that creation is, in any sense, an extension or completion of God’s identity. The
point of such a statement is that all of God’s actions ad extra must find their basis in
a precondition within the divine life to which they point. Creation, in other words, is
not ‘arbitrary’ for Balthasar, even as he is quick to deny the opposite extreme that
creation is therefore necessary.20 Here again we see Balthasar struggling to preserve
a real correspondence between God and the world, while avoiding collapsing the two
together. It is perhaps telling that the best analogies he can find to describe such a
connection (which is reflective also of ‘analogy’) are aesthetic in nature.21
The central import of the Trinity with respect to questions of creation is the
fact that God has ‘space’ within himself for ‘otherness’. There is an analogy, for
Balthasar, between the way in which the Son is given space by the Father to ‘have life
in himself’ and the way in which creation is ‘released’ by God to have its own reality.
This autonomy, like the Son’s autonomy, is not ‘detached’ from God – indeed, it is
related intrinsically to the divine as its source. This too is patterned analogically after
the generation of the Son who is both God in himself (a certain kind of autonomy),

17 Balthasar, TD5, p. 94:

Again, we must not see the ‘distance’ in opposition to, or in conflict with, the
‘closeness’ (of circumincessio in the one divine nature); at the same time such
distance is necessary, for two reasons: first, in order to hold fast to the personal
distinctness of each Person both in being and acting; and second, in order to establish
the basis within the Trinity for what, in the economic Trinity, will be the possibility
of a distance that goes as far as the Son’s abandonment on the Cross.
18 Balthasar, TD5, pp. 62–3 and 100: ‘The idea of the world is from God and in God.
Accordingly its whole (non-divine) reality cannot be located anywhere else but in him.’
19 Balthasar, TD5, p. 67.
20 Balthasar, GL1, pp. 443–4 and 448; Balthasar, TD2, pp. 251 and 256; Balthasar, TD5, p.
507. To say that creation is necessary is to risk pantheism in Balthasar’s mind.
21 See Balthasar, TD2, p. 269 n. 40. Balthasar suggests here that the freedom with which
God creates the world is like the freedom with which Mozart composed The Magic Flute.
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162 David Luy

but also returns to the Father all that he has in loving self-emptying.22 The trinitarian
processions therefore provide the ‘prototype’ for the overall shape and trajectory of
created existence. ‘Again, just as the Divine Persons are themselves only insofar as
they go out to the Others (Who are always Other), the created essences too are
themselves only insofar as they go beyond themselves and indicate their primal
ground . . . and their vocation of self-surrender’.23 This relationship is not merely a
clever illustration on Balthasar’s part, but is, for him, entirely constitutive of created
being whose source is the gratuitous overflow of the trinitarian life.
In light of this correspondence, Balthasar characterizes finite freedom (the
freedom of the human creature) in terms of two poles: namely, genuine autonomy on
the one hand, yet also a necessary indebtedness to the infinite on the other.24 The
first pole is necessary in order for the created other to be indeed other, with all
the genuine freedom this implies. Yet, the second pole is necessary to affirm the
overarching orientation of humanity beyond itself. Although it may seem at first
glance that these two poles tug against each other (and they often do in the course of
human history),25 both are crucial for an account of creation that is patterned
analogically after the ‘genuine otherness’ of the hypostatic distinctions within the
Trinity.
In the course of salvation history, God does not obliterate or overturn finite
freedom.26 Balthasar resists the tendency, found in some theological systems, to
speak of the relationship between infinite freedom and finite freedom in terms of a
‘zero sum game’.27 Finite freedom is not antithetical to infinite freedom (indeed, to
act as if this is the case is the essence of sin for Balthasar), but is directed towards it.
The finite is therefore most realized and most itself when it is oriented without
reserve beyond itself in dedication to the infinite.28 All of this presupposes the
underlying substructure of mutual self-giving that exists within the immanent
Trinity; a reality that is reflected in the Creator/creature relationship. The concept of
‘grace perfects nature’, has, for Balthasar, a decidedly trinitarian shape.
Applied conversely to God’s interaction with the world, Balthasar argues that
God does not need to work ‘against’ the grain of creation in order to accomplish his
purposes. The correspondence between God and finite reality means that God can,
with no alteration of either himself or creation, intersect with it and act within its
categories (categories that are finite reflections of his infinite being). Furthermore,
God is not threatened by creation’s otherness – he is able to allow it real space and

22 For a description of creation’s unique relationship to the Son, see Balthasar, TD4, pp. 261
and 325–6; Balthasar, TD2, p. 262; Balthasar, TD5, pp. 62 and 76.
23 Balthasar, TD5, p. 76.
24 Balthasar, TD4, p. 149.
25 Balthasar, TD4, p. 328.
26 Balthasar, TD2, p. 250.
27 The phrase itself is taken from David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three
Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 2.
28 Balthasar, TD2, pp. 273 and 316.
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The Aesthetic Collision 163

autonomy.29 This ability of God reflects Balthasar’s conceptual redefinition of

divine freedom and omnipotence in trinitarian categories. In light of the immanent
self-emptying that is central to the divine life, we ought not conceive of power in
terms of God’s ability to assert himself and overpower those external to himself, but
rather in terms of his loving freedom to allow ‘room’ for an other with no threat to
his own identity.30 The resultant relationship between infinite and finite freedom is
captured well in a quotation from the second volume of the Theo-Drama:
Thus, finally, it becomes clear why finite freedom can really fulfill itself in
infinite freedom and in no other way. If letting-be belongs to the nature
of infinite freedom . . . there is no danger of finite freedom, which cannot fulfill
itself on its own account . . . becoming alienated from itself in the realm of the
Infinite. It can only be what it is, that is, an image of infinite freedom, imbued
with a freedom of its own, by getting in tune with the (Trinitarian) ‘law’ of
absolute freedom (of self-surrender): and this law is not foreign to it – for after
all it is the ‘law’ of absolute Being – but most authentically its own.31
It is because the world exists in correspondence with ‘the law of absolute Being’
(which is trinitarian in nature) that God may intersect with the world and express
himself through its categories. Indeed, he must do exactly this if he is to take
the reality and integrity of finite freedom seriously. Neither God nor the world
is altered or changed into something they are not through this interaction. The
aesthetic correspondence in which the world was created enables continued aesthetic
intersections throughout salvation history in which both the reality of God (divine
splendour) and the concrete modality of created reality (correspondent form) may
be upheld in consonance with one another. This relationship explains at once
the possibility of genuine divine self-disclosure within the created economy, and the
source of analogical continuity (without collapsing the ever-greater discontinuity)
between God and creation that enables it.

Tether 3: the modality of post-lapsarian negative distance

The previous section sought to expound the underlying continuity that unites
God and creation in an ongoing analogical correspondence. The next step in
our discussion probes the extent to which the introduction of post-lapsarian evil
compromises the integrity of this correspondence. It would seem, at first glance, that
the perversion of finite freedom represented by humanity’s fall into sin must bring

29 Balthasar, TD5, p. 375: ‘The fact that God has given to the earthly realm its own
autonomy, so that it can freely turn and move toward him, shows that there is room for
it in God.’
30 See Balthasar, TD2, pp. 190, 244 and 256–7; Balthasar, TD4, p. 328; Balthasar, TD5, p.
66; Balthasar, MP, p. 28.
31 Balthasar, TD2, p. 259.
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164 David Luy

with it the derangement, if not abrogation of any pre-existing continuity between the
infinite and the finite. If this is the case, how can Balthasar argue that God can and
must express himself in the modality of this sinful economy? In other words, are the
first and third tethers irreconcilably opposed to one another? Does not a commitment
to one necessarily ‘snap’ its counterpart? This would seem to be the operative
assumption for many contemporary theologians who argue that God’s salvific
intersection with modalities of negativity and evil must change his own nature.
Balthasar, however, denies this assumption, arguing that the correspondence between
God’s nature and creation ‘holds good even in the worst of these modalities, namely,
the status naturae lapsae’.32 Exactly how Balthasar maintains this correspondence
is contingent upon a number of factors in his conceptual description of sin and evil.
It is to this description of sin that we now turn.
For Balthasar, the creation of finite freedom always entailed the ‘possibility’ of
misdirection on the part of humanity. In order for freedom to be authentic (that is,
autonomous in a genuine sense), it must include within it the potential for misuse.33
This is part of what it means for God to take seriously the ‘otherness’ of his creation.
– a necessary prerequisite of Theo-Drama.34 It is precisely this misdirection of
freedom that God allows of his ‘other’ that comprises the reality of sin for Balthasar:
‘In point of fact, man fell into error, and when he demanded his share of the
inheritance, his Father did not attempt to hold him back but let him go.’35
The irony of sin is that this very misdirection which seems to its autonomous
subjects as the premier expression of their freedom, is, in fact, its fundamental loss.
Failing to recognize the transcendent orientation of their nature (qua nature), they
seek fulfillment in areas where it is not to be found. Unbridled autonomy brings with
it the annihilation of self, since such a posture denies the source of its own existence.
At root here is a perverted understanding of freedom and power. Rather than seeing
freedom’s expression within the trinitarian framework of infinite self-giving,36 sinful
humanity envisions a freedom of power and unchecked self-determination. Yet,
according to the definition of finite freedom explicated in the previous section, this
quest for self-determination is actually a loss of self. Balthasar captures this point
well in the following paragraph:
The one who attempts to seize absolute power is overwhelmed by it; he has no
defense against it. Seeking ‘liberation’ through total autonomy, he is so fettered
by it (for total autonomy belongs to God) that release can come only from God.
We have already seen this in the fact that sin is a lie; the freedom that refused to
acknowledge God was bound to maintain this lie, but, by pursuing this course,

32 Balthasar, TD2, p. 271.

33 Balthasar, TD5, p. 510; Balthasar, TD2, p. 275: ‘The gift of man’s area of freedom, with
God latent within it, implies and accepts the possibility of going astray, with all the
consequences this may bring . . .’.
34 Balthasar, TD2, p. 184.
35 Balthasar, TD2, p. 275.
36 Balthasar, TD4, p. 147.
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The Aesthetic Collision 165

it actually worked against its own true nature, since part and parcel of this nature
is its transcendence backward and forward, that is, pointing to God as its origin
and its goal. Thus it is overwhelmed by the very power of self-transcendence
with which it has been endowed and becomes ‘bent in upon itself’. Augustine
calls this ‘incurvatio in se ipsum.’37
This misdirected freedom, however, remains an expression of the space endowed
to creation by God – a ‘space’ that is grounded in the ‘kenotic space’ of his own
immanent being. Although sin is indeed a misuse of finite freedom, the fact that finite
freedom is presupposed by the infinite positive distance of the Trinity means that
every modality of this distance retains a fundamental correspondence with the divine.
The separation between the hypostatic Persons possesses an infinite quality, and
therefore is itself the basis for every ‘distance’ of the created economy – even if the
particular expression of this distance departs from the purposes for which it was
intended:
God the Father can give his divinity away in such a manner that it is not merely
‘lent’ to the Son: the Son’s possession of it is ‘equally substantial’. This implies
an incomprehensible and unique ‘separation’ of God from himself that it
includes and grounds every other separation – be it never so dark and bitter.38
Thus, for Balthasar, even sin is a modality of kenotic space, albeit a modality that
has been perverted and ‘twisted’ by the senseless evil of humanity’s misdirected
freedom.39 The main point, with respect to our topic, is that God is therefore not
rendered mute by the power of sin. The radical form of his own internal self-
emptying allows him to intersect with the very depths of human evil and transform
(better – re-orient) it from the inside. It is the infinite quality of divine love that
enables this; a love that is, quite literally ‘as strong as hell’, or, more precisely,
stronger than hell.40 In light of a more specific account of the intra-trinitarian kenosis,
we see that the negative distance of sin does not move creation ‘outside of God’ even
though it perverts the relationship between them. More importantly, since negative
distance is a modality of trinitarian kenotic space, this means that God can ‘intersect’
with even this distance without taking anything foreign into himself.
Two points should be fairly clear by now: (1) that the three ‘tethers’ discussed
above are necessary aspects of God’s self-disclosure as conceived by Balthasar in
the framework of aesthetic correspondence; and (2) that the coincidence of these
‘tethers’ or ‘indices’ is, in fact, possible in light of the trinitarian framework in which
Balthasar situates the Creator/creature distinction. We could perhaps also argue that,
for Balthasar, a denial of genuine ‘intersection’ between these various indices would
amount to a denial of both revelation and salvation. If God is ultimately unable to

37 Balthasar, TD4, pp. 165 and 175.

38 Balthasar, TD4, p. 325.
39 Balthasar, TD4, p. 330. This does not mean that God ‘creates sin’ – but that the conditions
for it are traced into his trinitarian life of perfect self-giving. See Balthasar, TD5, p. 99.
40 Balthasar, TD4, p. 325.
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166 David Luy

manifest himself and engage with the finite order (even in its darkest modalities)
then creation is beyond the reach of divine grace, and humanity must remain in
its alienation. Intersection must be possible – and this intersection must avoid
‘snapping’ any of the aforementioned tethers.
This theme of ‘intersection’ explains why salvation history is portrayed so often
in terms of ‘intensification’ for Balthasar. In the Old Testament, for instance, we find
a multivalent set of trajectories, each of which points past itself to a ‘fulfillment’
that always lies beyond its grasp.41 An important locus of this intensification
is the covenant, in which infinite and finite freedom interrelate in tangible
correspondence.42 Through vehicles such as ‘covenant’, God ‘steers history toward
its climax’,43 a convergence of all these tensions that collide in the Christ-form: ‘The
drama that takes place between God and mankind proceeds toward its center in
the Incarnation of the Word of God in Christ; accordingly, no individual episode of
it can be wrenched from this process and evaluated separately.’44 The Christ-form,
however, has its own center at the cross, an event that Balthasar describes as ‘the very
heart of the theo-drama’.45 With these trajectories in place, we shall turn now to an
aesthetic analysis of the crucifixion in which each ‘tether’ will be shown perfectly to
intersect or collide with its counterparts.

The beauty of the Crucified: Balthasar on aesthetic collision

Although beauty is, without a doubt, a multifaceted concept in Balthasar’s theology,

we have argued that it expresses for him a relational idea. The fittingness of a
given ‘form’ is conditioned by the extent of its ‘transparency’ (which implies
correspondence) to the content of divine splendour. Its accessibility, however, is
measured by the depth of intersection with the context in which it is bestowed. In the
previous section, we have sought to explore briefly both the content and context of
‘form’ through the language of three mutually conditioning ‘tethers’ that must be
upheld in the self-disclosure of divine splendour. This language of correspondence and
continuity has also been situated within the context of the ever-greater discontinuity
that comes along with the governing principle of analogy for Balthasar.46 The

41 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7, Theology: The New Covenant,
trans. John Kenneth Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989) (hereafter Balthasar,
GL7), pp. 33 and 36.
42 Balthasar, TD4, pp. 173–4; Balthasar, GL7, p. 73.
43 Balthasar, TD4, p. 217.
44 Balthasar, TD4, p. 205. See also p. 208 which uses the language of a ‘crescendo’.
45 Balthasar, TD4, p. 229. See also Balthasar, TD2, p. 281; Balthasar, MP, p. 14; Balthasar,
GL7, pp. 13, 73, 80, 202 and 217.
46 The vocabulary enlisted here by Balthasar (intersection, translation, correspondence,
collision etc.) is, in its own way, a creative rendering of the analogia entis. Since Christ
is the point of correspondence between created existence and God, the source of all
being, Balthasar concludes, provocatively, that the Person of Christ is the analogy of
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The Aesthetic Collision 167

quotation with which we began this article demonstrated that Balthasar understands
the cross to represent the paradigmatic resolution of these various trajectories, an event
that embodies at one and the same time an archetypal transparency to the realities
of divine being and a perfect correspondence or intersection with the particular
modalities of the world’s post-lapsarian context.
In other words, to invoke a linguistic metaphor that Balthasar employs somewhat
regularly, the cross represents the perfect ‘translation’ of intra-trinitarian life into the
‘language’ of the world. This is true of the incarnation in general,47 but applies
especially to the crucifixion in which the Son’s self-abandonment to death reflects the
infinite self-giving of his eternal procession from the Father: ‘On earth, the Son
is obedient to the Father in the Spirit, even to his death on the Cross. This is the
intelligible form of his eternal attitude to the Father who begets him, namely, that of
primal obedience in willing cooperation and gratitude.’48 It should be noted that a
genuine ‘translation’ requires both a faithfulness to the content of divine splendour
(otherwise what is communicated?) and an appropriate contextualization of this
content into the vernacular of its audience. This is another way of stating the point
already argued that Balthasar’s aesthetic categories demand the coordination (not
dissolution) of all three tethers. A brief description of the cross-event in Balthasarian
terms will demonstrate that this is precisely what takes place.
In the form of the crucified Christ, we see a genuine modality of God’s being
in the context of sinful negativity. In his perfect and comprehensive obedience in
suffering, Jesus reveals the all-encompassing richness of the intra-trinitarian love – a
love that is so intense that it can enclose the negativity of sin’s folly and burn it up
as chaff in a furnace.49 The precondition necessary for such a profound intersection
is found in ‘the Son’s eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit’, which
presupposes and therefore is not threatened by ‘the unholy distance of the world’s sin
. . .’.50 It is only in this manner that Balthasar can say: ‘By becoming man, he enters
into what is alien to him and there remains at the same time true to himself.’51 Yet, the
very fact that this manifestation is a ‘modality’ and not identical with divine glory
itself suggests an ‘external’ context into which this content has been expressed. This
context reflects the second and third tethers. For God does not, in his redemptive and
self-revelatory activity, abolish or override the integrity of the human creature – an

being hypostatically concretized. See Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological

Discourse, pp. 83–4.
47 Balthasar, TD5, p. 120.
48 Balthasar, TD5 p. 123. See also Balthasar, GL7, p. 213; Balthasar, GL1, p. 479 and
Balthasar, MP, p. 91.
49 Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘The Scapegoat and the Trinity’, in You Crown the Year with
Your Goodness: Radio Sermons throughout the Liturgical Year, trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 91–2. See also Balthasar, TD5, pp. 122 and
517–18; Balthasar, GL1, p. 474; Balthasar, GL7, pp. 86, 89 and 226; Balthasar, MP, p. 81.
50 Balthasar, TD4, p. 362. To see Balthasar’s argument that worldly engagement never snaps
the first tether of divine glory, see Balthasar, GL1, p. 460; Balthasar, GL7, p. 83.
51 Balthasar, MP, p. 81.
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168 David Luy

integrity that he bestowed at creation. In the economy of grace, he continues to

take his ‘free, creaturely partner seriously’.52 The way in which he does this is by
actualizing and reinstating the natural orientation of finite freedom – an orientation
that is patterned after the mutuality of the eternal trinitarian relations. In his perfect
obedience, Jesus therefore not only discloses the shape of immanent divine life, but
also acts in perfect accordance with the ‘fundamental structure of the creature’.53
Finally, in the crucifixion Jesus also demonstrates God’s willingness to enter in
to the deepest abysses of human experience and meet ‘sinful, mortal man’ where he
finds himself ‘at his wit’s end’.54 On the cross, the radical nature of God’s power is
disclosed in that he can intersect with and communicate himself even in the midst of
an economy of negativity:
In an action that man could never have anticipated, he steps to his opponent’s
side and, from within, helps him to reach justice and freedom. Finitude, time and
death are not negated: they are given a new value in a way that is beyond our
comprehension. Indeed, even what is hostile to God, in all its profound abysses,
is not abandoned; God does not turn his back on it: it is taken over and
reworked.55
Unlike the other tethers that refer to original correspondences that retain viability
even once the process of redemption is complete, the correspondence with sin
is soteriological, and exists precisely for the sake of its removal through
transformation. Thus, while it is true that this third tether is not snapped (for God
does truly intersect with it), it is not a pole that has any kind of final ontological
status. It exists purely as a disfigurement of the second tether, and it is overcome
through the redemptive process of reorientation. In short, the crucifixion is
conditioned by the context of sin,56 unveils sin for what it is,57 and effects the
transformation and dissolution of sin through collision with the infinite ‘positive
distance’ of trinitarian love.58
To repeat the assumption with which we began this article, it is the aesthetic
correspondence between God and the world (always filtered through analogy) that
provides the governing substructure for all that Balthasar says about God’s actions,
especially with regard to his description of the crucifixion. This substructure
provides an important hermeneutical lens often absent in the work of Balthasar’s
perennial critics who purport to detect in certain sections of his work a fatal blurring
of key distinctions (immanent and economic Trinity, God and the world, and the
like). The texts raised in these criticisms are, in fact, better interpreted in terms of an

52 Balthasar, TD4, p. 238.

53 Balthasar, GL7, p. 217.
54 Balthasar, MP, p. 13.
55 Balthasar, TD4, p. 201.
56 Balthasar, GL1, p. 460.
57 Balthasar, TD4, pp. 174 and 179.
58 Balthasar, TD4, pp. 349–50.
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The Aesthetic Collision 169

intensifying correspondence leading to a supreme aesthetic collision – a framework

that preserves the integrity of both God and the world even as they are brought
into real and meaningful intersection with one another. This interpretation opens
up important dimensions of Balthasar’s narration of the cross-event, and explains in
what sense he upholds the profound beauty of the crucified Christ. For Balthasar,
beauty is ultimately that which is genuinely disclosive of him whose being
is synonymous with ‘the Beautiful’. The cross is therefore beautiful because it
represents the climax of God’s engagement with the world, and the fullest expression
of his being in the theater of creation.

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd