Existence As Prayer: American University Studies

A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S
Yenson
Existence as Prayer: The Consciousness of Christ in the Theology of Hans Urs
von Balthasar explores a major and controversial aspect of the thought
of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, the question of Christ’s
human consciousness. Although this issue is often cited in studies of
Balthasar’s theology, Mark L. Yenson analyzes it as a nexus for understand-
ing the broader dynamics of Christology, Trinitarian theology, anthropol-
ogy, and metaphysics in Balthasar’s works. Rather than providing mere
exposition, Yenson sets Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness
against the background of the Council of Chalcedon and its reception,
culminating in the all-embracing Christological vision of the great Byz-
Existence as Prayer
antine thinker Maximus the Confessor. Balthasar’s groundbreaking study
of Maximus, Cosmic Liturgy, is shown to provide some important keys
to Balthasar’s later thought, and reveals Maximus as a vital resource for
modern Christology. While this study is a significant contribution to
the critical discussion of Balthasar’s work, it will also serve as a valuable
resource for anyone engaged in Christology. It will be extremely useful in
advanced courses on Balthasar, classical Christology and its reception, and
contemporary Christological questions.
MARK L. YENSON holds degrees in English literature and a Ph.D. in the-

ology from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is currently
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Catholic Studies at King’s Existence as Prayer
vii • 330
University College, London, Ontario, and an active member of the Von

Balthasar Consultation of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
The Consciousness of Christ
in the Theology
ISBN 978-1-4331-2213-2 of Hans Urs von Balthasar
PETER LANG
A M E R I C A N
U N I V E R S I T Y
S T U D I E S MARK L. YENSON
www.peterlang.com
A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S
Yenson
Existence as Prayer: The Consciousness of Christ in the Theology of Hans Urs
von Balthasar explores a major and controversial aspect of the thought
of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, the question of Christ’s
human consciousness. Although this issue is often cited in studies of
Balthasar’s theology, Mark L. Yenson analyzes it as a nexus for understand-
ing the broader dynamics of Christology, Trinitarian theology, anthropol-
ogy, and metaphysics in Balthasar’s works. Rather than providing mere
exposition, Yenson sets Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness
against the background of the Council of Chalcedon and its reception,
culminating in the all-embracing Christological vision of the great Byz-
Existence as Prayer
antine thinker Maximus the Confessor. Balthasar’s groundbreaking study
of Maximus, Cosmic Liturgy, is shown to provide some important keys
to Balthasar’s later thought, and reveals Maximus as a vital resource for
modern Christology. While this study is a significant contribution to
the critical discussion of Balthasar’s work, it will also serve as a valuable
resource for anyone engaged in Christology. It will be extremely useful in
advanced courses on Balthasar, classical Christology and its reception, and
contemporary Christological questions.
MARK L. YENSON holds degrees in English literature and a Ph.D. in the-

ology from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is currently
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Catholic Studies at King’s
University College, London, Ontario, and an active member of the Von
vii • 330
Existence as Prayer
Balthasar Consultation of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
in the Theology
of Hans Urs von Balthasar
PETER LANG
A M E R I C A N
U N I V E R S I T Y
S T U D I E S MARK L. YENSON
www.peterlang.com
Existence as Prayer
SERIES VII
THEOLOGY AND RELIGION
Vol. 330
This book is a volume in a Peter Lang monograph series.

Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.
PETER LANG
New York ∙ Washington, D.C./Baltimore ∙ Bern
Frankfurt am Main ∙ Berlin ∙ Brussels ∙ Vienna ∙ Oxford
MARK L. YENSON
Existence as Prayer
in the Theology
of Hans Urs von Balthasar
PETER LANG
New York ∙ Washington, D.C./Baltimore ∙ Bern
Frankfurt am Main ∙ Berlin ∙ Brussels ∙ Vienna ∙ Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yenson, Mark L.
Existence as prayer: the consciousness of Christ in the theology
of Hans Urs von Balthasar / Mark L. Yenson.
pages cm. — (American university studies. Series VII, Theology and religion; v. 330)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1905–1988. 2. Jesus Christ—
Person and offices. I. Title.
BX4705.B163Y46 232.092—dc23 2013028596
ISBN 978-1-4331-2213-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1192-1 (e-book)
ISSN 0740-0446
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
The Scripture quotations contained herein (except those within citations)

are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.,
and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.
© 2014 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Contents v
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Chalcedonian Christology and the Consciousness of Christ 1
Hans Urs von Balthasar as Patristic Interpreter 4
Balthasar, Chalcedon and Maximus 7
Aim and Methodology 10
1 Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian Legacy 17

Introduction 17
Re-Reading Chalcedon 18
Chalcedon: The Triumph of Antiochene-Latin Christology? 21
Neo-Chalcedonianism 26
Maximus the Confessor and Neo-Chalcedonian Theology 30
Balthasar’s Maximian Ressourcement 45
Conclusion 49
2 Person, Mission, and the Analogy of Being 61

Introduction 61
“Person” in Modern Christology 62
Person as a Theological Concept 67
Person and Conscious Subject 71
Person and Intersubjectivity 73
The Personalizing Address of God 75
Jesus Christ: The Archetypal Person 78
The Person of Christ as the Concrete Analogia Entis 80
The Primacy of the Analogia Proportionalitatis 84
The Expressivity of Christ’s Humanity 88
Incarnational Saturation 90
Analogy and the Communicatio Idiomatum 92
vi Existence as Prayer
Conclusion 97
3 The Consciousness of Christ 107

Introduction 107
Jesus’ Self-Consciousness: The Biblical Data 108
Jesus’ Claim to Authority 111
Jesus’ Eschatological Consciousness 113
Mission-Consciousness: Trinitarian and Soteriological 117
Mission-Consciousness as Absolute 121
Balthasar on Neo-Antiochene Christology 124
A Limited Human Consciousness 127
Mission and the Visio Immediata 130
The Faith of Christ 133
Trinitarian Inversion 137
A Single or Double Consciousness? 141
Conclusion 145
4 Christ’s Consciousness and the Cross 159

Introduction 159
The “Hour” 160
The Exchange of Places 164
Christ’s Experience of Hell: The Visio Mortis 170
The Person of the Son as Subject of the Paschal Mystery 176
Economic and Immanent Trinity 179
The Positive Soteriological Function of the Humanity of Christ 183
Conclusion: Registers of Christological Discourse 191
Conclusion 205
What to Make of Chalcedon 206
Christological Particularity 208
Enhypostasia, Receptivity and Prayer 211
Bibliography 215
Index 227
Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to numerous people and communities who have
contributed to the gestation and completion of this book. My encounters with
late patristic authors and the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar began during
doctoral studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of St. Michael’s
College, Toronto School of Theology, and I am grateful to the many friends,
teachers and colleagues who inspired, guided, and nurtured me there. In
particular, I should like to mention my doctoral supervisor, Gill Goulding, CJ,
for her wisdom and encouragement; Pablo Argárate and Peter Casarella for
their richly insightful comments on the dissertation; and Catherine Clifford
for her encouragement and insight with regard to preparation of the
manuscript for publication.
I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for enabling my doctoral research leading to this book, and to King’s
University College at Western University, which has generously provided both
moral and financial support, especially in the form of faculty research grants.
Thanks go to my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and Religious
Studies of King’s University College for their friendship, hospitality and
collegial advice. The book has been greatly improved thanks to the work of my
diligent research assistant, Natalie Pepe, and my astute and generous copy-
editor, Michael O’Hearn.
Finally, I am grateful to my wife Andrea Di Giovanni, for her careful
reading of the final manuscript and unwavering support throughout the
writing and editing process, while providing so richly for our children, Sophia,
Madeleine, and Dominic. To her I dedicate this book.
Feast of St. Dominic

2013

Abbreviations
Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar

CL Cosmic Liturgy
ET (I-IV) Explorations in Theology, vols. I–IV
GL (I-VII) Glory of the Lord, vols. I–VII
KL2 Kosmische Liturgie, 2nd edition
MP Mysterium Paschale
TD (I-V) Theo-Drama, vols. I–V
TH A Theology of History
TL (I-III) Theo-Logic, vols. I–III
Other Abbreviations
AAS Acta Apostolicae Sedis
Ad Thal. Ad Thalassium (Maximus the Confessor)
Amb. Ambigua (Maximus the Confessor)
CCC Catechism of the Catholic Church
Communio ICR Communio: International Catholic Review (English)
Communio IKZ Communio: Internationale katholische Zeitschrift (German)
Disp. Pyrrh. Disputatio cum Pyrrho (Maximus the Confessor)
DS Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum
et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum
Opusc. Opuscula theologica et polemica (Maximus the Confessor)
PG Patrologia Graeca (Migne)
PL Patrologia Latina (Migne)
ST Summa Theologiae (Thomas Aquinas)

Introduction
Chalcedonian Christology and the Consciousness of Christ

THE consciousness of Jesus Christ is an inescapable issue for Christian faith. If
Jesus is not to become a mythological chimera lurking behind the texts of the
New Testament, the question must be posed about the extent to which early
Christian belief is rooted in Jesus’ own consciousness of his identity and
mission. Upon this question hangs the continuity of Christian existence and
mission today with the will and mission of Jesus. The International
Theological Commission of the Roman Catholic Church had this to say in its
1985 statement, The Consciousness of Christ Concerning Himself and His Mission:
in asking questions about Christ’s consciousness, “we are not dealing with
mere theological speculations but with the very foundation of the method and
mission of the Church in all its intimacy”; hence the problem of the
consciousness and knowledge of Jesus is of “maximal importance” to the
Church, its influence radiating out to every area of systematic theology.1
Ecclesiology is determined by whether Jesus willed the continuity of his
mission in a visible, historical community, even if the shape and structure of
such a community are subject to subsequent development. Soteriology is
determined by Jesus’ understanding and integration of his impending death
within his mission, even if more fully articulated interpretations of Jesus’
saving work emerged only later. Eschatology and the theology of history are
determined by whether Jesus understood the definitive coming of the kingdom
to be immanent within his own living, preaching and dying, or whether the
reign of God was a purely future prospect. It is not surprising, then, that
competing portrayals of Jesus “as he really was” provide fodder not only for
biblical scholars and theologians but also for newspapers and popular media.
The question of the consciousness of Christ speaks to the very intelligibility of
Christian faith. As the International Theological Commission states, echoing
2 Existence as Prayer
Gregory of Nazianzus, “No person of sense would place his hope in an

individual void of human mind and intelligence.”2
Theological, exegetical and popular approaches to the consciousness of
Christ have often based themselves on a variety of assumptions about what it
is to be divine and what it is to be human. Theological tradition, arguing
deductively from defined Christological doctrine and from the “principle of
perfection,” attributed to Christ’s human soul a perfect consciousness of
divine sonship, enjoyment of the beatific vision, and knowledge of all things in
God.3 In the light of modern historical-critical exegesis and historical-Jesus
research, such maximalism can appear embarrassingly aprioristic, ahistorical,
and inconsistent with both the synoptic gospels’ portrayals of Jesus and
modern sensibilities. Yet the various quests for the historical Jesus offer a
confusing array of “historical Jesuses,” from Jewish rabbinical reformer to
peasant revolutionary to Cynic teacher. It is arguable that many versions of the
historical Jesus suffer from the same kind of apriorism as Neo-Scholastic
maximalism, albeit in a more humanistic guise (as Albert Schweitzer
recognized over a century ago).4 For his part, Rudolf Bultmann repudiated all
interest in Jesus’ own self-understanding and intentions: “How things looked
in the heart of Jesus I do not know and do not wish to know.”5 For Bultmann,
what mattered was the existentially encountered Christ of faith, grounded only
in the fact of Jesus’ existence, not in the details of his life, ministry, or self-
understanding. The Catholic magisterium in the twentieth century and a
broad consensus of modern Catholic theologians, however, have consistently
maintained that the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” are one and
the same, distinct but never separate. Pope John Paul II, in the encyclical
Redemptoris Missio, writes that “the Christ is none other than Jesus of
Nazareth,” and that “it is not possible to separate Jesus from the Christ or to
speak of the ‘historical Jesus’ as if he were someone other than the ‘Christ of
faith.’”6 On this view, the canonical gospels give credible access to what Jesus
did and the effect that he had upon those around him, even if they do not
offer a comprehensive psychological “biography” in the modern sense. Since
Christian faith makes claims about the in-breaking of God into world history
in the person of Jesus, it is not only possible but also necessary to delineate
Introduction 3
some essential aspects of Jesus’ self-understanding as the precondition of his

public life, actions, and influence.
For its part, systematic theology must grapple with not only historical-
exegetical questions about the possible content of Jesus’ self-consciousness, but
also the Church’s dogmatic tradition as a definitive mediation of New
Testament Christology. One might say, however, that where the exegete comes
up against inconclusive historical data, the theologian comes up against
mystery. As E. L. Mascall famously noted, “It is indeed both ridiculous and
irreverent to ask what it feels like to be God incarnate.”7 Mascall’s warning
injects a healthy dose of apophatic reserve into theological discussion of the
self-consciousness of Jesus. Still, theological reflection on Christ’s conscious-
ness is a necessary corollary to the Church’s dogmatic formulation of the
union of two natures in the single person of Christ. If, as the Council of
Chalcedon taught, Christ is one person (hypostasis-prosōpon) in two natures
(physeis), and the natures are united without confusion (asynchytōs) and without
separation (adiairetōs), what are the implications for the properties of each
nature—consciousness, knowledge, and will—and for the psychological
coherence of the person of Jesus? Indeed, appealing to the Thomistic axiom
that being and consciousness are ultimately identical, Karl Rahner argues that
a hypostatic union on the plane being/ontology, but not on the plane of
consciousness, is an impossibility.8 The monothelite controversy of the seventh
century demonstrates historically that the safeguarding of the Christological
ontology of Chalcedon required a definition not only at the level of the
natures of Christ, but also at the level of energies or wills.9 The clear
distinction between divine and human natures, and subsequently between
divine and human wills in Christ, became the principle for speaking of the
knowledge of Christ in the Middle Ages: the omniscience of the divine Logos
is distinguished from the knowledge of the human soul of Christ, which in
addition to empirical knowledge enjoys the beatific vision of God and an
infused knowledge comparable to that of the angels. The early part of the
twentieth century saw a revival of Christological controversy, this time over the
broader notion of the “I” or “ego” of Christ, and whether two psychological
centres of consciousness were compatible with a single ontological (hypostatic)
centre.10 It is important to note the clear line of continuity between the

controversies over Christological ontology leading to Chalcedon and
subsequent controversies over the consciousness of Christ. Indeed, theologians
involved in the modern controversy self-consciously cast their debates in terms
of the pre-Chalcedonian schools of Antioch and Alexandria. The modern turn
to the subject and shift to historical-mindedness serve not to debunk the
achievements of classical Christology, but rather to render more acute the
question of how the eternal Son of God can take on a truly human and
historical existence. Thus the general methodological question arises: what are
the conditions for an adequate transposition of Chalcedonian Christological
ontology into a theology of the consciousness of Christ? I propose a response
to this question through an engagement with a theologian for whom the
consciousness of Christ is a central theme, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Hans Urs von Balthasar as Patristic Interpreter

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) has come into his own as a towering
figure in twentieth-century Catholic theology. All of Balthasar’s major works,
centred around the trilogy of Herrlichkeit (The Glory of the Lord, seven volumes),
Theodramatik (Theo-Drama, five volumes), and Theologik (Theo-Logic, three
volumes) have now been translated into English.11 Secondary literature on
Balthasar’s thought has burgeoned since his death in 1988. Yet critical
appropriation of Balthasar’s work in anglophone scholarship is still very much
a work in progress, due in part to the complexity of his thought and in part to
ecclesial partisanship. Balthasar’s literary style is diffuse, sometimes lyrical, and
often resistant to systematized interpretation. With his formal academic
background in Germanistik, Balthasar draws on a wide range of (largely
European) cultural resources in his writings—Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Hopkins,
Soloviev, Péguy, to name a few. Suspicious of the decadent Neo-Scholasticism
in which he himself was formed, Balthasar appeals to the “lived” theology of
the saints and mystics to complement traditional doctrinal sources. One of
Balthasar’s most innovative and controversial contributions is his theology of
Holy Saturday, a reworking of the traditional theological doctrine of Christ’s
descent into hell that draws upon the mystical experiences of his spiritual
Introduction 5
companion, Adrienne von Speyr. Herrlichkeit (Glory of the Lord) is a magisterial

endeavour to retrieve the neglected transcendental, beauty, and to elaborate a
theological aesthetics over and against both secular and religious rationalism.
His shorter polemical works have stoked a reputation for acerbity and
theological conservatism (in the most pejorative sense of that ambiguous
term), and have made him an ideologically charged figure in contemporary
Catholic theology and ecclesial life. Balthasar’s vast fund of cultural knowledge
and his interactions with such formative figures as Erich Przywara, Henri de
Lubac, and Karl Barth, not to mention his close association with von Speyr,
result in a number of estuaries leading into Balthasar’s own theological vision.
Balthasar himself insisted that his work was inseparable from that of von
Speyr, although as Peter Henrici notes, Balthasar’s early works were
independent of her influence, and “one can see in them how much von
Balthasar put of what was truly his own into his later work.”12
Among these earlier works are several translations and studies of the
Church Fathers, most significantly his selection of the writings of Origen and
the monographs on Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa.13
Balthasar’s first significant encounter with the Fathers was during his pre-
ordination studies in Lyons-Fourvière between 1933 and 1937, where he was
particularly influenced by Henri de Lubac. This introduction opened up a rich
theological and philosophical world to Balthasar and contrasted sharply with
the rationalism which so put him off the Neo-Scholastic manuals. Brian Daley
notes:
Here he met a thinking that expressed itself in symbols more than in conceptual
analysis; that is, he met a way of doing theology that drew its inspiration more from a
typological reading of Scripture and a broad awareness of the Christ-centred unity of
salvation history than from the distinctions inspired by Aristotelian logic—a theology
more keyed to the liturgy than to the classroom.14
In the breadth of their theological reflection, engagement with philosophy and

culture, and profoundly liturgical-mystical sensibilities, Balthasar found in
such figures as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus, a
model for contemporary theology. Although he produced textual studies and
translations, from the beginning Balthasar’s reading of the Fathers was
idiosyncratic and distinct from the approaches of his contemporaries, Karl and
Hugo Rahner, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, and de Lubac. As Charles
Kannengiesser says, “On the one hand, von Balthasar finds it normal to
interpret the Fathers in terms of their most daring initiatives. On the other, he
develops his own theoretical synthesis in his contact with the Fathers.”15
Commentators have noted this vigorously theological approach to the Fathers,
such that, as Brian Daley says, “Balthasar’s treatments of patristic authors are
generally not essays one would recommend to those who seek a deeper
acquaintance with the authors themselves,”16 and as Cyril O’Regan notes,
Balthasarian ressourcement “almost always betrays itself as a kind of
intervention.”17
An indication of Balthasar’s approach to the study of the Fathers can be
found in the foreword to his study of Gregory of Nyssa, Presence and Thought:
Being faithful to tradition most definitely does not consist of a literal repetition and
transmission of the philosophical and theological theses that one imagines lie hidden
in time and in the contingencies of history. Rather, being faithful to tradition
consists much more of imitating our Fathers in the faith with respect to their attitude
of intimate reflection and their effort of audacious creation, which are the necessary
preludes to true spiritual fidelity.18
Balthasar rejects an anachronistic approach that would find in the Fathers

ready-made solutions to contemporary theological and philosophical concerns.
At the same time, the Fathers serve as manifestations of the communal living
memory of the Church and therefore become an indispensable source and
model for theology in the contemporary world.19 In the programmatic essay
“The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” published in 1939, Balthasar
defines his methodology in analyzing patristic, scholastic and modern epochs
as an attempt to “press on past all external and superficial features of each
epoch, to focus on its innermost structural law, and then to measure each
respective formal law according to the structural law of what is essentially
Christian as we encounter this norm in the Gospel.”20 The governing
structural law of Christianity, says Balthasar, is the difference between God
and the creature: “This not-being-God of the creature must be maintained as
the most fundamental fact of all, ranking first and above all others.”21 For
Introduction 7
Balthasar, this “essence” of Christianity is expressed in terms of the analogia

entis: “in the relation between God and creature, similarity and difference do
not hold the balance, but this dissimilarity is more radical.”22 More will be said
about the analogia entis at a later point. For now, it is noted because this
“fundamental law” of Christianity requires of Balthasar a critical stance toward
the Fathers, a stance particularly critical of the excessive reliance on Platonic
emanationism in Origen and the Alexandrian tradition.23 Thus, Balthasar’s
program in this early essay indicates that he is far from being slavishly and
uncritically reverent toward the achievements of patristic theology. It indicates
too that the appropriation of patristic theology is never an exercise for its own
sake, never the highest criterion, but always an attempt to elucidate the
fundamental structure of Christianity as witnessed in biblical revelation and as
embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.
Balthasar, Chalcedon and Maximus

Balthasar’s general methodological approach to patristic thought also
governs his appropriation of classical Christology. He endeavours to grasp not
only the particular expressions of Christology in its development over the first
seven centuries, but its “inner structure,” the way in which it brings to light
the mystery of the Incarnation and the consequences for finite being in
general. His own Christological writings show a deep immersion in and
respect for the dogmatic tradition, as well as a strong tendency toward a
renewed existential register. In contrast, however, to the katabatic
Christological methodologies (“Christology from below”) that many of his
contemporaries employed, Balthasar’s Christology presupposes the explicit
identity of Jesus as the divine Son of God. As Mark A. McIntosh observes, at
first glance it can seem to the reader of Balthasar “as if Jesus’ humanity might
be in danger of a kind of oppressive half-existence in favor of the divine
Word’s cosmic self-emptying.”24 The question of how such a Christology
incorporates the full, historical humanity of Christ comes to a head in the
development of an approach to Christ’s consciousness: how did Jesus, as fully
human, understand his own identity, mission, and relationship to God?
Balthasar’s response to this question is born of his engagement with patristic
Christology. My contention is that the principles of Balthasar’s Christology are

worked out in his study of Maximus the Confessor: thus, what we might call a
Maximian Neo-Chalcedonian interpretation of Chalcedon grounds Balthasar’s
approach to the consciousness of Christ.
The connections between the Christologies of Balthasar and Maximus
have come to the attention of several commentators. Werner Löser has
provided the most comprehensive overview of Balthasar’s patristic studies,
including his work on Maximus.25 He argues that Balthasar’s study of various
Fathers is structured by three foci—the “positivity of finite being,” the
“appearance of Form within history,” and the “universality of the catholic.”26
James Naduvilekut sets out the broader Maximian cosmological-soteriological
background of Balthasar’s Christology, and like Löser, emphasizes how
Balthasar sets Maximus’s Chalcedonian metaphysics over against German
idealism.27 These studies highlight important themes in Cosmic Liturgy,
although they do not demonstrate as explicitly how Balthasar draws these
themes forward in his constructive theology; nor do they explicitly address
issues of Christological methodology and metaphysics apart from Maximus’s
defence and extension of Chalcedon. Mark A. McIntosh has delineated most
clearly Balthasar’s appropriation of Maximus’s incipient distinction between
the orders of essence and existence, coupled with an Ignatian understanding of
mission and election.28 McIntosh’s insight into the Maximian background of
Balthasar’s Christology can be considerably amplified and deepened with
sustained attention to Maximus’s own works, to Balthasar’s approach to
Maximus in Cosmic Liturgy and other works, and to such themes as the
Christologically centred analogia entis and Balthasar’s theology of personhood.
In an essay on Maximus’s Christology and scriptural hermeneutics, David
Yeago says tantalizingly, “Von Balthasar is perhaps the twentieth-century
theologian most indebted to Maximus. I believe that a careful examination
would show that the inner structure especially of his Theodramatik is deeply
Maximian.”29 The present examination of the Maximian background to
Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s consciousness is intended as a contribution to
this broader task.
Introduction 9
Balthasar’s Christology has frequently been described as “Neo-

Chalcedonian,” and this term merits some careful critical attention. Drawing
on the distinction between “pure Chalcedonianism” and “Neo-Chalcedon-
ianism” invoked by modern authors such as Karl Rahner, Werner Löser
locates Balthasar’s approach to the hypostatic union within the latter stream,
as do Gerald O’Hanlon and Thomas Krenski.30 Krenski and Löser provide
brief historical descriptions of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, highlighting
Balthasar’s indebtedness to the Theopaschite formula (“One of the Trinity
suffered in the flesh”) and the Neo-Chalcedonian approach to the
communicatio idiomatum, the exchange of properties belonging to each of
Christ’s natures. Balthasar is described as Neo-Chalcedonian with respect to
his Trinitarian passiology (as the title of Krenski’s study indicates) and to the
specific question of divine (im-)passibility. The work of these commentators
can be amplified by examining Balthasar’s Neo-Chalcedonian appropriation
not only in the sphere of his staurology but with regard to his general theology
of the hypostatic union and of Christ’s consciousness. What is further missing
in these brief allusions by Krenski, Löser and O’Hanlon to the Neo-
Chalcedonian character of Balthasar’s theology is the connection to the
Christology of Maximus, and Balthasar’s reliance not merely on the formulae
of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology but more importantly on the personalist
metaphysical structure that emerged in sixth- and seventh- century Neo-
Chalcedonianism: this inner structure will be the theme of Chapter 2.
The value of a more intensive study of the Neo-Chalcedonian-Maximian
dimensions of Balthasar’s theology of the consciousness of Christ has been
heightened by recent critiques of Balthasar’s theology which place his
commitment to the dogmatic tradition in question. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, for
instance, examines traditional formulations of Christ’s descent into hell, and
concludes that Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday contradicts the
“traditional” understanding, as she construes it.31 She regards Balthasar’s
theology of the descent as deeply problematic with regard to Christology and
Trinitarian theology. The most serious of Pitstick’s contentions is that
Balthasar’s Christology is shot through with monophysite-theopaschite
tendencies.32 Her pointed critique of Balthasar, especially within the context of
Chalcedonian Christology, renders a clarification of Balthasar’s position on

Christ’s consciousness especially timely.
Aim and Methodology

My principal aim, then, is to bring to light the continuities (and possible
discontinuities) of Balthasar’s theology of the consciousness of Christ with
dogmatic Christology as it developed in and after Chalcedon, and on this basis
to assess the internal coherence of Balthasar’s Christological approach. Such
an exercise will mean clarifying Balthasar’s stated priorities and hermeneutical
strategies as an involved reader of Maximus’s Christology, and then enquiring
into Balthasar’s operational Christology in light of these stated priorities.
Rather than offer an assessment of the historical accuracy of Balthasar’s work
on Maximus, I shall focus on the theological principles which Balthasar
identifies in Maximus and carries forward in his own constructive work.33
Such clarification of the internal dynamics as well as the explicit interests of
Balthasar’s Christology will uncover strata of Balthasar’s thought missed by
many of his commentators, while also submitting Balthasar’s Christology to a
critique based on dogmatic and theological criteria to which he himself
subscribes.
Although this study will touch on large themes in Balthasar’s theology,
including his Trinitarian theology, theological anthropology, and soteriology,
it will be delimited by the specific theme of Christ’s consciousness. The
question of Christ’s consciousness, while focusing Christological inquiry, also
opens up an entire field of possibilities for diachronic and synchronic
comparison, which can only be alluded to insofar as they situate and elucidate
Balthasar’s position. Thus, I will make reference to Balthasar’s theological
contemporaries insofar as they become his interlocutors in Christology.
Furthermore, as noted at the outset, the consciousness of Christ is a persistent
issue in New Testament studies as well as systematic theology. Although
concerned to unfold a biblically grounded Christology, Balthasar did not see
himself as an exegete, and this study does not attempt to assess Balthasar’s
Christology according to the canons of contemporary biblical exegesis.34
Introduction 11
Balthasar’s style is diffuse and often circular. A more felicitous (and more
Balthasarian) description might be to say that it is “fugal”: themes appear
under one guise, only to re-emerge elsewhere in transposition. Thus Balthasar
does not provide one exclusive locus for treating the consciousness of Christ.
The most sustained reflection on the consciousness of Christ is found in Theo-
Drama III, complemented by parts of the Theo-Logic,35 parts of Glory of the Lord
(particularly I and VII) and various shorter works.
Chapter 1 provides the groundwork for an exploration of Balthasar’s
Christology by re-examining the historical and theological context of the
Council of Chalcedon. I present a historical-critical approach to Chalcedon
which sets the council within the Christological paradigm established by Cyril
of Alexandria. This paradigm, I argue, is not abrogated but extended and
deepened by what modern scholars refer to as “Neo-Chalcedonianism.” I then
show that the Christology of Maximus the Confessor is deeply “Neo-
Chalcedonian,” emphasizing not, as is often thought, the duality of natures
(and thus wills) in Christ, but the concrete person of Jesus Christ, the Word
incarnate, within the drama of salvation. A closer study of Balthasar’s Cosmic
Liturgy will demonstrate that Maximus’s Christological priorities provide
foundation points for Balthasar’s Christology and his approach to Christ’s
consciousness.
In Chapter 2 I explore the ways in which Balthasar carries forward
Maximus’s distinction between natures and person, particularly in Balthasar’s
theological conception of personhood. I will examine how Balthasar’s mission-
centred theology of the person relates to philosophical notions of person, to
Balthasar’s description of Christ as the concrete analogia entis, and his
handling of the communicatio idiomatum.
While Chapter 2 draws the lines of continuity between late patristic
Christology and Balthasar’s Christological ontology, Chapter 3 outlines
Balthasar’s “Christology of consciousness.” Again, mission grounded in the
life of the Trinity provides the framework for Balthasar’s account of Christ’s
consciousness, his unknowing, historical learning, and possession of the virtue
of faith. This Balthasarian mission-Christology again shows fundamental
continuities with the Cyrilline Chalcedonianism of Maximus.
Chapter 4 focuses on the consciousness of Christ on the cross. I argue

that Balthasar follows a general “Chalcedonian logic,” again as seen through
the lens of Maximus, but that Balthasar’s theology of the descent into hell
introduces certain tensions into his theology of Christ’s consciousness.
Balthasar’s indebtedness to both the defined dogmatic tradition and to
spiritual-mystical modes of discourse present significant challenges to his
interpreters, nowhere more starkly than in his theology of Holy Saturday.
Faced with the massive output and astounding intellectual breadth of
Hans Urs von Balthasar, I have always thought that the only way in is to
summon one’s courage and enter through one of many theological or
philosophical doorways. The particular doorway that I have chosen is that of
Balthasar’s affinity with the Fathers and patristic Christology. I hope that it
will become clear that this doorway is by no means arbitrarily chosen, and that
it enriches a multiplicity of approaches (through various doorways) and
enlarges critical understanding of Balthasar’s theological contribution. At the
same time Balthasar’s own Christology is part of a much larger conversation in
the life of the Church about the mission and meaning of Jesus Christ, and I
hope this study opens up broader Christological conversation as well. As I
have tried to suggest here at the very outset, such a conversation is not an
optional luxury for theology within the Church.
Introduction 13
Notes
1 International Theological Commission, “The Consciousness of Christ concerning Himself
and His Mission,” in International Theological Commission. Texts and Documents, 1969–1985,
ed. Michael Sharkey (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 306.
2 Ibid., 305–306, citing Gregory’s First Letter to Cledonius, PG 37, 181C.
3 See Raymond Moloney, The Knowledge of Christ (London: Continuum, 1999), 53–67.
4 See Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, trans. V. Green (London: Burns & Oates and New
York: Paulist Press, 1976), 31; John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London:
SCM Press and Philadephia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 278.
5 Rudolf Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1969), 132.
6 Acta Apostolicae Sedis 83 (1991), 255, quoted in John P. Galvin, “‘I Believe...in Jesus Christ,
His Only Son, Our Lord’: The Earthly Jesus and the Christ of Faith,” Interpretation 50, no.
4 (October 1996), 376.
7 E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, (London: Longmans Green & Co.,
1946), 37.
8 Karl Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections on the Knowlege and Self-Consciousness of Christ,”
in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press and
London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 206.
9 See Jacques Dupuis, S.J., Who Do You Say I Am? Introduction to Christology (Marknoll, NY:
Orbis, 1994), 99–101 and 111.
10 See Joseph Ternus, “Das Seelen- und Bewußtseinsleben Jesu: Problemgeschichtlich-
Systematische Untersuchung,” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart,
vol. 3, ed. Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, (Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1954), 81–237;
Dupuis, Who Do You Say I Am? 114–116; Brian O. McDermott, Word Become Flesh:
Dimensions of Christology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 268–270. See also
the bibliography provided in Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 193–194.
11 The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols., trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis,
Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982–1989); Theo-
Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols., trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1988–1998); Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, 3 vols., trans. Adrian J.
Walker and Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000–2005).
12 Peter Henrici, S.J., “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” in Hans Urs von
Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991),
31.
13 Origenes. Geist und Feuer: Ein Aufbau aus seinen Schriften (Salzburg: Müller, 1938; 2nd ed.,
1952) (English translation: Origen. Spirit and Fire. A Thematic Anthology of His Writings,
trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
1984]); Kosmische Liturgie: Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbilds bei Maximus Confessor
(Freiburg: Herder, 1941); 2nd edition first published in 1961, Kosmische Liturgie: das

Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners (Einsiedeln & Trier: Johannes-Verlag, 1988) (English
translation: Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E.
Daley [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003]); Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie
religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942) (English translation: Presence and
Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Marc Sebanc [San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988]).
14 Brian E. Daley, “Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J., and David Moss (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 188–189.
15 Charles Kannengiesser, “Listening to the Fathers,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and
Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 59.
16 Daley, “Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers,” 202.
17 Cyril O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval: Post-Chalcedonian Symphonic
Theology,” Gregorianum 77, no. 2 (1996), 229.
18 Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 12.
19 Ibid., 11.
20 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” trans. Edward T.
Oakes, S.J., Communio ICR 24 (1997), 347–396 (“Patristik, Scholastik und Wir,” Theologie
der Zeit 3 [1939]: 65–104). Here at 352.
21 Ibid., 354.
22 Ibid., 355.
23 Ibid., 370–380.
24 Mark A. McIntosh, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von
Balthasar (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), x.
25 Werner Löser, Im Geiste des Origenes: Hans Urs von Balthasar als Interpret der Theologie der
Kirchenväter (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1976), 181–212.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 James Naduvilekut, Christus der Heilsweg: Soteria Als Theodrama im Werk Hans Urs von
Balthasars (St Ottilien: Verlag Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 1987), 148–170.
28 McIntosh, Christology from Within, esp. 39–44, and McIntosh, “Christology,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–34.
29 David S. Yeago, “Jesus of Nazareth and Cosmic Redemption: The Relevance of St.
Maximus the Confessor,” Modern Theology 12, no. 2 (April 1996), 191, n. 40.
30 Werner Löser, “Trinitätstheologie heute. Ansätze und Entwürfe,” in Trinität: Aktuelle
Perspektiven der Theologie, ed. Wilhelm Breuning (Freiburg: Herder, 1984), 27; Gerald
O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 133–134; Thomas Rudolf Krenski, Passio caritatis:
Trinitarische Passiologie im Werk Hans Urs von Balthasar (Einsiedeln, Freiburg: Johannes
Verlag, 1990), 258. For the “pure Chalcedonian” vs. “Neo-Chalcedonian” distinction, see
for instance Rahner, “Jesus Christ–The Meaning of Life,” in Theological Investigations,
Introduction 15

vol. 21, trans. Hugh M. Riley (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 213–215.
31 Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of
Christ’s Descent Into Hell (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2007).
32 See for example ibid., 189, 337.
33 Dom Polycarp Sherwood adverted to the difference between his own “understanding of
Maximus within its (sic) own tradition” and Balthasar’s approach: Balthasar “is neither
primarily concerned with Maximus as a locus classicus within the Byzantine tradition,
nor…with the contrast between the Byzantine and Latin theological traditions. Rather, von
Balthasar sees the task of the theologian, who, he proposes, should be audaciously creative,
as that of one who would bring into a coherent overall view the objective values of our
post-Cartesian world that bears so deep an imprint both from German Idealism and from
modern science. For this, he sees a magnificent exemplar in Origen, in Gregory of Nyssa
and particularly in Maximus, who made the Chalcedonian formula the keystone of a
theology embracing all in its unifying grasp” (“Survey of Recent Work on St. Maximus the
Confessor,” Traditio 20 [1964]: 433).
34 See Brian McNeil, C.R.V., “The Exegete as Iconographer: Balthasar and the Gospels,” in
The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh:
T. & T. Clark, 1986), 134–146; W. T. Dickens, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological
Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critical Biblical Interpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2003); “Balthasar’s Biblical Hermeneutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J., and David Moss (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 175–186; Edward T. Oakes, “Balthasar’s Critique of
the Historical-Critical Method,” in Glory, Grace, and Culture: The Work of Hans Urs von
Balthasar, ed. Ed Block, Jr. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 150–174.
35 See especially TL II, Part V, “The Word Was Made Flesh,” 219–361.

Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian Legacy
Introduction
1951 marked the sesquimillenial anniversary of the Council of Chalcedon. In
watershed essays, Bernhard Welte and Karl Rahner called for renewed
theological reflection on Chalcedon and particularly on the significance of
Christ’s humanity.1 The following decades saw the publication of landmark
studies in Christology by Catholic theologians, including Piet Schoonenberg’s
The Christ (1969), Edward Schillebeeckx’s Jesus: An Experiment in Christology
(1974), and Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ (1974). All show this renewed
emphasis on the human and historical reality of Jesus.2 Schillebeeckx in
particular also represents the shift from a Christology which takes Chalcedon
and the dogmatic tradition as its starting point to one which takes its
orientation from historical-critical research into the gospels and the life of
Jesus, a shift from “the humanity of Christ” to “the Jesus of history.”3 Even
this shift, however, is of a piece with the renewed “Chalcedonianism” for
which Rahner and Welte called. As Aloys Grillmeier declared, “All future
discussion on the will, knowledge and consciousness of Christ belong in the
end in that area of christological problems which was marked out by
Chalcedon.”4 Rahner famously said of Chalcedon that it should be viewed
both as “end and beginning.”5 But, as Sarah Coakley has astutely commented,
Chalcedon is better viewed as neither end nor beginning, “but rather a
transitional (though still normative) ‘horizon’ to which we constantly return,
but with equally constant forays backwards and forwards.”6 To understand
what kind of dogmatic norm Chalcedon’s Christological definition is, and
continues to be, for contemporary Christological thought, it is therefore
necessary to situate the Council clearly in its historical context.
I will argue for a renewed understanding of Chalcedonian Christology in

light of post-Chalcedonian developments and pre-eminently the Christology of
Maximus the Confessor. The first part of the chapter reinterprets the Council
of Chalcedon in light of historical considerations. Common dialectical
readings that pit Cyrilline-Alexandrian Christology against Chalcedon’s
“balanced” Antiochene-Western-Alexandrian synthesis. A more careful
analysis, however, yields an interpretation of Chalcedon as fundamentally
continuous with the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria. The second part of the
chapter will outline the contributions of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology and
demonstrate its continuity with Chalcedon: far from constituting a regression
from Chalcedon into “verbal monophysitism,” Neo-Chalcedonian Christology
elucidates the terms and relations of Chalcedon and thus renders it intelligible
in a way that the council itself could not do. Finally, Maximus’s Christology
will be shown to be thoroughly Neo-Chalcedonian in orientation, such that
his emphasis on the unconfused duality of Christ’s natures is at all times
grounded in the hypostatic unity of the incarnate Word. It will become clear
that the dominant portrayal of competing Christological approaches before, at,
and after Chalcedon is inadequate. Chalcedon was not exclusively concerned
with the defence of Jesus’ humanity against an overly “divinized” Christ; nor
can Chalcedon be described in terms of “distinction” over against unitive
Christologies. The Christological approach extending from Cyril through
Chalcedon to Maximus is best characterized as “diachronic,” or indeed in
more characteristically Balthasarian terms, “dramatic.” In the chapters that
follow I will delineate Balthasar’s elaboration of a contemporary “Neo-
Chalcedonian” Christology, particularly with respect to the theological
concept of person and the consciousness of Christ, and his theology of the
Cross.
Re-Reading Chalcedon
The story of the fifth-century controversy which resulted in the
convocation of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 has been well rehearsed, and
for our purposes a brief synopsis suffices. The controversy, modern textbooks
tell us, brought tensions to a head between two competing theological
Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian Legacy 19
approaches, the Antiochene logos-anthrōpos approach represented by Theodore

of Mopsuestia and Nestorius of Constantinople, and the Alexandrian logos-sarx
approach represented by Cyril of Alexandria.7 The Antiochenes vigorously
upheld the distinction between the divinity and humanity of Christ, and were
deeply suspicious of the ascription of divine attributes to the humanity and
vice versa—what has come to be known as the communicatio idiomatum.
Nestorius gave voice to this Christology-of-distinction in his rejection of the
traditional Marian title theotokos, God-bearer. In his First Sermon against the
title theotokos, he says, “I revere the one who is borne because of the one who
carries him, and I worship the one I see because of the one who is hidden.…I
divide the natures, but I unite the worship.” 8
For his part, Cyril of Alexandria’s vigorous polemic against the extreme
Antiochene Christology of Nestorius was funded by a characteristically
Alexandrian soteriology which emphasized the divine initiative in the
deification of humanity. Within this soteriological perspective, the true subject
of all Jesus Christ’s actions and existence must be the Logos itself. In his
Oration against the Arians, Athanasius of Alexandria explains the attribution of
hunger, thirst, ignorance and other human limitations to Christ: “[I]n nature
the Word Himself is impassible, and yet because of the flesh which he put on,
these things are ascribed to Him, since they are proper to the flesh, and the
body itself is proper to the Saviour.”9 Thus, in his argument against Nestorius,
Cyril asserts that Mary can properly be called “God-bearer,” since the one to
whom she gives birth is none other than the divine Word incarnate.10 In
Cyril’s thought, the Logos appropriates human nature and thus enables the
divinization of believers (this is of course a variation on the soteriological
axiom of Athanasius, and Irenaeus before him, that “God became man that
man might become god”).11 Cyril is more comfortable than his Antiochene
opponents with paradoxical statements to describe the mystery of the
Incarnation; thus he frequently repeats, “The Logos suffered impassibly.”12
Particularly irksome to his Antiochene opponents was Cyril’s use of the
formula, “one incarnate nature of the Word” (μία φύσις τοῦ Λογοῦ
σεσαρκωμένη), which Cyril (mistakenly) considered authentically Athanasian.13
The controversy was fuelled in no small part by semantic slippage, the terms
physis, hypostasis and prosōpon not having been fixed in their meaning.
Cyril was successful in defending the Marian title theotokos and in having
Nestorius condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. After Cyril’s death,
however, the case of the monk Eutyches reignited controversy, with the
Antiochene party denouncing Eutyches’ apparent belief that, although the
incarnate Logos was “out of” two natures, after the Incarnation there existed
only one nature of the Incarnate Word (invoking Cyril’s mia physis formula).
The Council of Chalcedon in October of 451 brought Antiochene and
Alexandrian parties together, as well as representatives of Pope Leo of Rome.
Under duress from the emperor Marcian, the council reaffirmed the teaching
of Nicaea and declared, against Nestorius on one hand and Eutyches on the
other, that in Christ exist two natures (physeis) in one person (prosōpon=
hypostasis):
So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one
and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in
humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body;
consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial
with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before
the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us
and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity; one
and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which
undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation (ἀσυγχύτως, ἀτρέπτως,
ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀχωρίστως); at no point was the difference between the natures taken
away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and
comes together into a single person (πρόσωπον) and a single subsistent being
(ὐπόστασις); he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same
only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from
the beginning.14
The Council appeared to have achieved a synthesis of Antiochene and

Alexandrian priorities, mediated by the Latin Christological language of Leo’s
Tome to Flavian, which emphasized the duality of natures and operations in
Christ (agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est),15 but
repeatedly affirmed the subject to be “one and the same” Son and Lord, Jesus
Christ.
Chalcedon: The Triumph of Antiochene-Latin Christology?

Modern accounts of Chalcedon frequently place strong emphasis on this
synthesis of different Christological schools in the Chalcedonian definition.
Aloys Grillmeier writes, “Here, as in almost no other formula from the early
councils, all the important centres of church life and all the trends of
contemporary theology, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople and Antioch, have
contributed towards the framing of a common expression of faith.”16 Charles
Moeller, in the first comprehensive study of Neo-Chalcedonianism, regards
Chalcedon as lending a Western-Antiochene balance to the docetic-
monophysite tendencies of Alexandrian Christology, a balance sadly lost with
the subsequent ascendancy of Neo-Chalcedonianism.17 Chalcedon is thus
viewed as an Antiochene-Western corrective to the unitive Cyrilline
Christology of Ephesus. I would suggest that this prevalent modern reading of
the Nestorian controversy and of Chalcedon is problematic both historically
and theologically. First, it misreads the crux of the difference between
Antiochene and Alexandrian Christological approaches; second, it misses the
basically Cyrilline pattern of the Chalcedonian Christological formula.
The first issue concerns a reformulation of the Antiochene-Alexandrian
differential. Contemporary authors have looked to the Antiochene logos-
anthrōpos model as a positive forerunner to the modern interest in Jesus’
integral humanity and historicity, as John McGuckin notes:
Exegesis of the last two centuries, and its concern with the “historical Jesus” has re-
opened this debate, and this explains why much of the Cyril-Nestorius controversy
has the ability to create resonances in modern theological discourse. The widespread
distinction in contemporary critical biblical interpretation between the Jesus of
History and the Christ of Faith frequently betrays, in the hands of its exegetical
users, an undisclosed christological anthropology that is much more like that of
Nestorius than it is of Cyril. The usual divorce between biblical specialists and
systematicians today, does nothing to resolve the large theological issues that are
thereby exposed.18
Thus, to take one recent example, in Jesus Symbol of God, Roger Haight calls for
a retrieval of Antiochene Christology. This logos-anthrōpos Christology is to
Haight’s mind “much closer to modern, historically conscious sensibilities,”
and its strength lies “in its preservation of the humanity of Jesus Christ
together with his divinity.”19 Haight admits that a potential weakness is its
failure to give an account of the personal unity of Christ, but he sees this not
as a specific weakness of Antiochene Christology, but a far more general
tendency shared by all parties to “the hypostatization of the Logos and a
pattern of objectivist thinking.”20 Pace Haight, however, some recent
reassessments have identified the main priority of Antiochene Christology not
as the defence of the integral humanity of Christ but rather as the defence of
divine transcendence and impassibility.21 In the heated epistolary exchange
between Cyril and Nestorius, Nestorius accuses Cyril of going astray precisely
in ascribing passibility to the coeternal Word of God.22 Theodoret of Cyrus’s
Christological dialogue Eranistes, gives strong evidence of this concern for
divine impassibility.23 “When we hear about suffering and the cross, we must
recognize the nature that experienced the suffering, and we must not attribute
it to the impassible nature, but to the nature that was assumed for this
purpose,” writes Theodoret.24 Antiochene Christology cannot therefore be
played off as a “Christology from below” against an Alexandrian “Christology
from above.” The terms logos-anthrōpos and logos-sarx are misleading if taken to
suggest that the particular, historical figure of Jesus was at the heart of
Antiochene Christology while Alexandrian theologians all tended more or less
to Apollinarianism and docetism.
The fundamental difference between Antiochene and Alexandrian
approaches is more helpfully construed as a difference between what can be
termed “narrative” and “analytical” Christologies. As R. A. Norris argues, Cyril
resisted attempts to “parse” the constitution of Christ analytically. Cyril’s
native Christological language is deeply traditional, as for instance:
The holy and great Council [Nicaea] stated that “the only-begotten Son,” “begotten”
by nature “of the Father,” “true God from true God,” “light from light,” “through
whom” the Father made all things did himself “come down, was incarnate, made
man, suffered, rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven.”25
In passages such as this, Norris finds a “quasi-narrative account of the

incarnation of the pre-existent Word.” Cyril is grasping toward what Norris
calls a Christology of predication, which seeks to attribute the characteristics of
humanity and divinity to the one subject of the Logos, but Cyril is compelled
to use the current Christological language in the heat of controversy, a
language that focuses on the conjunction of the natures, analyzing the union
synchronically and suggesting that the person of Christ is the product of the
union of the two natures.26 From this analytical perspective, Cyril’s own
narrative account was bound to be misinterpreted by dint of a category
mistake: what Cyril understood as the principal agent of the Incarnation was
taken by his opponents to mean an Apollinarian tertium quid resulting from an
admixture of the natures:
The Logos is said to unite the flesh to himself; and by this turn of speech Cyril
means to intimate that the unity of Christ has its principle in the nature or
hypostasis of the divine Son. The one Person of Christ is not constituted by the
union—that is, by a process of composition; rather, the personal unity of the divine
Son is as it were extended to embrace the manhood of which he makes himself the
subject.27
Cyril’s kenotic model treats the divine Logos as a single subject or actor in a
quasi-diachronic fashion, moving from pre-existence to incarnation and
appropriation of a complete humanity; it is within this narrative approach that
Cyril uses mia physis to describe the oneness of the subject of the Incarnation,
the same Word of God eternally begotten by the Father and “afterward” (εἴτα)
born in the flesh.28 As Brian Daley says:
The key to Cyril’s mistakes, Nestorius observes, is that his approach to the
constitution of Christ’s person is narrative or diachronic—“economic,” a modern
theologian might say—rather than analytical; it is focused on the divine initiative in
salvation and on the origins and operations of the radically different components of
the “person” in which God the Son historically carries out his work, rather than on
the paradoxical structure of Christ’s being—what Leontius [of Byzantium] would later
call the apotelesma or “end-product” of the incarnation.29
Nestorius, in contrast, wants to emphasize “the concrete, intelligible, visible

form in which Christ meets us,” the prosōpon of union.30 Theodore and
Nestorius characteristically use the term prosōpon to describe the union of

Christ’s humanity and divinity. As Grillmeier notes, prosōpon here should not
be taken in the fully ontological sense of “person” which would emerge only
with Chalcedon and post-Chalcedonian reflection, but rather it retains its
etymological sense of “appearance” or “countenance.”31 It is the outward
appearance, the form which a nature (physis) or hypostasis takes, and every
nature or hypostasis has its own natural prosōpon; it is the sum of the notae
individuantes, characteristics proper to a nature/hypostasis.32 The fundamental
question, then, is whether hypostasis denotes the subjective foundation of the
union of divinity and humanity in Christ, or rather the product or appearance
of these two natures united (Nestorius’s prosōpon of union). In this difference
of Christological approaches before Chalcedon we find the incipient question
which will exercise the minds of Neo-Chalcedonian theologians of the sixth
century: the ontological priority of essence/nature or of person/hypostasis.
The second problematic aspect of many modern readings of Chalcedon is
the failure to recognize how profoundly the definition is influenced by Cyril.
There is an undeniable element of truth in the widely held assessment of
Chalcedon as a synthetic formula, a “consensus document”: the council’s
definition accepted Cyril’s Second Letter to Nestorius and Leo’s Tome to Flavian
as orthodox Christological statements, and incorporated the carefully balanced
Christological statements of the latter to mediate both the Cyrilline emphasis
on the personal unity of Christ and the Antiochene distinction of the
humanity and divinity of Christ. The council opted for the more dualist ἐν δυο
φύσεσιν (“in two natures”) over the overtly Cyrilline ἐκ δυο φύσεων (“out of two
natures”).33 The Antiochene term used to denote the oneness of Christ,
πρόσωπον, was placed in apposition with the Cyrilline ὐπόστασις. All parties
understood it as necessary to exclude the Eutychian, “monophysite”
absorption of the humanity of Christ into his divinity.
Historical investigation suggests, however, that the synthetic quality of
Chalcedon should not be overemphasized, and that the council should by no
means be read as a rejection of the Alexandrian Christology of Athanasius and
Cyril. While anti-Chalcedonians argued that Chalcedon enshrined Antio-
chene Christology to the point of endorsing Nestorianism, the mind of the
fathers of Chalcedon was by and large Cyrilline in outlook. The council took
five days of deliberation to examine Leo’s Tome in light of Cyril’s writings,
making Cyril their touchstone of orthodoxy.34 Furthermore, in the sessions
leading to the final statement of faith, an initial draft including the Cyrilline
expression ἐκ δυο φύσεων (out of two natures) gained majority support,
excepting Roman and Antiochene parties. As Patrick Gray comments, the
position of this majority of bishops might be described as “dyophysite” but this
was “a dyophysitism which was Cyrillian rather than Antiochene in its
approach.”35 The shift from ἐκ δυο φύσεων to ἐν δυο φύσεσιν was aimed at
clearly excluding Eutychianism, and not at denying Cyril’s Christology:
…the change of heart which led the bishops to abandon their first use of the “out of
two natures” formula in favour of Leo’s “in two natures” does not imply an
abandonment of Cyrillian christology in favour of Antiochene or Western
christology; it implies a somewhat reluctant recognition by the Cyrillian majority of a
need to be more precise in their dyophysitism than the strictly Cyrillian formula
would allow, if they were to defend their faith against Eutychian misrepresentation.
They accepted the formula “in two natures” as the only possible formula which could
perform the task, as a necessary articulation of a basically Cyrillian position in
uncyrillian language.36
Finally, although the statement ultimately adopted by the council incorporated

an expression more native to Antiochene and Western dyophysitism, the
expression “in two natures” is balanced by the expression “one prosōpon or
hypostasis” (εἰς ἕν πρόσωπον καὶ μίαν ὑπόστασιν). The phrasing of the
definition does not treat the one subject as the product of the union, but as
the single reality “acknowledged” (γνωριζόμενον) in two natures. As Grillmeier
notes, “Chalcedon leaves no doubt that the one Logos (person) is subject of
both human and divine predicates.”37 The notions of double consubstantiality
and of the unconfused union of Christ’s natures were significant
contributions of the council to Christological reflection, but they do not
exhaust the intent or fuller meaning of the council, which was also to affirm
the personal unity of Christ as hypostatically identical with the Logos.
Although rejected by conservative disciples of Cyril who emphasized his mia
physis formula, Chalcedon was fully consonant with Cyril’s diachronic
approach to Christology, which understands the person/hypostasis of the Logos

as the foundation of the unity of the two natures, rather than the natures
coming together to constitute the person. It fell to theologians in the sixth
century, who were committed both to Cyril’s thought and to Chalcedon, to
bring the continuity between them to light.
Neo-Chalcedonianism
Not everybody, however, viewed Chalcedon as compatible with the
Christology of Cyril, and Chalcedon met with significant opposition,
particularly in Eastern and African segments of the Empire. The theological
opposition to Chalcedon was spearheaded by Severus of Antioch at the
beginning of the sixth century C.E. Severus made no distinction between the
controverted terms physis (“nature”), hypostasis, and prosōpon (“person”) as
applied to Christology: Chalcedon’s “in two natures” thus necessarily entailed
two hypostases, two subjects, in Christ. Against Chalcedon’s dyophysite
definition, Severus insisted on one perduring nature, Cyril’s mia physis.38
Severus encountered pro-Chalcedonian opponents in the monk Nephalius
and the presbyter John of Caesarea (“the Grammarian”), who argued for the
compatibility of Chalcedon’s and Cyril’s respective nature-language.39 The
defense of Chalcedon by way of Cyrilline reframing became the imperially-
endorsed theological position under Justinian, promulgated by the Second
Council of Constantinople in 553, and influenced by the theology of Leontius
of Jerusalem. The council explicitly identified the hypostasis of Christ with the
pre-existent Logos (Canons 3 and 5), and declared the equivalence of
Chalcedon’s two-natures/one-hypostasis formula to Cyril’s formula, “one
incarnate nature of the Word of God” when both are rightly understood
“according to the Fathers” (Canon 8). Constantinople II also endorsed the so-
called Theopaschite formula advocated by the Scythian monks in the early
sixth century, “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” (Canon 10).40 The
Theopaschite formula, while not of Cyrilline provenance, was an instance of
the communicatio idiomatum strongly supported by Cyril (similar in content to
Cyril’s “the Logos suffered impassibly”).41 The second Person of the Trinity,
the incarnate Word, is identified as the personal bearer of suffering, in a way
that pre-Chalcedonian Antiochene theologians could not have found

acceptable.
Since the early twentieth century, this theology of rapprochement aimed at
reconciling anti-Chalcedonian parties to the imperial Church has been termed
“Neo-Chalcedonianism.” The term “Neo-Chalcedonianism” originated with
Joseph Lebon in specific reference to Nephalius and John the Grammarian.42
The term was then taken up by Lebon’s student Charles Moeller, and by
Marcel Richard, who contrasted Neo-Chalcedonianism from (strict)
Chalcedonianism.43 For Neo-Chalcedonian thinkers, according to Moeller,
orthodox Christological faith demanded the simultaneous use of the
Chalcedonian two-natures formula and Cyrilline mia physis formula. For Aloys
Grillmeier, this form of Neo-Chalcedonianism is a form of bilingualism,
“simultaneous speech in two different conceptual systems,” more of a
juxtaposition than a genuine reconciliation; Grillmeier calls this insistence on
dyophysite and miaphysite language Neo-Chalcedonianism “in the extreme or
integral sense” and suggests that it might also be termed “neo-Cyrillianism.”44
“Moderate Neo-Chalcedonianism,” in contrast, represented by Leontius of
Jerusalem, takes Chalcedon as its foundation, supplemented by Cyrilline
terminology.45
Such modern historiographical distinctions, of “strict Chalcedonianism,”
“extreme Neo-Chalcedonianism,” and “moderate Neo-Chalcedonianism,” I
would argue, are somewhat problematic for two reasons. First, as suggested by
imperial and ecclesial endorsement at Constantinople II, the Cyrilline Neo-
Chalcedonian position was not merely one of several competing schools of
interpretation of Chalcedon; it was the majority position, as argued cogently
by Patrick Gray, based on his earlier assessment of Cyril’s authority at
Chalcedon itself:
They [the Neo-Chalcedonians] are not just a few theologians working in isolation, as
the theory of a novel school of hybrid christology would suggest, but theologians
dealing with the problems inherent in the position taken by the majority of
Chalcedonians…. In short, far from being a new school of christology, the Neo-
Chalcedonians appear to be merely the most articulate representatives of a position
widely held by the conservative majority of the church since 433.46
Second, this “conservative majority” could lay claim to fidelity to both

Chalcedon and Cyril. Thus, Grillmeier’s contrast between “extreme” Neo-
Chalcedonianism, which viewed Chalcedon as an appendix to Cyril, and
“moderate” Neo-Chalcedonianism, which saw Cyril as an appendix to
Chalcedon, is tenuous. It seems more prudent to adopt Patrick Gray’s broader
definition of Neo-Chalcedonianism as a firm adherence to Chalcedon coupled
with “an unmistakeable sympathy for a characteristically Cyrilline view of the
unity of the incarnate Word.”47 For this majority position, no choice had to be
made between Cyril and the council.
Gray’s historical study of the aftermath of Chalcedon similarly challenges
a widely held dialectical reading of the history of Christian doctrine that views
Constantinople II as the swing of the pendulum away from a Christology-of-
distinction toward a Christology-of-unity and thus in some sense an abrogation
of Chalcedon’s doctrine of the two natures. Moeller speaks of a “massive
attack” of Neo-Chalcedonianism against the Antiochene tradition which
risked upsetting the balance achieved by Chalcedon.48 Jacques Dupuis writes:
“The Council of Constantinople II (553) turned once more toward the pole of
unity (in the direction of Ephesus), while Constantinople III (681) [in its
affirmation of the two wills of Christ] followed the inverse process, turning
after Chalcedon toward the pole of distinction.”49 Yet even Grillmeier in his
later work contests this dialectical approach, arguing that the Neo-
Chalcedonian Christology of Constantinople II constitutes not an abrogation
of Chalcedon but rather its extension and clarification:
Because of this purified use of formulas the Fifth Ecumenical Council was not a
weakening of Chalcedonian terminology, but its logical continuation. With regard to
the basic formula “one hypostasis or person in two natures,” the canons of 553
belonged to the history of strict Chalcedonianism, because they were not set in
competition with the mia-physis formula. Nevertheless the use and application of the
main concepts were clearer and more unambiguous than at Chalcedon. The one
hypostasis or subsistentia as such was anchored in the pre-existent Logos; to him, as the
ultimate subject, Christ’s human nature was united sub ratione subsistentiae; the
assumption into this one hypostasis of the human nature which did not exist in itself
was formally the event of the incarnation or, seen from above, the self-
communication of this Logos hypostatically to the ensouled flesh, by the Logos
creating this flesh for himself.50
A shift in emphasis is perceptible: pressure was exerted on the bishops at

Chalcedon to exclude Eutychianism decisively, whereas Neo-Chalcedonianism
aimed to reconcile conservative Cyrillians opposed to Chalcedon. But the shift
occurred within a Cyrilline paradigm, that is to say, within an overall
Christological approach whose starting point was the kenotic initiative of the
divine Logos to assume a human nature. The endorsement of the
Theopaschite formula shows a commitment to the principle of the
communicatio idiomatum and the close connection in Neo-Chalcedonian
theology between theology and economy. Neo-Chalcedonian Christology,
then, did not merely parrot Cyril’s formulae in a manner reconcilable with
Chalcedonian terminology; rather, Neo-Chalcedonians defended and
expanded upon Cyril’s overall “diachronic” approach to Christology. Even if
Cyril and Chalcedon were unable to articulate this basic Christological
approach clearly and unambiguously, and even if Cyril was easily co-opted by
anti-Chalcedonians such as Severus of Antioch on the basis of dubious
formulae, the hallmark of Christological orthodoxy from the mid-fifth to the
seventh century, culminating with Maximus and his ecclesiastical vindication
at Constantinople III, remained Neo-Chalcedonianism in the broad sense.
The lasting contributions of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, however, are
found not merely in the acceptance of a diverse Christological terminology or
explicit dogmatic affirmation of the identity of the hypostasis of Christ with the
pre-existent Logos, but in the development of a sophisticated Christological
ontology which clearly distinguished between natural and personal (hypostatic)
poles of being. Such a clear distinction, it has been shown, did not exist in the
fifth-century Christological controversy, and had to be worked out in the
defence of Chalcedon particularly against Severan monophysitism. Only by re-
envisioning hypostatic existence could the subjective unity together with the
real, individual existence of the humanity of Christ be maintained. The
primary protagonists in this development in the sixth century were John the
Grammarian, Leontius of Jerusalem, and Leontius of Byzantium.51 But it fell
to Maximus to systematize and refine the insights of Neo-Chalcedonian
Christology.
Maximus the Confessor and Neo-Chalcedonian Theology

Maximus is known largely on the basis of his involvement in the
monothelite controversy and his vigorous defence of the two wills of Christ
(dyothelitism), a position for which he suffered mutilation, exile and
martyrdom. Maximus’s dyothelite position is a corollary of his fidelity to
Chalcedonian Christology and his exclusion of any admixture of created and
uncreated natures, both Christologically and universally. Frequently he appeals
to the Chalcedonian adverb asynchytōs—without confusion—in his writings,
distilling from Chalcedon a basic metaphysical principle.52 For Maximus,
however, the Chalcedonian distinction of natures is grounded in the
hypostatic unity of Christ. In this important respect, Maximus finds a place in
the Cyrilline-Neo-Chalcedonian Christological tradition, which he refines by
decisively shifting ontological discourse from substance and natures to
hypostasis and person.53 In what follows, I shall offer a detailed account of the
ways in which Maximus advances Christological terminology. By identifying
the unifying hypostasis of Christ with the eternal Logos, he binds Christology
closely to Trinitarian theology. But he follows Leontius of Jerusalem in
supplementing the Cappadocian Trinitarian notion of hypostasis, based on
natural idioms, with the notion of self-subsistence. A second important
distinction drawn by Maximus is between logos tēs physeōs (principle of nature)
and tropos tēs hyparxeōs (mode of existence), which enables Maximus to preserve
the natural characteristics and faculties of Christ’s humanity as enhypostasized
in the Logos, while avoiding the positing of two hypostases in Christ. Balthasar
is an especially astute reader of Maximus’s Christological lexicon, and so in
addition to Maximus’s own works as the primary sources, I will make reference
to Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy and to more recent works on Maximus which by
and large reinforce insights drawn out by Balthasar, as well as qualify
Balthasar’s interpretation.
H ypostasis. It fell to Neo-Chalcedonian theologians to find a definition of

hypostasis which could sustain two aspects, the personal unity of the incarnate
Logos and the reality of the individual humanity of Christ (without rendering
the latter a second hypostasis). In its Trinitarian usage by the Cappadocian
Fathers of the fourth century, hypostasis represents the “individual form,”

ἄτομον εἶδος, the sum of all particular characteristics, or notae individuantes. In
the Pseudo-Basilian Epistle 38, now widely attributed to Gregory of Nyssa,
universal substance is rendered an hypostasis by “particularizing characteristics”
(ἰδιώματα).54 Hypostasis is the manifestation of substance as specified by
individualizing qualities. This understanding of hypostasis is helpful for
interpreting unity and distinction within the Trinity, but less fruitful for
Christology, since it appears to suggest either that the human nature of Christ
with its idioms constitutes a second hypostasis or that the proper idioms are
absorbed into the hypostasis of the Logos, leaving a nature without its idioms.55
A further definition of hypostasis was required in order to avoid the quandary
of Nestorianism and monophysitism. John the Grammarian, writing in the
sixth century, was the first to supplement the Cappadocian understanding of
hypostasis with an older philosophical notion of hypostasis as self-subsistence or
incommunicability, καθ᾽ἑαυτὸν εἶναι.56 Leontius of Byzantium follows in
John’s footsteps by appealing to the Cappadocian hypostasis-doctrine—ἡ μὲν
ὑπόστασις ἀφορίζει τοῖς χαρακτηριστικοῖς ἰδιώμασι—as well as the meaning of
self-subsistence—καθ᾽ἑαυτὸν εἶναι.57 The former sense allows hypostasis to refer
to consubstantial beings, while the latter opens up the possibility of a being
constituted by more than one nature, a “synthetic hypostasis.” As Nicholas
Madden comments, “With the ontological ground now the pre-dominant
factor in hypostasis the assumed nature in the hypostatic union can be
ascribed ἀφοριστικά ἰδιώματα without danger of Nestorianism. There is no
fear of a second hypostasis because the Logos is the principle of individuation
as well.”58
Like John the Grammarian and Leontius of Byzantium, Maximus brings
together both aspects of hypostasis. In Epistle 15, a dense summary of
Maximus’s Christological teaching, he says: “Hypostasis is being that stands
apart, consisting on its own. For one defines hypostasis as the essence plus its
individuating characteristics, distinguished from other (things) of the same
essence through number.”59 In Cosmic Liturgy, Balthasar notes a range of
descriptors for being, from the general to the particular. Ousia, for instance,
can stand for the highest ontological determination, the totality of being under
which are included all species and individuals.60 It can also function
synonymously with physis to mean an individual or particular nature.61 Being
(einai) is a broad term which for Maximus always includes a kind of
qualification, “being of a certain kind,”62 and thus ranges from the general
ousia to the particular hyparxis, existence. Balthasar argues that the range of
meanings and registers of meaning of the various terms are undergirded by a
fundamental polarity between essence and existence, in which one pole is not
reducible to the other. Maximus’s use of hypostasis, however, constitutes a
special case according to Balthasar, since it is not limited to one specifying
category between the poles of general and particular being. Hypostasis answers
the question, “Who?”: “it is the indicator and affirmation of a subject [die
Anzeige und der Hinweis auf ein Ich].”63 Rather than a property or specification of
nature, hypostasis is that which has an essential being: hypostasis thus refers to
“the concrete bearer” of essence.64 Nature in fact requires hypostatization, to
be taken-possession-of, so to speak: “[The concept of hypostasis] contains…that
active, functional process of ‘ownership’ that is necessary if a concrete
individual is to result.”65 One can further distinguish between “essential
qualities” and “hypostatic” qualities.66 This distinction of essential and
hypostatic idioms is an important step forward in grasping the notion that
Christ’s humanity, along with its essential properties that constitute it as a
human nature, is not taken away but hypostatized by being assumed by the
Logos.
Thus, hypostasis is understood not only under the aspect of the
individualized, specified form of nature, the product of the individuation of a
nature, but more significantly as the subject and possessor of a nature. Here
Balthasar adverts to a new level of metaphysical reflection:
The unity of [Christ’s] hypostasis, his concrete and individual “Person,” possesses its
two natures both ontologically and in full spiritual freedom; by that very fact, it is far
more sublime than any natural union one might imagine. This theological insight
had a fruitful effect on the whole history of metaphysics…. These new “categories,”
which could not be reduced to the dimensions of essential characteristics, point at
once in the direction of the “existential” and the “personal.” Both of these are
implied in the new terms that came to be used: ὕπαρξις (existence) and ὐπόστασις
(concrete, individual being).… Maximus, who saw the words “being” (εἴναι) and
“essence” (οὐσία), on the one hand, and “personal being (ὐπόστασις) and “existence”
(ὕπαρξις), on the other, as closely related, was surely far from proposing the
neoscholastic “real distinction.” Still, with the appearance of a new emphasis on
existence and person, alongside the classical Greek concern with essence (οὐσία), an
important step had been taken in the direction of an ontology of created being.67
While it remains true that hypostasis does not, in general, precede nature
ontologically or chronologically—there is no hypostasis without a nature just as
there is no nature without hypostasis—still hypostasis has a priority over nature
such that personal existence can never be reduced to its essential components,
and certainly not in the case of the incarnate Logos.
“ From which, in which, and which he is.” The interpenetrative but

irreducible relationship of hypostasis and physis finds further expression in the
triadic formula frequently invoked by Maximus to refer to the natures of
Christ, ἐξ ὧν καὶ ἐν οἷς καὶ ἅπερ ἐστίν, “from which, in which, and which he
[Christ] is.”68 It was shown earlier that although the Cyrilline ἐκ δυο φύσεων
expressed the majority Christology of the fathers of Chalcedon, the final
statement used ἐν δυο φύσεσιν instead in order to exclude Eutychianism. Neo-
Chalcedonian theologians employed both formulae together. Maximus
amplifies this formula by adding a typically Antiochene expression, “Christ is
the natures,” yielding a description of the natures as “from which, in which,
and which he is.”69 The Cyrilline “out of two natures” conveys the union of
disparate natures, and the Chalcedonian “in two natures” points to the
perduring existence of both natures in Christ. Of the notion that “Christ is
the natures,” Nicholas Madden comments, “The ἐστίν insists on the fact that
there is not a third quid in Christ, that, whatever hypostasis may be it is not
reducible to the essential order and at the same time it can be identified with
that order, without doing violence to the principle of contradiction.”70 In
more quotidian terms, “The ‘who’ is identified with the two ‘whats’ without
being reduced to them. In a sense he has them.”71 Madden thus echoes
Balthasar’s thesis that in Maximus’s Christology priority is given to hypostasis as
the “possessor” of the natures. In the triadic formula “from which, in which,
which” Maximus both anchors the hypostasis of Christ metaphysically in the
realm of natures and conveys its irreducibility to this realm, such that
substance-language and hypostasis-language make up two different orders.
Hypostasis can (and must) be related to natures, but the two categories cannot
be collapsed.
The distinction of hypostatic and essential orders and a Cyrilline
emphasis on the event rather than the product of the Incarnation are
reinforced by Maximus’s delimitation of the body-soul analogy to the union of
natures in Christ. In his refutation of Severan monophysitism, Leontius of
Byzantium employed the anthropological analogy of the body and soul to
illustrate the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Christ.72 The
psychosomatic analogy was common enough in Christological discourse,73 but
it was Maximus who refined its Neo-Chalcedonian application and purified it
of anthropological reductionism. Leontius saw a similarity in the union of
body and soul and the hypostatic union in that two complete substances are
united to form one hypostasis, a “synthetic hypostasis.” Severus rightly asked why
“synthetic hypostasis” could not also be rendered “synthetic nature,” since a
body and soul do not together constitute only an individual human hypostasis,
but can be said to constitute a human nature. Maximus clarifies the limits of
the psychosomatic analogy and accepts the applicability of the analogy only
with the strictest conditions and qualifications. First, in the case of the human
being, the body and soul are contemporaneous; in the case of Christ, the
divinity pre-exists the humanity.74 Second, in the case of the human being, the
union of body and soul takes place passively, necessarily; the soul “possesses”
the body without willing or choosing.75 The Incarnation, in contrast, is a free
union of the Logos with humanity.76 Finally, as Balthasar has noted, on the
anthropological plane physical composition of body and soul is tied to
metaphysical composition, that is, the constitution not only of an hypostasis but
also of a human nature and therefore the situating of the individual hypostasis
within a species. While the physical analogy of two different substances in one
hypostasis holds Christologically, no third “nature” is constituted by the union
of divinity and humanity in Christ (precisely the point of Maximus’s formula
“from which and in which and which he is”): Christ is thus absolutely unique,
and Maximus preserves the sovereign mystery of the Incarnation from being
reduced to one case among other cases of created being. As Balthasar

comments, “Christ is, then, as a ‘composite hypostasis,’ utterly unique
(μονώτατος), and it is precisely this uniqueness, beyond all nature, that allows
him to share natures with the Father, on the one hand, and with man, on the
other; it proves that his unity is purely on the level of hypostasis.”77 What is
implied here is not just the hypostatic uniqueness of the incarnate Logos, but
the perduring reality of Christ’s human nature precisely as a nature, which is in
no way absorbed into a monstrous “synthetic nature.” In this way it becomes
all the clearer that the Neo-Chalcedonian Christology appropriated and
refined by Maximus does not lapse into “verbal monophysitism” but rather is
able to employ the Cyrilline notion of union according to hypostasis so as to
preserve the genuine human nature of Christ.
T he Enhypostatic Humanity of Christ. With the identification of the

single hypostasis of Christ with the pre-existent hypostasis of the Logos, the
status of Christ’s human nature still needs elucidation. Here, Neo-
Chalcedonian theology develops the notion of the enhypostatic humanity of
Christ. Originally, as Balthasar notes, ἐνυπόστατον had the meaning of
“hypostatic,” that is, “existing,” but with Neo-Chalcedonianism it becomes a
marker for “an intermediate grace of existence between nonbeing (or
accidental being) and full, hypostatic existence [i.e. self-subsistence].”78 John
the Grammarian speaks of an “enhypostatic (ἐνυπόστατος) union,” but appears
simply to be affirming by way of this expression the real existence of the
humanity of Christ, not its subsistence in the Logos. Leontius of Byzantium’s
use of enhypostaton suggests the newer meaning which affirms the real existence
of the human nature of Christ without affirming it as its own hypostasis.79 Still,
the basic meaning of enhypostaton is “real” or “existing,” as opposed to
anhypostaton, unreal or non-existent.
Leontius of Jerusalem offers a more thorough doctrine of enhypostasia,
clearly identifying the “hypostasis of the union” with the pre-existent hypostasis
of the Logos: Christ in his humanity “does not possess like us his own proper
human hypostasis which separates him from every similar or dissimilar nature,
but the common and indivisible hypostasis of the Logos, both for his own
[human] as well as for the [divine nature] which is over him.”80 Balthasar does
not treat Leontius of Jerusalem’s doctrine of enhypostasia in Cosmic Liturgy, but
he does allude to it in Theo-Drama III, where he cites Leontius’s statement that
the Logos “hypostasizes human nature in its own hypostasis.”81 Balthasar
comments, “According to this view, Christ possesses human nature in its
totality, not in an individual and limited way,” while admitting that Leontius
ascribes “a certain individuality” to the human nature of Christ.82 Subsequent
authors have offered more nuanced discussions of Leontius’s enhypostasia
teaching. According to Grillmeier, Leontius understands the human nature
assumed by the Logos to be an individual human nature, but not an hypostasis:
it is neither anhypostatic (without existence) nor idiohypostatic (having its own
proper hypostasis).83 Felix Heinzer cites Leontius of Jerusalem’s use of φύσις
ἰδική to challenge Balthasar on this point: it is not a general, but an individual,
human nature that is assumed by the subsistent Logos and sustained in its
particularity.84 In light of Grillmeier’s and Heinzer’s studies, Balthasar appears
to give too little credit to Leontius of Jerusalem in particular for developing
the theory of enhypostasia, and thus underestimates the Neo-Chalcedonian
background for Maximus’s Christology.
What cannot be disputed is that Maximus himself firmly holds that the
humanity of Christ exists enhypostatically in the hypostasis of the Logos, and
that this assumed humanity is to be regarded as individual and not generic. He
says in Epistle 15:
The flesh of the God-Logos is not therefore a hypostasis. For indeed never, not for
the length that a swift thought of the mind itself would take, was it distinguished
through itself by properties dividing it off from things of its own kind nor in the
personally conjoined Logos having what is proper separated off from what is
common, but enhypostasised, that is in him and through him receiving the genesis
of being and becoming, by the union, his flesh and united with him according to
hypostasis by the principle of particularity that divided it from the rest of men. To
speak more clearly, it was made proper to the Logos through hypostasis, so that what
is common by substance truly became his flesh by the union.85
In this passage, it is clear that the human nature of Christ is a particular human
nature, although in no way independently pre-existent but rather created and
particularized in the same act of assumption by the Logos.86 The hypostasis of

the Logos is the principle of individuation of Christ’s human nature, setting
Christ off from other human beings. The humanity of Christ does not have a
self-subsistence akin to other human beings (οὐ καθ᾽ἑαθτό χωρὶς ἤ δι᾽ἑαυτό) but
subsists on account of and in the Logos (ὡς δι᾽ἐκεῖνον καὶ ἐν ἐκείνῳ).87
Balthasar sees in Maximus a foreshadowing of the Thomistic real distinction
between essence and existence:
The act of being, really distinct from the being’s essence, bestows on it also a unique
and unmistakable personality. The actual being of [Christ’s] human nature, in
Maximus’ terms, is as such the reality of the Logos as a Divine Person, since it exists
“through him and in him” (ὡς δι᾽ ἐκεῖνον καὶ ἐν έκείνῳ). This explains why the
human nature of Christ, despite its integrity in the order of essences, is still not a
human person. It exists and attains its own synthetic unity from the divine reality of
the second Person of the Trinity. It is therefore not without hypostasis
(ἀνυπόστατος), but it is only made real by being included in that reality (ἐν-
ὑπόστατος), not by being a hypostasis on its own.88
Balthasar affirms Maximus’s doctrine of the enhypostatic humanity of Christ

by finding its resonance with later Christological reflection, and he sees in
Maximus’s Christology an important step forward from an essence-Christology
to a more existentially focused “Christology of being” (Wesens- vs.
Seinschristologie).89 Yet even apart from comparisons with later Christological
schools, it is apparent that with Maximus Christology has attained a new level
of sophistication which illuminates the Chalcedonian dogma in a manner
hardly imaginable to Cyril or the bishops at Chalcedon themselves. The
hypostasis of the union is identified with the hypostasis of the eternal Logos,
who both causes the union by assuming a human nature and freely becomes the
“product” of the union as a “synthetic” person.90 As Balthasar says:
One can and one must…assume a dynamic relationship between the Divine Person
of Christ and his divine nature, a relationship that is analogous to that between a
human person and his intellectual, human nature. And if this Divine Person should
also enter into this kind of relationship to a human nature, he can really be called a
synthetic person—not in the sense of being a passive product of two natures that have
simply come together, but rather in that the divine Person realizes this unification in
and through himself, in the highest freedom, so that he is called “synthetic” in the
sense of being the cause of synthesis.91
Maximus does not bring all terms and definitions to absolute clarity (a mark,
perhaps, of his apophaticism rather than a limitation) but the distinction
between essence and existence, and between nature and hypostasis, is
sufficiently clear to show that Chalcedon does not violate the principle of
contradiction in affirming two natures in one hypostasis: duality and unity
occur on irreducibly different planes.
T he logos/tropos Distinction. Maximus sharpens these distinctions and

emphasizes the reality of Christ’s humanity with a further distinction, between
logos tēs physeōs, “principle of nature,” and tropos tēs hyparxeōs, “mode of
existence.” In simplified terms, logos tēs physeōs refers to “what” a thing is by
nature; tropos tēs hyparxeōs denotes “how” the thing exists; as Nicholas Madden
notes, “The λόγος φὐσεως and the τρόπος ὑπάρξεως require each other as the
two necessary dimensions of all existents.”92 In Opusculum 4, Maximus
describes the human nature of Christ as retaining its natural being (to einai
physikōs) while subsisting “divinely” in the hypostasis of the Logos (to hypostēnai
theikōs).93 In Ambiguum 36, Maximus explains:
At first nature did not take on union with God in any mode (τρόπον) or structure
(λόγον) of substance or hypostasis, in which all things generally are considered. Now,
however, it has received union according to hypostasis with him through the
ineffable union, while maintaining its own proper structure (λόγον) according to
substance and distinct from the divine substance, with which, through the union, it
has oneness according to hypostasis as well as difference. Thus in the structure of its
being (τῷ τοῦ εἶναι λόγῳ), according to which it comes to be and is, [Christ’s human
nature] continues to have its own being properly and without diminution in any way,
while in the structure of how it exists (τῷ τοῦ πῶς εἶναι λόγῳ) it receives its existence
in a divine manner, and it does not know or admit any inclination of movement
toward any other thing. Thus the Word has effected a communion with human
nature much more admirable than the former one, uniting the same nature to
himself substantially, according to hypostasis.94
In the Incarnation, the human nature remains what it is, but changes in how it
exists, taking on a new tropos or mode of existence.95 More specifically,
Maximus defines the logos tēs physeōs of human nature to be a nature
constituted of body and rational soul: this natural principle remains stable
while its tropos tēs hyparxeōs changes.96 Tropos tēs hyparxeōs was first used in a
Trinitarian context by Amphilochius of Iconium and the Cappadocians in the
fourth century, and was only subsequently pressed into service for Christology
proper.97 In the Trinitarian context “mode of existence” is closely associated
with generation and origin: Gregory of Nyssa, for instance speaks of two
distinct “modes of generation” of the Son and Spirit, and three resultant
“modes of existence” within the Trinity.98 Maximus himself also applies the
logos-tropos distinction to Trinitarian theology:
The same unity and trinity has a unity without composition or confusion and a
distinction without separation or division. It is a unity by reason of essence (kata ton
tēs ousias logon) or of being, but not by any composition or joining together or
confusion; it is trinity by reason of its mode of existence and subsistence, but not by
any separation or diversity or division. For the unity is not divided into the persons
nor does it exist in such a way that it can be considered in an external relationship to
them. Nor are the persons put together to form a unity nor do they make it up by
contraction, but it is by itself the same reality, sometimes to be thought of in one
way, sometimes in the other. For the holy trinity of persons is an unconfused unity
in essence and in its simple nature; and the holy unity is a trinity of persons and in
its mode of existence.99
The passage is of particular note for its use of explicitly Chalcedonian

Christological terms (without separation or alienation or division: asynchytōs,
adiairetōs) within a Trinitarian context, witnessing once again to the close
interconnection of theological and economic discourses in the thought of
Maximus. Transferring the logos-tropos distinction to Christological discourse,
Maximus retains the Cappadocian association of tropos with origin:
Thus his humanity does not differ from ours by the principle of nature [διὰ τὸν
λόγον τῆς φύσεως] but rather by the new mode of conception [διὰ τὸν καινοπρεπῆ
τῆς γενέσεως τρόπον]; the same according to substance, not the same according to
absence of seed [i.e. virginal conception], for it was not simple but was of the One
who truly became human for our sake. Just as his [human] will also is properly by
nature like ours, but divinely impressed above ours.100
It is therefore according to the mode of existence that Christ’s humanity is

divinized, so that it can no longer be considered solely under the aspect of the
human:
For the superessential Word, who took on himself, in that ineffable conception, our
nature and everything that belongs to it, possessed nothing human, nothing that we
might consider “natural” in him, that was not at the same time divine, negated by
the supernatural manner of his existence.101
The logos-tropos distinction offers a way of describing the preservation of the

human nature qua nature, while positing the closest possible union with the
hypostasis of the Logos. As Balthasar says, “Everything that is truly human can
be found in this new manner of existing, yet none of it is any longer ‘simply
human’ (ψιλὸς ἄνθρωπος) or ‘only human’ (ἁπλῶς ἄνθρωπος), but it appears as
mysteriously ‘inhabited’ (τὼ ἐνοικεῖν) by another.”102
T he Energies and W ills of Christ. Maximus further shifts the focus of

Christological discourse from static categories of substance and natures to
dynamic and existential terms in his teaching on the energies, operations, and
wills of Christ. Maximus’s defence of the two wills of Christ in the
monothelite controversy is a direct result not only of his adherence to
Chalcedon’s doctrine of the two natures but also of his Aristotelian ontology
which regards natures and energies as mutually defining. Creaturely existence
is defined by the movement of natures toward their First Cause: nature itself is
dynamic, not static, and, for its part, movement—and in the case of an
intellectual nature, freedom—is rooted in nature.103 Thus, Maximus defines the
natural will as “a faculty (δύναμις) desirous of what is in accordance with
nature. For every being, and especially the rational being, desires by nature
what is in accordance with nature, having been given by God according to
essence the capacity (δύναμις) of that for its own constitution.”104 From the
point of view of the natures of Christ, Maximus insists that each nature is
complete and preserves its own properties:
In every case we must hold, on the one hand, both the nature assumed by the God-
Logos himself, who became incarnate and was made man perfectly for us, and its
natural properties without which there is absolutely no nature, but only hollow
appearance, and on the other hand safeguard the union where the assumed nature is
conserved in its natural diversity, while the union is recognized in the hypostatic
identity. Thus it must be shown that in its totality, the λόγος of the Economy is at
once without confusion and without division.105
The union of natures in the hypostasis of the Logos in no way eradicates the
nature; nor can nature be regarded merely as an abstraction, as if it did not
manifest itself in concrete and particular attributes and energies. Since it is of
the nature of the human being to have rational soul and body, including the
faculty of willing, Maximus will argue that in Christ there must be two wills,
human and divine. To argue otherwise would be to rob Christ not only of his
human attributes but of his human nature.
At the same time, these natural idioms do not exist independently, but
“belong,” like the human nature itself, to the hypostasis of the Logos. The
Logos is the hypostasis of both natures, “uncreated and created, impassible and
passible, [accepting] unfailingly all the natural principles of which he is the
hypostasis.”106 Maximus articulates the union and interchange of energies thus:
So also in the mystery of the divine Incarnation: the Godhead and the humanity are
united hypostatically, but neither of the natural energies is displaced by the union,
nor are they unrelated to each other after the union, but they are distinguished in
their conjuncture and embrace. For the active power of his own Godhead, the Word
made flesh, possessing the whole power of his humanity, with all its openness to
suffering, quite unimpaired by the union, being humanly God, performs wonders,
accomplished through the flesh that is passible by nature, and being divinely man, he
undergoes the sufferings of nature, making them perfect by divine authority. Or
rather in both he acts theandrically, being at the same time both God and man,
sufferings showing that he is what we have become, and by performing wonders
demonstrating to us what we are to become, and by both confirming the truth of
those things from which and in which and which he is.107
Maximus maintains the distinction of the energies and operations of the two
natures, but also regards them as united in the most intimate union possible
in the hypostasis of the Logos. His application of the communicatio idiomatum is
not purely notional: it is grounded ontologically in the union of natures with

their proper energies at the level of hypostasis. Maximus thus speaks of the
perichōrēsis of natures and operations of Christ.108 It becomes clear that
Maximus’s dyothelitism cannot be seen as an extension of an Antiochene
Christology-of-distinction or as an interpretation of Chalcedon which
emphasizes the two-natures doctrine over union according to hypostasis. As
Balthasar says, “One must not, then, any longer misunderstand the abiding
distance between the natures, as if there were between them only an extrinsic
relationship of parallel existence.”109 Maximus is consistently “Neo-
Chalcedonian” in his positing of the single hypostatic subject of all the acts
and experiences of Christ, and in his grounding of these activities and
experiences in the free self-abasement of the divine Word. Balthasar highlights
the hypostatic order as the realm of freedom when he says:
The Person of the Redeemer is both the divine act of being and the unlimited
personal freedom of the Son; both of them, as a unity, form the synthesis, and so
both also give hypostatic form to the synthesis’ human side, without being
“confused” with it…. All the genuine suffering [of Christ] is ultimately under the
control of a divine core of freedom and, thus, receives a personal character that is
missing from all other human flesh. In all of this, the existential aspect is evident: the
whole physical chain of events is translated into a divine “manner of being” (ὁ ὑπερ
φύσιν τρόπος), without doing any violence to [human] nature.110
Here Maximus extends the logos-tropos distinction to show that there is a

difference between the will seen from the point of view of nature, with its
proper logos, and the tropos of the will—how the will is used—which belongs to
hypostasis.111 As Nicholas Madden says succinctly, “With regard to the co-
ordination of the two operations in Christ, we have to realize that the Logos
does not act on his human nature but in it.”112 It is important to recognize
here that this emphasis on the personalizing actuation of the will by the Logos,
far from rendering the human nature passive, in fact renders it most fully
active and free: “Nature, moved by the divine hypostasis, does not simply act
passively, any more than the nature of any ordinary person does when he acts
personally.”113
The humanity of Christ, therefore, becomes expressive in its entirety of

the divine nature. Maximus makes this point in Ambiguum 5, in a discussion of
Pseudo-Dionysius’s controversial expression, “[one] new theandric energy.”
Referring to the miracle of Jesus’ walking on water, Maximus highlights the
inseparability of the natural and the supernatural:
If then with unmoistened feet, which have bodily bulk and the weight of matter, he
traversed the wet and unstable substance, walking on the sea as on a pavement, he
shows through this crossing that the natural energy of his own flesh is inseparable
[ἀχωρίστῶς] from the power of his divinity.114
Maximus then highlights the hypostatic union of Godhead with the assumed
human nature and the reality of the latter:
For the movement that can make such a crossing is constituted by a nature belonging
to no-one else than the Godhead, that is beyond infinity and being, united to it
hypostatically. For the Word beyond being who once assumed being humanly
possessed undiminished, as his own, the movement that characterizes him generically
as a human being, naturally specified in everything he performs as man. Since he has
truly become man, he breathes, speaks, walks, moves his hands, uses his senses
naturally in the perception of things sensible, is hungry, thirsty, eats, sleeps, is tired,
weeps, is distressed, and possesses every other independent capacity and, in every
other respect in the mode of a soul that with its own energy moves the body that
forms one nature that has truly become and is called his own, or to speak properly,
without change he has become whatever nature was needed to fulfil in reality the
economy for our sake.115
Here we find Maximus at once overcoming the limitations of Alexandrian and

Antiochene Christological options. Where the Alexandrian tradition
exemplified by Athanasius and Cyril had difficulty in ascribing human need
and passion to Christ, Maximus clearly acknowledges all the human realities
experienced by Christ, including hunger, thirst, and fatigue. None of this is
feigned or merely experienced by a kind of external appropriation, in the way
one might “sympathize” with another who is truly experiencing such needs, or
put on purely for the sake of divine instruction and example (as, for example,
Athanasius had argued).116 But Maximus is equally insistent that even though
the divine and human natures must be distinguished, both “belong” to the
hypostasis of the divine Logos, and therefore do not exist on the same level
competitively, as it were, or manifest themselves separately and in alternation
(as if the miracles belonged to the divinity, the weaknesses and passion to the
humanity). Everything about Christ’s incarnate existence is fully human and,
being fully human, expressive of the more-than-human. It is precisely in the
most human activities and experiences of Christ that the divinity of Christ is
revealed.
Maximus’s doctrine of the perichoretic expressivity of the humanity of
Christ has more far-reaching and radical implications with respect to Christ’s
sufferings. Even though Maximus ascribes Christ’s fear and desire to preserve
his life in Gethsemane to the human will, which is overcome in an act of
obedience to Father, still it is not that Christ desired one outcome as a man
and the second outcome as God: Christ does all things as both God and
man.117 In his reading of Maximus’s theology of Christ’s agony, Balthasar
emphasizes the enactment of the drama of redemption, the overcoming of
opposition between finite and infinite freedom, in Christ’s person. This drama
is already situated within the divine freedom of the Son: “with Maximus,
everything depends on a prior, unconstrained, free act of the person who
steers the struggle from above and on the voluntary character of that person’s
‘self-immolation.’”118 François-Marie Léthel has laid renewed emphasis on the
fact that for Maximus both the fear of death and the submission to the will of
the Father are acts of the human will of Christ.119 Yet Léthel has not
contradicted Balthasar’s emphasis on hypostatic realization, only highlighted
that the fully human willing of Christ is expressive of Christ’s divine person.
The human willing of Christ is the human willing of none other than the
Logos. As Marie-Joseph Le Guillou says in the preface to Léthel’s study, the
free consent of Jesus in Gethsemane reveals that “our salvation has been willed
humanly by a divine Person.”120 I shall have occasion to say more about
Maximus’s theology of the Agony of Christ in relation to Balthasar’s
soteriology at a later point. For now, it suffices to emphasize that for Maximus
the ascription of two wills to Christ on the basis of his two natures does not
violate the principle of hypostatic unity. Precisely the opposite: the difference
of the wills and their union are mutually reinforcing. The human will is most
authentically itself in the perichoretic embrace of the divine will.
Balthasar’s Maximian R essourcement

In highlighting the Neo-Chalcedonian character of Maximus’s
Christology, this chapter has already drawn a great deal on Balthasar’s
commentary and interpretation. While elucidating some of Maximus’s own
priorities, this engagement with Balthasar has also begun to show Balthasar’s
own emphases and the basic Cyrilline-Chalcedonian sympathies of his own
theology. Studies in the wake of Balthasar’s groundbreaking work have helped
illuminate further aspects and correct certain opinions in Cosmic Liturgy. For
instance, Balthasar stresses Maximus’s “Chalcedonianism” more than he does
the connections between Maximus and Neo-Chalcedonianism. This is in part,
I would argue, because the whole notion of “Neo-Chalcedonianism” was
relatively new, and because it lacked adequate definition when Balthasar
produced Cosmic Liturgy. In the second edition of Kosmische Liturgie, published
in 1961, he briefly notes the relatively recent refutation of Friedrich Loof’s
earlier identification of the two Leontii (Jerusalem and Byzantium), clearing
the way for future studies of Maximus’s relationship to sixth-century Neo-
Chalcedonian Christology.121 The connection has since been made more
explicit by Thunberg and Heinzer.122 But I would argue that Balthasar’s
achievement in Cosmic Liturgy has not been substantially refuted or overturned
by the expansion of post-Balthasarian studies on Maximus and on post-
Chalcedonian Christology. Indeed, the historical outline which I have
presented here reinforces certain aspects of Balthasar’s interpretation of
Maximus.
One of the major emphases of Cosmic Liturgy is the centrality of
Christology for metaphysics. Chalcedon is, according to Balthasar, the
keystone of all of Maximus’s thought: “‘Synthesis,’ not ‘confusion’, is the first
structural principle of all created being.”123 It is on the basis of the
Chalcedonian asynchytōs that the positivity of created being is affirmed,
precisely in its non-identity with uncreated being. The positivity of created
being also shines through in the polarity between generality and particularity,
which Balthasar calls “the structure of finite being” in Maximus’s

understanding.124 This polarity is expressed generally as the dialectic of matter
and form, and specifically in the realm of intellectual being as the dialectic of
essence (ousia) and “a specifying, limiting difference that gives [to the subject]
concrete existence, forming it as a self and clearly distinguishing it from every
other thing.”125 “This idea of the balance and reciprocity of universal and
particular is perhaps the most important in the whole of Maximus’ thought,”
says Balthasar, for Maximus overcomes the Greek overemphasis on universal
being in order to emphasize the particular, and he makes this philosophical
advance precisely by turning to Chalcedon: “Here the fruitful effect of
Chalcedon, and its emphasis on ‘unconfused (ἀσυγχύτως) union,’ is so real
one can touch it with one’s hands.”126 Balthasar even sees in Maximus’s
gradation of being between the poles of substance (οὐσία) and concrete
individual being (ὑπόστασις) a foreshadowing of the scholastic real distinction
between essence and existence.127 The union of created being with uncreated
being presupposes as its condition of possibility the permanent, divinely
ordained difference and non-identity of creaturely being.
The clarity with which Maximus sees the distinction between created and
uncreated Being is grounded in the union of the natures of Christ without
confusion. But, as we have seen, neither for Maximus nor for Balthasar is the
bare assertion of the two natures sufficient. The point is that the natures are
united, and that they are united hypostatically in the concrete person of
Christ. Without an adequate notion of hypostatic being, Christology remained
at an impasse between the extremes of Eutyches and Nestorius:
Their mistake was to look for the synthesis on the level of nature itself and then to
describe it as a synthesis of natural powers (Nestorius) or as a natural union
(Eutyches). A solution to the problem was impossible as long as one was unable to
recognize any other dimension of being than that of “nature” or “essence”—the
dimension considered by ancient Greek philosophy. For the result of this one-
dimensionality was the conclusion that all ‘essence’ (οὐσία, φύσις) possessed reality
in itself, or was at least the key element, the structure, the law of some really existing
thing.128
As Demetrios Bathrellos has noted, this tendency to reduce Christology to the

order of essences has been perpetuated even in modern scholarship on the
monothelite controversy.129 Early in the twentieth century, Joseph Tixeront
argued that because the human nature of Christ belonged to the person of the
Logos and not strictly to the divine nature, the divine and human acts of
willing are parallel and not subordinated to one another.130 Each nature is the
efficient cause of its proper will, and the alignment of human and divine wills
“results from the free and spontaneous consent of the man regulating his own
resolutions and acts in conformity with the divine will and acts.”131 Tixeront
was challenged by Martin Jugie, who argued that the wills are not parallel but
rather the human will is subordinated to the divine will. 132
The controversy between Tixeront and Jugie over the interpretation of
Maximus’s dyothelitism would appear to replay the Antiochene-Alexandrian
debate, largely because neither commentator has given sufficient attention to
the breakthrough of Neo-Chalcedonian and Maximian ontology, the
distinction between hypostatic and natural orders. Bathrellos rightly argues
that a strict parallelism or a competitive notion of hegemony are unavoidable
unless regarded from the perspective of person, the person of the divine Logos
who “being one and the same, wills as God by his divine will and obeys as man
by his human will.”133 In more specific terms, Bathrellos offers the following
solution:
It is one thing to say that the human will of Christ is moved by the Logos, and quite
another thing to say that it is moved by the divine will (or by the divinity). To say
that the human will of the Logos is moved by him is perfectly compatible with
Maximus’s thought, for time and again Maximus makes it explicit that the willing
subject is Christ, the willer who wills as God and as man, is the enfleshed Logos.
Given that it is the willer who moves his will, and that the willer in Maximus’s
Christology is identified with the enfleshed Logos, it is the enfleshed Logos who
moves his human will as well as his divine will. However, this does not in any way
contradict the self-determination of the human will; on the contrary, it affirms it, by
enabling its actualization.134
Bathrellos’s emphasis on hypostatic unity in Maximus’s Christology is

consonant with the insight of Balthasar in Cosmic Liturgy, that a “dynamic
relationship” obtains between the divine person of the Logos and his divine
nature, and between the Logos and his assumed human nature, such that the
person constitutes himself as a synthetic or composite person.135 The
difference of natures and operations is only guaranteed by this closest of
unions, a union in the order of hypostasis. The interpenetration of natures
“only rests on the (ontological) identity of the hypostasis and thus can come
about only through it and in it as its medium.”136 Indeed, Balthasar describes
the kenōsis of God (which is to say, of the person of the Son) as “the place
of…love’s highest freedom,…a freedom that stands at once beyond both
‘natures,’ makes both into an expression and sign of itself, and is genuinely
capable of achieving a ‘coincidence of opposites.’”137
As a commentator on Maximus, Balthasar is duly attentive to the insight
in Maximus and his Neo-Chalcedonian predecessors that nature and hypostasis
are distinct, and while the duality of natures with their idioms must be
maintained, the mysterious manner of their interaction and synergy occurs in
the order of the hypostasis of the Son of God. More than the distinction of
essential and personal orders, however, at the heart of Maximus’s Christology
is a diachronic or economic approach to the Incarnation which does not ask,
“How is Christ constituted by his natures?” but rather, “How does the Son of
God constitute in himself the hypostatic identity of his natures?” This is the
approach, which we earlier identified with Cyril of Alexandria, that
emphasizes the divine freedom of the Son as the basis for the incarnation.
Balthasar rightly sees a new soteriological dimension opening up here:
With Maximus, the principle weight no longer lies on Christ’s acquisition of a

complete human nature, its immediate and “automatic” delivery from sin, and its
divinization, as was so clearly evident in Athanasius and the Cappadocians; rather, it
lies at the ultimate center of hypostatic existence, where freedom, love, and being are
one.138
For Balthasar, the shift toward a personalist ontology in Maximus, grounded

in a diachronic Christology, means that Christology is henceforth more
explicitly correlated on one hand to Trinitarian relationality and on the other
to historical particularity and finite freedom: in Christ, over and beyond the
two natures, we encounter the Son of God entering and assuming human
history. As we shall see, Maximus’s Neo-Chalcedonian Christological synthesis

will find ample resonance with Balthasar’s theo-dramatic Christology.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have explored the meaning and implications of “Neo-
Chalcedonian” Christology, and have argued that Chalcedon ought to be read
within a Cyrilline paradigm and by way of its Neo-Chalcedonian reception.
The path has been long and winding, and it has seemed advisable to err on the
side of greater rather than less detail in presenting what I consider an accurate
portrayal of the development of Christological doctrine. If one of our central
questions in this study is how Balthasar’s Christology can be regarded as
“Chalcedonian,” it is imperative to understand Chalcedon within its historical
context, as part of a larger development of Christological thinking. I have
argued that it is reductive to speak of the “two-natures” doctrine of Chalcedon,
and likewise to see Maximus’s teaching of the two wills of Christ, confirmed by
the Third Council of Constantinople in 681, as dyophysite without reference
to hypostatic unity. The distinction of natures, by which Chalcedon excluded
Eutychian monophysitism, is to be understood within a diachronic approach
to the mystery of Christ, wherein the ontological subject of the entire existence
of Jesus Christ is the pre-existent Logos: such was the explicit teaching of
Constantinople II in 553. Neo-Chalcedonian Christology therefore distin-
guishes between natures and hypostasis, and recognizes in hypostasis the
principle of existence of the natures, not the other way around. The
achievement of Maximus in his defence of Chalcedonian Christology needs to
be seen in this light as well: the humanity and divinity of Christ do not run
along parallel lines, but enter into the closest possible, mutually
interpenetrating relationship in the hypostasis of the Logos. Maximus affirms
created being precisely as created, so that redemption and divinization are not
negations of the logoi of created beings, but an alteration in how they exist, in
their tropoi. Similarly, the human nature of Christ with its proper operations
are in no way annulled or altered in their logos, in what they are, but are rather
brought into a new tropos, indeed into the supernatural mode of existence of
the Son of God. Maximus works this out most clearly in his theology of the
two wills of Christ, which does not posit a duality of willing subjects in Christ,
but rather a duality of wills, both belonging to the one subject of the incarnate
Logos, “one and the same.”
In this light, Karl Rahner’s suggestion of two options in Christology,
“strict Chalcedonianism” and “Neo-Chalcedonianism,” or as he put it in a late
interview, “orthodox Nestorianism” and “orthodox monophysitism,” stands
on highly questionable historical grounds.139 Rather, as Joseph Ratzinger
argues, the full meaning of Chalcedon does not come to light without
acknowledging the Neo-Chalcedonian theology leading up to the Third
Council of Constantinople: without this acknowledgement, one is left with
the impression of a parallelism or juxtaposition between the natures of Christ
rather than a true personal unity.140 Indeed, the well-known expression in
Leo’s Tome—agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est141—
is prone to precisely such a two-track interpretation if not read in the context
of Cyrilline Chalcedonianism, and then Maximus’s measured dyothelitism.
Thus too, one must challenge Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s contention that in his
Christology Balthasar has “lost the advance made by St. Maximus the
Confessor, namely, since faculties flow from natures, Jesus obeys with His
human will the single divine will of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”142 I will
say more about this critique of Balthasar later. At this point it suffices to state
that the bald statement that Maximus taught the distinction of human and
divine wills is not enough: it is imperative to advert as well to Maximus’s
distinctions between natural and hypostatic ontological orders, and therefore
between natural will and hypostatic willing. This Balthasar does in Cosmic
Liturgy.143
This chapter has focused on identifying and affirming the dogmatic
starting point for Balthasar’s Christology. I end by noting that in Cosmic
Liturgy Balthasar presages some of the hallmarks of his own Christology and
theology of personhood. Just as he follows the tortuous trajectory of
philosophical terms such as physis and hypostasis through the refining fires of
Christological controversy, Balthasar will himself propose a concept of person
explicitly derived from the Christological and Trinitarian categories of
Christian revelation. Following Maximus, Balthasar will advert to the
determination of the entire human existence and freedom of Christ by the

Trinitarian personhood-in-relation of the Logos, such that, as Nicholas
Madden says of Maximus’s Christology, the Logos does not act upon the
human nature of Jesus but precisely in his human nature.144 And in keeping
with the Cyrilline-Chalcedonian approach of Maximus, Balthasar will
maintain a strong narrative focus in his dramatic Christology, in which there
can be no consideration of the relationship between created and uncreated
being in Christ that prescinds from the historical and personal.
Notes
1 Karl Rahner, “Chalkedon—Ende oder Anfang?” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und
Gegenwart, vol. 3, ed. Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht (Würzburg: Echter-Verlag,
1954), 3–49; Bernhard Welte, “Homoousios Hemin. Gedanken zum Verständnis und zur
theologischen Problematik der Kategorien von Chalkedon,” in ibid., 51–80.
2 Piet Schoonenberg, The Christ: A Study of the God-Man Relationship in the Whole of Creation
and in Jesus Christ, trans. Della Couling (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971); Edward
Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York:
Seabury Press, 1979); Kasper, Jesus the Christ.
3 John Galvin, “From the Humanity of Christ to the Jesus of History: A Paradigm Shift in
Catholic Christology,” Theological Studies 55, no. 2 (October 1996), 252–273.
4 Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon
(451), trans. John Bowden (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1965), 553.
5 Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans.
Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1961), 150.
6 Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It not? Some Reflections on
the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’” in The Incarnation: An
Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God, ed. Stephen T. Davis, David
Kendall, S.J., and Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 163.
7 On this distinction, see especially Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1,
From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. J. S. Bowden (London: A. R. Mowbray,
1965), 239–242; also J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (London and New
York: Continuum, 1977), 301–309.
8 Richard A. Norris, trans. and ed., The Christological Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1980), 130.
9 Athanasius, Oration against the Arians 3.34, PG 26, 396C; English translation from
Athanasius, Select Writings and Letters, ed. Archibald Robertson, A Select Library of Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 4 (reprint, Edinburgh: T&T
Clark and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 412.
10 Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 17.11; Select Letters, trans. and ed. Lionel Wickham (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1983), 26–27.
11 John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology,
and Texts (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1994), 184. I have followed McGuckin’s
nuanced translation in non-inclusive language, maintaining the parallelism between the
singular “man” and singular “God,” avoiding the abstraction of “humanity” and the
Christologically ambiguous “human being,” and using the miniscule “god” to describe the
divinization of humankind.
12 See Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 17.6; Select Letters, trans. and ed. Wickham, 20–21. See also
McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 185.

13 See for example Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 44; Select Letters, trans. and ed. Wickham, 62–63,
with Wickham’s footnote 2.
14 Norman P. Tanner, ed., The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (London: Sheed &
Ward and Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 86; DS 302.
15 Ibid., 79.
16 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 482. For similar judgments, see Basil Studer,
Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of the Early Church, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Matthias
Westerhoff (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 216; Kelly, Early Christian
Doctrines, 341. Kelly, however, recognizes the place of honour given to Cyril at the
Council, and concludes, “Thus, if the Antiochene Christology was victorious at
Chalcedon, it was so only after absorbing, and being itself modified by, the fundamental
truths contained in the Alexandrian position” (342).
17 Charles Moeller, “Le Chalcédonisme et le Néo-Chalcédonisme en Orient de 451 à la fin
du VIe siècle,” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 1, ed. Aloys
Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht (Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1951), 719.
18 McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 190.
19 Roger Haight, Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 270.
20 Ibid., 269–270.
21 See for instance John J. O’Keefe, “Impassible Suffering? Divine Passion and Fifth-Century
Christology,” Theological Studies 58, no. 1 (March 1997): 39–60. Cf. McGuckin, St. Cyril of
Alexandria, 138.
22 Nestorius, Reply to Cyril’s Second Letter, translated in McGuckin, 364.
23 See O’Keefe, “Impassible Suffering,” 55–57.
24 Theodoret of Cyrus, Eranistes, trans. by Gerard H. Ettlinger, S.J. (Washington, D.C.:

Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 221.
25 Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 4.3; Select Letters, trans. and ed. Wickham, 5.
26 R. A. Norris, “Christological Models in Cyril of Alexandria,” in Studia Patristica XIII:
Papers presented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1971.
Part II: Classica et Hellenica, Theologica, Liturgica, Ascetica, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975), 258–260.
27 Ibid., 263.
28 Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 46.3; Select Letters, trans. and ed. Wickham, 86–87.
29 Brian E. Daley, S.J., “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union’: Late Patristic Models for the
Personal Unity of Christ,” in The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the
Incarnation of the Son of God, ed. Stephen T. Davis, David Kendall, S.J., and Gerald
O’Collins, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 182. Cf. also Kenneth Paul
Wesche, On the Person of Christ: The Christology of the Emperor Justinian (Crestwood, NY: St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 15–19.
30 Daley, “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union,’” 182.
31 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 351.
32 McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria, 144.

33 See for instance Cyril of Alexandria, Ep. 45.6; Wickham, 74–75.
34 P. T. R. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 10.
35 Ibid., 11.
36 Ibid., 13–14.
38 Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint
Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31. Addressing the recent
eschewing of the term “monophysite” to refer to anti-Chalcedonian parties (now churches)
in favour of the more neutral “miaphysite,” Bathrellos nonetheless points to a
onesidedness in their emphasis on the unity of Christ, and a “Cyrillian fundamentalism”
with regard to Christological terminology (33).
39 Aloys Grillmeier, with Theresia Hainthaler, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2, part 2, From
the Council of Chalcedon (451) to Gregory the Great (590–604): The Church of Constantinople in
the Sixth Century, trans. John Cawte and Pauline Allen (London: Mowbray, 1995), 49–67.
40 Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 114–122; DS 421–432.
41 Cf. Ep. 17.6, Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters, trans. and ed. Wickham, 20–21.
42 Joseph Lebon, Le monophysisme Sévérien: étude historique, littéraire et théologique sur la résistance
monophysite au Concile de Chalcédoine jusqu’à la constitution de l’Église jacobite (Louvain: J. Van
Linthout, 1909). See Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon, 170; Marcel Richard, “Le néo-
chalcédonisme,” Mélanges de science religieuse 3 (1946), 156–161; Grillmeier, Christ in
Christian Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 2, 317–334, 429–439; Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and
Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Open
Court Press, 1995), 38–39.
43 Richard, “Le Néo-chalcédonisme,” 156–161; Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2,
pt. 2, 431.
44 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 2, 433–434.
45 Ibid., 434.
46 Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon, 167–168.
47 Ibid., 104, 164–165.
48 Moeller, “Le Chalcédonisme et le Néo-Chalcédonisme,” 719.
49 Dupuis, Who Do You Say I Am? 97. See also Walter Kasper’s summary of this dialectical
reading of the development of Christological dogma (Walter Kasper, “‘One of the
Trinity…’: Re-Establishing a Spiritual Christology in the Perspective of Trinitarian
Theology,” in Theology and Church, trans. Margaret Kohl [New York: Crossroad, 1989], 98).
50 Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 2, 456–457. While it is materially true,
as Sarah Coakley argues, that Chalcedon “does not tell us that the hypostasis is identical
with the pre-existent Logos” (“What Does Chalcedon Solve?” 162), Constantinople II’s
explicit identification of the hypostasis with the Logos is a logical extension of Chalcedon as
read in light of Cyril’s understanding of the Incarnation.
51 The relationship of Leontius of Byzantium to Neo-Chalcedonianism on one hand and to
Origenism on the other is disputed: see Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 39–40; Gray, The

Defense of Chalcedon, 90–103; John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 61–68; Grillmeier, Christ in
Christian Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 2, 186–89. In outlining the contributions of the two Leontii
to Christology in the sixth century, I am distinguishing their writings as per the consensus
view since Marcel Richard’s “Léonce de Jérusalem et Léonce de Byzance,” Mélanges de
science religieuse 1 (1944), 35–88.
52 As we shall see, Balthasar represents one pole of interpretation, which sees Maximus’
entire metaphysical vision as anchored in the asynchytōs of Chalcedon. Melchisedec
Törönen has argued against what he calls such “pan-Chalcedonianism”: “The
Chalcedonian Definition is not the unique great fountainhead of theology and inspiration
for Maximus as it has too often been thought to be. It is clear, of course, that Maximus in
his Christology follows post-Chalcedonian theologians such as Leontius of Byzantium and
Justinian, but it is far less evident that his cosmology, for instance, is one inspired by the
Chalcedonian Definition; even if some distant echoes might be heard in some areas”
(Melchisedec Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor
[Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007], 2). According to Törönen, “unconfused union”
was a widespread expression even apart from Chalcedon’s use: “The works of the
Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria and especially Dionysius the Areopagite…would have
been sufficient to provide him with this language had the Chalcedonian Definition never
been written” (Törönen, 5–6). While one can understand Törönen’s misgivings about
distilling Maximus’ entire vision into one principle, Maximus nonetheless consciously
used the notion of unmixed union, and often consciously appealed to Chalcedon in doing
so. Even if the notion could have been drawn from these other sources, it necessarily stood
in the shadow of Chalcedon and its difficult reception.
53 Thus, Lars Thunberg is correct in orienting his entire study of Maximus’ theological
anthropology with a section on “Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian position” (Microcosm
and Mediator, 36–48).
55 See Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 38, citing Moeller, “Textes ‘monophysites’ de
Léonce de Jérusalem, ETL 27 (1951), 417 ff.
56 Felix Heinzer, Gottes Sohn Als Mensch: Die Struktur Des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus
Confessor (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1980), 67.
57 Nicholas Madden, “Composite Hypostasis in Maximus Confessor,” in Studia Patristica,
vol. 27, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 185. Cf. PG 86, 1277D and
1280A.
58 Ibid., 186.
59 PG 91, 557D, translated in CL, 225.
60 CL, 216.
61 Ibid., 217.
62 Ibid., 218.

63 Ibid., 223. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus des
Bekenners, 2nd edition (Einsiedeln and Trier: Johannes Verlag, 1988), 220 (henceforth
abbreviated as KL2).
64 Ibid., 225.
65 Ibid., 224. For its part, hypostasis does not exist apart from nature, but is always
“essentialized” (ἐνούσιον): here Balthasar points to a central point of debate of Νeo-
Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian theologians, the assertion that there is no nature
without hypostasis, but also no hypostasis without nature. Maximus’ achievement is to show
the inseparability of the terms, but also the irreducibility of hypostasis to nature, indeed the
ontological priority of hypostasis.
66 Ibid., with reference to Opuscula; PG 91, 248Bff.
67 Ibid., 64. This insight into the development of hypostasis as the primary ontological
category is also articulated by John Zizioulas, although he places the shift prior to
Chalcedon in the context of Trinitarian controversy: see Being and Communion: Studies in
Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 36–41.
68 Maximus, Opusc. 9, PG 121AB; see also Opusc. 19, PG 91, 224A; Ep. 15, PG 91, 573A. See
Heinzer, Gottes Sohn, 90–91 for further references.
69 Thus Heinzer calls the addition of the relative pronoun “which” “eine echt schöpferische
Erfindung von Maximus” (Gottes Sohn, 90–91). See also La Dispute de Maxime le Confesseur
avec Pyrrhus, trans. Marcel Doucet (Montreal: Université de Montréal, Institut d’Études
Médiévales, 1972), 117–118: “[L]’adjonction d’un troisième élément à la formule néo-
chalcédonienne bipartite lui est propre [i.e. to Maximus]; et c’est cet élément qui fournit
l’une des prémisses de son argumentation dithélite.” In the Dispute with Pyrrhus, Maximus
declares, “the hypostasis is nothing else but the natures” (PG 91, 289B).
70 Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 184.
71 Ibid.
72 Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 62. See also TD III, 217, where Balthasar
cites Meyendorff’s discussion of Leontius’ psychosomatic analogy.
73 See for instance Cyril’s use of the analogy in the Second Letter to Succensus 4; Select Letters,
trans. and ed. Wickham, 88–89.
74 Maximus, Ep. 13, PG 91, 517A. See CL, 243; Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 177.
Balthasar notes that Maximus’ condition involves a correction of Leontius of Byzantium’s
Platonic-Origenist teaching of Christ’s pre-existent human soul (CL, 240).
75 E.g. Maximus, Ep. 12, PG 91, 488D.
76 Maximus, Ep. 13, PG 91, 517AB.
77 CL, 246 with reference to Maximus, Ep. 13, PG 91, 532B. See also Madden, “Composite
Hypostasis,” 178–182.
78 CL, 231.
79 Leontius of Byzantium, Adversus Nestorianos et Eutychianos I, PG 86, 1277C–1280B.

80 Leontius of Jerusalem, Contra Nestorianos V, 29; PG 86, 1749BC, in Grillmeier, Christ in
Christian Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 2, 277.
81 Balthasar does not give the source, but see Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian
Thought, 75.
82 TD III, 217. Balthasar does not give the citation, but appears to be translating Leontius’
φύσις ἰδική τις (PG 86, 1485D). Juan-Miguel Garrigues also claims that Leontius teaches
that the Logos assumed a general rather than an individual human nature (“La Personne
composée du Christ d’après Saint Maxime le Confesseur,” Revue Thomiste 74 [1974], 202.)
83 Leontius of Jerusalem, Contra Nestorianos II, 10; PG 86, 1556A4–8.
84 Heinzer, Gottes Sohn, 111–112. See also Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 188.
85 Maximus, Ep. 15, PG 91, 560BC, trans. Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 189.
86 There is an equivalency here to the adage originating with Augustine: ipsa assumptione
creatur (See Contra sermonem Arianorum 8.6, PL 42, 688).
87 Maximus, Opusc. 4, PG 91, 61B.
88 CL, 248.
89 KL2, 243.
90 See Maximus, Ep. 15, PG 91, 556CD.
91 CL, 249–250.
92 Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 193. While it is fair to say that logos falls into the
register of substance and nature, physis, and that tropos falls into the “existential” register of
person, hypostasis, it is not correct to equate tropos tēs hyparxeōs with hypostasis, since, as we
shall see, Maximus ascribes a tropos tēs hyparxeōs to Christ’s human nature, which does not
constitute it as a hypostasis. See Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 103.
93 Maximus, Opusc. 4, PG 91, 61B.
94 Maximus, Amb. 36, PG 91, 1289C3–D5; I have followed Daley in generally translating
λόγος as “structure.” See Daley, “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union,’” 186.
95 See Maximus, Amb. 6, PG 91, 1289C.
96 Maximus, Amb. 42, PG 91, 1341D: λόγος δὲ φύσεως ἀνθρωπίνης έστι τὸ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα
καὶ ἐκ ψυχῆς λογικῆς εἴναι τὴν φύσιν καὶ σώματος, τρόπος δὲ ἡ ἐν τῷ ἐνεργεῖν καὶ
ἐνεργεὶσθαι φυσικῶς τάξις ἐστιν, ἀμειβομένη τε πολλάκις και ἀλλοιοθμένη, τὴν δὲ φύσιν
ἑαθτῇ παντελῶς οὐ συναμείβουσα. “The principle of human nature is to exist in soul and
body as one nature constituted of rational soul and a body; but its mode is the scheme in
which it naturally acts and is acted upon, which can frequently change and undergo
alteration without changing at all the nature along with it” (On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus
Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor, trans. and ed. trans. Paul M. Blowers
and Robert Louis Wilken [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003], 90).
97 CL, 214; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 90.
98 Daley, “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union,’” 174. Madden suggests that Maximus was
probably the first to transfer the logos/tropos distinction to Christology (“Composite

Hypostasis,” 184–185). Daley credits Leontius of Byzantium with reviving the use of tropos
in the Christological context, specifically tropos tēs henōseōs, “mode of union.”
99 Maximus, Mystagogia 23, PG 91, 700D–702A, in Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings,
trans. George C. Berthold (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 205. See also
Daley, “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union,’” 185–186.
100 Maximus, Opusc. 4, PG 91, 60C. My translation, with reference to Opuscules Théologiques et
Polémiques, trans. Emmanuel Ponsoye (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998), 139.
101 Maximus, Amb. 5, PG 91, 1053CD. I use Brian Daley’s English translation of Cosmic
Liturgy (CL, 209). Cf. Maximus the Confessor, trans. and ed. Andrew Louth (London and
New York: Routledge, 1996),176.
102 CL, 215.
103 Balthasar shows how this Aristotelian ontology is aligned with Maximus’ rejection of the
Origenist notion of movement (kinēsis) as a falling away from God. Movement is rather a
“good ontological activity of a developing nature” (CL, 130) and “an ontological
expression of created existence (CL, 141).
104 Maximus, Opusc. 16, PG 91, 192B; trans. Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 123.
105 Maximus, Opusc. 4, PG 91, 61C; trans. Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 191.
106 Maximus, Amb. 3, PG 91, 1037A; trans. Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 191.
107 Maximus, Amb. 5, PG 91, 1060A–C, in Maximus the Confessor, trans. and ed. Louth, 178–
179. See also Ep. 19, PG 91, 593A.
108 See Maximus, Opusc. 7, PG 91, 88A; Disp. Pyrrh., PG 91, 345D (where Maximus speaks of
a circumincession of the natures proper—τῶν Χριστοῦ φύσεων περιχωρήσεως). On
Maximus’ “Chalcedonian” application of perichōrēsis and its prior history, see especially
Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 21–36.
109 CL, 258.
110 Ibid., 254.
111 Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 194–195. Maximus makes the distinction between the
will and the actuation of the will by the hypostasis in several ways, for example, “Will
(θέλησις) is related only to what is natural, whereas proairesis is related to…what is up to us
and capable of being brought about through us” (Opusc. 1, PG 91, 13A; Bathrellos, The
Byzantine Christ, 122). Or as Balthasar comments, “To act and to achieve reality is the work
of nature; it is only in the manner, the ‘how’ of realization that the hypostatic comes into
its own” (CL, 227).
112 Madden, “Composite Hypostasis,” 193.
113 CL, 228. Balthasar invokes the terms actus primus and actus secundus to distinguish the basic
activity belonging to nature and the realization of the activity in the order of hypostasis.
114 Maximus, Amb. 5, PG 91, 1049BC; Maximus the Confessor, trans. Louth, 173. ἀχωρίστως is,
of course, one of the four Chalcedonian privative adverbs describing the union of natures.
115 Maximus, Amb. 5, PG 91, 1049CD; Maximus the Confessor, trans. Louth, 173–174.
116 See Athanasius, Orationes contra Arianos 3, 42–46, PG 26, 412A–421B.

117 On this point, see François-Marie Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie du Christ: La liberté humaine du
Fils de Dieu et son importance sotériologique mises en lumière par Saint Maxime le Confesseur
(Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1979), 96. See Opusc. 6, PG 91, 65A–69B.
118 CL, 268–269.
119 Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie, 95–96.
120 Marie-Joseph le Guillou, Preface, in ibid., 6 (my translation). See also Bathrellos, The
Byzantine Christ, 146–147.
121 CL, 25.
122 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 36–48; Heinzer, Gottes Sohn, 22–113.
123 CL, 207.
124 Ibid., 156.
125 Ibid., 156–157, quoting PG 91, 1400C.
126 Ibid., 161.
127 CL, 64, 113, 248. On this point, Balthasar is criticized by Vladimir Lossky for conflating
existence and hypostatic being, thereby implying three acts of existence in God. Lossky
concludes, “In the notion of the created hypostasis, Maximus the Confessor may have
reached the new domain of that which cannot be conceptualized because it cannot be
reduced to its essence; but one will not find in the Thomistic distinction between essence
and existence—a distinction which penetrates to the existential depths of individual beings–
the ontological solution of the mystery of the human person” (In the Image and Likeness of
God [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974], 122). The questions Lossky
raises about the analogous nature of Trinitarian, Christological and anthropological
predication and about a Trinitarian-personalist ontology are important: they shall be
touched upon again at a later point with respect to Balthasar’s theology of the person. For
the moment, one might argue that Balthasar is sufficiently aware of the difference between
the existence of the humanity of Christ in its new mode of existence and the hypostatic
existence of the Word incarnate not to equate existence and hypostatic being.
128 CL, 210.
129 Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 162.
130 Ibid., 163, with reference to J. Tixeront, Histoire de Dogmes, vol. 3 (Paris: Lecoffre, 1912).
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid., 165.
134 Ibid., 169.
135 CL, 249–250; see also CL, 258, 270. Georges de Schrijver, in his study on the analogy of
being in Balthasar, is imprecise in describing the new mode of the human will of Christ as
the enhypostasization of the will: “C’est ce qu’on appelle, en langage technique,
l’enhypostasie de la volonté humaine de Jésus dans la volonté divine” (Georges de Schrijver,
Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez Hans Urs von
Balthasar [Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983], 233). Enhypostasia in Maximus, and also
in Balthasar, is, as far as I can see, a term reserved for the reality and individuation of the

human nature in the hypostasis of the Logos, not for the will, which is not another nature in
need of hypostatic existence but an idiom of the nature. One might agree with the
underlying claim that the human will is activated and exercised in complete synergy with
the divine will, within the hypostatic freedom of the Logos.
136 CL, 258.
137 Ibid., 259. Bathrellos contends that Balthasar tends more toward the solution of Tixeront
than Jugie, on the evidence of Balthasar’s frequent warning of the dangers of Alexandrian
logos-sarx Christology (The Byzantine Christ, 164). Yet while Balthasar refuses any attempt to
render the human nature a passive instrument of the Logos (see for instance CL, 228), he,
like Bathrellos and unlike either Tixeront or Jugie, clearly affirms that the hypostasis of the
Logos is the principle of all Christ’s actions.
138 Ibid., 260. For a similar judgment of Maximus’ “narrative” focus, see Marie-Joseph le
Guillou, “Quelques réflexions sur Constantinople III et la sotériologie de Maxime,” in
Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg, 2–5 septembre
1980, edited by Felix Heinzer and Christoph von Schönborn (Fribourg: Éditions
universitaires, 1982), 235; Aaron Riches, “After Chalcedon: The Oneness of Christ and
the Dyothelite Mediation of His Theandric Unity,” Modern Theology 22, no. 4 (April 2008),
203–204.
139 Karl Rahner, “Jesus Christ–The Meaning of Life,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 21,
trans. Hugh M. Riley, (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 208–219; Karl Rahner, Karl Rahner
in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965–1982, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert
Biallowons, trans. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 127. The full quotation
from the interview, admittedly parenthetical, runs, “Perhaps it is possible to be an
orthodox Nestorian or an orthodox Monophysite. If this were the case, then I would
prefer to be an orthodox Nestorian.”
140 Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 37–38.
141 Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 79.
142 Pitstick, Light in Darkness, 145.
143 Strikingly, Pitstick does not mention Cosmic Liturgy or include it in her bibliography. As far
as a critique of Balthasar against the standard of Maximus is concerned, this is a fatal
lacuna.
144 See n. 112 above.

Person, Mission,
and the Analogy of Being
Introduction
IN the previous chapter I offered an interpretation of the Council of
Chalcedon as a defining moment within a broader trajectory of Christological
reflection, whose metaphysical implications were made explicit in the Neo-
Chalcedonian theology of the sixth century. Balthasar is a reader sensitive to
the limitations of Chalcedonian Christology and its further development,
pointing in Cosmic Liturgy to dimensions of the Chalcedonian definition
which required significant philosophical refinement, most importantly the
nature-hypostasis distinction, with an emphasis on the ontological priority of
hypostasis. More recent historical-critical and theological interpretations of
Chalcedon and of Maximus as a Neo-Chalcedonian thinker serve to reinforce
Balthasar’s reading. Lars Thunberg, for example, characterizes Maximus’s
theology as fundamentally continuous with Cyrilline and Neo-Chalcedonian
Christology in the very first chapter of his detailed study of Maximus’s
theological anthropology, Microcosm and Mediator.1 In this chapter, we will
examine how Balthasar draws on the Maximian person-nature distinction and
carries it forward in his theology, with the principal aim of ascertaining the
specifically Christological implications. The Neo-Chalcedonian outlines of
Balthasar’s Christology will emerge with greater clarity not only on the basis of
his dogmatic starting point but also in the constructive contributions that he
makes to a theology of the Incarnation through the governing motif of
mission. In the Theo-Drama, Balthasar argues that the concept of person must
be derived from Christology and Trinitarian doctrine rather than from a
general philosophical model of personhood. This Christocentric re-envisioning
of personhood enables Balthasar to hold together the identity of the person of

Jesus Christ with the Logos along with the integrity of a conscious human
subjectivity (a point that will warrant more ample investigation in Chapter 3,
on Christ’s consciousness). I will also show how the primacy of the order of
person in distinction from nature furthermore allows Balthasar to speak of
Christ as the concrete analogia entis and to emphasize the positive dimension
(via eminentiae) of the Christological analogy of being, resulting in a vigorous
endorsement and application of the communicatio idiomatum.
Balthasar’s most extensive Christological exploration of the concept of
person is found in Theo-Drama III: The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ.2
This volume will provide the focus and to some extent the structure of this
chapter, but it will also be essential to make reference to other volumes of
Theo-Drama in which Balthasar elaborates his general understanding of person
in the realm of anthropology (especially Theo-Drama I and II) and to the short
but important volume, A Theology of History,3 in which Balthasar outlines his
approach to Christ as the concrete analogia entis. In the terms of traditional
Catholic Christology, this chapter will emphasize the constitutio ontologica of
Christ while the following chapter will have Christ’s constitutio psychologica as
its focus. A separation of chapters does not, however, imply a methodological
separation between the two aspects of Christology. For Balthasar, ontology and
psychology mutually inhere: being and consciousness coincide. Both a
“Christology of being” and a “Christology of consciousness” are necessary.4 I
have chosen to emphasize the ontological aspect first in order to show how
Balthasar draws forward and reworks classical Christology, with its ontological
conception of person. Chapter 3 will show how Balthasar correlates a revised
Christological metaphysics with the data of consciousness and the New
Testament’s attestation to the historical mission and self-understanding of
Jesus.
“Person” in Modern Christology

Modern historians and theologians make an important distinction in the
attempt to understand the development of hypostasis in classical Christology,
that is, that the Fathers were working with an ontological concept of hypostasis
Person, Mission, and the Analogy of Being 63
and not a concept based, as in modern approaches, on self-consciousness.

Balthasar makes it clear, for instance, that hypostasis for Maximus is an
ontological term. In Maximus’s theology, he notes, “Unity of consciousness is
not the foundation of hypostatic unity; for this reason, we will have to be very
careful in using the word ‘person.’”5 Classical approaches to “person,” whether
under the Cappadocian aspect of concrete individualized nature or under the
Neo-Chalcedonian aspect of self-subsistence, always retain a grounding in
essential being. This unbroken connection to the spectrum of being is
maintained even when person emerges as a category “transcending” and
“possessing” nature and as a centre of freedom, as in Maximus. We recall that
while Maximus sees the divine hypostasis of the Logos as “possessing” the
natures, still the incarnate hypostasis of Christ is “nothing but” the natures
(“from which, in which and which he is”). The distinction between essence
and existence, the shift toward “existential” categories, and the inclusion of
rational consciousness and freedom in the definition of hypostasis can only be
glimpsed as implicit undertones of the development of ontological categories.6
Balthasar emphasizes that Maximus’s understanding of hypostasis/person is still
ontologically grounded and not a turn to a modern, nominalist form of
personalism devoid of metaphysical content.
If this distinction, between a concept of person as an ontological category
and a concept of person based on the conscious subject, is important in
understanding the development of the concept of hypostasis-person,
nonetheless it remains precisely a distinction and not a separation between the
order of being and the order of consciousness. Walter Kasper notes that with
John Locke, “person” has come to be defined in modernity in terms of self-
consciousness, to the point of severing “person” from being:
This first of all led to isolating the subject from the world of things. Although the
attempt was repeatedly made to construct an ontology in the perspective of
subjectivity, the problem of mediation between being and consciousness, substance
and subject, act and being, remained a fundamental difficulty for modern thought,
and persists in the still fashionable habit of opposing personalism and ontology.7
If the doctrine of Chalcedon is to be mediated in modern anthropological

terms, the concept of person cannot be devoid of metaphysical content, even
as it takes on the subjective dimensions of consciousness and freedom. To

clarify and concretize this point, I will examine the example of Piet
Schoonenberg’s study, The Christ, which provides interesting points of
comparison and contrast with Balthasar. Schoonenberg makes the
Chalcedonian Christological doctrine his starting point, and unlike several of
the modern commentators on Chalcedon whom we encountered in the
previous chapter, Schoonenberg recognizes that the personal unity of Christ—
and not only the “two-natures” doctrine—was a major and irreversible
affirmation of Chalcedon. But the modern shift from discussion of ontological
person to discussion of Christ’s human psychological “ego,” or centre of
consciousness, does not obviate the problem of Christ’s hypostatic unity.8
Ontological personhood and psychological subjectivity cannot be cleft cleanly
apart from one another: if two psychological “subjects,” “egos,” or act-centres
are posited in Christ, what does “personal unity” ultimately mean? As
Schoonenberg puts it:
What in fact is an ontological person who does not exist in consciousness and
freedom even psychologically as an ego and act-center? And conversely: is a
psychological act-center or consciousness completely an ego or a self-consciousness if
the ontological person who bears it is not constantly consciously present in it,
certainly as co-conscious, but also thus defining the content of consciousness? If in
Jesus Christ the human ego or act-center stands psychologically outside his
ontological person, it is then clearly not the ego or act-center of Jesus. And if therein
the ontological person of Christ is not itself conscious and does not speak to us, then
Jesus as man is in this regard not different from us and the Christ or the Son has
disappeared behind the man Jesus without being of significance for our salvation.9
The danger, then, in positing a human act-centre apart from the ontological,
hypostatic centre of Christ’s existence is that the ontological person appears to
exist “above the fray.” As Schoonenberg notes quite rightly, such a position
has serious soteriological implications, casting doubt on the reality of the
Incarnation.
Schoonenberg’s response is to affirm the unity of Christ’s hypostatic
existence, but then, in a radical move, to regard Christ’s personhood as a
human personhood. Thus, for Schoonenberg, the Neo-Chalcedonian order of
enhypostasization is reversed:
Now not the human but the divine nature in Christ is anhypostatic, with the
proviso, moreover, that this is valid inasmuch as we do not know the person of the
Word outside the man Jesus. However, it is primarily not the human nature which is
enhypostatic in the divine person, but the divine nature in the human person.10
Schoonenberg argues that Chalcedon itself did not identify the one hypostasis
of Christ with the pre-existent Logos, but rather understood the hypostasis as
“the result of a concurrence of the natures”: the explicit identification of the
hypostasis with the pre-existent Logos occurred only with the Neo-
Chalcedonian interpretation of Chalcedon.11 Thus, in his own idiosyncratic
and quite sophisticated way, Schoonenberg is arguing for a “pure”
Chalcedonianism purged of Neo-Chalcedonian accretions. The historical
overview which I presented in Chapter 1, however, casts doubt on the
hermeneutic of discontinuity that Schoonenberg applies to Chalcedon and
Neo-Chalcedonian developments. While we cannot enter into a full
theological critique of Schoonenberg’s interpretation of Chalcedon, what is
important to note is Schoonenberg’s presupposition that to be fully human it
is necessary to be a human person, “person” being understood both
ontologically and psychologically. To be a person is to be limited by
individuality, and to have consciousness and freedom; these are ascribed in the
first instance to the human being: “Personhood first of all is said of the
man.”12 It could be argued that this equation of humanity with human
personhood is a common assumption, and that it is difficult if not
unintelligible, based on the modern conception of person as a centre of self-
consciousness, to speak of Christ as “fully human” yet not “a human person.”
Schoonenberg is tapping into this common-sense approach to the personhood
of Christ. But this common-sense modern notion of person also neglects the
development of hypostasis as a category of Trinitarian theology and Christology:
Schoonenberg’s proposal that the divine nature is enhypostasized in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth could be taken to mean “concretization,”
“particularization,” “historicization.” But the divine nature is not rendered a
reality which it was not “previously,” nor can the man Jesus in his created
nature be said to be both cause and product of the Incarnation in the way that
the Logos can. Schoonenberg is playing rather unhelpfully with the meaning
of hypostasis and enhypostasia.
I have permitted myself this brief excursus on Schoonenberg’s Christology
(with which Balthasar, interestingly, does not interact in Theo-Drama) because
it illustrates both the need to think through Christ’s personal unity as
ontological and psychological, and the need to find a concept of personhood
which can sustain such a unity. Schoonenberg locates the unity of Christ’s
person in his human existence, but this move is theologically costly: it reduces
personhood to an anthropological term and severs the analogy between
creaturely and Trinitarian personhood which is indispensable to the Christian
elaboration of personhood.13 Balthasar shares Schoonenberg’s recognition that
ontological and psychological personhood cannot be treated separately,
repeatedly rejecting the separation of a personalist theology from the question
of being.14 In Theo-Logic I Balthasar adverts to the fundamental unity of being
and consciousness by way of an etymological examination of the German
Bewußtsein: “In the act of thinking, a consciousness [Bewußtsein] is unveiled,
hence, present to itself with such immediacy that the two components of the
word [Bewußt and Sein] admit of no separation whatsoever.”15 Thus, what he
says about person in his constructive Christology in the Theo-Drama and
elsewhere is based on a commitment to this ultimate unity of being and
consciousness (ens et verum convertuntur).16 His approach to person is
phenomenological, but the purpose of this approach is not a rejection of the
ontological formulation of Chalcedon—two natures in one hypostasis—but an
illumination of Chalcedonian doctrine under the aspect of consciousness.17
Like Schoonenberg, Balthasar stands firmly against the bifurcation of Christ’s
psychological constitution into two interfacing act-centres, of the Logos and of
the man Jesus. In contrast to Schoonenberg, however, Balthasar retains a
fundamentally Neo-Chalcedonian approach which identifies the person of
Christ, and therefore also the centre of his consciousness and freedom, with
the pre-existent Logos: the prime analogate for personhood is not the human
person but the person of the Son in Trinitarian relationship. Thus, Balthasar
describes the “the thorniest problem in Christology” in this fashion: “Here we
have someone who is entirely man, an unabridged human being, who ‘became
like us in all things but sin’; how then, when he uses the word ‘I’, can he be
speaking, not as a human person, but as divine?”18 As we shall see, while he
accepts the Neo-Chalcedonian Christological use of “person,” Balthasar fills its
content differently, such that Christ becomes the archetypal person in his
identity with his mission and thus defines “from above” what it is to be a
person.
Person as a Theological Concept

In Cosmic Liturgy, Balthasar reads Maximus as grasping incipiently toward
the Scholastic real distinction between essence and existence. At Maximus’s
stage of reflection on hypostatic being, hypostasis remains a liminal concept,
referring on one hand to the aspect of essence (recalling the Cappadocian
definition of hypostasis as notae individuantes) and on the other to the aspect of
existence.19 Thus, there can be no “clean break” between essence and
existence: “It is impossible, in the end, to carry through a clean distinction
between individualizing characteristics in the order of essence and those in the
order of person, because such a clean distinction simply cannot be drawn
between the ‘order of being’ and the ‘order of existing.’”20 Balthasar finds in
Maximus’s notion of the synthetic hypostasis of Christ, however, an implicit
move toward personal and dialogical categories: what begins to emerge is a
vision of being as “the sphere in which an intellectual substance is called into
existence by immediate, personal intimacy with God, and invited to become a
person.”21 Balthasar’s meditation on this point is worth quoting in extenso:
It is, for this reason, the sphere in which—in the depths of the mystery of God’s own
freedom—the one who is called can also be, at some point in history, the one who
himself calls: in which the answer to the primeval Word calling us forth can, at some
point in history, be brought to a fulfillment beyond its own creaturehood and
become that primeval Word itself. This is only possible because the primeval Word
is, within the trinitarian reality of God, always an answer to the call of the Father and
can therefore—within the economy of salvation—include and bring to fulfillment all
the personal reality of creatures as responses to that call in his own primeval answer.
All of this certainly continues the direction of Maximus’ Christology. It only
presupposes that one detach the concepts purposefully from their undifferentiated
philosophical and theological usage and set them in a context derived exclusively
from revelation. In such a context, hypostasis would then no longer be useable

simply as a general category of created being (as it was in the sixth century, when
every created essence had its hypostasis) but would have to be limited first of all to
human, intellectual persons; further, one would have to resist the temptation simply
to subsume the hypostasis of Christ univocally under a concept of person formed in
this way.22
These paragraphs do not appear in the first edition of Kosmische Liturgie, but
were added in the 1961 edition.23 What we encounter here, then, is not a
historical-critical reading of Maximus’s Christology so much as a
characteristically Balthasarian intervention, in language that Balthasar will
employ in his later works, particularly in the Theo-Drama. Thus we perceive in
nuce the central motifs of Balthasar’s mission-Christology. In Christ, the one
who calls and the one called are identical; this is so because the one who calls
is already always constituted as response (Antwort) to the Father within the life
of the Trinity. Now, however, taken up into this Trinitarian dynamic,
creaturely personhood is elevated and fulfilled. Balthasar thus understands his
own Christologically determined concept of person to be in fundamental
continuity with the Neo-Chalcedonian development of the concept of
hypostasis, and more specifically composite hypostasis. At the same time
Balthasar desires to push beyond Neo-Chalcedonian metaphysics: his concept
of person is distinct in not being a philosophical concept pressed into
theological service (as he suggests is the case for the notions of physis and
hypostasis in Trinitarian and Christological doctrinal history), but a theological
concept, “derived exclusively from revelation,” whose fullest meaning cannot
be illuminated without the encounter with the tri-personal God in Jesus
Christ.
If the passage just quoted from the second edition of Cosmic Liturgy
constitutes a kind of programmatic statement, the first task that Balthasar
identifies is to differentiate philosophical and theological concepts of person.
In the essay, “On the Concept of Person,” Balthasar notes that the nature-
person problem appeared with the fourth- and fifth-century Christological
controversies, and that even the modern, secular concept of person owes
something to this origin in Christian revelation and theology:
Historically, the word has vacillated between two very different realms: that of
common sense (where the everyday understanding may be rendered more precise in
moral theology, law, and philosophy) and that of Christian theology, in which the
concept of person acquires a completely new sense first in trinitarian doctrine and
then in christology. Now in the Christian era, the general (or philosophical) concept
must already exist if it is to receive its special theological content. Yet the unique
trinitarian or Christological content that the concept acquires in theology casts its
light back upon the general (or philosophical) understanding.24
Balthasar thus undertakes a form of corrective ressourcement, namely to identify

the original problematic of Christology (always undergirded by Trinitarian
theology) and to show that the philosophical elaboration of the concept of
person was unable to offer a solution to the theological issue of Christ’s person
and natures.
Similarly, in Theo-Drama III Balthasar casts his eye once again over the
history of the notion of person and argues that the great classical
Christological debates, between those who emphasized the divine “I” in Jesus
and those who emphasized a fully human consciousness, were destined to
stalemate “because the available philosophical concepts were drawn exclusively
from the natural spectrum of the conscious subject.”25 Echoing the
conclusions reached in Cosmic Liturgy, Balthasar states, “The Fathers did not
get beyond describing the person (not distinguished from the conscious
subject) as that which is ‘special,’ ‘indivisible,’ ‘incommunicable,’ ‘for itself’ or
‘in itself.’”26 Balthasar further charts the aporiae of patristic Christology
introduced by the application of Trinitarian concepts of nature and person to
Christology, and by the lack of terminological precision around the notion of
person. He notes once again with Grillmeier that the Cappadocian
determination of person as substance individualized by general and specific
qualities never reaches the order of the personal.27 He reaffirms that Nestorius
was “a prisoner of the (Cappadocian) inability to distinguish individuality
from person.”28 Balthasar rehearses the logos-anthrōpos/logos-sarx distinction
previously exposited in Cosmic Liturgy, arriving at the following articulation of
the Chalcedonian problematic:
How, using persona, could the distinction be shown, in Christ, between the divinity
of the person and the humanity of his conscious nature—a nature that was whole and
entire, not merely “half,” that is, sarx? And how, using persona, was it possible fully to
do justice to Cyril’s central concern, namely, that this Person was not an
epiphenomenon coming to light in the wake of the union of two hypostases or
prosōpa, but the locus of God’s saving design?29
Two tasks were required after Chalcedon, says Balthasar. The first, to show
how a human being endowed with reason and free will can be God, was most
adequately fulfilled by Maximus.30 The second task was to find concepts to
elucidate what was meant by “person,” and Balthasar regards patristic
Christology as having failed in this task. For all the advances forged by
Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of Jerusalem in finding a Christologically
adequate notion of hypostasis, the concept of enhypostasia remained limited by
the general-individual scheme of the Cappadocian definition and by univocity
across all levels of being.31
According to Balthasar, a general metaphysical notion of hypostasis and a
general inability to distinguish between the spiritual subject and the person
continue to plague Christological developments in the Middle Ages. This
blurring of the individual spiritual subject with person is evident in Boethius’s
famous definition, persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia. Balthasar
notes that this classical definition also makes it very difficult to apply the
concept of person to God without falling into tritheism.32 The sixth-century
Roman deacon Rusticus defined person by the ability of an individual rational
nature to remain in itself (manere in seipso), and understood the human nature
of Christ to be “the property of the subsistence of the divine Logos,” hence
not a person. But Balthasar asks, “How can an essentially self-subsistent being,
equipped with reason and freedom, be the ‘property’ of another? Surely the
latter, by definition, must rob it of its self-possession.”33 The problem
identified by Balthasar is the univocal ascription of personhood to the
hypostasis of the divine Logos and to the human subject. Person is still a
function of nature, and so the affirmation of only one person in Christ, the
divine person, renders the status of Christ’s human nature problematic. Only
by complex theories involving the replacement of the created act of being or
the positing of a second act of being of the human nature can the absence of a
human person in Christ be explained. This is precisely the kind of univocity

which leads Piet Schoonenberg to ascribe an exclusively human personhood to
Christ. But the denial of human personhood to Christ need not imply a
denigration of his human nature. Balthasar seeks to overcome this univocity
by reserving “person” to an exclusively theological context, in contradistinction
to the conscious subject.
Person and Conscious Subject

Balthasar argues for a moratorium on the use of “person” within a general
metaphysical or anthropological framework, saying, “We can do without the
concept of ‘person’ much longer than we think.”34 The general concept of
“person” is more accurately expressed as “conscious subject” or “spiritual
subject” [Geistsubjekt].35 At the level of all living beings, all individuals of a
species share a specific nature, but each is also an incommunicable individual,
“for itself.” On the human level, “nature” is marked by consciousness, “the
inclusion of all conscious subjects [Geistsubjekte] (equipped with reflexio completa
or self-consciousness) in human nature.”36 It is important to recognize that
Balthasar is not denying anything to individual human beings that a general
philosophical understanding of person ascribes, whether on ontological or
psychological planes, that is to say, incommunicability, freedom and
consciousness. He is simply re-naming this kind of “personhood” as
conscious/spiritual subjectivity to highlight that personhood in its theological
sense exists only in nuce, as an initial and imperfect image, within the natural
order.37
While both classical and modern accounts of personhood are able to shed
light on particular dimensions of the person, such as incommunicability, self-
subsistence, consciousness, and freedom, Balthasar argues that no guarantee of
personal identity can be proffered by philosophy or the human sciences. Only
revelation, in the synthetic person of Jesus as the incarnate Son, guarantees the
fullness of personal identity. Much of the first three volumes of Theo-Drama is
an examination of how individual personal identity can be secured,
culminating in Balthasar’s treatment of Christological mission-personhood. At
a phenomenological level, the individual experiences herself as unique and
incommunicable, and yet this experience is not yet the experience of being a
person: “The conscious subject knows that he is such; he knows he is human in
a unique and incommunicable way. But does he also know who he is?”38
Balthasar thus recapitulates the question posed at the end of the first volume
of Theo-Drama, a question not of essence but of personal identity: “The
question that has to be asked is not, ‘What kind of being is man?’ but ‘Who
am I?’”39 What, Balthasar asks, constitutes and secures the positivity of the
concrete individual qua individual, over and against definitions of common
essence? Balthasar surveys attempts to address this most fundamental question
of human existence, from ancient Stoicism to modern psychology, sociology,
and philosophy. Balthasar’s discussion of role as “acceptance of limitation”
and as “alienation” is too wide-ranging to enter into here, but certain salient
points may be highlighted which elucidate Balthasar’s approach to the concept
of person. First, Balthasar’s discussion of “role” as the intra-mundane analogue
to divine “mission” implies that the question of the individual’s identity is the
very condition of possibility for there being a “theo-drama.” The world as a
theatre of interaction among finite freedoms and between finite and infinite
freedoms requires that there be actors, unique subjects who experience
themselves as unique, incommunicable and free, even if the question of the
ultimate ground of individual identity remains obscured. Second, concurring
with Neo-Chalcedonian Christological thought and the direction of Maximian
ontology, Balthasar insists on the personal as the highest determination of
ontology, and rejects all claims that “person” is subordinate to, or the passive
product of, nature. Thus, to highlight just one example, in his examination of
Meister Eckhart’s approach to person and individual identity, Balthasar raises
the concerns that Eckhart “regards the personal trinitarian process as
something penultimate in God” and that in Eckhart’s anthropology human
nature is “already more interior to the ‘I’ than the ‘I’ itself.”40 For Balthasar,
there is nothing “behind” or “beyond” the personal. Balthasar’s comments on
Hegel’s notion of the “generalized individual” at the end of Theo-Drama I
further exemplify Balthasar’s commitment to the primacy of the order of
person; he foreshadows his understanding of Christ’s person as absolutely
unique and universal by rejecting Hegel’s “one-sidedly” universalizing spirit by
which “no personalizing vocation is imparted to the individual.”41 For Hegel,

says Balthasar, “the ‘I’ as such is not sustained, in fact it declines to the level of
‘an element of minimal significance.’”42 Hegel offers an extreme example of
philosophical attempts to secure the individual within a vision of the whole,
which never achieve their end because they cannot attain to the level of
“person” theologically conceived.
Person and Intersubjectivity

According to Balthasar, all attempts to define the conscious subject
empirically as a unique “who” fail to secure personal identity, since they offer
no more than transitory and contingent characteristics based on fortuitous
historical circumstances: “This individual, under different conditions, could
have become quite a different subject.”43 Looking back to the development of
the concept of hypostasis described in Chapter 1, we can note that the
problems with modern empirical perspectives on personhood are similar to
those found with the Cappadocian definition of hypostasis as the sum of the
notae individuantes: neither probes adequately the surplus of incommunic-
ability, on the one hand, or the primordial dimension of relationality, on the
other, which Balthasar sees as necessary to an elaboration of personal identity.
A more hopeful, but still unstable basis for securing the identity of the
individual conscious subject is an interpersonal approach. In Theo-Drama I,
Balthasar claims that modern dialogical philosophers (in particular Martin
Buber, Ferdinand Ebner and Franz Rosenzweig) most nearly approach a
Christian vision of the person. Indeed, these philosophers appeal to Jewish
and Christian scripture and tradition to develop their intersubjective theories
of personal identity: “Doubtless this means that the ‘discovery’ of the ‘dialogue
principle’ has something to do with reflection on the Bible of the Old and
New Covenants.”44 Balthasar considers these “dialogicians” to be working at
the very threshold of philosophy and theology: “The dialogicians…are
philosophers who themselves need theology in order to develop their thought
to completion.”45
The value of the dialogical principle lies in its retrieval of the primordial
relational aspects of personhood. Against the post-Cartesian stress on
individual self-consciousness as the basis for personhood, the intersubjective

path asserts that “existence as a person comes about only in the relationship
between the I and the Thou.”46 Balthasar himself frequently, and at pivotal
moments, invokes the phenomenon of the mother’s smile as an unsurpassable
moment in the development of self-consciousness and personhood. In Glory of
the Lord V, the awakening of the child’s consciousness of its distinctive self by
the mother’s smile constitutes the first of four “differences” which lie at the
heart of Balthasar’s metaphysics:
[The child’s] “I” awakens in the experience of a “Thou”: in its mother’s smile
through which it learns that it is contained, affirmed and loved in a relationship
which is incomprehensively encompassing, already actual, sheltering and nourishing.
The body which it snuggles into, a soft, warm and nourishing kiss, is a kiss of love in
which it can take shelter because it has been sheltered there a priori. The awakening
of its consciousness is a late occurrence, in comparison with this basic mystery of
unfathomable depth. It finally sees only what always has been, and can therefore only
confirm it.47
In this phenomenological approach, Balthasar attempts to transcend a purely

formal, ontological definition of person, whether by way of notae individuantes
or as self-subsistence: the movement toward “personalization” involves
“awakening,” that is to say, involves the individual’s growing consciousness,
through the simultaneous experience of love and alterity, of being unique and
being set over against other unique beings. In one sense, personhood thus
construed is something “grown into” in consciousness; in another sense, the
awakening of this consciousness bespeaks something prior to the individual in
her self-subsistence: “The experience of being granted entrance into a
sheltering and encompassing world is one which for all incipient, developing
and mature consciousness cannot be superseded.”48 This inchoate notion of
oneself as person, therefore, cannot be distilled into either purely a priori
ontological or purely a posteriori psychological categories.
Balthasar is thus highly sympathetic to the primacy of relationality as
retrieved by modern dialogical philosophy. The dialogue principle is limited,
however, insofar as it draws only on the horizontal axis of revelation, in other
words, intersubjectivity at the human level without explicit reference to the
God-creature axis. On the horizontal plane, it is impossible to secure the

identity of the individual, since, first, the I-Thou encounter is always subject to
contingency and fortuitousness, and, second, one’s identity is never
constituted exclusively by any one encounter with another, but by various
encounters: “In each of these, the ‘I’ is endowed with a new and different
name and nature: Who am I, then, in the end?”49 The markers of identity are
thus caught in a web of contingency in which the individual cannot be
conferred with absolute meaning and affirmed in her uniqueness. The
contingency and instability of “who” the individual is, whether defined
empirically or interpersonally, means that the individual is always in danger of
being absorbed by a greater whole.
The Personalizing Address of God

The only sure foundation for personal identity, for the uniqueness of the
individual amidst other individuals, is to be found in the address of God to
each individual. The subject becomes a “person” when addressed by the
Absolute Subject:
It is unavoidably clear that a positive answer can only be expected from the vertical
axis of biblical revelation…. Only through the “name” that God uses to address the
individual human being is he validly and definitively distinct from every other
human being; only thus is he no longer simply an individual of a species but a
unique person. Neither pre-Christian thought nor mysticism nor idealism; neither
psychology nor sociology were equipped, or even authorized, to give this answer.50
In the important section of Theo-Drama II, “Infinite and Finite Freedom,”

Balthasar explains that theo-drama is possible only when “God” or someone
representing God steps on to the stage as “a person” over against other
characters. While philosophical approaches to God would be reluctant to
ascribe such personhood to God, in the high periods of religious drama, “God
was able to appear on stage as a free Someone over against free worldly
beings.”51 Against static philosophical portrayals of the Absolute, Balthasar
grounds the theo-drama in the freedom-bestowing freedom of God:
The “Absolute” has a sovereign ability, out of its own freedom, to create and send
forth finite but genuinely free beings (which is bound to cause the philosopher the
greatest embarrassment) in such a way that, without vitiating the infinite nature of
God’s freedom, a genuine opposition of freedoms can come about.52
While Balthasar’s use of “person” at this point in the theological-anthropo-

logical volume of Theo-Drama still requires significant explication—which only
Christology and the doctrine of God can provide—it is clear that personhood
from a theo-dramatic perspective cannot be extricated from the realm of
freedom. Nor, again, can personhood be separated from self-presence and
consciousness, since, as was already apparent in Theo-Drama I, the bestowal of
personhood is connected to the revelation of unique identity, the dawning of
awareness that one is not merely a member of a species or nature, but also a
unique individual among others. Thus, Balthasar says:
We are concentrating on the fundamental paradox that both things are unveiled in
my own presence-to-myself: namely, the absolute incommunicability of my own being
(as “I”) and the unlimited communicability of being as such (which is not “used up”
by the fullness of all the worldly existence in which it subsists). It would be a mistake
to attempt to clarify this duality by attributing unlimitedness one-sidedly to being as
such, while regarding limitation as a characteristic of my “nature” (as one man
among other men, as one individual of a species). For it is precisely in the experience
of being “I” (and no one else) that I pass beyond all limiting knowledge of my nature
and touch being (reality) in its uniqueness.53
What is revealed to the subject is the real distinction between essence and
existence. Earlier, we saw that Balthasar regards Maximus as straining toward
the difference between essence and existence as articulated in Thomistic
philosophy. Balthasar’s own version of this difference is within his develop-
ment of the “fourfold difference” in Glory of the Lord V; this fourfold difference
stands at the centre of Balthasar’s entire metaphysics, and certainly grounds
his elaboration of personhood. The first difference is the intersubjective
difference represented by the interface of mother and child. The second and
third distinctions are the difference between being (Sein) and beings (Seienden),
and the converse.54 One recognizes the inexhaustibility of the act of being,
which is not limited to the enumeration of actual existents; at the same time
one experiences one’s own uniqueness amidst countless other unique beings.
Here, Balthasar reverts to language of both Maximian and Thomistic
resonance: “In this primal experience, while I can distinguish between my
‘mode of being’ (modus subsistentiae, tropos tēs hyparxeōs) and my grasp of
(universal) being, I cannot separate them.”55 This presence to oneself as a
unique “I” involves an openness to being, and therefore involves freedom, the
freedom to affirm being and beings: “Present to ourselves in the light of being,
we possess an inalienable core of freedom that cannot be split open.”56 This
finite freedom is both intellectual and volitive—indivisibly, Balthasar says. But
it is important to note that Balthasar does not yet speak of the subject
possessed of reason and free will as “person.” Freedom, like self-subsistence, is
constitutive of the person, but not sufficient, for personhood requires the free
self-communication of God to the individual subject.
The conscious subject is not only addressed or confronted by God, but in
this address also called and commissioned. Finite freedom is thus invited to
share in divine freedom:
Something of the radiance of God’s freedom and uniqueness falls on the essence and
countenance of the chosen one, lifting him out of the purely natural species. It sets
him apart for a face-to-face meeting with God; yet this does not transport him from
the world but equips him to undertake a God-given task among his human
brethren.57
What in Theo-Drama I Balthasar characterizes as naming, with examples from

the Old Testament of God’s bestowal of name and identity,58 has the added
dimension in Theo-Drama III of the bestowal of mission: “It is when God
addresses the conscious subject, tells him who he is and what he means to the
eternal God of truth and shows him the purpose of his existence—that is,
imparts a distinctive and divinely authorized mission—that we can say of a
conscious subject that he is a ‘person.’”59 Mission, then, is not accidental to
personal identity, even though in all cases save one, Jesus Christ, mission is
bestowed a posteriori and through human freedom can be entirely or partially
unfulfilled. Yet “in the plan of God,” says Balthasar, “each conscious subject is
created for the sake of his mission—a mission that makes him a person.”60
Such mission must be construed not as an act of personal autonomy, but
rather as a participation in the archetypal personal—and personalizing—mission

of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ: The Archetypal Person

The archetypal narrative of the bestowal of personal identity, transcending
the naming of the prophets and other Old Testament figures, is the address of
the Father at Jesus’ baptism: “You are my beloved Son.”61 Balthasar argues that
while the mission of prophets gives an inkling of the possibility of the
complete identity of a person with a mission, such an identity in an absolute
sense evades the categories of anthropology: its appearance cannot be foreseen
or deduced “from below.”62 Jesus is imparted a mission that is at once
universal and utterly unique: “Here, indeed, in the mission of Jesus, where an
exact definition of personal uniqueness coincides with its universal
significance, we have the irrefutable expression of his divinity. He receives this
divinity, for we are speaking of a mission that is imparted to him.”63 In Jesus,
unlike all other persons, there is therefore no interval or diastasis between his
human conscious subjectivity and his divine person. All the questions and
various approaches to the question “Who am I?” come to a head in the
archetype of personhood, the person of Jesus Christ; indeed, the unique a
priori identity of Jesus’ person and mission is not only the prime analogate but
the very condition of possibility for the a posteriori personalization of all other
conscious subjects. It is important to note the weight that Balthasar places on
the archetypal mission-personhood of Jesus: for Balthasar, this Christological
centering of personhood is the only adequate response to the anthropological
question of individual identity; at the same time, theologically, it is the only
adequate approach to the person of Jesus himself, in whom created
consciousness and freedom do not give way to divinity but express, in terms of
mission, his divine person as proceeding from the Father.
One of the most important principles in Balthasar’s Christology is the
continuity between intra-Trinitarian relations and the mission of Christ in the
economy. He frequently cites Thomas Aquinas on the transposition of processio
into missio. Regarding the identity of character (=person) and mission,
Balthasar explains, “This identity is only possible if the Person has been given
a mission, not accidentally, but as a modality of his eternal personal being, if,
as Thomas says, the Son’s missio is the economic form of his eternal processio
from the Father.”64 Thus Nicholas J. Healy comments that
the analogy (difference-in-unity) between human and divine within Christ’s person is
grounded in a more fundamental relation between Father, Son, and Spirit. In other
words, the possibility of Christ’s person being able to measure and “bridge” the
distance between created and uncreated being without in any way abrogating the
abiding distinctness of natures resides in his trinitarian mode of existence as the
eternal Son.65
Balthasar understands the Son’s person within the Trinity as constituted first
and foremost by receptivity: while affirming the unity of the hypostatic
existence of each Trinitarian person with the divine nature, Balthasar does not
characterize the hypostatic existence of each of the persons of God as
specifications of the divine nature, but rather in terms of their perichoretic
interrelatedness:
The Son’s form of existence, which makes him the Son from all eternity ([John]
17:5), is the uninterrupted reception of everything that he is, of his very self, from
the Father. It is indeed this receiving of himself which gives him his “I,” his own
inner dimension, his spontaneity, that sonship with which he can answer the Father
in a reciprocal giving.… In the selfsame act in which he receives himself (and hence
his divine understanding) he receives, too, the entire will of the Father concerning
God and the world, and assents to it as his own.66
And based on the continuity of processio and missio, the Son’s incarnate
existence is marked by the same receptivity to the Father’s will:
But if, as Saint Thomas has it, his mission in this world is the manifestation,
conformed to this world, of his being begotten (generatio), then his mode of being
here on earth will simply be the manifestation in the created sphere, the translation
into creatureliness, of this heavenly form of existence.67
Balthasar goes so far as to say that this receptivity not only specifies but
constitutes Jesus’ human individuality: “It is the fact of being he who is open,
he who receives, he who obeys and fulfills that makes him—a man, of course,
but only by making him this particular man.”68 Here, Balthasar has transposed
Neo-Chalcedonian enhypostasia into existential, obediential terms.69 Jesus is not

a human being constituted primordially by self-subsistence and individuality
who then grows into relationality; from the beginning, his human singularity is
constituted by being drawn into the eternal procession of the Son, which is
always also the event of receiving all that he is from the Father and eternally
assenting to the Father’s will.
The Person of Christ as the Concrete A nalogia Entis

At several key points in his writings Balthasar refers to Jesus Christ as the
“concrete analogy of being.”70 In A Theology of History, he says that Christ
“constitutes in himself, in the unity of his divine and human natures, the
proportion of every interval between God and man. And this unity is his
person in both natures.”71 The analogia entis, the similitude within an ever-
greater dissimilitude between God and the creature, is rendered concrete in
the person of Jesus Christ, and is thus determined by the Christological
formulation of Chalcedon: the two natures, divine and human, are united
without detriment to either in the one person. It is beyond the scope of this
study to trace Balthasar’s development of the analogia entis in any
comprehensive way.72 For our purposes, we may note that he draws on his
teacher Erich Przywara’s retrieval of the analogy of being, itself developed out
of the Fourth Lateran Council’s statement, inter Creatorem et creaturam non
potest [tanta] similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.73 In A
Theology of History Balthasar allows for a philosophical definition and universal
application of the analogia entis, against the Barthian rejection of the analogy
of being.74 But the similarity-within-greater-dissimilarity between God and the
creature finds its archetype and fulfillment in the person of Christ:
The philosophical formulation of the analogy of being is related to the measure of

Christ precisely as is world history to his history—as promise to fulfillment, the
preliminary to the definitive. He is so very much what is most concrete and most
central that in the last analysis we can only think by starting with him; every question
as to what might be if he did not exist, or if he had not become man, or if the world
had to be considered without him, is now superfluous and unnecessary.75
The analogy of being, as the formal principle governing all statements relating
God and creation, cannot be utilized etsi Christus non daretur. Philosophy is
thus transcended by and subordinated to the event of the Incarnation:
But when God reveals his inner intention—that he willed creation from all eternity;
that now, bound up with the world in the indissoluble bond of the hypostatic union,
he will never again be without the world; that he designed and predestined man as
the brother of his eternal Son become man—then it becomes clear how, without
losing its validity, the plane of philosophy is transcended.76
Thus Balthasar finds a mediating position between Barth’s replacement of the

analogia entis with the analogia fidei and the philosophically determined analogia
entis. He reads the analogia entis within the analogia fidei in such a way that the
person of Christ constitutes the “measure” of the general distance between
God and creature.
As a philosophical concept, the analogia entis cannot involve the positing
of a univocal general concept of being under which are subsumed God and
creature, a risk which Balthasar identifies in Scotism and late Scholastic
rationalism.77 Indeed, implicit in Balthasar’s discussion of the analogia entis in
Christology is the position articulated explicitly in Cosmic Liturgy, that the
principle of union in Christ cannot be described within the order of essential
being at all. The principle of union is hypostatic, and no other hypostasis than
the divine hypostasis of the Son can act as the “concrete analogia entis”:
The person of the Logos in whom the hypostatic union takes place cannot function,
in any way, as the (“higher”) unity between God and man; this person, as such, is
God. Since the person of the Logos is the ultimate union of divine and created
being, it must constitute the final proportion [Maß] between the two and hence must
be the “concrete analogia entis” itself. However, it must not in any way overstep this
analogy in the direction of identity.78
Contained within Balthasar’s use of the term “hypostatic” are all the elements
of his theological conceptualization of person: the divine person of Christ
possesses both terms of the analogy of being, created and uncreated, in
freedom; he freely “makes” himself a “synthetic person,” the “product” of the
two natures, in the event of the Incarnation and the history of his human
existence; the concrete analogia entis, therefore, is conceived of in dramatic, not

static, terms. Nicholas J. Healy’s stress on the notion of enactment is correct,
when he says that Christ does not merely “reproduce” the analogy between
God and the creature, but in fact “he enacts that relation in himself.”79
Similarly, Georges de Schrijver criticizes several earlier commentators on
Balthasar for what he calls their “overly exterior” readings (“trop
extérieure…insuffisament ancrée dans le champ de la spiritualité vécue”80) of
the Balthasarian analogia entis, resulting in a “reduction to the ontological.”
For Balthasar, says de Schrijver, the ontological plane is the general field
within which a concrete event takes place, in which a finite person allows
himself to be taken up into “correspondence with God” and becomes the
historical form and figure of divine love.81 The distinction of the orders of
essence and person that emerged in Neo-Chalcedonian Christology is central
to the concretization of the analogy of being in the person of Christ. Without
it, the divine and human natures of Christ are bound to remain in an external
relationship or to collapse into monophysitism; or, alternatively, a univocal
concept of being inclusive of divinity and humanity must be introduced as a
tertium quid. Christ then becomes a function of a more general phenomenon
rather than the efficacious archetype of the analogy between God and the
creature. But Balthasar implicitly retains the principle articulated by Maximus,
that Christ in his hypostatic existence is “out of the natures, in the natures,
and nothing but the natures,” and he is all this because of a synthesis effected
in hypostatic freedom.
In his discussion of Christ as the concrete analogia entis, Balthasar
furthermore appeals to the theme of image: humanity is made in the image of
God (Gen. 1:26), and Christ himself is the image of the invisible God (Col
1:15). Balthasar says:
The analogy between God and man means that all conscious, created nature is an
image, at a fundamental and indestructible level, of the primal Image, God; it refers
to the openness of reason and freedom exhaustively discussed in the previous
volume. And, throughout the history of Christology, the purpose and meaning of
the Incarnation of the Logos has been portrayed as the transcendent, inner elevation
of the image: it is lifted up into the primal, divine Image; or the latter is implanted
into the former.82
Balthasar here refers back to an excursus in Theo-Drama II on “The Image and

Likeness of God.”83 There, he affirms that humanity’s image-quality cannot be
forfeited, indeed that by its free, rational nature humanity is unassailably imago
Dei.84 And yet, as in the theological anthropology of Irenaeus of Lyons,
humanity must grow toward the “likeness” of God. Human nature’s image-
quality lies in the openness of human reason and freedom, which are yet to be
determined and actualized—that is to say, yet to be personalized. Again,
Balthasar must be read in a Christological key, and it is in Christ that the
image is assimilated and elevated. Indeed, humanity can be understood in its
nature as the image of God precisely because Christ in his person is “primal,
divine Image”:
Infinite freedom itself produces an Image, the eternal Son, within the Godhead, thus
laying the foundation in him for the images of finite creatures. Accordingly, the
assimilation of finite freedom to infinite has an infinite prototype [Urbild] as its ideal
and goal, but all the same it is an image [Bild], and an incarnate one at that.85
The imaging of God in creation, then, is dynamic and personal, grounded in

the person of the Son within the Trinity as image of the Father. Balthasar
describes the hypostatic-Trinitarian basis for creation’s imaging of God in
another part of his discussion of finite and infinite freedoms in Theo-Drama II,
which deals specifically with consciousness of the self not just according to
nature but in one’s individual mode of being, tropos tēs hyparxeōs:
If, from this point, we wished to make an abrupt transition to the province of
theology, the first result would be that communicated being is not only in general an
“image of God”—in whom all beings participate in order to have any being at all and
who, in his self-communication, is always richer than the sum of all who thus
participate—but it is actually an image of the three-personal God, in whom the
incommunicability of the hypostases is one with the unity of “essence” in each of them.
However, this image is only visible to one who is assured of the uniqueness of his
finite person, and ultimately he cannot have this assurance unless God’s word has
told him, thereby guaranteeing that he “shares in the divine nature.”86
Created being in general is thus the product of the overflowing goodness of

God (bonum diffusivum sui) and hence has a participatory image-character by the
very fact of its existence; but Balthasar locates the most intensive created
participation and imaging of God—the triune God— in hypostatic existence,

and specifically in the receptivity to God’s address and commissioning that
constitutes one fully as “person.” Trinitarian differentiation as the basis for
personhood becomes an even stronger theme in Theo-Drama III, where it
becomes clear that to be constituted as a person is not only to be an “I” in
encounter with the ultimate “Thou” but to enter into participation in the
always already occurring dynamic of Trinitarian personhood-in-relation. To
“share in the divine nature,” to use the language of the Fathers and of the
liturgy, is not to be depersonalized, but rather to be assured definitively of
one’s utterly unique personhood as an image of the tri-personal life of God.
The Primacy of the A nalogia Proportionalitatis

Balthasar ensures that the analogia entis in its Christological form does not
fall back into non-personal categories by his emphasis on the analogia
proportionalitatis rather than the analogia attributionis in establishing the
ontological relationship between God, Christ and the creature. The most
frequent appeal to analogy in logic is to the analogia attributionis, the analogy of
attribution, which posits a common attribute to two distinct objects.87 For
instance, to call God “good” is to ascribe goodness to God in a supereminent
way, recognizing a certain comparability with the human experience of
intramundane goodness but without univocity. The similitude between God
and the creature exists within an ever greater dissimilitude, as taught by the
Fourth Lateran Council and emphasized by Balthasar’s mentor Przywara. The
analogy of attribution in itself says nothing about an intrinsic relation between
the objects themselves, but only posits extrinsically a similarity based on a
relationship to the predicate.88 Thus, if the analogy of attribution is not
grounded within a metaphysics of participation, it runs the danger, as
Balthasar suggests of Scotus and Suárez, of falling either into equivocity or
univocity.89 For Balthasar, the metaphysical basis for the analogia attributionis is
provided by another kind of analogy, the analogia proportionalitatis. This type of
analogy is between two proportions, between two relations, or, as Thomas
Dalzell says, “the analogy is rooted in the likeness between the internal
orderings of…two things.”90 Balthasar brings the analogia proportionalitatis to
the fore when, drawing on the Thomistic real distinction between essence and
existence, he avers that the non-subsistence of created being in relation to
individual essences exists in analogical relation to the relation of identity
which obtains between God’s essence and existence:
In analogia proportionalitatis, both entities are incomparable per se, but each exhibits
an inner proportion supplying the basis for a comparison; thus the creature has a
relationship of non-identity to its contingent being, and God has a relationship of
identity to his absolute being. But this proportionality between God and the creature
does not affect the fact that the creature owes its entire being (both essence and
existence) to God, by analogia attributionis.91
As Dalzell argues, Balthasar’s preference for the analogia proportionalitatis

derives from a commitment to the positivity of the creature.92 Along these
lines, we have already noted Balthasar’s criticism of Przywara’s notion of
analogy as excessively emphasizing dissimilitudo and therefore de-valorizing the
positivity of created being.93 In Przywara’s articulation of the analogia entis,
there would appear to be an overemphasis on the analogia attributionis and a
lack of attention to how the similitude-within-dissimilitude of created being to
divine being is drawn into a dynamic of personalization and participation.
Generally, Balthasar invokes the analogia proportionalitatis to refer to
creaturely being as an imperfect image (in the non-identity of essence and
existence) of God who is ipsum esse subsistens.94 I would like, however, to
highlight the Christological mediation of this option for the analogia
proportionalitatis over the analogia attributionis. De Schrijver argues that the
metaphysically conceived analogia entis provides the ground for a “mystical
‘accord,’” so that the analogy between God and creature does not remain at a
formal level but is actualized in freedom:
For it is not enough that the human being should be in correspondence with his
Creator in abstracto; his particular vocation calls him to place himself wholeheartedly,
in conformity with the will of his Lord to communicate Himself to the most inner
depths of the human soul in the splendor of His glory (doxa, kabod), to the service of
Him who makes Himself present to the soul. Thus the concrete form that the
relation of proportionality took on already on the plane of ontology and
participation in being now attains a new depth: it will manifest itself henceforth, in
its deepest reality, as an exchange and a gift of self in love.95
Thus, while it is true that the real distinction between essence and existence
within created being is key to Balthasar’s metaphysical vision, being indicative
of the createdness and gift-quality of contingent being, both its poverty and
positive analogicity to divine being, Balthasar takes a further step by
emphasizing that the analogy of proportionality gives rise to a call to created
freedom to enter into existential harmony with the will of God. Balthasar sees
Christ as the archetype of this harmony. In musical terms, Christ is “in tune”
(in Stimmung, in der rechten Stimmung).96 This harmony, this “right disposition”
(Stimmung) in Christ arises out of the concordance (Übereinstimmung) between
his mission and his existence. Such attunement between mission and personal
existence excludes any heteronomy in Christ’s existence and obedience, and
affirms his double consubstantiality: “The mandated task is divine, its
execution human, and the proportion of perfect ‘attunement’ prevailing
between them is both human and divine.”97 This inner attunement also
means that the analogia proportionalitatis operates between Christ and the
conscious-subject who is called to be a person in the theological sense. The
creature is called to live out her existence in accord with her creaturely essence
(one can hear an echo here of Maximus’s logos/tropos distinction), and does so
most fully in the reception and execution of her mission. In receiving her
mission a posteriori, the person analogically imitates Jesus Christ, who not only
receives his mission but is his mission.98 Just as the non-identity of essence and
existence in the creature exists in an analogy of proportionality to the identity
of essence and existence in God, it can be said that the personalization of the
conscious subject by mission is analogically related to, and similarly dependent
on, the identity of person and mission in Christ. The analogia proportionalitatis
serves, then, not merely as a general “grammar” about Absolute and
contingent being, but in a more Christologically specified form as an
affirmation of Christ’s personal unity and of the possibility of human
participation in his mission.
Furthermore, I submit that the analogy of proportionality, or at least an
analogous relation between two relations, obtains within Christ, this time
between the unconfused relation of human and divine natures (in the order of
essence) and the hypostatic relation of the Son and the Father in the Spirit (in
the order of person). Balthasar alludes to just such an analogy in his discussion
of the Trinitarian mediation of the types of analogy in Theo-Logic II:
We must begin with a primary attributio of all things to the Logos, who, being the
ground and end of the creation, himself exemplifies prototypically the right proportio
between God and the creature, and through the Spirit, communicates it to creation.
Yet this proportion transcends every human concept. Consequently, despite all
appropriation (attributio) to Christ and all graced “participation in the divine nature,”
it remains a proportionalitas, a “proportional relation between proportional relations,”
that is, between the relation of difference between God and creature and the relation
of difference between Father, Son, and Spirit.”99
Here Balthasar switches once again into a Trinitarian register, such that
beyond the analogy of creaturely being (with its real distinction between
essence and existence) to the divine unity of essence and existence, there is an
analogy between the God-creature difference and between Trinitarian
hypostatic difference. A fortiori there is an analogy of proportionality between
Christ’s human nature in relation to the divine nature and his (divine) person
in relation to the person of the Father. In the hypostatic union, Christ’s
human nature receives real existence (enhypostatically) by being assumed by
the person of the Son, and has no existence independently of the personal
existence of the Son. Within the Trinitarian communion of persons, the Son
is generated and thus receives his whole being as gift from the Father. What
matters for Balthasar is that the former analogate is taken up into the latter:
the unity of Christ’s human and divine natures in his person is precisely a
function of his personal unity with the Father. And indeed for Balthasar it is
preferable, both because it speaks in the highest ontological register—the
register of person—and because it is more faithful to the language of the New
Testament, to speak of the relation of the Son to the Father than to speak of
the relation between Christ’s human nature (or even consciousness) and his
divinity. Thus, as we shall emphasize again in the following chapters, the man
Jesus does not obey himself as the Logos; nor does Jesus dialogue with God as
Trinity, but rather as Son he dialogues with the Father in the Spirit.100
Attribution is always grounded in personal relationality: Christ is “obedient”

in his human nature and as a theandric person because he surrenders himself
completely to the Father. Balthasar is always less interested in the analogous
imaging of the divine nature in Christ and creation than he is in the economic
manifestation of the event of divine love of the persons of the Trinity: his
treatment of the analogia entis is not only a concretization but indeed a
personalization, at the highest pitch of consciousness and freedom, of the
analogia entis.
The Expressivity of Christ’s Humanity

Like Maximus, Balthasar draws on the enhypostasia doctrine to highlight
the complete expressivity of Christ’s humanity. The humanity of Christ is a
true humanity—something that Balthasar will make quite explicit in his
treatment of Christ’s consciousness, knowledge and freedom—and yet in
Maximian terms, Christ’s humanity changes in its tropos hyparxeōs, its mode of
existence, by being drawn into (not absorbed by) the hypostatic mode of
existence of the Son. This new mode of existence means for Balthasar, as it did
for Maximus, that everything about Christ’s human existence becomes
expressive of his hypostatic identity and relation to the Father. Thus, Balthasar
rejects the vision of Christ as only a teacher of truths distinct from his own
person:
By virtue of the hypostatic union, there is nothing in him which does not serve
God’s self-revelation. As the centre of the world, he is the key to the interpretation
not only of creation, but of God himself. He is so not only in and through his
teaching, through the particular or universal truths which he stands for, but
essentially and above all by his existence. We cannot separate his word from his
existence: it possesses his truth only in the context of his life, that is of his giving
himself for the truth and love of the Father even unto death on the Cross.101
This understanding of Christ’s entire human life as revelatory is qualified

elsewhere by the distinction between actus humanus and actus hominis, the
former being conditioned by the proper human faculties of reason and free
will. Thus, Balthasar writes:
In Christ there is nothing human (we speak of course of the actus humani, not of the
actus hominis) that is not the utterance and expression of the divine; and likewise
there is nothing divine that is not communicated and revealed to us in human terms.
This applies not only to all the acts of the public life, his preaching, founding of the
Church, passion and resurrection, but equally to his hidden acts, his prayer to the
Father, his obedience, his love for the Father unto death. It is precisely this inner
aspect that is most essential, definitive, in the whole economy of redemption. For it
is not true that the acts and states of the Redeemer, by which he makes for redeemed
humanity a new spiritual and heavenly home, are only partially human acts (that is to
say, a subordinate part therefore), while those where the human nature as such falls
short of the divine call for the intervention of the higher nature, [those] of the God-
man. That would be pure Arianism. The acts and states by which Christ redeems us
are genuine human acts, from the lowest to the highest; and though they are never
solely human they are always human.”102
It is notable that Balthasar lays emphasis on the “hidden,” interior acts of Jesus
as most central to the revelation of God in the economy, as these interior acts
are what determine precisely who Jesus is as the Son of God—the one who is
sent, who prays, who receives, who obeys. Of further note is the claim that
these acts are all genuinely, essentially human, but never only human, and that
they are transfigured into expressions of Jesus’ divine identity precisely as
human acts. In Theo-Logic II, he reiterates his opposition to a Nestorianizing
partitive exegesis of the gospels, affirming in particular Jesus’ sonship as a
personal mode of existence which cannot be bifurcated into divine and human
“sonships” according to the natures:
Jesus’ relation to the Father…is the expression or self-utterance, not by any means of
his humanity alone, but, through his humanity, of his person, which is inseparable
from and is represented through, his humanity. The “Son” that Jesus says himself to
be is the eternal Son of the Father, who speaks to the Father in his assumed
humanity. The “one Lord Jesus Christ” is “the Logos of God, God from God” (DS
40); he is “as Christ God’s word and wisdom and power” (DS 113). His words and
actions cannot be divided into two, as if some came only from the man, while others
(also) from his divinity (DS 255), as if the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection
were not acts of the divine Logos (DS 502), as if he, being one and the same person,
did not have “two births, one eternal from the Father, one temporal from his
mother” (DS 852). The Son, who alone knows the Father in his whole truth and
who alone is qualified to reveal him as such to men, is not merely the man Jesus; he
is rather the Son of the Father in the Trinity (Mt 11:27).103
Balthasar’s copious citation of Denzinger-Schönmetzer anchors his assertion of

Christological unity within the dogmatic tradition, a tradition that does not
come to a halt with Chalcedon’s distinction of the natures, but rather includes
the explicit identification of Jesus Christ with the person of the Word and Son
of God. Balthasar’s intention is two-pronged here: on the one hand, Jesus’
genuinely human existence cannot be separated from his divine person in
relation to the Father and the Spirit; on the other hand, Jesus’ human
existence is so expansive that it alone gives access to the inner, Trinitarian life
of God, by what we will call “incarnational saturation.”
Incarnational Saturation
Balthasar’s stress on the personal unity of Christ is evident not only in his
rejection of anthropological reduction, but also in his refusal to speculate on
the life, existence and function of the Son in such a way as to bracket out his
incarnate existence. Cyril O’Regan has described this impulse in Balthasar in
lapidary manner as “incarnational saturation”: “Incarnational saturation is
deemed to be present when the entire history of salvation not only finds in the
incarnation its episodic center, but when in a real sense this history, stretching
from creation to eschaton, is condensed in it.”104 I will use the term
analogously also to suggest that the hypostatic plenitude and complete
personal self-surrender of the Son is present in the particular figure of Jesus
Christ.
Grounding his position characteristically in the kenōsis hymn of
Philippians 2:5-11, Balthasar rejects any bifurcation, such as suggested by the
extra calvinisticum doctrine, of Christ’s divine person into the Son incarnate
and the eternal Son outside of the flesh (asarkos): “If we are to follow biblical
revelation, we must not split the Son of God in the exercise of his mission into
the one who carries out his mission on earth and the one who remains
unaffected in heaven, looking down at the ‘sent’ Son. For he is One: he is the
eternal Son dwelling in time.”105 Just as the divine attributes of “immutability”
and “impassibility” need to be wrested out of a static substance-metaphysics,
such that Christ’s human experiences and suffering can be viewed as economic
translations of the Son’s intra-divine mode of existence, so too “eternity” and
“temporality” are not to be played off against each other, as if Christ’s

temporal existence as a human being is a contradiction of his eternal existence
as Son. Thus, “it is precisely because the Son is eternal that he assumes
temporality as his form of expression when he appears in the world, elevating
it so as to make of it a precise, suitable, perfectly fitting utterance of his eternal
being as Son.”106 For this reason, there is no separation between a “lower
sphere” in which Christ appears and “a supreme ‘eternal’ sphere in which he
enjoys calm, self-sufficient possession of himself.”107 Balthasar recasts time and
eternity such that Christ can, as incarnate Son, possess his own “mode of
time,” in which temporal history is expressive of his eternal personal existence
as receptive and obedient. Given the hypostatic unity of the Son, a split of
temporal and eternal existence along the lines of the two natures is untenable.
Balthasar reinforces the incarnational concentration of his Christology by
locating the ideas and mission of creatures not in the eternal Logos, but in
Jesus Christ as incarnate. As such, Christ is not only the archetype for creation
but also the norm of history. As Balthasar says, “the life of the Son is related to
the whole history of the world of ideas which gives it its norms and its
meaning.”108 The Son’s “life” is the condition of possibility for the Fall, for
Paradise, for creation itself, according to the Christology of the Epistle to the
Colossians, “for in him all things were created in heaven, on earth, and under
the earth” (Col. 1:16).109 In contrast to the Platonic and Stoic Logos-doctrines
appropriated by the Fathers, Balthasar does not treat this “containment” of
ideas in the person of the Son as a protological-cosmological trope, but instead
as an incarnationally saturated soteriological statement: “It is not, so to say, the
divine Logos but the Incarnate Son who speaks of himself as ‘him, who is
before all and at the end of all, who underwent death and is now alive’ (Rev.
2:8).”110 It is in the human estate that Christ fulfils the law and history, and
acts as the concrete standard for every instance of fulfillment or non-fulfilment
of the Law.111 And it is the human history of Christ that provides the norm for
every human exercise of freedom before God:
Each situation in the divine-human life is so infinitely rich, so full of meaning, that it
generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations, just as any number of
essences can be subordinated to an Idea without its being exhausted or restricted by
them. For like the Idea, the situation of Christ is of a different order from that which
it rules. Its elevation above all things makes it proof against depletion; it is the
wellspring of history, of unfathomable depth and abundance.112
What in patristic Logos-theology was the inherence of all the logoi of the world
in the divine Logos is for Balthasar the generation of space within the
incarnate person of Christ for human conscious subjects to participate and to
become fully personalized through mission. Balthasar sees Maximus moving
toward this historicization and, if the neologism may be permitted,
“paschalization” of Greek Logos-theology:
Maximus expressly says that the Incarnation—more precisely, the drama of the Cross,
grave, and Resurrection—is not only the midpoint of world history but the
foundational idea of the world itself.… Synthesis, in reference to both God and man,
can now be reinterpreted primarily in terms of a love rooted in freedom: both the
Incarnation of the Son and his commandment of love, which brings to full
realization the idea of humanity, presuppose and generate freedom.113
Indeed, Balthasar’s reluctance to speculate about the person of the Son in

such a way that prescinds from the fact of the Incarnation can be seen once
again against the background of Maximus’s Christological formula “the
natures from which, in which, and which he is.” The person of the Son has
definitively assumed a real human nature and existence and is thus constituted
by his two natures without remainder. There is, Balthasar is clear, undoubtedly
a surplus in the divine nature of the Son which cannot be adequately revealed
in the limited terms of creaturehood (according to the maior dissimilitudo of the
analogia entis); yet this mysterious “more” must not be conceived of as “other”
than what is expressed analogically in the human history of Jesus.
Analogy and the C ommunicatio Idiomatum

The distinction of person and essence and the analogy of being become
for Balthasar the fundamental principles for Christological predication. Thus,
the communicatio idiomatum still stands under the analogy of being and can
only be applied due to the distinction of essential and personal orders:
It is only possible to apply qualities and attributes of the one nature to the other
because both are united in the one person of the Logos—not by way of nature, by way
of the person; certainly, the natures are “undivided,” but, however close the union,
they are “unconfused,” “the properties of each remain unimpaired [sozōmenēs].”114
In similar fashion, Balthasar alludes to the caveat running through the

tradition regarding the incomparability of God and the creature, citing
Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus, and the Scholastic axiom employed by Thomas,
Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, “there is no relationship [proportio] between
infinitely remote entities.”115 The incomparability of God and the creature acts
as a limit to the idea of the synthetic person: “In this perspective, we can see
the limitations of the concept of a hypostasis synthetos that arose in Antiochene
Christology and was admitted by many Fathers (like Maximus and John
Damascene) and finally also by Peter Lombard and Thomas.”116 Again, as in
Cosmic Liturgy, Balthasar insists that the hypostatic union is no passive
synthesis, but a freely undertaken, kenotic act of the Son: “In fact, the
‘synthesis’ is a free act of the divine Person; it is not a quality impressed on the
divine Person by the two natures.”117 Thus, as Balthasar says in Theo-Drama III,
“Between the divine and the created natures there is an essential abyss. The
fact that the person of Jesus Christ bridges this abyss without harm to his unity
should render us speechless in the presence of the mystery of his person.”118
The foundation of the Christological analogia entis within Trinitarian
difference and the emphasis on the continuity of processio and missio
nonetheless allow Balthasar to employ a strong form of the communicatio
idiomatum. The divine attributes find their definitive expression in the
historical mission and personal existence of Jesus:
Jesus experiences his human consciousness entirely in terms of mission. The Father
has commissioned him, in the Holy Spirit, to reveal God’s nature and his disposition
toward man. There is nothing one-sided about this revelation (as people like to think
today); it is not simply that God takes the part of sinners and the needy: in his sense-
mediated human nature, Jesus is to reveal all God’s other attributes as well, that is,
God’s anger (for instance, over the sinful desecration of his place of worship); God’s
weariness at having to endure for so long these people who are so lacking in
understanding; God’s grief and tears at Jerusalem’s refusal to respond to his
invitation. We can even say that, in the cry of dereliction on the Cross, Jesus reveals
how God is forsaken by sinners. Jesus’ whole existence, including the aspect that the
Greeks found so difficult, his pathē, is in the service of his proclamation of God.119
Again Balthasar expresses his wariness of an approach to the New Testament

which would regard the most “human” and therefore “non-divine” moments
of Jesus’ life—his anger, his weeping, his suffering—as purely a function of his
humanity. Regarding the attribution of obedience to the divine Son, Balthasar
admits that “obedience” in this case constitutes a figure of speech, an
anthropomorphism, but appeals to the principle of analogy, first by negation
then by affirmation:
In applying it everything is to be excluded from the concept of obedience that derives

from the relationship between God and the creature insofar as the creature is
regarded qua creature, that is, as having its origin in nothingness. Everything is to be
retained, on the other hand, and translated into the infinite (in the sense of the via
eminentiae) that pertains to the analogy between God and the creature as the positive
image of God, or more properly, of the Trinity. The obedience of which the Son of
God gave us an example in his human nature is by no means merely something that
is grounded in his human nature and intended as an example for us insofar as we are
creatures. Like all his utterances, it is not only borne by his divine person; it is also a
positive revelation of his divine person—and hence of his divine nature—translated
into human terms.120
Thus the obedience of the Son in the economy reveals the modality of divine
love which constitutes the Son’s hypostasis, and not, as in the creaturely realm,
a form of inferiority or subordination.121 The positive dimension of all
analogical predication about God is necessarily mediated by the hypostatic
order, or, more concretely, by the particular narrative of Jesus’ life, death and
resurrection. Thus, too, the communication of idioms finds its justification
only in the fact that divine and human attributes are “borne by his divine
person.”
Balthasar’s approach to the communication of idioms is nowhere so
radical and so controversial as in his theology of divine suffering. Balthasar not
only endorses, but intensifies the Theopaschite formula, “One of the Trinity
has suffered,” quoting it without the usual patristic qualification, “in the
flesh,” which explicitly excluded divine passibility.122 I do not intend here to
examine in detail Balthasar’s approach to divine passibility,123 and the occasion

to discuss the question of Jesus’ human freedom and the Cross in greater
depth will present itself in Chapter 4. It is important, however, to note
Balthasar’s brief reference to the Agony and Passion of Christ within the
context of the Christological concretization of the analogia entis inasmuch as
the human reality of Jesus’ obedience and suffering cannot be regarded as
purely a function of his human nature, external to the divine person of the
Son, but constitutes the economic manifestation of the Trinitarian mode of
existence of the Son. Even in the Agony, Jesus’ obedience is not a purely
human obedience to a heteronomous command, but a fidelity to the mission
that makes him who he is as a person: “There is no intervening factor between
his acceptance of the Father’s mission and the decision to send him: he is the
one who has always consented to it—‘for this I came’ (Jn 10:10).”124 Thus
Balthasar speaks of the “subject” who undergoes the “hour” not as Jesus faced
with the will of God, but as the Son speaking to the Father.125 Balthasar is
insistent on keeping Christological discourse in the order of person, with far-
reaching implications for the doctrine of God as it relates to mutability and
suffering:
If it is possible for one Person in God to accept suffering, to the extent of God-
forsakenness, and to deem it his own, then evidently it is not something foreign to
God, something that does not affect him. It must be something profoundly
appropriate to his divine Person, for—to say it once again—his being sent (missio) by
the Father is a modality of his proceeding (processio) from the Father.126
Balthasar offers, then, a thoroughgoing version of the communication of

idioms, one grounded in the unity of Christ’s person as determined by his
relation to the Father in the Spirit and as incarnate in the economy. Balthasar
is arguing that the communication of idioms functions differently if we begin
with the order of person rather than with predetermined attributes belonging
to the natures. If we begin with the philosophical ascription of passibility to
creaturely nature and impassibility to divine nature, it is very difficult to give
an account of how Jesus as both God and man is a single subject of the
Passion. Rahner insists dialectically on divine immutability, but also on the
ability of God to change “in the other”; he considers this the best account of
Chalcedon’s asynchytōs.127 Balthasar feels impelled to say more. As Gerard

O’Hanlon comments:
Balthasar…goes further than this: within his notion of the christological analogy of
being he understands the human to be different from but also an expression of the
divine, and so can posit something like a supra-mutability and suffering within God
himself so that the distinction between inner and outer, God in himself and God in
the other, is maintained, but in a less exclusive, separatist mode.128
Because Christ’s person is identical to the person of the Son, the attribution of
impassibility to God must undergo radical revision in light of the Cross;
Rather than positing immutability and impassibility tout court to God,
Balthasar will use neologisms such as “supra-mutability” and “supra-
suffering.”129 Balthasar recognizes the pitfalls of ascribing something akin to
suffering to God, and he is quick to distance himself from Jürgen Moltmann’s
version of theopaschism,130 but given the personal identity of Christ in the
theologia and in the oikonomia, positing divine impassibility without
qualification does not do justice to revelation. To quote O’Hanlon again, “It is
[Balthasar’s] understanding of the mutuality of the relationship between
nature and person, and of the analogy between the divine and human natures,
that leads him to go beyond Rahner to posit a supra-mutability in God’s own
being.”131 O’Hanlon observes that Balthasar’s approach to divine immutability
and impassibility is not to give a direct response, but to transpose these terms
“into the terminology of the divine trinitarian event.”132 Balthasar’s Trinitarian
theology, and thus his approach to such questions as God’s immutability and
impassibility, are subject to a kind of “feedback” from the shift of a Neo-
Chalcedonian sort that we have seen in Balthasar’s Christology, from the
generality of nature to the particularity of person. In Trinitarian theology as in
Christology, Balthasar is suggesting that discussion of the attributes of a nature
cannot be divorced from consideration of the eventfulness of hypostatic
freedom. That freedom, of course, is exercised in the economy in the
obedience by the incarnate Son, who thus renders his whole human nature
and existence analogically expressive, in its totality, of the divine life.
Conclusion
In the course of this chapter, I have charted Balthasar’s endeavour to
“continue the direction” of Maximus’s Christological thinking. Balthasar seeks
to carry out this task by differentiating a theological from a philosophical
concept of person, such that the human question of personal identity finds its
complete response only in revelation in Christ and the imparting of Christian
mission. Balthasar demonstrates the fruitfulness of Neo-Chalcedonian
development of hypostasis and the hypostatic order, at the same time showing
its limitations of residual reliance on nature as the primary ontological
category, of which person is then the specification and individualization. The
modern conception of person based on individual consciousness and freedom
in large measure lacks attention to the intersubjective dimension of
personhood, and even in its dialogical manifestations requires the completion
of divine-creaturely relationality. An adequate definition of person must
embrace both ontological and psychological aspects, argues Balthasar, and can
be found only in an approach from revelation which sees Christ as the
archetype of all personhood, and all others constituted as persons en Christōi.
All human individuals are first conscious subjects before they grow into
personhood by responding to the address and mission of God in their lives. In
Christ, however, there is a complete identity between his mission and person.
The distinction between person and conscious/spiritual subject and the a
priori determination of Christ’s person by mission allow Balthasar to speak of
Christ’s human particularity without positing a duality of persons, either in
the classical ontological sense or in the modern psychological sense. Balthasar
claims the possibility of attributing to Christ’s human nature more than the
status of a property of his divine person, or a set of attributes and faculties
activated instrumentally by the Logos (a kind of ghost in the machine).
Nothing of the conscious intentionality and freedom associated with the
modern (philosophical) notion of person is denied of Christ’s human
existence. Christ is a fully human conscious subject, and as this particular
conscious subject, is, in the economy, none other than the eternal Word and
Son. He is never a conscious subject independent of his mission; his conscious
subjectivity is always, a priori, determined by his divine, universal mission. But
this complete assumption into his mission implies no ablation of what he

shares in common with all other particular, human conscious subjects.
The human conscious subjectivity of Christ, however, is that of the
person of the Son, and in its tropos hyparxeōs as assumed by the person of the
Son it becomes fully expressive of the Son’s divine hypostatic being and eternal
self-surrender to the Father. In light of the priority of the order of person
developed in Maximus’s Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, the analogia entis
becomes Christologically focused, governed by Chalcedon’s asynchytōs (without
confusion), to be sure, but also by Chalcedon’s adiairetōs (without division). It
can easily appear that Balthasar’s language of the expressivity of Christ’s
human existence and his ontological construal of the communicatio idiomatum
overstep the dissimilitudo of the analogia entis and lead to a confusion between
Christ’s divinity and his humanity. In response, it can be argued that in
Christ’s person, the highest degree of comparability between terms of the
analogia entis is attained, the closest and most concentrated similitudo between
created and uncreated natures and freedoms. Dissimilitude still operates, such
that creaturely attributes cannot be ascribed to the divine nature simpliciter.
But a stress on the via eminentiae and the dimension of similitude within the
analogia entis do not add up to a violation of the analogia entis or a
transgression of Chalcedon’s asynchytōs.
More importantly, the communicatio idiomatum is never for Balthasar a
purely formal cross-attribution between natures, but always a form of
predication grounded in the one person of Christ. Balthasar’s understanding
of the hypostatic union is, I have argued, “incarnationally saturated” and
always focused on the particularity of Christ’s person. Jesus does not reveal
true humanity in general, but in the particularity and historicity of his life of
obedience and self-surrender, moving toward the Cross. Nor does Jesus reveal
divinity in any “general” sense. His human existence fully expresses in history
his filial mode of existence as the Son of God and, therefore, his relationship
of mutual self-giving with the Father in the Spirit (hence, the attention paid to
the analogia proportionalitatis, whereby the analogy of Christ’s natures is taken
up into the hypostatic unity-cum-difference between Father and Son in the
Spirit). Neither divine nor human nature is to be imputed to Christ in such a
way that his hypostatic particularity becomes simply a function of preconceived

notions of divinity and humanity. He is thus not a “product” (either
ontologically or epistemologically) of the Incarnation. Rather, both divine and
human natures are to be read out of the person of Christ in his historical,
hypostatic particularity. Like Cyril and Maximus, Balthasar’s Christological
speech is economic, in the sense of being tied to and regulated by the person
of Christ in the oikonomia. What he says of the Son’s relationship of self-
surrender to the Father is said of the Son as incarnate, never speculatively of
the logos asarkos. This economic approach to Christology shows once again the
profound affinity that Balthasar has with Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian
tradition. The general question of the analogia entis, of the similitude-within-
greater-dissimilitude between God and the world, then, does not find
resolution in speculation in the order of essences, but always leads us back to
the particularity, indeed the absolute uniqueness, of the person of Jesus Christ
and his enactment of the drama of human and divine freedom. In the next
chapter, I examine how this drama is played out within Christ’s unique
human consciousness.
Notes
1 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 36–48. Georg Essen differs from Thunberg in defining
Neo-Chalcedonianism more closely with the Leontii in the sixth century and the
development of the enhypostasia-doctrine; Essen nonetheless regards Maximus as an
inheritor and corrector of this tradition. See Essen, Die Freiheit Jesu: Der neuchalkedonische
Enhypostasiebegriff im Horizont neuzeitlicher Subjekt- und Personphilosophie (Regensburg: Verlag

Friedrich Pustet, 2001), 59–65, 118–121.
2 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III: The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). German original: Theodramatik:
Zweiter Band: Die Personen des Spiels. Teil 2: Die Personen in Christus (Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1978).
3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, trans. unnamed (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1963; reprint, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994). German original: Theologie der
Geschichte (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1959). References to the English translation will
be to the reprinted edition.
4 See TD III, 163.
5 CL, 215.
6 Ibid., 215–216.
7 Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 243. See also John J. O’Donnell, The Mystery of the Triune God
(London: Sheed & Ward, 1988), 102–103.
8 Schoonenberg, The Christ, 67.
9 Ibid., 70.
10 Ibid., 87.
11 Ibid., 75.
12 Ibid., 88.
13 Indeed, Kasper criticizes Schoonenberg precisely for a modalist doctrine of God: see Jesus
the Christ, 180–181, 244–245.
14 For instance, Balthasar characterizes the generation of the Son as both a reception of the
eternal freedom of the Father and the fullness of being: “That is why it will not do simply
to replace the so-called ‘theo-ontological’ categories of philosophy with ‘personological’
categories, that is, to dissolve Being and its relationships” (TD II, 268).
15 TL I, 37.
16 On this Thomistic axiom, see Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 205.
17 Maximus’ involvement in the monothelite controversy is instructive on this point: the
duality of the natures at the level of being could not be separated from the question of
human and divine freedom in the realm of action; similarly hypostatic being could not be
bracketed out of a reflection on the divine Logos as a centre of hypostatic freedom.
Freedom emerges as one of the key dimensions of personhood in Balthasar’s theology, but
as with Maximus, Balthasar envisions a freedom which is not the liberum arbitrium of the

individual, but the freedom rooted in creaturely nature which constitutes the human
being’s graced movement toward its supernatural end. See CL, 227–229.
18 TD III, 202.
19 CL, 248.
20 Ibid., 248–249.
21 Ibid., 249.
22 Ibid., 249–250.
23 Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Liturgie cosmique: Maxime le Confesseur, trans. L. Lhaumet and
H.-A. Prentout (Paris: Aubier, 1947), 185–186.
24 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” Communio ICR 13 (Spring 1986),
19. See also Joseph Ratzinger, “Zum Personverständnis in der Theologie,” in Dogma und
Verkündigung (Munich and Freiburg: Erich Wewel Verlag, 1973), 201: “Wir stehen
also…bei dem Begriff der Person vor einem jener Zuschüsse, die das christliche Glauben
an das menschliche Denken ermöglicht und geleistet hat; die nicht einfach aus dem
eigenen Philosophieren des Menschen hervorwuchsen, sondern aus der Auseinander-
setzung des Philosophierens mit den Vorgegebenheiten des Glaubens und insbesondere
der Heiligen Schrift.”
25 TD III, 209.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 212.
28 Ibid., 213.
29 Ibid., 214–215. Balthasar’s interpretation of sarx in this quote is rather reductive,
neglecting the intregity of humanity denoted for orthodox Alexandrian theologians such
as Cyril.
30 Ibid., 215.
31 Ibid., 216–217.
32 Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” 22.
33 TD III, 218.
34 Ibid., 203.
35 Although the English translations of both TD II and TD III were carried out by the same
translator, Graham Harrison, in the former Geistsubjekt is translated “spiritual subject” (cf.
for example TD II, 403), while in the latter, “conscious subject” is used (see TD III, 203–
208), perhaps because of the context of a “Christology of consciousness” (Bewußtsein). The
latter translation should not obscure the proper ontological nature of the Geistsubjekt,
which is not only a function of consciousness but of individualized, spiritual being.
36 TD III, 204.
37 This nuance is helpful as a response to one criticism of Balthasar, that his emphasis on
relationality leads to an inattention to self-subsistence, and thus to a denigration of
individuals as persons. Thus, Josef Seifert asks, “Könnte man dann aber ausschließen, daß
z.B. ungeliebte ungeborene Kinder noch nicht ‘personiert’ und deshalb keine Personen
seien?” (“Person und Individuum: Über Hans Urs von Balthasars Philosophie der Person

und die philosophischen Implikationen seiner Dreifaligkeitstheologie,” Forum Katholische
Theologie 13, no. 2 [1997], 89). But such a criticism ignores Balthasar’s point that full
personhood (in the theological sense) is not only horizontally relational, but vertically,
such that even when not explicit in consciousness, the personalizing address of God to
each human being prevents the individual from becoming merely a function of other
human beings.
38 TD III, 204.
39 TD I, 482.
40 Ibid., 554–555.
41 Ibid., 588.
42 Ibid.
43 TD III, 205.
44 TD I, 627. Cf. also TL II, 45.
45 TL II, 49.
46 Balthasar, “On the concept of person,” 24.
47 GL V, 616; cf. TD II, 205; TD II, 388–389.
48 GL V, 616. Nicholas J. Healy comments, “To be sure, the mother does not create the
child’s consciousness ex nihilo. And yet there is an immediate presence of the act of
creation in the event of the mother-child relation. Thus, if the mother does not simply
create the child’s consciousness, neither is that consciousness a kind of dormant light
merely awaiting a switch to be turned on by an outside hand in order to begin to function
autonomously” (The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005], 64).
49 TD I, 629. Similarly, in “Who Is Man?” in Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit and Institution,
trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 19–20, Balthasar writes:
“These times have witnessed an important trend that appropriately honors the dialogical
principle, which in fact has only today been really recognized and appreciated. But we
must nonetheless absolutely transcend it. Not only are most dialogues between people
hopelessly superficial and full of misunderstandings, they can also silt up, break off, bog
down. And in the very place where a person unfolds himself in a lifelong exchange of love,
he must draw on the power of keeping his promise from the provisions of a silent and
lonely fidelity that can be found only in the inner core of his self and not in the dialogical
principle per se.”
50 TD I, 628.
51 TD II, 189.
52 Ibid., 190.
53 Ibid., 208–209.
54 GL V, 618–624.
55 TD II, 209.
56 Ibid., 210.

57 Ibid., 402. This naming and commissioning must be construed as a supernatural event,
not to be collapsed into individualization at the natural level: see for instance Man in
History: A Theological Study (London and Sydney: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 72, n. 1, against
Anton Günther’s equation of personal transcendence of nature with the theological
supernatural:
It is true that the uniqueness of the human person can have its root only in the
uniqueness of having been created and called into being by the absolute uniqueness
of a personal God. In this sense personal man stands in an immediate relationship to
personal God: it does not, however, necessarily follow that the infinite freedom of
the personal God will reveal and offer to share the intimacy of his divine being with
personal man, though it is true that the created person only becomes truly aware of
his personality through the call of God’s revelation.
At the same time, “every human being can share this distinction to some degree” and the
call to become a person in a theological sense can occur at any point in a human life,
including in the womb, as in the case of John the Baptist (TD II, 402).
58 See TD I, 639, 645.
59 TD III, 207. Cf. Balthasar, “On the Concept of person,” 25.
60 Ibid., 208.
61 Ibid., 207. Cf. TD II, 286.
62 Ibid., 150.
63 Ibid., 207.
64 Ibid., 201; cf. Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” 25. See ST I, q. 43, a. 1.
65 Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 104.
66 TH, 31.
67 Ibid., 31.
68 Ibid., 31–32.
69 Mark A. McIntosh argues that Balthasar has complemented Maximus’s emphasis on the
order of existence with an Ignatian Christological structuring of Christian mission and
election, whereby deification is further concretized as the installation of creaturely freedom
within divine freedom (Christology from Within, 39–44).
70 For example, TH, 69–70, n. 5; “Characteristics of Christianity,” in Explorations in Theology
I, Spouse of the Word, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 177; TD III,
222; TL II, 311–316.
71 TH, 70.
72 For more complete treatments, see de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord; Thomas G. Dalzell,
The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 59–100; Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar, 19–90.
73 TD III, 220–221, n. 51, with reference to Denzinger-Schönmetzer 806. Balthasar is critical
of Przywara’s construal of the analogy of being insofar as it places too much emphasis on
the dissimilitudo (based on the inclusion of “tanta” of a former edition of Denzinger which

was later excised), such that even divine initiative cannot overcome the dissimilarity.
Balthasar concludes laconically, “It is no accident that Przywara never produced a
Christology.”
74 Barth’s objection is expressed most vehemently as “the invention of the Antichrist”:
Church Dogmatics I, viii–ix, quoted in The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation,
trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 49.
75 TH, 70.
76 Ibid., 70.
77 TD III, 221.
78 Ibid., 222.
80 De Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 48.
81 Ibid., 50: “Chez Balthasar, le contexte ontologique n’a d’autre fonction que de dessiner le
cadre général à l’intérieure duquel aura lieu un événement tout à fait concret,
nommément le fait qu’une personne finie bien determinée consente à se laisser modeler
tellement par la volonté divine que sa ‘correspondance avec Dieu’ pour prêter ‘forme’ et
‘figure’ à l’épanchement de l’amour divin dans l’histoire humaine.”
82 TD III, 223.
83 TD II, 316–334.
84 Ibid., 320, 326–327.
85 Ibid., 330.
86 Ibid., 209–210.
87 See de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 53.
88 See Dalzell, Dramatic Encounter, 64–65.
89 De Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 55: “Dès qu’elle est coupée de ses racines religieuses, la
relation de concordance harmonieuse de l’analogie de l’être (Übereinstimmung,
Entsprechung) en arrive nécessairement à retomber dans les mouvements contraires d’une
dialectique oscillant entre la ressemblance et la dissemblance. De cette manière, Dieu,
aussi bien que l’homme, se dégradent en objets. Ils ne sont plus que des concepts sans vie,
que seul un jeu de dialectique des contraires parvient encore à relier entre eux, en leur
attribuant, au risque de tomber dans l’équivocité, un concept d’être univoque. Il ne reste
plus rien ici du contexte vivant de la communication s’effectuant en vertu de la justesse
intrinsèque et de la proportionnalité dans l’être.”
90 Dalzell, Dramatic Encounter, 64.
91 TD III, 221, n. 52.
92 Dalzell, Dramatic Encounter, 68–69.
93 TD III, 220–221, n. 51.
94 See Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 26–53.
95 De Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 56 (my translation): “Car il ne suffit pas que l’homme
soit in abstracto en correspondance avec son Créateur; sa vocation particulière l’appelle à se
mettre de tout coeur, conformément à la volonté de son Seigneur de se communiquer au

plus intime de l’âme humaine dans la splendeur de sa gloire (doxa, kabod), au service de
Celui qui se rend present à elle. Ainsi la forme concrète que la relation de
proportionnalité revêtait déjà sur le plan de l’ontologie et de la participation à l’être, reçoit
un approfondissement nouveau: elle s’exprimera dorénavant, en sa réalité la plus
profonde, comme un échange et un don de soi dans l’amour.”
96 GL I, 468, cf. Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik, vol. 1, Schau der Gestalt (Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1961), 450.
97 GL I, 469.
98 See TD III, 171. Cf. TD III, 207.
99 TL II, 316.
100 See TD III, 199.
101 TH, 20. The theme of the expressivity of Christ’s human nature functions as a leitmotif in
Balthasar’s writings. See for instance “Characteristics of Christianity,” in Explorations in
Theology I: The Word Made Flesh, trans. A. V. Littledale with Alexander Dru (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1989), 165: “His creaturely status is an expression and function of his
eternal and uncreated Sonship. This is the real ground and justification of the Council of
Ephesus’ anti-Nestorian definition of μία φύσις even when taken in conjunction with the
Chalcedonian δύο φύσεις. In virtue of the hypostatic union the eternal Son of Man (under
the law of the real distinction) can represent the Trinity in the world.”
102 Balthasar, “The Implications of the Word,” in Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made
Flesh, trans. A. V. Littledale with Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 57.
103 TL II, 125.
104 O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval,” 232.
105 TD III, 228.
106 TH, 34.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., 64.
109 See ibid., 65.
110 Ibid., 65. Cf. TD III, 257: “It is not only the Logos but Christ who is the mediator of
creation” (italics original).
111 TH, 66.
112 Ibid., 71–2. Cf. TD II, 270, in which Balthasar emphasizes analogicity based on freedom
and the space of freedom opened by the Son’s hypostatic existence: “The personal ‘idea’ of
each individual finite freedom lies in the incarnate Son in such a way that each is given a
unique participation in the Son’s uniqueness. His divinity, with its infinite freedom,
permits this inexhaustible multiplication of what is once-for-all and unique; thus it also
permits each individual freedom to fulfill itself in an utterly distinct manner within the
realm of infinite freedom. This is the very context for which the personal ‘autoexousion’ was
designed in the first place; its arrival is expected; its prototype is already there, and this
prototype is indispensable to finite freedom so long as it has not become alienated from

itself. The Son’s infinite hypostatic distinctness, since it is divine and unique, is what
distinguishes each person founded thereon. And the more the person, in response to the
Son’s call, walks toward his prototype in the Son, the more unique he becomes. Here we
can speak of ‘exemplary identity’ (G. Siewerth), which is mediated, living and
indestructible, by the analogy of Creator and creature.”
113 CL, 134–135, with reference to Maximus, Ad Thal. 62, PG 90, 656D. Cf. TD III, 258, with
reference to Amb. 47, PG 91, 1360AB: “It is true that abstract reflection can discover the
original models of all these worldly copies in the divine Logos; but the relationship only
becomes concrete when, like Maximus the Confessor, we find the authentic, primal
archetype or idea of every human being in the incarnate, crucified and risen Son, who as
such is the primal idea of God, mediating all creation.”
114 TD III, 222, with reference to the Chalcedonian definition, DS 302.
115 Ibid., 222–223. Balthasar notes that the Scholastic appeal to the principle of the
incomparability of natures came into play in the debate over Christ’s divine and human
knowledge. This point merits discussion in the next chapter.
116 Ibid., 223.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., 220.
119 Ibid., 225.
120 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 78.
121 Ibid., 79.
122 TD III, 226; cf. the quotation again without the qualification in TD V, 13, in a rebuttal to
Rahner’s charge of Neo-Chalcedonianism. See DS 401, 432.
123 The subject is well treated in Gerard O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
124 TD III, 226.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid.
127 See for example Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of
Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 220.
128 O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God, 133.
129 See ibid., 136.
130 See TD IV, 321–323.
131 O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God, 205, n. 76.
132 Ibid., 46.

Introduction
IN the previous chapter I examined Balthasar’s theology of personhood against
the background of Neo-Chalcedonian Christological priorities. From the
ontological constitution of Christ as one hypostasis existing in two unconfused
natures—or in Balthasarian terms the archetypal person defined by mission
who enacts in himself the analogia entis—we turn our attention to the
psychological aspect of the hypostatic union. Balthasar recognizes that while a
reasonable, if abstract, account of the analogia entis can be given with respect to
being, the Christological enactment of the analogia entis becomes “acutely
difficult” when considered under the aspect of consciousness: “How can there
be an identity between the consciousness of a (divine) person in his assumed
humanity and his inherent divine consciousness, particularly if the nature that
has been adopted exists in the mode of alienation from God?”1 In this chapter
I will present and offer critical commentary on Balthasar’s response to this
question. While the question of Christ’s consciousness stems directly from
dogmatic Christology, and is already hinted at in the monothelite controversy,
it is an especially pressing issue for systematic Christology in the modern era,
an era characterized not only by the turn to the subject and to the question of
individual consciousness but also by the predominance of historical-critical
exegesis of the New Testament. Accordingly, I will present the biblical basis for
Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness, examining the question of how
Jesus understood his own identity and mission. Here we are dealing with “self-
consciousness” not in the philosophically differentiated sense of an operation
of the subject, but in the common-sense understanding of thematic “self-
understanding.” It will become clear that Balthasar has taken to heart the need
to construct a “Christology from below,” but rejects several presuppositions

about history and exegesis proposed by modern historical-critical method.
From the biblical data as he construes it, Balthasar develops his notion of
Christ’s unique mission-consciousness, a consciousness both amplified and
limited by his mission from the Father. For Balthasar, mission not only
constitutes Christ’s person, but also unifies several aspects within Christ’s
consciousness which would otherwise appear contradictory. Personalizing
mission carries Christ into the status exinanitionis, and the distinction between
Christological states of self-emptying and exaltation allows Balthasar to
describe nescience, faith, and kenotic obedience as positive aspects of Christ’s
consciousness. Finally, Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s consciousness can be
assessed with regard to its fidelity to and possible advancement of
Chalcedonian Christology. I will ask what Balthasar contributes to the on-
going discussion about Christ’s consciousness in Catholic theology since the
beginning of the twentieth century, a discussion which came to the fore during
the 1950’s but which has not lost its relevance today.
Jesus’ Self-Consciousness: The Biblical Data

In examining Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness, it is
important at the outset to consider what kind of question we are posing when
we ask about Christ’s consciousness and knowledge. “It is both ridiculous and
irreverent to ask what it feels like to be God incarnate,” declared E. L. Mascall,
issuing a salutary warning quoted numerous times by Balthasar himself.2
Balthasar also repeatedly cites Romano Guardini’s warning that “there can be
no psychology of Jesus.”3 That is to say, the human science of psychology is
inadequate in the face of what Christian faith claims Jesus to be: dealing with
general laws and patterns, psychology cannot grasp the uniqueness of Christ’s
person and conscience.4 This rejection of human psychology does not mean,
however, that nothing can be said about Christ’s consciousness, only that what
can be said must be determined by the object itself, by the revelation of God
in Christ, and therefore that, as with the concept of person, the only valid
approach to Christ’s consciousness is a theological one. Distancing himself
from both the excesses of Neo-Scholastic theories of Christ’s knowledge and
The Consciousness of Christ 109
the novelistic lives of Jesus of nineteenth-century liberal Christology, Balthasar

writes, “We are not asking, for instance, about the contents of Christ’s
knowledge, let alone the kind of personality he had, but about the conditions
that made it possible for what empirically took place in him.”5 Taking the New
Testament as the starting point, certain claims can be made with confidence,
supported by strong historical plausibility, about how Jesus understood his
own identity and mission.
Addressing the prevalent dichotomy of modern historical-critical research
between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith,” Balthasar
acknowledges historical development from Jesus’ own self-understanding to
the explicit, post-Easter Christologies of the New Testament, but not a radical
rupture. New Testament Christologies stand in fundamental continuity with
Jesus himself and his self-understanding: there exists an “indissoluble nexus
between event (Christ) and interpretation (Church).”6 Thus, Balthasar rejects
Rudolf Bultmann’s stance that the New Testament kergyma is so existentially
powerful that the historical strata “behind” the kerygma no longer matter at
all.7 Against the Bultmannian rejection of Historie, Balthasar cites Harald
Riesenfeld’s articulation of the question of Jesus’ consciousness: “What kind
of self-consciousness must it have been not only to be able to exercise a direct
historical [geschichtlich] effect on us today (through Scripture) but also to have
resulted in things such as the post-Easter events in the primitive Church?”8 For
Balthasar, posing the question in this way overcomes the rupture between
Historie and Geschichte, opening up properly historical questions about the
origins of faith in Jesus. At the same time, the question admits the validity of
Geschichte, “existential history,” and rejects supposedly presuppositionless
inquiry. As Balthasar comments, “Put this way, the question already contains a
prior judgment…but it invites the opponent to show how the denial of it can
be scientifically substantiated.”9 A fundamental continuity between the
historical Jesus and New Testament Christologies, according to Balthasar,
explains the phenomenon of belief in Jesus as the only Son of God better than
a historical-Jesus portrayal that prescinds from New Testament witness, and so
makes better sense of the historical data.
Thus Balthasar argues that the chronology between the death of Jesus, the
conversion of Paul and the penning of Paul’s letters effectively refutes the
notion that so-called “high” Christological titles and concepts were introduced
gradually out of pagan Hellenistic sources. The notions of Jesus’ pre-existence,
his divine identity and his role in creation seem to have arisen within the first
three decades after Jesus’ death, out of a Jewish rather than pagan context.10
Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender (as suggested by the probable
historicity of the titulus posted above Jesus’ cross), and “did not need to be
styled ‘Messiah’ only subsequently.”11 And the soteriological formula, “Christ
died for our sins” is “certainly” pre-Pauline, and “cannot be proved to be
chronologically secondary,” suggesting a salvific interpretation of Jesus’ death
originating with Jesus himself.12 Balthasar expresses confidence (not out of
keeping with a consensus among many biblical exegetes) that Jesus expressed
his intimate and unique relationship with God using the Aramaic, Abba.13 He
cites Joachim Jeremias’s further suggestion that the eucharistic words of
“institution” derive from Jesus himself, as do many other logia which,
according to Heinz Schürmann, Jesus may have given directly to his disciples
in sending them out.14 Thus, heightened claims about Jesus’ identity, intimacy
with God and role in the divine plan for the redemption of Israel do not
constitute inventions of the post-paschal community but rather are rooted in
the impact that Jesus had upon his followers during his lifetime,
notwithstanding the difficulty of ascertaining specifics. But by positing a
general formal continuity between Jesus’ self-consciousness and the New
Testament kerygma in its various expressions, Balthasar brackets out much of
the discussion of historicity of specific actions or logia, such that claims about
the historical roots of New Testament Christological development are not
dependent on whether specific sayings or deeds in themselves can be traced
back to ipsissima verba et facta of Jesus.15 A broad sense of Jesus’ self-
understanding can be articulated under the rubrics of Jesus’ unique claim to
authority, his unique eschatological consciousness, and, underlying these, his
unique sense of mission.
Jesus’ Claim to Authority

More than anything in Jesus’ character, what emerges with supreme clarity
in the gospels is Jesus’ sense of his own authority. His claim (Anspruch) to
authority and judgment is, Balthasar says, “the formal Leitmotiv” of all the
gospels.16 Jesus appears as the proxy of God’s judgment on individuals and on
the people bound by the covenant. He asserts authority over the law, “and
thereby set[s] his own authority alongside (and thus above) that of Moses.”17
Repeatedly in the gospels, Jesus exercises authority over the Sabbath. Jesus
furthermore claims to judge the hearts of human beings, knowing the secret
thoughts of hearts and judging people’s faith or lack of it. Such knowledge of
others is analogous to the “charism of cardiognosis” found among the prophets,
and yet this knowledge in Jesus has apocalyptic dimensions that render it
unique and final, for this judgment is functionally equivalent to the judgment
of God.18 Such claims to know and judge are eschatological in tenor—signs not
only of Jesus’ special prophetic identity, but of his definitive role in the coming
of God’s reign. More significant than any particular verbal claims to authority
are Jesus’ actions—the quality of his teaching, his healings and exorcisms,
forgiveness of sins and action in the Temple. Balthasar continues, “This
authority appears in his sovereign acts, such as the cleansing of the Temple, in
connection with which he is naturally questioned about his warrant for doing
such a thing.”19
This claim to enact, and in a sense to be, the judgment of God is what
distinguishes Jesus from John the Baptist: “The Baptist points to the one who
is coming after him…but Jesus points to no one who should come after him.
After him comes no one else, and he is identical with the content of his call.”20
Similarly, while prophetic imminent expectation of God’s action, such as in
the cases of Elijah and Deutero-Isaiah, are analogous to the apocalyptic
eschatology found in Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God, still, Balthasar says:
Whereas in the case of the prophet, the fulfilment of the Word that is uttered
through him lies with God and remains independent of the person of the prophet
himself, the claim that Jesus makes, to be the present Word of God in judgment,
refuses to permit such a distancing: the future of God, into which Jesus leads the
poor and the sinners, must finally lie in him himself.21
Jesus does not simply preach the word of God, but identifies himself so closely
with it that the New Testament understands him to be the Word of God. The
radical claim to authority at the core of Jesus’ public life and indeed his whole
existence has strong historical grounding, since it becomes the provocation of
his execution: “It is historically certain that he was crucified because of a
presumptuous claim that could be given a political interpretation, and brought
him the inscription on the cross, ‘The king of the Jews.’”22 Externally, Jesus is
crucified for the presumptuous and blasphemous claim to stand in the place of
God, to exercise an authority belonging to the God of Israel alone. Balthasar,
however, suggests an internal logic whereby Jesus, in exercising divine
authority, must renounce all earthly power and authority and embrace
absolute poverty to the point of death: Jesus is “the one who is absolutely
poor.”23 The Gospel of John expresses most clearly the paradox of Jesus’
exercise of divine authority in his poverty, of the glory of God shining through
in the Crucifixion.
Balthasar’s emphasis on the circumincession of the authority and poverty
of Jesus works along the same principles as his explicitly metaphysical
Christological thought: for Balthasar, a strong version of the communicatio
idiomatum, grounded in the personal unity of Jesus Christ as incarnate Son of
God, results in a paradoxical interpenetration of “authority” and “poverty.” It
is not that the two dimensions of Jesus’ historical existence and consciousness
are merely juxtaposed as contrasting dimensions; rather, Jesus’ authority is
rooted in his poverty, a vice versa: each expresses and fulfils the other. With
resonances of Philippians 2:5–11, Balthasar argues that Jesus’ absolute
authority is such that it cannot be possessed and held to one’s self (harpagmos:
Phil. 2:6), but demands by its nature a sharing and bestowing in poverty of
spirit: “Jesus is the bringer of salvation, equipped only to pass on what he has
to others; for himself, he has nothing.”24 Without this poverty, Jesus’ authority
would be presumption, the overstepping of human limitations, a Promethean
grasping at divine authority. But in Jesus is found a claim to authority that will
lead him into utter poverty and vulnerability, the paradox of which can only
be sustained by his self-abandonment to the mission given by the Father. Thus,
the Balthasarian leitmotif of the paradoxical coincidentia oppositorum in the
person of Jesus, anchored in his Trinitarian hypostatic existence, is heard once

again. As will become clearer when we treat Christ’s mission-consciousness,
authority and poverty cannot be separated along the lines of Christ’s divinity
and humanity: both belong together to Christ’s person in relation to the
Father.
Jesus’ Eschatological Consciousness

One of the most contested points in modern historical study of Jesus and
the New Testament has been the question of eschatology and apocalypticism.
Did Jesus expect a temporally imminent arrival of the reign of God, or was the
reign of God already “present,” and only subsequently expressed in terms of
future expectation by the early Church? Johannes Weiss, followed by Albert
Schweitzer, advocated attention to Jesus within the context of Jewish
apocalypticism.25 On this view, Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected
the imminent arrival of the kingdom and attempted to force its coming by his
own death. Schweitzer concluded that Jesus was ultimately mistaken: Jesus
expected the kingdom to come historically, and it did not come. In contrast,
advocates of realized eschatology, such as C. H. Dodd, point to the logia
highlighting the “already” of the kingdom: apocalyptic statements put into
Jesus’ mouth either cannot be attributed to him or really refer to a timeless,
existential coming of the kingdom. Debate has continued into the present day
within the frame set by these poles of futurist and realized eschatology.
Balthasar is especially resolute in his opposition to realized eschatology on
the grounds that it reduces Jesus’ existence and message to an instantiation of
a larger, timeless, quasi-Platonic idea.26 Furthermore, he argues, “the
eschatological question will not allow a rounded picture of the historical Jesus
to be drawn. There is a residue, concerning Jesus’ expectation of the imminent
end, which refuses to be dissolved.”27 But Balthasar calls both options, realized
and futurist, “techniques of avoidance” that fail to do justice to the presence
in Jesus’ preaching of both a relentless emphasis on the present and a strong
apocalyptic expectation of the kingdom’s imminent arrival.28 These two
dimensions coexist in Jesus’ consciousness in a “paradoxical conjunction”
which can only be resolved theologically.29 Rather than “realized” or “futurist,”
Balthasar appropriates Joachim Jeremias’s term “self-realizing eschatology,” an

eschatology which is fully realized only in and through the death and
resurrection of Jesus; Origen’s term autobasileia likewise conveys the
inseparability of Jesus’ unique existence from the decisive redemptive action of
God.30 The apocalyptic strain in Jesus’ preaching must be qualified by his
emphasis on the present (e.g. Luke 17:21: “the kingdom of God is among
you”), such that the kingdom to come is already present in his own person in a
way that transcends the preaching of John the Baptist and Jewish messianic
expectation in general.31 Jesus’ consciousness is characterized by a polarity
between future expectation and “living in the moment”: “he looks ahead to
the reality that will come without fail, and he possesses the peace of the man
who unhurriedly performs his tasks each day that is granted to him…. He lives
‘proleptically’ in both directions.”32 Here, for Balthasar, examination of the
synoptic gospels and discernment of genuine sayings of Jesus lead to the
conclusion that seemingly contradictory perspectives coexist within Jesus’ one
earthly consciousness.33 Both logia of imminent expectation of the in-breaking
of the kingdom and logia about the kingdom’s presence “among you” are
ascribable to Jesus, and must be said to have coexisted in his consciousness.
Similarly, Jesus speaks of “the hour” (e.g. Matthew 26:45) and the coming of
the Son of Man (e.g. Luke 12:8), but not as if the end of his life and the end-
time are separated by an interim period: the destiny of the world is intimately
connected with Jesus’ own personal destiny.34 Balthasar thus rejects
approaches to Jesus’ self-understanding that de-eschatologize his message and
existence, rendering him a non-apocalyptic prophet of a timeless divine sophia.
At the same time, the distillation of Jesus’ preaching into an exclusively future-
oriented eschatological expectation leads to an unacceptable separation
between Jesus’ person and God’s eschatological action.
For Balthasar, Jesus’ eschatological consciousness can only be adequately
dealt with once one has recognized its absolute uniqueness, which does not
admit of an existentialist reduction but demands a theological approach:
The issue of Jesus’ expectation of the imminent end is by no means a mere

gnoseological problem that we have to clarify philosophically (or demythologize) so
that we may be able to share it. What is at stake is his completely unique destiny; it is
this that brings him, within the span of his own life and death, to the end of the
world; it is this that causes him to bring the world in its entirety into his temporal
life and there deal with it. The eschatological dimension of his existence lies in the
universality of his task, which is not concluded by the words, “I have survived” but by
“it is finished.”35
It can be said that Jesus experiences time differently from other human beings,
indeed that in his person he lives a qualitatively different, Christological time-
scale. While the New Testament writers, almost by necessity, may have had to
translate Jesus’ words of expectation into temporal terms, Jesus has his own
personal time, which includes his limited mortal existence within which he
must surrender himself completely to the will of the Father, as well as the
unknown future that will come about with and in his death. There is in the
New Testament a post-Easter temporal bifurcation of Jesus’ death and the
parousia, but “this quantitative dischronicity conceals a qualitative
dischronicity.”36 Balthasar also refers to this dischronicity as a “double
temporal horizon” within the consciousness of Jesus. Knowing himself to be a
mortal man, Jesus recognizes the historical limitation of what he can achieve;
yet he is conscious that what he is bringing about in his person is nothing less
than the salvation of the whole world:
The finitude and limitation of his life force him, like any other man, to limit his
plans and his undertakings; thus, from the human point of view, his mission is
limited exclusively to Israel…. But this limited period is to be the sphere within
which God’s definitive dealing with the world is to take place, the definitive act that
the old covenant called the Day of the Lord; the final division, the final justification
of God and man, the final salvation.37
On one hand, within his own unique time, Jesus is conscious of reaching the
end of history in his death, descent and resurrection: Balthasar speaks of the
descent into hell as an experience of non-time (a point to be taken up in the
next chapter), while the paschal state of Jesus admits of no “points” of time.38
On the other hand, Jesus foresees the continuing flow of historical,
chronological time for his disciples, the “time of the Church,” which is
qualitatively different from his own time, but which is assumed into his time
and “included in his grasp.”39
Balthasar’s notion of Christ’s double temporal horizon recapitulates the

theme of Christ’s time as qualitatively different from world-time, expressed in
A Theology of History. By recalling his discussion of Christological time in that
work, one is reminded that Balthasar is transposing the Christologically
determined analogia entis into temporal terms and now applying it to Christ’s
consciousness. Furthermore, Balthasar is convinced that this Chalcedonian-
funded approach to Christ’s consciousness maintains the necessary tensions
within New Testament Christology and eschatology which other approaches
side-step. To take one specific example, Balthasar considers the eschatological
Son-of-Man passages, such as Jesus’ saying in the Gospel of Mark, “Those who
are ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of
them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his
Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38).40 Balthasar takes it as probable that
these sayings are “based on authentic words of Jesus.”41 A further exegetical
question is whether the sayings are self-referential or whether Jesus speaks of
the Son of Man as an eschatological figure (based on the apocalyptic vision in
Daniel 7) distinct from himself. Balthasar argues that there must be “an
ultimate identity between [Jesus’] ‘I’ and the ‘Son of Man.’”42 The community
of disciples was unlikely to have merged the figures of Jesus and the coming
Son of Man, if in Jesus’ own consciousness and preaching he clearly
distinguished himself from the latter, if he saw himself only as the forerunner
or herald.43 From what Balthasar has argued—that Jesus’ preaching of the reign
of God embraced both “already” and “not-yet” eschatological dimensions—it
appears that Jesus saw himself as the decisive figure in the coming of God’s
reign, as “the measuring rod of earthly man’s eternal salvation or ruin” (hence
the warning in Mark 8:38 that judgment on Jesus will result in being judged by
the Son of Man).44 But if these eschatological Son-of-Man sayings are rooted in
Jesus’ own self-understanding, why does Jesus distinguish between first-person
and third-person references, between “I”/“me” and “the Son of Man”? The
distinction derives, Balthasar suggests, from a polarity within the consciousness of
Jesus himself:
And if…he said “Son of Man” instead of “I,” it would show how stupendous and
unimaginable he found the relationship between the two sides of his own self: on the
one hand, he was someone living on earth with a particular mission that, humanly
speaking, he could carry out; and, on the other hand, he was plunged into a mission
that had been eschatologically stretched to the breaking point through the
experience of the “hour” (Passion-Resurrection), with an outcome that, at present,
was quite unforeseeable.45
The eschatological tension within Jesus’ consciousness and preaching must be

maintained, argues Balthasar, and is held together only by reference to Jesus’
mission, a universal eschatological mission which is inseparable from his
person. Balthasar asks, “Might not Jesus’ consciousness of his mission
(Auftragsbewußtsein) have been that he had to abolish the world’s estrangement
from God in its entirety—that is, to its very end—or, in Pauline and Johannine
terms, deal with the sin of the whole world?”46 For Balthasar, the universality
of this mission offers the best account of the unique person and consciousness
at the historical core of all the Christological images and motifs of the New
Testament.
Mission-Consciousness: Trinitarian and Soteriological

The previous chapter showed that Balthasar refocuses the concept of
person around the notion of mission. Christ is “the One sent,” the one
identical to his mission, and it is in Christ that all other human beings are
bestowed personhood, as participants in Christ’s own mission:
This [identity] is the origin of the true concept of “Person,” which in Christology is
above all a theological concept, not a generally accessible philosophical one. Because
Jesus is identical with his mission, he is the primordial Person (Urperson). And each
human conscious subject (Geistsubjekt) shares in personal being (only) insofar as it is
given to her by the grace of Christ to share in an aspect and fragment of his
universally salvific mission.47
Mission will be the guiding principle in Balthasar’s treatment of Christ’s

consciousness as well, and Balthasar finds in the New Testament evidence of a
unique sense of mission in Jesus. The theme of mission is especially strong in
the Christology of the Gospel of John, but already Paul speaks of God sending
“his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3). The synoptic
gospels also contain numerous sayings, arguably deriving from Jesus himself,
which speak of Jesus being sent by God: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes
me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” Jesus says in
Matthew 10:40.48 From the breadth of references to sending and being sent
throughout the New Testament, Balthasar concludes that “the Johannine
missio Christology is only the logical development of implications already
present in the Synoptics, which testify to a unique sense of mission on the part
of Jesus.”49 Given multiple attestation in the various strata of the New
Testament and various logia in which Jesus speaks of himself as being sent, the
notion of mission cannot be located exclusively in a later stage of
Christological reflection, but can reasonably be traced back to Jesus himself,
who understood himself as the one sent by his Father. Just as Jesus’ person is
ontologically constituted by his mission, so too with respect to consciousness,
“Jesus’ knowledge of himself coincides with his knowledge of his being sent.”50
Balthasar proposes that the uniqueness of Jesus’ person and consciousness
is grounded in two aspects of mission, the Trinitarian and the soteriological.
The Trinitarian dimension is particularly strong in the Fourth Gospel, where
Jesus speaks explicitly of coming from God (e.g. John 8:42). But Jesus has not
only come from God, but comes for the salvation of the world, to “serve,” to
“fulfill the law,” to “give his life as a ransom for many.” As Balthasar says,
“References to his ‘having come’ always manifest the Messianic awareness of
bringing about, in his own person, an ultimate saving event.”51 The Trinitarian
and soteriological aspects of Jesus mission do not stand in juxtaposition, but
mutually inhere:
The intimate relationship between the One sent and the One who sends him takes
the form of obedience within the Father’s act of surrender. The Father is the One
who sends, and in this act of sending he establishes, guides and takes responsibility
for Jesus’ whole existence on earth; he lays down the latter’s purpose right from the
start, namely, the salvation of the world.52
The mission of Jesus is qualitatively different from that of a prophet on

account of the intimacy between the Sender and the One sent. This intimacy
renders the Sender immanently present in the One sent, and the One sent
wholly dependent on the Sender for his entire being. As elucidated in the
previous chapter, with all other human beings a mission is bestowed a
posteriori; in the case of Jesus, identity is constituted from the beginning by the
mission imparted by the Father. Thus, to reiterate the Thomistic axiom:
To identify his human “I” (with all its human faculties) with a divine mission in the
fullest sense: this would be an interpretation of the Christological formula of
Aquinas, that the mission (missio) of the Son is nothing but the prolongation into the
world of his eternal coming-forth (processio) from the Father.53
The continuity between intra-Trinitarian procession and economic mission

obtains not only with regard to Christ’s ontological constitution, but also with
regard to his consciousness: Jesus knows himself to be the one sent by God for
the salvation of the world. The mutual inherence of Trinitarian and
soteriological dimensions of Jesus’ mission means that all thematizations of his
own identity in Jesus’ consciousness are mediated by the single concept of
mission, and that the “from” aspect includes the “for” aspect, and vice versa. To
put it in the form of caricature, Jesus did not have to articulate his self-
understanding as such: “I am the second Person of the Trinity.” Rather, his
awareness of his own divine identity, his identification of God the Father as
the source of his personal being, is implicit in the soteriological aspect of Jesus’
self-understanding as the one through whom the world is to be reconciled to
the Father. Jesus’ consciousness of his own divinity is at all times mediated by
the consciousness of having a mission which is unique and all-consuming, so
much so that it can only be the mission of one who was with God from the
beginning.
How does Balthasar construe the soteriological dimension of Jesus’
mission? As already noted with regard to Jesus’ eschatological self-
consciousness, this mission cannot be reduced to announcing the coming of
the reign of God as a purely future event. Balthasar is suspicious of theories of
redemption that portray Jesus as an emissary with only an extrinsic connection
with the coming of God’s salvific reign, or, as Hans Küng considers him, the
“advocate” (Sachwalter) between God and humanity.54 Balthasar finds popular
models of Jesus’ solidarity and pro-existence similarly reductive, suggestive even
of humanism “under the cover of orthodoxy.”55 According to Balthasar, the
attribution of universal saving significance to Jesus, and particularly to his
death on the cross, is a ubiquitous motif in the Johannine and Pauline

literature, and must go back to the mind of Jesus himself: “It is impossible to
suppose that God could use this death to reconcile the world to himself if the
one who died it was unaware of its significance.”56 Similarly in Glory of the Lord
VII, Balthasar regards Paul’s attestation to a representational soteriology as
definitive and traceable to Jesus himself:
It is certain that if one robs Jesus of the consciousness of being a proxy for the whole
of mankind in the judgment of God—although this is something that Paul
continuously attributes to him—then one brings down at a single stroke the whole
edifice of the Church’s proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ and the portrayal of his
earthly life.57
In making such a claim, Balthasar is largely dismissing the psychological

question of whether such a mindset is compatible with a “healthy,” integrated
human consciousness: it is precisely because Jesus’ consciousness is unique, a
consciousness constituted and conditioned from the beginning by a universal
mission, that human psychology arrives at its limit and can go no further. The
question of how a “human being” could think of himself in this way neglects
the analogical relationship—the similarity only within greater dissimilarity—
between Christ’s and all other human consciousnesses. Balthasar does,
however, want to give due weight to the New Testament’s attestation to Jesus’
own sense of his mission. At various points in the gospels, particularly in the
synoptics, Jesus speaks of a mission to Israel: “I was sent only to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel” (Matt 15:24). This articulation of Jesus’ mission shows
the limitations of a single mortal life, such that “from a human point of view,
his mission is limited exclusively to Israel.”58 At the same time, this historically,
temporally limited mission is not merely one moment within a broader
universal process, but precisely the moment in which God deals definitively
with the world and its sin, the “Day of the Lord.”59 Jesus’ particular mission to
Israel is universalized in his own consciousness because he knows that his
limited circumstances, acting, and suffering, are inextricably bound to the
definitive judgment of God.60 Balthasar says that it is also universalized on
account of Jesus’ obedience: “While initially his task focuses on Israel, it is
actually wide open; his attitude of readiness makes it universal.”61 The
universalizing effect of Jesus’ obedience is noteworthy in Balthasar’s

soteriology: Jesus’ obedience is universally salvific because it restores and
transforms fallen human freedom; it is the personal freedom of the Son of
God incarnate which brings him to the point of vicariously taking on
humanity’s sin. Jesus need not know all things, every contour of the divine
plan for salvation; the universalizing principle is not the content of his
knowledge but his mission, and thus Jesus’ explicit awareness of how his
mission becomes universal in scope need not be complete: “Since he must
leave the universalizing of his mission to the Father, he can only have an
implicit preknowledge (ein implizites Vorwissen) of this process as a whole.”62
Balthasar thus ascribes a more specific and defined soteriological content to
Jesus in his earthly life than many exegetes and theologians might; at the same
time he allows for the thematization of Jesus’ consciousness of mission to
prioritize the restoration of Israel and to refer to the salvation of the world
only obliquely and implicitly.
Mission-Consciousness as Absolute
Balthasar speaks of Christ’s consciousness of mission as absolute, because
his person is identical with his mission and his mission is nothing less than
universal. Thus, “in the individual human consciousness of Jesus, there is
something that in principle always goes beyond the purely human horizon of
consciousness.”63 Balthasar continues: “A more-than-human mission—to
reconcile the whole world to God—cannot be a secondary and accidental
development of a human consciousness, however much room we must leave
here for the growing clarity of mission-consciousness.”64 Balthasar asserts
repeatedly that Jesus’ self-consciousness cannot be conceived of as having a
punctiliar historical starting point or beginning; rather, he refers to die
Unvordenklichkeit des Sendungsbewußtseins Jesu.65 The German Unvordenklichkeit is
very difficult to translate, and has both a noetic sense of “unpreconceivability,”
that is to say, something that cannot be anticipated by thought, and an
ontological sense of “without starting point,” which is how the English
translator of the Theo-Drama has largely chosen to translate it with regard to
Christ’s consciousness. In Theo-Logic II, Balthasar also invokes the term to
describe the intra-Trinitarian generation of the Persons.66 Here, it is the

begetting of the Son by the Father that is unvordenklich in at least two senses.
First, in the sense that the Son is, according to Nicene faith, coeternal to the
Father; the Father (contra Arius) is never without the Son, and is “originally”
totally self-giving. Second, the generation of the Trinitarian persons is
unvordenklich because it is a love that “cannot be anticipated,” that breaks open
all pre-conceptions of love. The English translator of the Theo-Logic, Adrian J.
Walker, offers this helpful note on the term Unvordenklichkeit in this
Trinitarian context:
It suggests, first, that God the Father has, so to say, already loved the Son before
there is any chance of reflective deliberation about whether he wants to or not. It
also suggests that God’s love is the context in which his intellect, and all other
faculties and properties, take shape. Finally, it suggests that no human thought can
get behind God’s love, which is thus the source of God’s mysteriousness for us.67
It is important to be attentive to this term because Balthasar calls upon it

frequently in speaking of Christ’s consciousness. That he applies it to the
begetting of the Son within the Trinitarian life is significant for Christology,
since it is a term that binds personal being and consciousness, both grounded
in the mission which is itself a translation of the intra-divine procession. Thus
it closely binds the human consciousness of Jesus to the Trinitarian person of
the Son: this human consciousness is from the beginning the human
consciousness of none other than the eternal Son.
The Unvordenklichkeit of Jesus’ consciousness means that he owes neither
his personal being nor the constitution of his consciousness to any creaturely
origin. For this reason, Balthasar argues, Jesus was born virginally of Mary:
Jesus knows that he is one with his mission, and this means that he owes his entire
being to the heavenly Father who has sent him. This would be impossible if he also
owed his existence to an earthly father, for he would be indebted to the latter for
part of his “I,” while owing nothing to him with regard to his mission (a mission
inseparable from that “I”).68
This argument for the virginal conception is secondary to Balthasar’s

discussion of Mary’s role in awakening Jesus’ consciousness to his role within
the context of the covenant. But the point reaffirms the a priori principle of
Jesus’ absolute identification with his mission. There was, argues Balthasar, no
point in Jesus’ existence when his mission did not shape his entire personal
being, since for his mission to be bestowed subsequently would mean the
assignment of a universal saving mission heteronomously to an independently
existing human being (conscious subject). Such an imposition of the mission
to save the whole world would constitute not a development in a human
consciousness, but a rupture:
Thus it is ridiculous to suppose that Jesus should have experienced himself first as
purely a man and should only have arrived at the end of his life (rightly or wrongly)
at the thought that he was, in a way surpassing other human beings, the one sent, the
Son of God.69
Balthasar insists that nothing in the gospels gives the impression of such a
“leap” in the consciousness of Jesus, which, he says, would only reveal a grave
mental sickness.70 Jesus’ consciousness, therefore, never developed apart from
the mission which constitutes his person.
In making mission constitutive of Jesus’ consciousness, Balthasar has
effected a transposition of the Neo-Chalcedonian doctrine of the enhypostatic
humanity of Christ. We recall that according to this doctrine the individual
human nature of Christ is created by the act of being assumed into the
hypostasis of the Logos, and had no independent existence apart from
subsistence in the person of the Logos (either pre-existing in an Origenian
fashion or existing historically, as in a Nestorian homo assumptus Christology).
When Balthasar says that Jesus’ self-consciousness had no temporal beginning,
he is not denying that this consciousness is human, which would be
monophysitism. He is saying rather that there is no discreet point in the life
and career of Jesus when Jesus’ consciousness of his mission was suddenly
ignited, having been a purely human consciousness before that moment. His
“I” was never anything else but his mission: “Rather, he is the one, who, from
before all time, has had the task—indeed, he is the task—of fulfilling this
universal design; everything in him, mind, intelligence and free will, is
oriented to it.”71 Balthasar continues, “It is for the sake of his mission that
Jesus is this particular human being.”72 Here, the echo of the doctrine of
enhypostasia is unmistakeable: it is not just the singularity of the event of the
Incarnation, but the singularity of the saving mission of the Son that
constitutes the individual human existence of Jesus.
Balthasar on Neo-Antiochene Christology

To appreciate the Neo-Chalcedonian character of Balthasar’s Christology,
it is useful to consider the context of the mid-twentieth-century debate in
Catholic Christology about the consciousness of Christ. Early in the century,
the French Franciscan Déodat de Basly retrieved the mediaeval homo assumptus
theory, according to which there are two subjects in Christ, the Word and the
homo assumptus, “autre et autre quelqu’un.”73 Déodat’s disciple Léon Seiller
described Déodat’s central idea as “the duel of love between the Triune God
and the assumed man”74 The sonship of Jesus is not, according to Déodat, the
natural sonship of the Word vis-à-vis the Father, but the sonship of the man
Jesus vis-à-vis the Trinity.75 Even if the person of the Logos is regarded as the
ontological centre of the hypostatic union, still the man Jesus, joined to the
Logos, has a fully autonomous consciousness and field of action. Pius XII’s
1951 encyclical, Sempiternus Rex, on the sesquimillenial anniversary of
Chalcedon, rejected Déodat de Basly’s and Seiller’s retrieval of the homo
assumptus model and the positing of two “sons” in Jesus.76
A more nuanced position was presented by Paul Galtier in several articles
and in the monograph, L’Unité du Christ.77 Galtier acknowledges that Christ
cannot be regarded as a human person distinct from the Logos, but, given that
consciousness belongs to nature and not to person, Christ must possess a
human ego or act-centre.78 Galtier speaks dialectically on the one hand of an
ontological dependence of the human nature on the person of the Word and
on the other of a psychological independence, making the human nature the
immediate subject and formal cause of Christ’s actions. Galtier states pre-
emptively that this psychological independence does not make the human
psychology of Christ an independent agent: “It is simply to affirm that, despite
its state of union with the Word, [the human nature] maintains all its vital
and psychological spontaneity.”79 Given this psychological autonomy of
Christ’s human nature, how was it that Christ did not mistake himself for a
human person? Galtier argues that the human nature knows that it does not
constitute an ontological human person because it possesses the beatific
vision: “It has always had full consciousness of this vision, of the knowledge
[connaissance] thus obtained, and this consciousness itself belongs to the
Word.”80 It is telling that the subject in this passage is “the human nature.”
The beatific vision is rendered necessary in Galtier’s approach to Christ’s
consciousness as a protective measure against a case of mistaken (self-) identity.
As Wolfhart Pannenberg comments wryly, “Here the disjunction Christology
is held in check by a shot of the antidote of the hegemony of the Logos.”81
We have already noted various contributions of Karl Rahner to the mid-
century debate about Christ’s consciousness. Rahner can be seen as advancing
the (moderately) neo-Antiochene position of Galtier. He too affirms the
ontological unity of Christ but believes that the Chalcedonian definition and
the Third Council of Constantinople’s dyothelite doctrine set a dogmatic
precedent for positing a psychological duality:
Now it may and indeed must of course be said that the doctrine of the unconfused
and unchanged real human nature implies, as the struggle against monothelitism
after the rejection of monophysitism shows, that the “human nature” of the Logos
possesses a genuine, spontaneous, free, spiritual, active centre, a human
selfconsciousness (sic), which as creaturely faces the eternal Word in a genuinely
human attitude of adoration, obedience, a most radical sense of creaturehood.82
It is striking that Rahner employs only two of the adverbs used by Chalcedon
to make his point about the psychological autonomy of Christ’s human
nature, omitting “without division” and “without separation.” Rahner
highlights Christ’s human consubstantiality and the continuities in the realm
of consciousness between the hypostatic union and the life of grace. Thus
Christ in his humanity is the highest instance of the creaturely stance before
God, and in the hypostatic union the closest union between God and
humanity is also, in a direct proportion, the relationship of supreme
independence and freedom.83
By no means is there a direct line from Déodat de Basly’s heterodox homo
assumptus theory through Galtier to Rahner. Déodat emphasizes the duality in
Christ to such an extent that it suggests not only psychological distinction but
a neo-Nestorian parallelism of subjects.84 Galtier and Rahner affirm more
vigorously the complete ontological union of divinity and humanity in Christ,
while attempting to see Christ’s human consciousness as a genuine act-centre
rather than a passive instrument. But in the comparison between Galtier and
Rahner on the one hand and Balthasar on the other a sharp contrast appears
between two approaches to Christ’s consciousness that claim Chalcedon as a
fundamental criterion. Balthasar rejects the description of Christ’s self-
consciousness as the human nature’s consciousness of its union with the
Logos. As I have argued throughout this study, Balthasar’s fundamentally Neo-
Chalcedonian approach binds Christology closely to Trinitarian theology,
emphasizes the priority of hypostasis over natures, and views the Incarnation
narrativally rather than analytically. Thus in the discussion of Rahner’s
approach to Christ’s consciousness, Balthasar makes Helmut Riedlinger’s
question his own: “Is it really true that the God-consciousness of Jesus refers
primarily to his own Godhead, that is, to divinity as such?”85 Balthasar affirms
with Rahner that in Christ, self-consciousness and God-consciousness
coincide, but with Riedlinger he insists that this self-consciousness refers not
to a direct consciousness of his own divine nature, but rather to a
consciousness of his relationship with the Father, a relationship mediated by
mission.86 For Balthasar consciousness is always constituted by inter-
subjectivity, and such inter-subjectivity, whether it be Christ’s awakening to his
mission through Mary or his unique sense of being the Son of his heavenly
Abba, belongs to the order of person, not to the order of nature.87
The common Galtier-Rahner thesis of a psychologically independent
human ego makes it very difficult to grasp what personal unity means on the
ontological plane without some reference to a single psychological subject.
Rahner voices concern about “monosubjectivism,” but this term is somewhat
ambiguous, as can be seen by reference to Balthasar’s Christology. Balthasar
does not deny the human subjectivity of Christ, but he denies that in Christ the
human nature constitutes a human subject alongside or over against the person
of the Son.88 For Balthasar, what we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth is none
other than the person of the Son as a human individual, who has made
himself subject to the economy. Balthasar can even speak of the “identification
of the Logos with the consciousness of a human subject.”89 But in contrast to
the homo assumptus theory, the “human subject” has no independent existence
prior to or in the hypostatic union: the human subject is numerically identical,
in the order of being and in the order of consciousness, to the person of the
Word. Thomas Weinandy echoes Balthasar’s Neo-Chalcedonian approach
when he says:
An intellect is not aware, nor does a “will” act; only a person knows and only a
person acts and he does so through his will…. It is the Son of God who wills either
with his divine will or with his human will, but the wills themselves do not interact
apart from the one who is willing, the divine Son.… Moreover, a “will” does not act
apart from the one whose will it is, nor does a “will,” as if it were an acting subject,
subordinate itself to another will. Only persons subordinate their will to another
person. To say that one will subordinates itself to another will implies two persons.90
In other words, the human nature, endowed with consciousness and will,
must be regarded as the principium quo (although not in a passive instrumental
sense) but not the principium quod, which belongs to the order of person. Thus
Weinandy says, “[W]ithin the Incarnation, the Son of God humanly comes to
know or humanly becomes conscious, within his human intellect and human
consciousness, that he is the Son of God.”91 Furthermore, by his emphasis on
the a priori mission which constitutes Christ as this particular human subject,
Balthasar eschews the speculation entailed in Galtier’s position on the
function of the beatific vision. While Galtier requires the beatific vision as a
kind of a corrective measure to preserve the human ego of Christ from
erroneously ascribing human personhood to itself, from a Balthasarian
perspective, there is simply no possibility of an individual personal existence
and self-consciousness of Jesus apart from his existence as the Son of God.
Such a possibility is nonsensical even in abstracto. Here we see again how
deeply indebted Balthasar is to the doctrine of enhypostasia.
A Limited Human Consciousness

Although Balthasar regards Jesus’ consciousness as a function of his
divine person, where person is identical to mission, it is nonetheless a human
consciousness subject to historical development. Balthasar therefore rejects the

principle of perfection invoked in some Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic
Christologies to ascribe the sum of all knowledge to Christ, “right from his
conception and birth.”92 According to these theories of Christ’s knowledge, as
mediator of divine knowledge Christ as a human being must of necessity have
enjoyed relative omniscience imparted by the Logos to the human intellect.
Thus, Christ was not capable of learning from empirical data or from other
human beings.93 Thomas Aquinas allowed for empirical learning on Jesus’
part, but did not find it strictly necessary given the possibility that Jesus could
know the same things by infused knowledge.94
Against such tendencies, Balthasar emphasizes the distinction between the
status exaltationis and the status exinanitionis, and warns against superimposing
the conditions of the former on the latter.95 For Balthasar Jesus’ learning and
knowledge must be situated within his mission-consciousness: “Jesus under-
goes an historical learning process with regard to his fellow men and their
tradition, but essentially this is a paralleled by an inward learning whereby he
is initiated more and more deeply into the meaning and scope of his mission.”96
Jesus’ mission-consciousness has an a priori dimension, a horizon of the
mission which constitutes his own person, but this horizon is not always
explicit; sometimes it is “only obscurely and indirectly felt or left entirely to the
Father’s guidance”97 This mission-consciousness is mediated by Jesus’ own
historical circumstances, by the people and events around him. Thus, against
Thomas’s position that Jesus could not learn from other human beings,
Balthasar says:
Here the Scholastic a priori comes up against an elementary truth of human nature:
unless a child is awakened to I-consciousness (Ichbewußtsein) through the
instrumentality of a Thou, it cannot become a human child at all. Thomas’
proposition is at odds with the logic of the Incarnation. Jesus cannot escape the
anthropological principle described by Maurice Nédoncelle as the “réciprocité des
consciences” any more than anyone else can: it is something fundamental that
cannot be undercut.98
In the previous chapter, the phenomenology of the mother’s smile was

highlighted as central to Balthasar’s metaphysics and anthropology. Here the
unsurpassable intersubjective experience between mother and child finds its

theological archetype in the awakening of Jesus’ consciousness by Mary. Mary
does not create Jesus’ self-consciousness as a human being, which is identical
to his mission: “All that is necessary is that the initial awakening shall be in
harmony (a ‘pre-established’ harmony) with the specific nature of his self-
consciousness (which we cannot conceive as having a starting point).”99
Through her induction of Jesus into the religious traditions and hopes of
Israel, Mary awakens “the sense of mission latent in the Child’s person.”100
This awakening, for Balthasar, is fully in accord with the “logic of the
Incarnation”: “Without this spiritual handing-on, which takes place
simultaneously with the bodily gift of mother’s milk and motherly care, God’s
Word would not have really become flesh. For being in-the-flesh always means
receiving from others.”101 Although he does not explicitly make the point here,
within Balthasar’s Trinitarian-Christological vision, this receptivity on the part
of the child Jesus is not only an affirmation of his full humanity, but also a
revelation of his divinity in the mode of filial receptivity to the Father in the
Spirit.102 It is not a contradiction of Christ’s divine identity as consubstantial
Son of the Father, but rather an expression of it for him to submit to the
circumstances of his historical context, relationships, and religious traditions.
Within the context of the development and unveiling of Christ’s
consciousness, it is important to note Balthasar’s minimalism, expressed in the
repeated formula, “all that is necessary.” Balthasar does not pose the question
of Christ’s consciousness in terms of what is necessary to his divinity, or what
is necessary to his humanity, but rather what is necessary to his mission. For
Jesus to carry out his mission, he did not need, by the principle of perfection
or an a priori notion of what is fitting to his dignity, to know all things (or
indeed many things). Balthasar offers the example of the temptation in the
desert. Here, “Jesus conquers his…temptations solely by recourse to words
from the Old Covenant that were familiar to every Israelite.”103 Emphasizing
Jesus’ obedience to the Covenant in contrast to Israel’s failure to observe the
law, Balthasar says, “Jesus takes seriously the central precepts of the Old
Covenant; thus they suffice to enable him decisively to dismiss the temptations
against his unique mission.”104 Balthasar relativizes knowledge in two ways:
first, Israel “knew” the precepts of the law and failed to obey, hence knowledge
is not sufficient; second, Jesus has adequate knowledge to obey and needs to
know no more than this in the exercise of his mission. This is not to say that
Jesus did not at times display extraordinary knowledge, such as when he
displays the charism of “cardiognosis.” But the measure of such knowledge is
always Jesus’ mission, not the attributes of the divine or human natures, and
nescience, or unknowing, can serve an even more important role in the
exercise of Jesus’ mission than his explicit knowledge. It will of course be in his
Passion that Jesus enters into supreme darkness and unknowing for the sake of
his mission.
Mission and the V isio Immediata

In Balthasar’s Christology, the visio immediata traditionally ascribed to
Christ’s human soul is similarly reinterpreted in terms of mission-
consciousness. Thus Balthasar says of Jesus, “It is of this [his mission], and of
this alone, that he has a visio immediata, and we have no reason to suggest that
this visio of the divine is supplemented by another, as it were, purely
theoretical content, over and above his mission.”105 Balthasar thus invokes
Rahner’s analysis of Christ’s consciousness insofar as Christ’s consciousness of
his divinity is not the knowledge of an object “before him.”106 In the essay
“Dogmatic Reflections on the Knowledge and Self-Consciousness of Christ,”
Rahner argues that consciousness admits of differentiations, such that in
addtion to things known explicitly and thematically there is also a realm of pre-
thematic knowing: “Human consciousness is an infinite, multi-dimensional
sphere,” says Rahner, which includes “reflex consciousness and things to
which we attend explicitly,” “conceptual consciousness of objects,” and
“transcendental, unreflected knowledge attached to the subjective pole of
consciousness.”107 Self-consciousness does not refer to an articulated and
complete awareness of one’s identity as a kind of object, but is rather the
transcendental, a priori horizon and condition of categorical, a posteriori
knowledge of objects in the world. Turning to Christology, Rahner thus
affirms that Jesus has a basic consciousness of his divine sonship, but this basic
consciousness is not necessarily available in explicit, categorical terms: it thus
affords the possibility of genuine advancement and learning in human

knowledge:
It is absolutely legitimate to desire to see which of the notions prescribed by his

religious environment Jesus actually used in order to express slowly what he had
always known about himself in the very depth of his being…. For this does not mean
that Jesus “discovered something” which he did not know in any way up until then,
but it means rather that he grasped more and more what he already always is and
basically also already knows.108
This basic consciousness can be regarded as the visio immediata, and indeed,
Rahner thinks that the hypostatic union requires such a visio immediata: “A
purely ontic Unio hypostatica is metaphysically impossible to conceive.”109 But
such a vision should not be construed as the vision of an object, “the vision of
the divine essence present before his mind’s eye as an object.”110 Rahner
speaks of this visio rather in terms of the direct presence of the Logos to the
human soul of Jesus.
Balthasar joins Rahner in identifying Jesus’ self-consciousness as
necessarily and in some form the consciousness of his divine identity, but
along with Rahner Balthasar denies that this consciousness requires a super-
human explicit and perfect knowledge of himself and of things in the world.
Balthasar and Rahner both insist that the immediate vision enjoyed by Jesus in
his humanity is not a vision of the divine essence in the form of an object.
Balthasar differs from Rahner here in that rather than arguing from the
structures of human knowing, he takes mission as his starting point:
Mission is not there in order to be the object of contemplation but to be carried out;
consequently Jesus’ intuition that he is the measure of the Old Covenant is not a
purely theoretical observation: it is also the practical demand that, in fulfilling his
own mission, he shall also bring to fulfillment what is preliminary in the Old
Covenant.111
Indeed, while acknowledging the tradition of Christ’s visio immediata, Balthasar

generally eschews the language of sight in describing Jesus’ self-consciousness,
in an effort, I suspect, to avoid the idea of heteronomy in Jesus’ execution of
his mission.112 He opts rather for the language of interiority—“intuition,”
“implicit knowledge.” Jesus’ mission-consciousness has the character of an

inner imperative conditioning his entire being and knowing. For this reason
prayer and action do not exist in juxtaposition in Jesus’ life but mutually
inhere:
The Son does not contemplate the Father for a while and then pause in order to
imitate in his own activity what he has seen the Father do. Even while he is active, he
keeps is gaze fixed steadily upon the Father in order not to lose a moment’s direction
from him. But he is not inactive while he is contemplating. He understands his
contemplation so entirely as service and mission that he translates into action and
reality all that the Father shows him.113
Christ’s visio immediata is of the Father who sends him in mission, a mission of
“translating” not a propositional knowledge about God but the receptive, filial
mode of divine life into a human existence. The “sight” and knowledge of
Christ is in the first instance a kind of existential knowing, a relational
knowing of himself as brought forth by the Father.
Balthasar differs from Rahner in that he does not make systematic
correlations between his “Christology of consciousness” and a general theory
of cognition. He does not define consciousness (Bewußtsein) or explain in
terms of a theory of consciousness or epistemology how consciousness
coincides or differs from knowledge. At various points, he seems to use
“consciousness” interchangeably with “self-consciousness” (Selbstbewußtsein),
“intuition,” and “awareness.”114 There often seems to be a deliberate vagueness
in Balthasar’s descriptions of Jesus’ consciousness of his own divinity: “Jesus is
aware of an element of the divine in his innermost, indivisible self-
consciousness.”115 Nonetheless, Balthasar presupposes that consciousness
consists of various modes of knowledge and self-presence, not to be identified
with explicit, thematized knowledge. He endorses Rahner’s positive evaluation
of nescience as possibly “a more perfect attribute” than knowing: the nescience
of Christ in the status exinanitionis “is such that human freedom and
susceptibility to temptation are allowed room to operate.”116 Balthasar,
however, goes further than Rahner. Rahner, contesting “the Greek ideal of
man,”117 emphasizes that it is fitting for Christ to experience unknowing, that
there is no a priori reason that nescience cannot be attributed to Christ. For his
part, Balthasar argues that nescience is not only fitting but indeed necessary for
the accomplishment of Christ’s mission. Citing Adrienne von Speyr, he says:
For the sake of obedience, he has renounced his divine foreknowledge and given it
into the Father’s keeping: “This lack of knowledge in him is something perfectly
serious, not in the least a game in which he would merely make a pretense of not
knowing. Even his supernatural, human knowledge in God is made use of by him
only to the extent that this is necessary for his task…. That is where it has its
boundary, where it is rather the lack of knowledge that is necessary for him to carry
out the commission he has received.”118
What Jesus knows is that his mission will be fulfilled (and in this sense,
Balthasar can say that he is “aware of its totality”),119 but how this will be so is
not accessible to him, and indeed he knows that there exists a diastasis between
his universal mission and what he can accomplish within his limited human
existence. As Balthasar says, “Maintaining the union of his two status
[exinanitionis and exaltationis] was not his business.”120 As we shall see in the
next chapter on Christ’s consciousness and the Cross, a gradual darkening of
Christ’s knowledge and the exercise of an obedience that does not anticipate
anything but receives the will of the Father from moment to moment are
central to Balthasar’s passiology.
The Faith of Christ

Challenging the Thomist position that the virtue of faith cannot be
ascribed to Jesus, Balthasar is among the most pre-eminent of modern
Catholic authors to argue that Jesus did indeed possess the virtue of faith.121
His most detailed argument for this position is the 1961 essay “Fides Christi:
An Essay on the Consciousness of Christ,” an essay to which he refers in a
number of his later works.122 As Henri Donneaud notes, Balthasar’s essay was
radical because it challenged not just Thomas, but Scholasticism in general
and indeed an entire established tradition reaching back to Augustine.123
Balthasar’s essay is a two-pronged attempt to retrieve a biblical and
interpersonal notion of faith. First, he challenges Martin Buber’s separation of
Old Testament and New Testament forms of faith. Buber characterized Old
Testament faith as personal trust in God and God’s promises, and New
Testament faith as “dogmatic” endorsement of the proposition or “fact” that

Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God.124 If Christian faith is to be a
fulfilment “from within” rather than a replacement of Old Testament faith,
Balthasar argues, then the continuity of Christian faith with the personal faith
of Israel must be highlighted and understood as mediated by Jesus himself.125
Second, Balthasar questions the Thomistic evaluation of faith as a deficient
form of sight and knowledge. Thomas denies that Christ possessed faith on
the basis of Christ’s continual possession of the beatific vision, by which he
“has seen God according to his essence from the very first moment of his
conception.”126 Faith and the beatific vision have the same object, but faith is
marked by non-vision, which constitutes for Thomas an imperfection
(imperfectio cognitionis est de ratione fidei).127 As Donneaud notes, Balthasar’s
approach differs from Thomas’s in not being a “scientific” or theoretical
analysis but rather a biblical and phenomenological description, and in
emphasizing the continuity of Old and New Testaments.128 Balthasar says, “If
we keep in mind that the New Testament concept [of faith] completes and
perfects the Old Testament concept, fully displaying its crucial priority, then we
will not automatically emphasize the moment of negativity (the non-seeing)
and thus the provisionality of the attitude of faith.”129 Faith in its inner,
positive essence is not a form of nescience, but, in obediential terms, “the
complete correspondence between God’s fidelity and man’s fidelity.”130 For
Balthasar, drawing on the Old Testament, faith is “the adequate expression for
the way the chosen people related to God.”131 It is the attitude in which “the
moments of personal fidelity and complete surrender converge”; it is “a daring
trust beyond all earthly considerations, transcending all fears.”132 Balthasar
regards faith principally as an existential stance rather than as a category of
religious knowing, and it is easy to see how, within the terms he has set, such
faith is applicable to Christ: indeed, if faith is redefined primarily in these
terms, it becomes necessary to attribute faith to Christ as the archetype of
personal self-surrender to the will of God.133
The biblical basis for such an ascription is found in Hebrews 12:2, where
Christ is described as the “author” and “perfecter” of faith (archegōs kai teleiōtes
pistou). In other passages of the New Testament, the expression pistis Christou
Iesou is used (Gal 2:16, 20; 3:22; Eph. 3:12; Phil. 3:9; Rom 3:22, 26). The
exegetical question hinges on whether the genitive Christou Iesou is always an
objective genitive (“faith in Christ Jesus,”) or can also be read as a subjective
genitive (“faith of Christ Jesus”). Balthasar offers a third alternative, the
“mystical genitive.”134 What is this rather oddly named grammatical concept
meant to convey? It captures elements from both the objective and subjective
genitives, insofar as the faith of believers in Christ derives from the faith which
characterizes Christ himself: Christ could not bestow the gift of faith were he
not to have it himself, were he not its exemplary cause. Indeed, Balthasar
concurs with the view of the early twentieth-century exegete Ernst Lohmeyer
that faith is not merely a subjective attribution to Christ, but a metaphysical
principle, a formal cause which flows from the person of Christ and shapes the
mode of existence of the Christian.135 Lohmeyer’s metaphysical description of
the Pauline notion of faith can be seen as a foreshadowing of Balthasar’s
mission-centred theology of the person, where mission also connotes a formal
cause which constitutes the conscious subject as person. Lohmeyer argues that
for the one who believes, there is always a distinction between the “I” and the
“faith” within the subject: “One could even say, not I believe but faith in
me.”136 As divine and human, and as one with his mission, Christ does not
simply “have” faith and pass it on, but himself “is” faith and therefore
constitutes the principle of the faith of believers.
Balthasar also grounds his position on the faith of Christ in the
Chalcedonian doctrine of Christ’s unabbreviated human nature. The human
consubstantiality of Christ requires a reflection not only on Christ’s mind but
on the possibilities of freedom within a limited human existence: “What basic
constitutional features of temporal-finite existence—to which hope and
obedience, trust and patience certainly belong—are also necessary, so that we
can genuinely say of the Son that he has become like us in all things but
sin?”137 Balthasar draws on the apophaticism of the mystical tradition to argue
that even in the beatific vision, God continues to reside in transcendent
mystery, such that “there remains that mediation that the creature needs in
eternity in order to withstand the inconceivable God, precisely in his
appearing.”138 Thus too, whatever form of visio is attributed to the human soul
of Christ, it is not a vision that apprehends the divine nature, but one which
must be a “surrender to God’s inconceivability.”139
Christ does not, however, merely exemplify a human stance before God:
faith belongs to Jesus in a super-eminent way because he embodies and enacts
such fidelity on both sides, on the part of God and on the part of human beings.
Here too, Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s faith is thus grounded in
Chalcedonian Christology:
When God’s Word became man, the fides Dei was incorporated into Christ, and
God’s Covenant of fidelity became one with humanity. This man who is, as the
expression of God’s essence and deliberate love, his Son, is the incarnate
“faithfulness of God” (pistos ho Theos) in whom “all the promises of God have found
their Yes.”… Because, and insofar as, he is this, he can answer God as perfect man
with a faith that gathers and establishes the faith of all mankind in order also to be
the incarnate Covenant of humanity with God. But he does not go back and forth
along these two ways but rather is such simultaneously. Indeed, he is the hypostatic
identity of these two ways, and thus he is the substantial Covenant, the ontic bond
between God and the world. He is this Covenant, this bond essentially as “faith” in
the wider sense and as “metaphysical principle” (Lohmeyer), so that he has become
the final reality of the relation between God and world that grounds everything and
that cannot be superseded.140
Christ is “author and perfecter” of the faith of humanity because he is first the
personal expression of God’s fidelity. The movement “from below” of the
perfection of human nature in the stance of creaturely obedience and self-
surrender to the will of God is predicated on the movement “from above” of
the Son’s kenōsis, and these two movements are united in Christ’s hypostatic
identity. Balthasar here transposes the analogia entis into covenantal terms:
Christ is, substantially and personally, the Covenant in its fullness and
perfection, just as he is the fullness and measure of the entire God-world
relation. Indeed, Balthasar’s relational and Trinitarian approach to the
analogia entis is recapitulated in his treatment of Christ’s faith:
And so Christian faith is just as inseparably determined by the stance of the Son
toward the Father (where Abraham’s faith is perfected) as it is by the attitude of the
Father toward the Son, which as grace for the world shapes the attitude of the Son to
the metaphysical principle of the world’s stance toward God.141
As I suggested in the previous chapter, the essential difference between

creation and God is encompassed and perfected within the hypostatic
difference between the Father and Son in the Spirit. The Trinitarian
personhood of the Son is the individualizing centre of Jesus’ humanity, and
therefore also the ground of his human exemplarity. Balthasar has broadened
the notion of faith, such that the intellectual dimension of faith is situated
within the act of self-surrender of the whole person: on this basis it is difficult
to see how Christ cannot exemplify faith, and indeed exemplify it archetypically
and super-eminently. But this human exemplarity belongs to Christ precisely
because he also expresses the faithfulness of God in and by his person. Thus
Balthasar is critical of the univocal ascription of faith to Christ, and contends
that Christ’s faith is qualitatively different from the faith of believers on
account of the prevenience of his mission.142 Christ’s faith, including the
restriction of his knowledge within historical time, is not a human defect
despite which he is the Son of God, but is the translation in terms of a human
existence of God’s fidelity, and of the filial obedience of the Son to the Father.
This discussion of Christ’s faith thus brings us to the Trinitarian dimension of
Christ’s consciousness.
Trinitarian Inversion
Balthasar’s Neo-Chalcedonian sympathies are clear in his approach to the
obedience of Christ, which will be treated in greater depth in the next chapter.
Suffice it to reaffirm here that Balthasar rejects the notion of a distinct human
subject in Christ over against the Logos or the Trinity:
Jesus of Nazareth, in his earthly life, is in communion and dialogue, not with “God”
(the Three-in-One), but with his Father. It is not that he executes the saving plan of
the triune God; no he receives his mission from the Father through the Holy
Spirit.143
Balthasar does not ascribe the obedience of Christ exclusively to Christ’s

human nature, but emphasizes that this obedience is always Trinitarian. Thus
he speaks of mission and obedience as antecedent to the Incarnation:
We cannot conceive of a time when he had not (yet) consented to this mission and
offered himself for it (hat sich unvordenklich immer schon zu dieser Sendung entschlossen
und angeboten). If we are guided by Scripture, we would be wrong to suppose that the
Son made two decisions, separated in time; that is, the first as God, in eternity, and
the second as man, in time. The Son’s eternal decision includes his temporal one,
and his temporal decision holds fast to his eternal decision as the only one that
matters…. The incarnate Son, in his freedom (which is now a human freedom too),
does not embrace his own will as God but primarily the Father’s will, to which he
has always consented. It is precisely in embracing his Father’s will that Jesus discovers
his own, most profound identity as the eternal Son.144
From a Trinitarian perspective, the eternal Son of God “consents to being sent
to be this human being,”145 who, qua human being, does not pre-exist
independently of the Incarnation but is brought into conscious existence by
the coming-into-the-world of the Son. The consciousness of Jesus is the human
consciousness of the Son, taken up perichoretically but not absorbed into his
hypostatic freedom and consciousness as the eternal Son of God.
If Balthasar’s characteristic definition of Christ’s mission is as the
economic form of the processio of the Son from the Father, by no means does
he ignore the role of the Holy Spirit in the economy and in the earthly life of
Jesus. Balthasar strives to hold two aspects together. First, as is already clear,
Jesus’ mission-consciousness and obedience do not have a point of beginning
in his earthly history: “The Son’s obedience does not come after an
incarnation actively brought about by him: rather, his soteriological obedience
starts with the Incarnation itself.”146 Second, Scripture bears witness to the
active role of the Spirit in Jesus’ life from the beginning, and to Jesus’
submission to the Spirit. How are these two aspects of Jesus’ mission to be
related? According to Thomas, the event of the hypostatic union, the
assumption of human nature by the Word, is ontologically and logically (but
not temporally) prior to the sanctification of Christ’s human soul by the Holy
Spirit.147 Walter Kasper contests Thomas’s ordering of hypostatic union and
endowment of habitual grace in the Spirit: “The sanctification of Jesus by the
Spirit and his gifts is…not merely an adventitious consequence of the
sanctification by the Logos through the hypostatic union but its pre-
supposition.”148 For Kasper, this pneumatological Christology guarantees the
freedom of God in the Incarnation. But Balthasar voices reservations about

Kasper’s Spirit-Christology:
We must still ask whether it fully does justice to the mystery of the Son’s incarnation.
For the Spirit’s role is not simply to discover in the man Jesus the appropriate
instrument for the Son’s historical obedience: it is explicitly to overshadow the
Virgin and so bring the Son into the condition of humanity. But in this activity on
the part of the Spirit, the Son is already obedient, insofar as he entrusts himself to
the activity of the Spirit in accord with the Father’s will.149
Implicit in Balthasar’s critique is his concern for the unity of the person of
Christ; Kasper’s position appears to lead to heteronomy in Christological
obedience and to a fissure between the Son who by obedience becomes
incarnate and “the man Jesus” (however abstractly and “anhypostatically”
conceived) who is led by the Spirit. But the man Jesus subsists enhypostatically
in the person of the Son, whose “I” cannot be conceived of apart from his
mission from the Father. The Spirit’s agency upon and over Jesus—for
instance in the Annunciation narrative in Luke and in the “driving” of Jesus
by the Spirit into the desert—is fundamentally, then, a Trinitarian dynamic.
The Spirit’s mediation of the Father’s will to the Son is the economic form, in
the status exinanitionis, of the intra-Trinitarian mediation of the Father and
Son’s love by the Spirit. While the order of the hypostases within the Trinity is
Father-Son-Spirit, whereby the Spirit is spirated by the Father and Son and is
“the objective form of their subjectivity,” in the economy, the Spirit appears
also under a second aspect—as witness to the difference between Father and
Son. The free unoriginate consent of Jesus to the Father is the revelation in
the economy of their common spiration of the Holy Spirit. But, Balthasar says,
“for reasons of salvation history…this spiration has to go into hiding, as it
were, behind the Spirit’s second aspect.” Thus, “the Spirit takes over the
function of presenting the obedient Son with the Father’s will in the form of a
rule that is unconditional and, in the case of the Son’s suffering, even appears
rigid and pitiless.”150
What are the implications of “Trinitarian inversion” for Christ’s
consciousness? First, Balthasar ensures that the union of the Son with a
human nature (gratia unionis) and the bestowal of the Spirit and the Spirit’s
gifts (gratia habitualis) are not separated. Nor are the personal a priori obedience
of the Son in the Incarnation and the obedience found in the human figure of
Jesus in the historical living-out of his existence separated. As Nicholas J. Healy
says, “The union of natures is not simply an a priori consequence of Christ’s
divine status, but is an ongoing event that is accomplished throughout the life
of Christ.”151 Balthasar also highlights the Spirit’s mediation of Christ’s
consciousness of his mission from the Father: Jesus’ vision of the Father in the
status exinanitionis is presented to him by the Spirit, whereas the Father
“withdraws” from explicit vision. By this theologoumenon of “Trinitarian
inversion,” Balthasar takes seriously the human nescience and obedience of
Christ in history, who, although he breathes forth the Spirit in his resurrected
state, is subject to the Spirit in his human history. Balthasar’s notion of
Trinitarian inversion is consistent with his stress on the Incarnation as an a
priori act of kenotic self-surrender by the Son, in no way a “seizing” of a human
reality: in his a priori obedience, Jesus “does not ‘take’ his humanity but
‘entrusts himself’ to the Spirit who makes him man.… This non-grasping,
which is primary, governs the entire attitude of the Son in becoming man.”152
The Son’s Incarnation is kenotic and therefore pneumatologically conditioned
through-and-through. But this inversion is in no way an “interruption” of the
divine life: “The infinite variety of the relations between the divine Persons is
so rich in aspects that one such aspect can precipitate the Son’s Incarnation,
and the “inversion” we have described, without requiring any change in the
internal divine order.”153 It is vital to recognize the significance of the
Trinitarian dynamic that Balthasar gives to Jesus’ subjection to the Spirit.
Trinitarian inversion occurs in the order of the divine hypostases, so that it is
the Son of God himself, identical to Jesus of Nazareth, who submits to the
Spirit and whose obedience to the Father is mediated by the Spirit: the Son
can be “under” the Spirit, while never being anything other than the Son. It is
a personal submission to the Spirit, not a sanctification of Christ’s human
nature distinct (even if only logically) from the hypostatic union; and the
consciousness of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is the very same mission-
consciousness of the Son.
A Single or Double Consciousness?

Throughout his Christological writings, Balthasar consistently maintains
the tension between the Son’s absolute mission-consciousness which does not
admit of a historical beginning-point (unvordenklich) and the limitations placed
upon this consciousness in the execution of his mission in history. Jacques
Dupuis has called Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness “from
above,” in contradistinction to Rahner’s approach “from below.” If the
approach “from below” begins with the question of “how the man Jesus is
subjectively aware of his divinity,” Balthasar reverses the perspective of the
question, asking instead “how the Word incarnate becomes humanly self-
aware in Jesus’ human consciousness.”154 Dupuis is correct in articulating the
main thrust of Balthasar’s approach, and faithful to Balthasar in his nuanced
phrasing—the Word becomes humanly self-aware in Jesus’ human consciousness.
Repeatedly, Balthasar rejects a “double consciousness” in Christ and insists
that the controlling concept of mission makes the vexed question of the
relation of the human and the divine self-consciousness secondary:
If, therefore, we take Jesus’ entire awareness that he belongs to God and refer it to
his mission, we shall not need to agonize over the relation of his human self-
consciousness to his divine self-consciousness. The task given him by the Father, that
is, that of expressing God’s Fatherhood through his entire being, totally occupies his
self-consciousness and fills it to the very brim…. Insofar as, from all time, he fully
embraces and affirms his mission (which does not mean that he has a total and
detailed view of it), he is comprehensor; but the mission itself sets him upon a path,
and to that extent, he is also viator.155
In this passage, Balthasar shifts from the distinction between human and
divine self-consciousness to the singular “task” and singular “self-conscious-
ness,” which is not a function of nature but of mission. In Christ there is a
single psychological as well as ontological subject, who can exist in the modes
of both comprehensor and viator. Balthasar recognizes that his unitive approach
to Christ’s consciousness seems to cut across the analogia entis and unconfused
union of the natures, yet he holds fast to it:
Although in the analogia entis there is no common proportion between the absolute
and the contingent, we cannot ascribe a twofold consciousness ([ein] doppeltes
Bewußtsein) to the Logos-made-man. The mission of which Jesus is aware is the
mission of the only Son. He knows that, as man, he freely does what, as Logos, he
wills to do. Or—which is the same thing—the man Jesus knows that what he freely
does is done by the Son of God.156
Does this insistence on the personal identity of the human subject Jesus with
the eternal Son violate the “unconfused” union of the natures and their
operations? In the words of Mark McIntosh, “Is the human Jesus forced by his
mission to become so utterly transparent to the eternal Son as to vanish
altogether…? Does Jesus’ human existence give expression to the divine Word
only by being silenced into nonexistence?”157
I have been cumulatively answering this very question throughout this
chapter. One further point can be made, however: Balthasar’s approach to
Christ’s consciousness is, to repeat the term from the previous chapter,
“incarnationally saturated.” If the man Jesus can never be regarded as “for
himself” apart from the person of the Son, neither can the divine Son be
considered apart from Trinitarian mission:
The Son in heaven is not in the first instance a person for himself, only subsequently
undertaking to place himself at the disposal of the Father; and in the same way, the
Son on earth is not in the first instance a man for himself, only subsequently
opening himself to the Father to hear and do his will. It is the fact of being he who is
open, he who receives, he who obeys and fulfills that makes him—a man, of course,
but only by making him this particular man.158
I do not interpret this statement as suggesting an ontological division of the

person of the Son, but rather as making a notional distinction between the
Son “considered in the theology” and the Son “considered in the economy.”
Just as the human existence and consciousness of Christ cannot be considered
apart from the Trinitarian mission and obedience of the Son, the person of
the Son and the Trinitarian life cannot be considered apart from the incarnate
existence of the Son. The historical, economic figure of Jesus of Nazareth is
the full revelation of the person of the Son: if it is God’s Word that has become
flesh, then, in the order of consciousness and knowledge:
Everything that is to be disclosed—despite every seeming impossibility—must become

present in this “flesh,” in this transitory existence…. No supratemporal contents, nor
contents from another period of time, may be put into it…for this would mean that
at most a fraction of the divine Word would have become flesh.159
The revelation of the Trinity is “narrowed” or “concentrated” in Jesus’ human

existence. This narrowing also means that his incarnate mode of existence is
tensive, marked by a stretching beyond the bounds of a normal human
consciousness and existence; this “stretching” will find its term only in the
Cross and Jesus’ total self-abandonment.
One implication of Balthasar’s incarnational focus is his rejection,
mentioned in the last chapter, of a bifurcation of the being and consciousness
of the Son into heavenly and earthly realms. Thus in the preface to Mysterium
Paschale, Balthasar writes:
Doubtless the Kenosis of the Son will always remain a mystery no less unsoundable
than that of the Trinity of hypostases in the single God. And yet, by placing the
emphasis, in the doctrine of the Kenosis, so exclusively on the human nature
assumed by the Son, or on his act of assuming that nature—the divine nature
remaining inaccessible to all becoming or change, and even to any real relationship
with the world—one was running the risk of underestimating the weight of the
assertions made in Scripture, and of succumbing at once to both Nestorianism and
Monophysitism. Only the “Jesus of history” would do the suffering, or perhaps the
“lower faculties” in Christ’s being, whereas the “fine point” of his soul remained,
even in the moment of the abandonment, united to the Father in a beatific vision
which could never be interrupted.160
Again we encounter in Balthasar not just a refusal to speak of the human

consciousness of Jesus independently of the Son, but also a refusal to speak of
the Logos asarkos, prescinding from Jesus’ human existence. Thus Jesus’ human
consciousness, which is tied to and limited by his mission, expresses faithfully
his consciousness as the Son of God: this is not an absorption, but an
analogical attunement. Balthasar criticizes modern kenoticist Christologies for
a disjunctive construal of divinity and humanity, such that Christ must divest
himself of the omniscience and omnipotence that characterize the divine
nature. In the Incarnation, the Son does not divest himself of his divine
nature or split his being and consciousness into two, but “deposits” or “lays
up” his divine knowledge in an act of self-surrender to the Father and

obedience to his mission.161 Balthasar will insist that is only on the basis of the
doctrine of the Trinity is it possible to navigate between the Scylla of a
Nestorian division in the being of the Son and the Charybdis of a
mythological mutation of God into the form of a creature:
We can call it kenōsis…but this does not imply any mythological alteration in God; it
can express one of the infinite possibilities available to free, eternal life: namely, that
the Son, who has everything from the Father, “lays up” and commits to God’s
keeping the “form of God” he has received from him. He does this in order to
concentrate, in all seriousness and realism, on the mission that is one mode of his
procession from the Father.162
As Balthasar says in A Theology of History, “the form of [Christ’s] human self-

awareness is the expression, in terms of this world, of his eternal consciousness
as Son.”163 Indeed, Balthasar pushes this human expressivity to the limit of
analogy, suggesting for instance with Adrienne von Speyr that there is a kind
of “primal faith within the Trinity.”164 There is always a “more” to the divine
consciousness, and an incommensurability between the creaturely and the
divine, but this “more” is not contradictory to, or other than, what has been
revealed in Christ’s human nature and consciousness in the economy.
Mission-consciousness furthermore becomes the framework for
understanding the pre-existence of Christ. The pre-existence of Christ emerges
in the hymns in Colossians 1 and Philippians 2, and the Johannine Prologue.
But even if it is permissible to speak narrativally, and thus “diachronically,” of
the Incarnation of the Logos, still the “pre-” should not be taken
mythologically, “in terms of an ante-natal existence” within a longer time-
continuum.165 Rather, the notion of pre-existence finds its meaning in Jesus’
“certainty of being the epitome of the Word of God addressed to the
world.”166 Balthasar continues, “Jesus’ certainty regarding the universality and
finality of his mission suffices to allow us to take everything said in the
Prologue of St. John’s Gospel and trace it back to his earthly consciousness.”167
Balthasar’s treatment of pre-existence is striking in that it is not the Logos
asarkos who pre-exists the Incarnation, but the person of the Logos incarnate
who in his earthly consciousness “is directly conscious of having been always
with God when, together with the Logos, God drew up the world plan, that is,
to bring together all things in the incarnate Word.”168 Balthasar continues,
“The assumption of the ‘flesh’—which, seen from eternity, is timeless—is
already an integral part of the original world plan.”169 And yet he is quick to
distance this interpretation of Christ’s pre-existence from Gnostic myths (or an
Origenist notion of the pre-existence of Christ’s humanity). Again, it must be
said in favour of Balthasar’s bold language that there is never a question of
prescinding from the one incarnate person attested in the New Testament.
The incarnate Logos is the only Logos known by revelation, and only by way of
testimony to his own earthly consciousness. As Mark McIntosh comments:
One may of course have doubts about the degree to which the earthly life of Christ
can inform about the eternal life of the Trinity, yet a very positive assessment of the
trinitarian implications of Jesus’ human existence (such as von Balthasar’s) is quite
the reverse of a gnostic overlay of cosmic congeries upon the historical details of
Jesus’ earthly life.170
Ironically, for all the apparent audaciousness of his language—faulted by

Rahner as a lack of epistemic humility171—there is in Balthasar’s thought a
particular kind of apophatic reserve that insists on the indispensability of the
Incarnation and Christ’s human existence in the status exinanitionis in speaking
about the life of God. The divine consciousness, shared by the Trinitarian
persons according to the mode proper to each, is only accessible via the
human consciousness which the Son of God assumes without confusion and
without separation.. Balthasarian apophasis is not a general philosophical
principle of God’s unknowability, but a structuring and determination of all
theological predication by the narrative of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
Conclusion
I have endeavoured to delimit the subject matter of this chapter to the
theme of Christ’s consciousness of his own personal identity and mission.
Such a delimitation is a challenge, since Balthasar’s presentation of Christ’s
mission-consciousness stands at the very heart of his theological enterprise,
with implications for Trinitarian theology in relation to Christology, anthropo-
logy and the relationship between nature and grace, and the relationship of
biblical exegesis, history and theology. None of these areas can be treated
exhaustively here. But it is worth highlighting a few salient aspects that have
emerged with regard to Christ’s consciousness.
Balthasar regards the Christologies of the New Testament as rooted in an
“implicit Christology” of Jesus himself. This implicit Christology is not a
matter of particular logia or deeds being attributable to Jesus, but rather the
entire form of his existence and the effects on his followers. Jesus understood
his own person and fate as the locus of God’s eschatological judgment of the
world, and committed himself entirely to his task as “the One sent” by the
Father. With mission as the governing motif of Christology, it becomes
possible to speak of Christ’s human consciousness not as his thematic human
awareness of his identity as the Logos, but rather as the prevenient shaping of
his human consciousness by his relation with the Father. Balthasar suggests
that to play off Jesus’ human consciousness against the divine consciousness of
the Logos in terms of nescience/omniscience, mutability/immutability, does
not do justice to the particularity and expressivity of Jesus’ human
consciousness, one that in all things refers back to his origin in the Father.
The analytical question of the relationship between Christ’s human and divine
consciousness arises from a failure to understand the Incarnation as the kenōsis
of the person of the Son and thus to understand Christ’s consciousness in
Trinitarian terms.
Balthasar does not always make explicit reference to Chalcedonian
Christology in his treatment of Christ’s consciousness, but I have argued that
his Chalcedonian construal of the analogia entis is never absent from his
innovative treatments of such questions as the faith of Christ. The Neo-
Chalcedonian concept of enhypostasia is discernible in Balthasar’s thesis of the
Unvordenklichkeit of Christ’s mission-consciousness. On this point, Balthasar
might strengthen his case by drawing more explicit connections to the
Christology of Maximus. Read in isolation, some of Balthasar’s statements
about the single consciousness of Christ are prone to raise suspicions of
implicit monenergism if not monophysitism. But these statements can and
should be read against the background of Maximus’s notion of the peri-
choretic relationship of the natures of Christ and the distinction between logos
tēs physeōs and tropos tēs hyparxeōs. The human consciousness of Christ must be
regarded as a genuinely human consciousness, in its natural principle, which
remains unaltered; yet it is never anything other than the human
consciousness of the divine Word, and so has been elevated to a new
theandric mode of existence. This new mode of existence of the human
consciousness of Jesus is disclosed in his unique claim to authority joined with
his utter poverty, in his unique sense of union to the Father and of mission for
the salvation of the world. Secondarily, it manifests itself in supernatural
knowledge, in his gift of cardiognosis which signals not only his prophetic
identity but moreover his definitive eschatological role. But this new tropos is
also characterized by Jesus’ human unknowing, receptivity and concomitant
ability to learn from others and from his environment, and the temporal
exercise of obedience to the will of the Father mediated by the Spirit.
In his treatment of the debate about Christ’s consciousness in modern
Catholic theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg says, “Following the logic of the
Dyothelite decision of 681, one probably would have to speak of a divine ego
and a human ego side by side.”172 Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s
consciousness suggests that Pannenberg’s logic here is flawed. Rather than
introducing a parallelism between the human and divine egos, the logic of
Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, out of which emerged the dyothelite doctrine,
entails a non-competitive account of Christ’s consciousness, such that Christ
becomes the archetype of human receptivity, faith, and obedience because of,
and not despite, the fact that he is the revelation of the Father. Unknowing is
transfigured into a positive value in the human existence of the Son of God. It
remains for us to examine Christ’s entrance into the very heart of unknowing,
the condition of death and hell, which constitutes the centre of gravity of
Balthasar’s theology, and to examine to what extent Balthasar sustains a Neo-
Chalcedonian logic in his theology of the Cross.
Notes
1 TD III, 223–224.
2 Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, 37; cited in TD III, 165; Hans Urs von
Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” Communio IKZ 8 (1979), 30.
3 For example, TD III, 164, n. 2; Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 30.
4 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 30: “Psychologie hat es mit allgemeinen seelischen
Gesetzen zu tun, nicht mit dem wesenhaft Einmaligen.”
5 TD III, 150. Cf. Balthasar’s identification of the central question of Christ’s consciousness
in “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 31: “In welchem Maß und in welcher Art hat sich in
diesem Bewußtsein widergespiegelt, was nachösterlich von seiner einzigartigen Bedeutung
und Wirkung ausgesagt worden ist?”
6 GL VII, 115.
7 TD III, 67.
8 Ibid., 70.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 82–84, citing Martin Hengel, “Christologie und neutestamentliche Chronologie,” in
Neues Testament und Geschichte (Tübingen: TVZ-Mohr, 1972). For a more recent study
marshalling similar arguments concerning the emergence of Christian worship of Jesus, see
Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest
Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 31–42.
11 Ibid., 83. For a positive assessment of the historicity of the inscription above the cross, see
Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1994), 78.
12 Ibid., 83.
13 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 32.
14 TD III, 84–86.
15 GL VII, 121.
16 Ibid., 118.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 121.
19 Ibid., 124. For Balthasar, the authority which Jesus claims for himself by his behaviour
relativizes the Christological titles: “The right approach does not consist in asking what
Jesus said and did, and what he did not say and do, or which ‘titles of sovereignty’ he
applied to himself and which not; it consists in asking what was the necessary
presupposition of the act whereby his community formed his words, deeds and titles in the
way it did” (GL VII, 116). For a contemporary approach to Jesus’ action in the Temple as
the decisive act of presumed authority and motive for Jesus’ execution, an enacted
prophecy of the destruction of the Temple, see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 413–428.

20 Ibid., 117.
21 Ibid., 139.
22 Ibid., 117.
23 Ibid., 133.
24 Ibid., 131.
25 See John MacQuarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM Press and
Philadephia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 273–278.
26 GL VII, 167–168.
27 TD III, 109.
28 Ibid., 89.
29 Ibid., 90.
30 GL VII, 168, citing Origen, In Matth. Tom. XIV, 7: see also Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 100;
111, n. 2.
31 TD III, 90–91.
32 Ibid., 92.
33 For instance, the famous logion of Mark 13:32 (“But about that day or hour no one
knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”) can be regarded as
an authentic statement of Jesus’ apocalyptic expectation, since, by the principle of
embarrassment, it is improbable for the community to have attributed ignorance to Jesus
had he not done so himself.
34 See TD III, 99.
35 Ibid., 113.
36 Ibid., 115. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Zuerst Gottes Reich: Zwei Skizzen zur biblischen
Naherwartung (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1966), 14: “Somit war die Naherwartung der
Jünger und der Urkirche weitgehend ein chronologisches Mißverstehen der onto-
theologischen Naherwartung Jesu, ein teilweises Absinken von der ungeheuren Dichte
und unfehlbaren Wahrhaftigkeit seiner Aussage in eine weltlich-neutrale Zeitdimension
hinein, die nicht allein durch Glaube, Liebe und Hoffnung, sondern zum Teil durch
Gerichtsfurcht, zum Teil durch eine gewisse eschatologische Neugierde mitbestimmt
wird.”
37 GL VII, 166.
38 Ibid., 172.
39 Ibid., 177.
40 See also Luke 12:8; Mark 14:62; Matthew 19:28.
41 TD III, 115.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 115–116.
44 Ibid., 115.
45 Ibid., 116–117. See also GL VII, 150; TD III, 143: “In the mind of Jesus, this ‘Son of Man’
would be both the person he knows himself to be, the person whose coming sufferings he

predicts, and also the ‘other’ Son of Man (of the Book of Daniel), equipped with the full
panoply of judgment, who will come on the clouds of heaven.”
46 TD III, 110 (Theodramatik 2/2, 100).
47 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 39; my translation: “Dies ist die Quelle des
wahren Begriffs der Person, der in der Christologie ein primär theologischer (und nicht
für jedermann zuhandener philosophischer) Begriff ist. Weil Jesus mit seiner Sendung, in
der seine göttliche Sohnschaft liegt, identisch ist, ist er die Urperson. Und am Personsein
hat jedes menschliche Geistsubjekt (nur) insofern teil, als es in seiner Begnadung in
Christus Anteil bekommt an einem Aspekt und Fragment seiner alllösenden Sendung.”
48 See also Luke 9:48, 10:16; Mark 9:37.
49 TD III, 154.
50 Ibid., 153: “Jesu Wissen um sich selbst fällt deshalb zusammen mit seinem Wissen um sein
Gesendetsein” (Theodramatik 2/2, 140).
51 Ibid., 152.
52 Ibid., 153.
53 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 38, my translation: “Sein menschliches Ich (mit
allen seinen menschlichen Fakultäten) als identisch wissen mit einem im vollen Sinn
göttlichen Auftrag: dies wäre eine Auslegung der christologischen Formel des Aquinaten,
daß die Sendung (missio) des Sohnes nur die Welt hinein erfolgte Verlängerung seines
ewigen Ausgangs (processio) aus dem Vater ist.” See also TD III, 157.
54 Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1977), 293.
Balthasar cites Küng’s epithet in “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 35. See also Balthasar,
“Gekreuzigt für uns,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Adolf Deissler, Walter Kasper, et al.,
Diskussion über Hans Küngs “Christ sein” (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976), 83–94.
55 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 35. See also TD IV, 267–273, on the solidarity-
models of Küng, Kessler, Duquoc, Schillebeeckx and Moingt.
56 TD III, 164.
57 GL VII, 166–167.
58 Ibid., 166.
59 Ibid.
60 It is helpful to consider Israel’s own self-understanding as a people who would be a
“covenant to the people and a light to the nations” (Isa 42:6), in order to show how the
restoration of the house of Israel in and of itself was to have universal salvific implications.
For Jesus to consider his own mission to Israel a universal saving mission is not,
historically, as unthinkable as it might first appear.
61 TD III, 164.
62 Ibid. (Theodramatik 2/2, 150).
63 Ibid., 166.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 176, 177 (Theodramatik 2/2, 162). The published English translation evacuates one
of Balthasar’s sub-headings of much of its theological nuance by rendering “Die

Vereinbarkeit der Unvordenklichkeit des Gottbewußtseins Jesu mit dessen geschichtlicher
Vermittlung” (Theodramatik 2/2, 159) as the rather nondescript heading, “Jesus’ God-
Consciousness and Its Historical Medium” (TD III, 173).
66 TL II, 135.
67 Ibid., n. 11.
68 TD III, 177.
69 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 37, my translation: “…wird die Vermutung
lächerlich, Jesus habe sich zunächst als ein reiner Mensch gefühlt und sei erst gegen Ende
seines Lebens (zu Recht oder zu Unrecht) auf den Gedanken gekommen, er sei in einer
von den übrigen Menschen abgehobenen Weise der Gesendete, der Sohn Gottes.” See
also TD III, 175, n. 20, citing R. Haubst on the impossibility of an initially purely human,
autonomous “I”-consciousness in Jesus.
70 Balthasar, “Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu,” 37: “Der ihn schließlich nur als einen geistig
Schwerkranken enthüllt hätte.”
71 TD III, 167–168.
72 TD III, 168. See also TH, 31–32.
73 Ternus, “Das Seelen- und Bewußtseinsleben Jesu,” 137.
74 “Le duel d’amour entre Dieu Trine et l’Homme assumé est…l’aspect central de l’oeuvre du
P. Déodat de Basly, son ‘idée maîtresse” (quoted in Ternus, “Das Seelen- und Bewußtseins-
leben Jesu,” 140).
75 Ibid., 140–141: “Das ‘Du’ des Beters Jesu aber richte sich nicht an den Vater als erste
trinitarische Person für sich allein, sondern an den dreieinigen Gott als den Vater des
Menschen Jesus Christus.”
76 AAS 43 (1951), 638, quoted in ibid.,141.
77 Paul Galtier, L’Unité du Christ (Paris, Beauchesne, 1939).
78 See Paul Galtier, “La conscience humaine du Christ,” Gregorianum 32 (1951), 547, n. 43:
“Ontologiquement, la nature humaine, dans le Christ, n’est nullement ‘sui iuris’, car, au
lieu d’être un tout substantial indépendant, elle est seulement partie d’un tout subsistant
qui est le Christ. Psychologiquement, au contraire, elle pourrait être dite ‘sui iuris’, comme
ayant en elle-même le principe de son activité.”
79 Ibid., 567: “C’est simplement constater que, malgré son état d’union au Verbe, elle
conserve toutes ses spontanéités vitals et psychologiques.”
80 Ibid., 568: “De cette vision, de la connaissance ainsi obtenue, elle a toujours eu pleine
conscience, et cette conscience elle-même appartient au Verbe.”
81 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man (London: SCM Press, 1976), 330.
82 Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” 157–158.
83 As Raymond Moloney says of Rahner’s Christology, “The divinization of the world hinges
on the divinization of the humanity of Jesus, whose unique position requires the unique
intensity of grace embodied in the Hypostatic Union” (The Knowledge of Christ, 85). See
also Essen, 68–85.

84 Indeed, the redactional history of Pius XII’s encyclical on the anniversary of Chalcedon,
Sempiternus Rex, shows that even magisterial teaching perceived a difference between neo-
Nestorian homo assumptus Christologies and the nuanced Christologies-of-distinction put
forward by such authors as Galtier. In the original published version of the encyclical
(L’Osservatore Romano [13 Sept 1951], 212, 2), the phrase saltem psychologice appeared,
ruling out both an ontological and a psychological distinction of subjects or egos; this
phrase was omitted when the encylical appeared in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS 43
[1951], 638). See also Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 210, n. 11; Ternus, “Das Seelen-
und Bewußtseinsleben Jesu,” 141.
85 TD III, 172–173.
86 Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, 334, concurs on this point: the self-consciousness of Jesus
can only be treated by way of Jesus’ consciousness of sonship: “One cannot properly
understand Jesus’ Sonship without taking his relation to God the Father as the point of
departure. The question of the unity of the man Jesus with the eternal Son of God cannot
be put and answered directly.”
87 See the perspicacious discussion of consciousness and intersubjectivity, contrasting
Balthasar and Rahner, in Dalzell, Dramatic Encounter, esp. 23–41.
88 This distinction between “subject” and “subjectivity” is key to Bernard Lonergan’s
approach to the human consciousness of Jesus: see his “Christology Today:
Methodological Reflections,” in A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., ed.
by Frederick Crowe (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 90–93.
89 TD III, 227.
90 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M.Cap., “The Beatific Vision and the Incarnate Son:
Furthering the Discussion,” The Thomist 70 (2006), 611. Weinandy makes this statement
as part of his argument against Thomas Joseph White’s defence of Christ’s beatific vision,
which according to White ensures that Christ’s human intellect is conscious of his divine
sonship and that Christ’s human will acts according to the divine will of the Son. White’s
thesis is reminiscent of Galtier’s argument that the beatific vision is necessary to save
Christ’s human consciousness from misconstruing himself to be a human person. See
Thomas Joseph White, “The Voluntary Action of the Earthly Christ and the Necessity of
the Beatific Vision,” The Thomist 69 (2005), 497–534.
91 Ibid., 610.
92 TD III, 178.
93 This, of course, is a generalized description including several, nuanced positions in
mediaeval Christology. See Moloney, The Knowledge of Christ, 53–68. Balthasar himself
acknowledges that such maximalist ascriptions of knowledge to Christ’s human mind were
“not simply the product of a shortsighted theology of the conveniens,” but were based also
on biblical attestation of Jesus’ apparent omniscience (TD III, 174).
94 TD III, 174, citing ST III, q. 2, a. 2.
95 See ibid., 159. The English translation is misleadingly imprecise in rendering Balthasar’s
“Zwei-Status-Lehre” as “the doctrine of the two natures.” Balthasar is not referring here to

the two natures of the Chalcedonian definition, but to the states of existence of the person
of Christ, the status exinanitionis and status exaltationis—diachronically, as it were.
96 Ibid., 179. Italics original.
97 Ibid., 179–180.
98 Ibid., 175 (Theodramatik 2/2, 160). See ST III, q. 12, a. 3.
99 Ibid., 176. Again, here, Balthasar’s important term, unvordenklich: “Nur so viel ist
notwendig, daß die erste Erweckung mit der Besonderheit seines (unvordenklich eigenen)
Selbstbewußtseins in einer ‘prästabilierten’ Harmonie steht” (Theodramatik 2/2, 161).
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid., 177.
102 Nicholas J. Healy has shown that the poverty and receptivity of Jesus as child of Mary is
central to Balthasar’s vision of the analogia entis: “In entering the world as a child, God
enters into a relation of neediness and poverty with respect to his human mother. This
reversal, I submit, provides the key to answering the question…how does Christ’s
enactment of the dramatic coming into their own of the divine and the human realities
show us the deepest meaning of both?” (The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 99).
103 TD III, 177.
104 Ibid., 178.
105 Ibid., 166.
106 Ibid., 172, citing Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 193–215.
107 Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 200.
108 Ibid., 212.
109 Ibid., 206.
110 Ibid., 205.
111 TD III, 167.
112 This is certainly the case in TD III, although in TD V Balthasar refers more frequently to
Christ’s immediate vision, influenced by Adrienne von Speyr, whom he quotes heavily in
this volume. See for example TD V, 123–124.
113 Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 81. See also TD III, 195. In “Action and
Contemplation,” in ET I, 227–240, Balthasar highlights the analogy in the experiences of
the saints to the perichoretic unity of contemplation and action: “While the Christian life
ostensibly consists in alternate periods of action and contemplation, its aim should be to
make the two interpenetrate more and more. With the saints they were no longer
distinguishable” (237–238). Balthasar also brings to light the Ignatian background to his
theology of mission: in the words of Ignatius, the Christian is to be in actione contemplativus
(238).
114 Randall S. Rosenberg, “Christ’s Human Knowledge: A Conversation with Lonergan and
Balthasar,” Theological Studies 71, no. 4 (2010), 823. See TD III, 166–167 for the use of
some of these terms together; also TD III, 182, where Balthasar suggests that at least in
certain moments Jesus may have had “a clear awareness” (ein genaues Wissen) of suffering
on humankind’s behalf. Speaking of Jesus’ soteriological self-awareness, Balthasar says, “It

is impossible to suppose that God could use this death to reconcile the world to himself if
the one who died it was unaware of its significance” [“Unmöglich kann Gott diesen dem
Sterbenden in seinem Sinn unbekannten Tod zum Anlaß genommen haben, die Welt mit
sich zu versöhnen”] (TD III, 164; Theodramatik 2/2, 150). In the same place he speaks of
Christ’s “implicit foreknowledge” (ein implizites Vorwissen).
115 TD III, 166.
116 Ibid., 161, 162. See Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 202: “There is certainly a nescience
which renders the finite person’s exercise of freedom possible within the still continuing
drama of his history. This nescience is, therefore, more perfect for this exercise of freedom
than knowledge which would suspend this exercise.”
117 Rahner, “Dogmatic Reflections,” 201.
118 TD V, 127–128.
119 TD III, 161.
120 Ibid., 162. The original reads, “denn nicht er selber sollte seine beiden status ver-
klammern” (Theodramatik 2/2, 148).
121 Other contemporary proponents of this view (individual nuances notwithstanding)
include Karl Rahner and Wilhelm Thüsing, A New Christology (New York: Seabury Press,
1980), 143–154; Jacques Guillet, La Foi du Christ (Paris: Desclée, 1980); Gerald O’Collins,
S.J., and David Kendall, “The Faith of Jesus,” Theological Studies 53 (1992), 403–423;
Gerald O’Collins, “Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 250–268; Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-
Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2003), 154–157. Sobrino’s discussion of the faith of Christ,
which cites Balthasar, comes in for criticism in the Notification on the Works of Fr. Jon
Sobrino, S.J.: Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórico-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret (Madrid,
1991) and La fe en Jesucristo. Ensayo desde las víctimas (San Salvador, 1999), published by
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2006: the Notification (para. 8) claims
that Sobrino has not given due account of the uniqueness of Christ’s consciousness, and
prefers to speak of Christ’s vision, indeed beatific vision, citing Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis,
John Paul II’s Novo millenio ineunte and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Text of the
Notification is accessible at: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/
documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20061126_notification-sobrino_en.html.
See also Franco Giulio Brambilla, “Gesù autore e perfezionatore della fede,” in La
fede di Gesù: Atti del convegno tenuto a Trento il 27–28 maggio 1998, ed. Giacomo Canobbio
(Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2000), 69–124. For a biblical perspective, see Richard B.
Hays, The Faith of Christ: An Investigation into the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11,
2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002).
122 Balthasar “Fides Christi: An Essay on the Consciousness of Christ,” in Explorations in
Theology II: Spouse of the Word, trans. A. V. Littledale, Alexander Dru, Brian McNeil,
C.R.V., John Saward, and Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 43–
79. See also GL VII, 135–136; TD III, 170–172; TD V, 123–124.

123 Henri Donneaud, OP, “Hans Urs von Balthasar contre saint Thomas d’Aquin sur la foi
du Christ,” Revue Thomiste 97 (1997), 335.
124 Balthasar, “Fides Christi,” 43–44.
125 Ibid., 44, 51–51.
126 ST III, q. 7, a. 3, quoted in ibid., 65.
127 ST Ia-IIae, q. 67, a. 3. Donneaud notes that Thomas denies nothing of the positive virtue
of faith as belonging to Christ, but only the imperfection of non-vision proper to faith
(“Balthasar contre saint Thomas,” 340).
128 Ibid., 340.
129 Balthasar, “Fides Christi,” 65.
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid., 43.
132 Ibid., 44.
133 Donneaud defends St. Thomas’s position from some of Balthasar’s criticisms, regarding it
as no less biblically and philosophically grounded than Balthasar’s own approach, despite
its “intellectualism” and apparent downplaying of relationality: see “Balthasar contre saint
Thomas,” 346–350. Moreover, Donneaud notes nuances in Thomas’s position that
Balthasar seems to miss: for Thomas, the absence of faith in Christ’s human soul does not
imply a concomitant absence of obedience and confidence which constitute “le motif
formel de la foi” (352); “beatific vision,” notes Donneaud, does not mean for Thomas an
exhaustive vision of God (352). For another sympathetic and nuanced explanation of
Thomas’s theory of the knowledge of Christ, see Moloney, The Knowledge of Christ, 58–63.
134 Balthasar, “Fides Christi,” 57–58.
135 Ibid., 59.
136 Cited in ibid.
137 Ibid., 70.
138 Ibid., 75.
139 Ibid., citing Karl Rahner, “The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our
Relationship with God,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and
Boniface Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press and London: Darton, Longman & Todd,
1967), 35–46.
140 Ibid., 78.
141 Ibid., 60.
142 TD III, 171.
143 Ibid., 199.
144 Ibid., 199–200 (Theodramatik 2/2, 182). See also TD III, 227: “There is no question of
Jesus as man obeying himself as God; nor does he obey the Trinity; as Son, in the Holy
Spirit, he obeys the Father.”
145 Ibid., 227.
146 Ibid., 184.
147 Ibid., 184–185, with reference to ST III, q. 7, a. 13.

148 Kasper, Jesus the Christ, 251, cited in ibid., 185.
149 TD III, 186.
150 Ibid., 188. See also Balthasar, “Spirit and Institution,” in Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit
and Institution, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 231–232.
152 TL III, 48–49.
153 TD III, 190. Guy Vandevelde-Daillière argues that in his elaboration of “Trinitarian
inversion,” Balthasar ignores the unity of Trinitarian action ad extra: “Le problème que
Balthasar s’est posé n’est pas un problème. Il n’y a pas d’inversion trinitaire sotériologique.
En insistant de façon unilatérale sur la dimension tripersonnelle de l’œuvre de Dieu dans
le salut, Balthasar ne considère guère que toute action ad extra est commune aux trois
Personnes. Par conséquent, si l’Esprit Saint est actif dans l’incarnation, c’est parce que
celle-ci est opérée par la Trinité en entier. L’économie ne nous révèle pas seulement la
distinction des Personnes divines. Elle révèle aussi leur consubstantialité,” (“L’‘inversion
trinitaire’ chez H.U. von Balthasar,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 120 [1998], 379). It seems
to me, pace Vandevelde-Daillière, that Balthasar has taken account of the revelation of the
consubstantiality of the persons, but has also made appropriate distinctions between the
mode of action proper to each Person of the Trinity, and between the status exinanitionis
and the status exaltationis, which reveal different aspects of the intra-Trinitarian relations.
Balthasar might reiterate his question, whether an approach to the Incarnation under the
aspect of the unity of divine action ad extra takes adequate account of the datum that it is
the Incarnation of the Son (see TD III, 186).
154 Dupuis, Who Do You Say I Am?, 118.
155 TD III, 172.
156 Ibid., 227 (Theodramatik 2/2, 208). Balthasar’s insistence of a single subject in Christ is
highlighted by a quotation from Adrienne von Speyr in Theo-Drama V: “He is ‘I’ as man
and as God, and in this ‘I’ there must be no discrepancy of any kind, since as man he is
not a reflection of his own divine nature but the unequivocal Word of the Father; he is
the incarnate, only begotten Son in the whole profundity and uniqueness of this Word”
(TD V, 125, n. 58).
157 McIntosh, Christology from Within, 8.
158 TH, 31–32.
159 GL VII, 143–144.
160 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (henceforth abbreviated
as MP), trans. Aidan Nichols (Edinburgh T&T Clark, 1990), vii–viii.
161 TD V, 259; see also TL II, 288; Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Self-Consciousness of
Jesus,” in You Crown the Year with Your Goodness, Radio Sermons, trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 319: “As [God], is he not omniscient? Yes, but that
does not mean that he wishes to share all his divine attributes with his human nature….
Just as the Son, as God, eternally receives full divinity (and hence full omniscience) from
his Father, so he eternally gives himself, all that he has and is, back to the Father in

gratitude: it is at the Father’s sole disposal. Thus, in some way, we can understand that,
when the Son’s eternal ‘procession’ from the Father takes the shape of a ‘mission’ to the
world, the Son deposits his divine attributes (without losing them) with the Father in
heaven.”
162 TD III, 228.
163 TH, 32.
164 TD V, 124.
165 TD III, 255.
166 Ibid.
167 Ibid.
168 Ibid., 256: Balthasar voices his agreement with Karl Barth that “there is not a single
moment when the Logos can be held to be asarkos, nor does the New Testament entertain
such a view.”
169 Ibid. As Gerald O’Hanlon soundly remarks, “The earthly existence of Christ is not merely
a repetition of something that has already taken place in heaven. In fact, of course, pre-
existence as applied to the eternal Logos is not properly a temporal term at all: eternity is
not measured in ‘before’ and ‘after’” (O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God, 23).
170 McIntosh, Christology from Within, 73.
171 See TD V, 13; O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval,” 251.
172 Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, 329.

Christ’s Consciousness and the Cross
Introduction
BALTHASAR’S indebtedness to the theological and spiritual traditions of the
Church and his innovative reworking of these traditions have been in evidence
throughout this discussion of the consciousness of Christ, especially in his
theological reframing of the concept of person and of the question of Christ’s
faith and immediate vision of God. Nowhere is he more radical, however,
than in his approach to soteriology and his theology of Christ’s descent into
hell. Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday continues to be controversial, due
both to his commitment to a soteriological model of vicarious substitution and
to his reliance on mystical experiences, particularly those of his close spiritual
companion Adrienne von Speyr.1
The intent of this chapter is not to treat Balthasar’s theology of the Cross
and descent comprehensively, but only within the scope of the two central
themes of our study, the consciousness of Christ and Balthasar’s particular
modulation of Chalcedonian and Neo-Chalcedonian Christology. In outlining
Balthasar’s theology of the Cross and its implications for his Christology, I will
proceed in four steps. First, I will explore the biblical-dogmatic foundations of
Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness on the Cross, with particular
attention to his notion of Jesus’ “hour.” The second section will examine what
Balthasar means by Christ’s experience of sin, including Balthasar’s emphasis
on the admirabile commercium to the point of vicarious representation and a
passive descent into hell. In the third section I will present and evaluate the
foundation for Balthasar’s soteriology in the person of Christ and in
Trinitarian mission. Finally, I will assess Balthasar’s soteriology with respect to
Chalcedonian Christology, asking what positive soteriological role the
humanity of Christ plays for Balthasar. This final section allows us once again
to bring Maximus the Confessor into conversation. I will argue that, despite
unevenness in his Christological language with regard to the descent into hell,
Balthasar’s soteriology can be understood as fundamentally continuous with
Chalcedon and the theology of Maximus not only in terms of linguistic affinity
but at a deeper structural level as well.
The “Hour”
In the previous chapter, I highlighted the eschatological consciousness of
Jesus in Balthasar’s Christology. Jesus has his own “time,” which embraces
world-time but is not limited to it, being structured by his universal mission.
Jesus understands himself as the enactment of God’s definitive judgment on
Israel and thus on the world. He makes a unique claim to authority which
therefore appears to Jesus’ contemporaries as blasphemous in its proportions,
and which indeed cannot be ratified in worldly terms but only in utter poverty
and self-abandonment. Here, Balthasar speaks of an “exorbitant demand”
(Überforderung). Such an exorbitant demand is placed upon any who would
follow Jesus, argues Balthasar, and must a fortiori constitute the mission of
Jesus himself.2 In purely historical terms, Jesus’ movement toward this “hour”
can be expressed by the recognition that his mission to the house of Israel is
met increasingly with rejection:
It is unthinkable that Jesus should ever have entertained the illusion that the old
Israel, which had over a thousand years of tragic history behind it and which had in
any case been scattered to the winds for half a millennium and had never completely
returned, could become the new Israel of God without a miracle, the miracle of an
eschatological transformation. And the wider Jesus’ missionary activity became, the
clearer became his lack of success: people were not willing to give what he demanded;
they took offense at his central message, which was inseparable from hard criticism
of the scale of values adhered to by people of influence. The more he revealed the
Father’s merciful love, the more entrenched became their rejection. At the end of his
active life Jesus has to hide. His death is certain; he is a wanted man.3
Christ’s Consciousness and the Cross 161
At a deeper level, within his consciousness of mission, Jesus is aware that his
life is “moving toward a ‘baptism,’ toward a ‘cup’ he will have to drink,” and
which will stretch him beyond human limits.4 Thus:
His life is running toward an akmē that, as man, he will only be able to survive by
surrendering control of his own actions and being determined totally by the Father’s
will. For this surrendering of control to the Father is essential if, in this hour, the
single, indivisible event that dogmatics requires is to take place: he must bear the
totality of the world’s sin (Jn 1:29), being “made to be sin” (2 Cor 5:21), becoming “a
curse” (Gal 3:13) by the all-disposing will of the Father.5
On the one hand, Jesus is aware that his own human existence is limited, and
that the mission for the conversion of Israel will not reach a definitive
conclusion on its own terms. On the other hand, his consciousness is
measured by his mission, and this mission is nothing less than the salvation of
the world. Only a final moment of complete surrender to the will of the Father
can bring these poles together (but not dissolve the polarity).
Balthasar insists on the fundamental unity of Jesus’ active life and the
final “hour,” because both are embraced within his mission. At the same time,
the hour of the Passion represents a “deep incision,” a qualitatively new
modality in Jesus’ life and temporal mission:
His life remains the result of his own initiative, whereas, in the hour, it is his “being
given up” that dominates. He is given up by men, by Christians, Jews and Gentiles,
and finally by the Father too. This is a seemingly passive letting-things-happen [ein
scheinbar passives Geschehenlassen], but once Jesus, in Gethsemane, has wrestled and
won through to it, it clearly becomes a “super-action” [Über-aktion] in which he is at
one with a demand that goes beyond all limits [Über-forderung], a demand that could
only be made of him.6
What is striking in this passage is Balthasar’s subversion of the active-passive

dichotomy. In “the hour,” Jesus is passive in being given up by his fellow
human beings and by the Father, but his stance of “letting-things-happen” is
only “seemingly passive,” for Balthasar can describe Jesus in his Agony as
“having wrestled and won through it,” and as a “super-action,” echoing what
he says elsewhere: “His suffering and dying is not a mere Passion but a super-
action.”7 As we have seen previously, the mode of receptivity, as ascribed either
to the person of the Son or to his humanity, is not equivalent to passivity.

Here in the Passion, what appears in the form of complete passivity can indeed
be “super-action.” We do well to keep this subversion of the active-passive
dichotomy in mind as we examine Balthasar’s notion of Christ’s obedience in
the descent into hell. I will also return to this theme in my assessment of
Balthasar’s soteriology in light of Chalcedonian Christology.
Although Jesus knows “formally” of the hour to come, his movement
toward it is marked by ever-greater nescience and veiling of knowledge. In part,
Balthasar is stressing the humanity of Jesus and thus his historical, temporal
existence. Thus, in Mysterium Paschale, he criticizes Sergei Bulgakov’s sophio-
logical approach to the Cross: “The notion that the historic Cross is only a
phenomenal translation of a metaphysical Golgotha is Gnostic.”8 Similarly,
although he will draw on the 17th-century cardinal and mystic Pierre de Bérulle
and the “French School” in speaking about the “states” of Christ, Balthasar is
critical of the notion that “the whole existence of Jesus was, from the start,
interiorly identical with the Cross.”9 In Glory of the Lord VII, Balthasar rejects
the interpretation of Jesus’ life as one of “maximal suffering”: such a life
“would not correspond to a true human life, which is a mixture of joy and
suffering and, as a Christian life, is carried by faith, love and hope.”10 Such an
idealization of the Cross, says Balthasar, also “calls into question…the
authentic temporality of the ‘hour’ and so the genuineness of [Christ’s]
humanity and incarnation.”11 As we saw in the previous chapter, the
obedience of the Son incarnate is a temporally conditioned obedience. Thus,
Jesus’ stance is marked by both knowing and not-knowing, but more
fundamentally by non-anticipation:
Jesus refuses to anticipate either the time or the content of the hour, yet he sees
them both, time and content, as something that God has immutably appointed (dei)
and that he, the Son, has unconditionally to go through. So he longs for it with his
whole being (Lk 12:50). This is his mission’s center of gravity, his ordeal by fire. It is
impossible, therefore, for him not to have been aware of its scope, “formally,” as it
were, right from the start.12
Balthasar leaves room for the possibility of a minimalist interpretation of the

Passion predictions, and he does this within the context of Trinitarian
inversion: “He in no way anticipates the tremendous moment of this hour,

preferring to leave the knowledge of it with the Father (Mk 13:32), just as he
will leave its interpretation to the Spirit and those whom the Spirit will inspire
(Jn 16:13–15).”13 Note once again that Balthasar is able to take at face value
the Marcan text at the centre of every controversy around Christ’s knowledge—
“No one knows the hour, not even the Son, but only the Father” (13:32).
Balthasar personally favours, however, an approach which locates the Passion
predictions (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34) in Jesus’ life and does not regard
them simply as vaticinia ex eventu: “Jesus did speak of it [the hour], even if the
evangelists may have added some details in light of their knowledge of the
Passion; there can be no doubt that he knew in advance that the conclusive
breakthrough would not happen ‘today and tomorrow’ (Lk 13:32) but on a
mysterious ‘third day.’”14 Against Bultmann’s famously skeptical remark that
we cannot know how Jesus approached his death, Balthasar argues that Jesus
did indeed know that the “hour” would be the eschatological fulfillment of his
mission. And while numerous contemporary exegetes and theologians have
concluded that such soteriological motifs as “ransom” and “sacrifice” can only
be dated to the post-Easter Church, Balthasar suggests the historical
probability of “ransom” as part of Jesus’ own interpretation of the meaning of
his death:
We can leave it open whether he himself used the word “ransom” (λύτρον: Mk
10:45; Mt 20:28)—deliberately recalling the Servant of Deutero-Isaiah bearing the
sins of the people and of the “many”—but the words of institution at the Eucharist,
which cannot be denied to be his, speak in favor of it.” 15
The general principle of Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness applies

also to Christ’s consciousness in the approach to the Cross: he knows that he
is impelled toward the “hour” by his universal salvific mission, but in his
humanity and his mode of filial receptivity he leaves the content of the hour in
the hands of the Father.
The Exchange of Places

Drawing a line of direct continuity between the self-consciousness of Jesus
and New Testament soteriology, Balthasar reasserts in Theo-Drama IV that the
pro nobis formula of 1 Corinthians 15:3 and Romans 4:25 belongs to the
earliest layer of tradition, pre-dating even Paul.16 The pro nobis formula is the
New Testament’s “central interpretation of the ‘hour’” and “unlocks not only
all Christology but the entire trinitarian doctrine of God that flows from it, as
well as the doctrine of the Church.”17 The formula thus expresses the depth
and breadth of the Cross, first in the consciousness of Jesus and then in more
explicit terms in the New Testament kerygma: it affirms the positive
significance of Jesus’ suffering and death, in which God acts definitively to
fulfill the Covenant; it expresses the uniqueness of Jesus’ death as well as the
demand for appropriation in freedom on the part of those redeemed. Thus,
“the ‘pro nobis’ contains the innermost core of the interplay between God and
man, the center of all theo-drama.”18 The key concept in unpacking the pro
nobis formula is that of representation (Stellvertretung), to which Balthasar will
devote much attention. Balthasar expands on the central and irreducible pro
nobis formula by enumerating five dimensions of the New Testament’s
doctrine of atonement. Balthasar draws these five dimensions from the
various, interacting soteriological images and models of the New Testament
read as a whole, but for our purposes it is important once again to note that
Balthasar identifies the ultimate source of all New Testament soteriology as the
consciousness of Jesus: “His self-understanding is an essential part of the
meaning of the whole event. What is intrinsically impossible is that, if God has
imparted universal scope and efficacy to an event, Jesus should be unaware of
its essential meaning.”19
First, the atonement is a Trinitarian event in which the Father gives up
the Son. As the Gospel of John says, “For God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son” (John 3:16). In this giving, the Son is not passive but allows
himself to be given up; hence the statement, “I lay down my life of my own
accord” (John 10:17–18). Balthasar says, “At the heart of this obedient letting-
things-happen (Geschehenlassen), there is an active consent, deliberate action.”20
Here, Balthasar emphasizes divine freedom and initiative in the act of
redemption: “The words of institution show that Jesus’ eucharistic self-

surrender is prior to any action of men’s part to send him to his death.” 21
Second, Christ’s self-surrender results in an exchange of places
(Platztausch). Christ becomes “sin” (2 Cor 5:21) and a “curse” (Gal 3:13) for us
in order that we might become the righteousness of God and receive blessing.
This exchange is also expressed in the image of the Lamb of God, who takes
away (airein) the sin of the world by bearing it. Balthasar emphasizes the
ontological transfer of sin to Christ, effecting an ontological transfer of those
redeemed into righteousness. As Antoine Birot notes, “With this concept,
Balthasar expresses with precision the fact that, according to Scripture, the
reconciliation of the world with God could not be achieved through some
extrinsic process.”22
Third, in negative terms, the New Testament describes the effects of the
atonement as a liberation (Freisetzung). Sinners are liberated from slavery to
sin, from the devil, from “the power of darkness,” from the law, and from “the
wrath to come.”23 This theme finds expression in economic metaphors of
“price” and “ransom,” and in cultic terms of propitiation. The fourth aspect is
the positive dimension of redemption, the initiation of believers into the
Trinitarian life by the indwelling of the Spirit of adoption. Again, Balthasar
emphasizes both the Trinitarian initiative and purpose in the redemption of the
world—the sharing of the life of the Trinity by theōsis or divinization. Finally,
although Balthasar will want to hold on to the notion of God’s righteous
anger, the event of reconciliation must ultimately be attributed to God’s
merciful love.24
These five aspects constitute a kind of soteriological grammar, although as
Balthasar notes, they are dimensions of the mystery of redemption and
therefore not susceptible to systematization. All five aspects must be upheld in
a balanced tension, with no one aspect allowed to dominate and no aspect
replaced by supposedly equivalent non-biblical categories.25 Balthasar’s
dramatic soteriology constitutes an attempt to do justice to all five aspects of
New Testament soteriology, highlighting in particular the extent of Christ’s
exchange of places and literal assumption of universal sin and guilt.
Balthasar argues that patristic theology in general is most distinctively

characterized by its emphasis on the second aspect, the exchange of places, the
admirabile commercium, although not to the exclusion of the other motifs. The
term commercium, Balthasar notes, emerged at the time of the Council of
Ephesus as a superior term to the ambiguous descriptions of the Incarnation
and the divinization of humanity as a mixis or krasis. Commercium describes the
exchange by which, as Athanasius puts it, “the Logos became man so that we
might become divinized.”26 Balthasar marshals a catena of patristic texts to
demonstrate that the admirabile commercium was not a punctiliar event of
Incarnation; more than just the Logos’s entrance into humanity, it was the
assumption of an entire human life, oriented from the beginning to the
Passion and death of Jesus: the exchange “has a history.”27 The admirabile
commercium becomes a leitmotif for Balthasar, a means of transposing
Christological discourse from metaphysical analysis of Christ’s natures to a
dramatic presentation of Christ as actor who represents the struggle of life and
death (mors et vita duello in the words of the Easter Sequence) in his own
person.
In emphasizing the amplitude of the patristic commercium model,
Balthasar offers a more nuanced reading of patristic soteriology than is
sometimes suggested by descriptions of patristic and Eastern soteriology as
entirely focused on Incarnation and divinization.28 The Fathers, however,
imposed an “unconscious limit” on the “exchange,” in that Christ assumed
the consequences of the sin of humanity, its non-culpable weaknesses and
pathē, but not sin itself.29 Balthasar writes, “In this way the admirabile
commercium comes up against an unconscious limit—unconscious because it is
taken for granted. The Redeemer acting on the world stage does not com-
pletely fill out his role of representing the sinner before God.”30 Christ plays a
dramatic role, but patristic theology has not pushed toward the ultimate
consequences of a dramatic soteriology:
The crucial question here is this. How internal is this role-playing in the suffering
Christ, and how far does he identify himself with the role? The relationship between
Christ the Head and his members (which we are), to which Gregory Nazianzen also
refers, must surely point us in the direction of a true identity.31
The “unconscious limit” seems to arise from both a theological concern for
preserving divine immutability and a Christological concern for preserving the
sinlessness of Christ.32 But this limit does not allow patristic soteriology of the
commercium to attain the realism of the Pauline declaration of God’s action in
Christ pro nobis, of Christ in a quite literal manner “becoming” sin and “a
curse.” In both Theo-Drama IV and Cosmic Liturgy, Balthasar regards Maximus
as standing precisely at this “limit.” Christ bears the consequences of sin,
including fear of death (hence the genuineness of Christ’s human horror of
death in the Agony), but cannot bear sin itself in any literal sense. Or, in other
words, Christ identifies himself with sinful humanity by a “relative
appropriation” rather than an “ontological appropriation,” insofar as Christ is
sinless. Balthasar points to a certain ambiguity in Maximus, since this
appropriation cannot be regarded as purely relative: “Christ’s union with
human nature, after all, is itself ontological, and original sin is situated
precisely in the universal reality of this nature, as such.”33 Christ “represents
our rebellion in himself.”34 John Damascene follows along the path of
Maximus, speaking of Christ’s bearing of non-sinful pathē and relative
appropriation of the debt of sin; Christ does not become a curse, but
conforms himself to sinners by taking on a role, prosōpon.35 The separation
between Christ and his “role,” by which he represents sinful humanity only by
relative appropriation, contradicts the central tenet of Balthasar’s own
Christology, the absolute identity of Christ’s person and mission, a mission to
deal with the totality of humanity’s sin by a real and ontological exchange of
places.
The admirabile commercium remains a valid and helpful lens through which
to understand the pro nobis of Pauline and Johannine soteriology, and
Balthasar shows that this exchange did not only entail the fact of the
Incarnation, but also the assumption of sin on the Cross. However, although
the Fathers established the formal outlines of this “wondrous exchange,”
Balthasar says:
We have to wait for Western, Augustinian and Anselmian soteriology before we find
an explicit realization—in all the realism of Paul, John and the whole New Testament
witness—that the mission of Jesus runs from the Incarnation to the Cross and that it
is on the Cross that the sinner changes places with the only Son.36
Balthasar is generally sympathetic to Anselm’s theory of satisfaction,

particularly to the account it takes of divine and creaturely freedom in the
redemption. If, however, out of a concern to defend divine immutability
patristic authors set an “unconscious limit” on Christ’s contact with sin,
Anselm expressly makes the innocence of Christ a central factor in his
soteriology, such that the death of the Innocent One can “outweigh” the sins
of humanity. Thus, “here Jesus is less than ever the ‘Bearer of sin.’”37 In
Anselm as well as in Thomas Aquinas after him, Balthasar finds “the same lack
of any inner contact between Jesus and the reality of sin as such.”38 For
Balthasar, nothing less than the complete entry of Christ’s person into the
place of the sinner, and the entry of sin into the person of Christ, does justice
to the New Testament’s soteriological formulae.
Hence, Balthasar is also critical of the contemporary notion of solidarity,
particularly as presented in “liberal” Christologies, where solidarity does not
express so much Jesus’ full immersion in and communion with sinful
humanity but rather his “social” solidarity with the poor, sinners, and the
marginalized.39 Authors such as Hans Küng, Christian Duquoc and Edward
Schillebeeckx exemplify this approach, which questions the intelligibility of
categories such as “sacrifice” and “ransom” and regards the Cross as the
historical consequence of Jesus’ pro-existence for others.40 Balthasar’s criticism
of the solidarity model represented by these authors is, first, that contemporary
terms have been sought in order to render intelligible the soteriological images
of the New Testament. They argue (thus Anton Vögtle, Schillebeeckx) that
Jesus did not regard his imminent death as expiatory or salvific—a position
already challenged by Balthasar’s description of Jesus’ consciousness in the
approach to the final, eschatological “hour.”41 And while proponents of a
solidarity model can be located within the tradition of the patristic admirabile
commercium, “yet the commercium no longer operates at the ontological plane
but only at the social and psychological level.”42 Rejecting the historical-critical
reduction of the pro nobis to a purely human solidarity, Balthasar will want to
use “solidarity” in a clearly ontological sense, and will want in a more radical
manner to speak of Christ’s solidarity with humanity even in sinful alienation

and in death.43
As we have stated already, Balthasar is concerned to interpret with the
utmost realism the Pauline notion that Christ was “made” sin and the patristic
trope of the admirabile commercium. He asks for instance:
Could Jesus somehow mysteriously adopt the world’s guilt—without having incurred
it—and experience it and its effects in that “hour” which is both the Father’s hour
and the “hour of darkness”? Did the Redeemer so identify himself with his brothers,
the sinners, that he will not distinguish himself from them in the presence of God,
with the result that, like a lightning rod, he draws the judgment of God—a judgment
upon the reality of opposition to God in the world—on to himself?44
The contemporary shift toward soteriologies of solidarity does not take full
account of what it means for Christ to become sin, to become a curse. For
Balthasar, “there is solidarity, it is true, but it extends as far as substitution:
Christ’s solidarity with us goes as far as taking our place and allowing the
whole weight of human guilt to fall upon him.”45 Nor do juridical and penal
interpretations of substitution go far enough: it is not an extrinsic imputation
of guilt and sin to Christ, but an actual ontological exchange of places that
occurs between Christ and the sinner: “The Crucified does not bear the
burden as something external: he in no way distances himself from those who
by rights should have to bear it.”46 Balthasar describes this “becoming sin” in
various ways. Christ experiences “the darkness of the sinful state,” and thus
experiences complete abandonment by God.47 Christ’s agony is a co-suffering
with sinners, “of such a kind that the real loss of God which threatened them
(the poena damni) [is] assumed by the incarnate Love of God in the form of a
timor gehennalis.”48 The experience of abandonment is analogous to hell in the
loss of all sense of time.49 Christ’s sufferings can be described as “punish-
ment,” although only analogously: “Subjectively…[Christ] can experience it as
‘punishment,’ although objectively speaking, in his case, it cannot be such.”50
The exchange of places entails an experience of God’s anger toward sin; this
anger is “unloaded” upon Christ: “Can we seriously say that God unloaded his
wrath upon the Man who wrestled with his destiny on the Mount of Olives
and was subsequently crucified? Indeed we must.”51
Christ’s Experience of Hell: The V isio Mortis
For Balthasar, the definitive manifestation of the extent of the admirabile

commercium, which is in turn encompassed by the infinite distance between the
persons of the Trinity, is Christ’s descent into hell. Balthasar sees the descent
of Christ as an experience of the sinner, an experience of the furthest
alienation of the creature from God:
If Jesus has suffered on the Cross the sin of the world to the very last truth of this
sin-godforsakenness—then he must experience, in solidarity with the sinners who
have gone to the underworld, their—ultimately hopeless—separation from God,
otherwise he would not have known all the phases and conditions of what it means
for man to be unredeemed yet awaiting redemption.52
Just as in his going to his Passion, Jesus did not exhibit a purely human,
“social” or “psychological” solidarity with the poor and with sinners, so too in
death Christ’s solidarity is not only in dying but in the state of death itself:
“One can reject as incomplete a ‘theology of death’ which limits Jesus’
solidarity with sinners to the act of decision or some self-gift of existence in the
moment of dying.”53
In contrast to mythological depictions of a journey to the underworld,
and unlike the portrayal of Christ as victor conquering hell, Balthasar
describes Jesus’ descent in passive terms, a “sinking down” and “being
removed.”54 As he says in Mysterium Paschale,
Jesus was truly dead, because he really became a man as we are, a son of Adam, and
therefore, despite what one can sometimes read in certain theological works, he did
not use the so-called “brief” time of his death for all manner of “activities” in the
world beyond…. In the same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the
living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead…. Each human being lies in
his own tomb. And with this condition, seen here from the viewpoint of the
separated body, Jesus is at first truly solidary.55
More than solidarity in the experience of physical death, the descent is an

experience of sin from the inside, “an inner appropriation of what is ungodly
and hostile to God, an identification with that darkness of alienation from
God into which the sinner falls as a result of his No.”56 Indeed, this solidarity
must be extended to the experience of “the second death,” the experience of

judgment and hell and of sin itself.57
This second death is described, in terms drawn from Nicholas of Cusa, as
a visio mortis, a vision of the “the pure substantiality of ‘Hell.’”58 Balthasar also
describes the descent as Christ’s removal of the substance of sin from
individual sinners, “no longer sin as attaching to a particular human being, sin
incarnate in living existences, but abstracted from that individuation,
contemplated in its bare reality as such.”59 Balthasar also appeals to Nicholas
of Cusa to argue that Christ’s suffering of hell is not only a form of solidarity
with sinners, but in fact goes beyond the punishment suffered by the sinner:
Nicholas of Cusa is correct to deduce that Jesus was the only one who suffered the
complete poena damni for all, just as he expiated alone all sin on the Cross; and as the
eschatological abandonment by God passed over already on the Cross into what is
timeless, so on Holy Saturday this abandonment by God becomes definitively
timeless in Jesus’ being truly dead, in the loss of all the spiritual lights of faith, hope
and love.60
In Theo-Logic II, where the influence of von Speyr is clearly felt, Balthasar
speaks of Christ’s experience in hell as the loss of the Father, as sheer futility
and as timelessness.61 This loss of a sense of meaning and of time finds an
analogue in the dark night described in the mystical tradition:
An uninterrupted charismatic re-interpretation of the Cross…runs through the

centuries of the Church’s life. It constitutes the New Testament reflection of the Old
Testament experience of God-abandonment and of what the doctor of the Church
John of the Cross experienced and described as the “dark night.” That experience
has frequently been considered, both before John and after him, as an experience of
damnation, of Hell.62
In this experience of damnation, Christ still exercises a kind of obedience, “an

absolute obedience that reaches out beyond life and stands the test precisely in
the place where otherwise only coercion and servitude reign,” but this
obedience is experienced as powerlessness, and thus—borrowing a phrase from
Francis of Assisi—as “the obedience of a corpse.”63 In Theo-Drama V, Balthasar
speaks with von Speyr of a kind of reification of the “I” of Christ: Christ’s
knowledge of the abomination of sin is a “purely objective,” “mechanical”

experience on the part of one who is self-alienated, who “does not know who
he is and whether he is in the first place”; the “I” becomes “a pure impersonal
‘one,’ the thing becomes purely neuter.”64 Similarly elsewhere, Balthasar
describes Christ’s passivity in hell as “an obedience that has been humiliated
to the point of being pure matter.”65 Particularly in his appeal to Adrienne von
Speyr’s own words on Christ’s experience of hell, Balthasar shifts into heavily
metaphorical and vividly imagistic language. It is therefore difficult to assess
the nature and status of the “I” of which von Speyr and Balthasar speak here.
At one point, Balthasar refers to the Son becoming “mere man” in hell;66
elsewhere hell is portrayed as “the stripping away of the man Jesus.”67 Mark
McIntosh’s point is well taken:
On the one hand, this very emphasis is what immediately sets von Balthasar apart
from all docetic views of the Incarnation in which a purely spiritual Christ only seems
to suffer and die. On the other hand, the very detail with which…von Balthasar
describes Jesus’ death and presence in hell tends to arouse questions: is he really
talking about the actual historical human being Jesus or a kind of mystical-
theological construct?68
For the moment I will leave this as an open question. I will not propose any
final verdict on Balthasar’s theology of the descent, but the question of the
imagistic and apparently self-contradictory Christological statements in
Balthasar’s descriptions of the descensus will be treated in the ensuing
discussion of Christ’s Passion and death from the perspectives of Trinitarian
mission and the humanity of Christ.
Before turning to these systematic dimensions of Balthasar’s theology of
the descent into hell, a word should be said about his sources. Balthasar
admits that almost nothing is said about Holy Saturday and the descent into
hell in Scripture. One of the few, cryptic references is in 1 Peter 3:18–20,
which refers to Christ’s going to the spirits imprisoned in order to preach
salvation. More significant as a source for Balthasar, as we have seen, is the
mystical tradition, including the experience of the dark night, highlighted
particularly in the Carmelite spirituality of John of the Cross as well as Thérèse
of Lisieux.69 Nicholas of Cusa’s description of the poena damni and visio mortis
furthermore provides an important precedent in the tradition for the theology

of the descent, one which radically reframes the descent in terms of obedience
rather than triumph.
Of course the primary source for Balthasar’s theology of the descent is
Adrienne von Speyr, whose visionary experiences of Christ’s sufferings and
descent into hell Balthasar calls “the greatest theological gift she received from
God and left to the Church.” In First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, Balthasar
describes these visions, which began in 1941 and recurred annually during the
Triduum, in much the same terms that appear in his own descriptions—hell is
a place where faith, hope, and charity are absent; Christ exercises the
“obedience of a corpse” and enters the formlessness of the “second chaos,”
and so on.70 In Theo-Logic II, Balthasar says that von Speyr “sounds and
expresses the abyssal depths like none before her.”71 He refers readers to her
own works and diaries, and refers to Mysterium Paschale as “an attempt to pave
the way for [von Speyr’s] bold teaching.”72
There is, however, a less obvious influence on Balthasar’s theology of the
descent of Christ into hell. While Balthasar adverted to an “unconscious
limit” in the patristic understanding of the admirabile commercium, and
included Maximus within his survey as affirming Christ’s assumption of sin by
relative appropriation only, Balthasar elsewhere appeals to Maximus’s spiritual
writings (as distinct from his explicitly Christological contributions). In
Mysterium Paschale, for instance, Balthasar invokes Maximus’s familiar theme
of the recapitulation of the logoi of all things in Christ, not—as we noted in
Chapter 2—in the logos asarkos but in Christ incarnate and, specifically, in the
paschal mystery:
The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word contains, as in a synthesis, the

interpretation of all the enigmas and figures of Scripture, as well as the meaning of
all material and spiritual creatures. But whoever knows the mystery of the Cross and
the burial, that person knows the real reasons, logoi, for all these realities. Whoever,
lastly, penetrates the hidden power of the Resurrection, discovers the final end for
which God created everything from the beginning.73
Here, Balthasar is quoting Maximus’s Gnostic Centuries.74 In the translation and

commentary of the Gnostic Centuries included in the second edition of
Kosmische Liturgie, Balthasar says that the entire structure and rhythm of
created being finds its inner meaning and fulfilment in the dying and rising of
Christ.75 Balthasar situates Maximus within a larger trajectory of an
“uninterrupted charismatic re-interpretation of the Cross,” the same trajectory
that will later include Nicholas of Cusa, the Rhenish mystics, and John of the
Cross (and, presumably for Balthasar, von Speyr).76 Specifically, Balthasar
shows that Eastern Christian mysticism, exemplified by Diadochus of Photike
and Evagrius, thematized the spiritual experience of akēdia as an experience of
“hell” and God-forsakenness. Within this monastic spiritual tradition,
Maximus refers to four kinds of God-abandonment, the first of which is the
experience of Christ, “where ‘by apparent abandonment the abandoned had
to be saved.’”77 Finally, Balthasar draws on Maximus’s Gnostic Centuries, which
he translated into German and published in 1941, the same year as the first
edition of Kosmische Liturgie.78 In Man in History, Balthasar invokes Maximus’s
phrase, “the grave of the Logos” from the Gnostic Centuries I, 67.79 Maximus
exemplifies the attempt of Christian mystics to find an analogue in the paschal
mystery for the overcoming of all human effort and for purifying surrender to
God, “to make their own the sabbatism of the Creator and of the Redeemer,”
the Sabbath here being precisely Holy Saturday, “the great, silent Sabbath
when the Word rests from its labors.”80 In the spiritual life, the “grave of the
Logos” thus represents an apophatic moment, the ceasing of purely creaturely
activity and discursive intellection: “For when all the natural power and
movement of the understanding is removed, then the Logos rises alone,
existing for itself, as if rising from the dead.”81 Within a monastic spirituality,
activity gives way in a kind of dying to a passivity, allowing oneself to be
determined by God. 82
The appeal to Maximus with specific regard to the descent into hell is
rather fleeting, it seems, and so has not attracted very much attention in the
secondary literature on Balthasar’s theology of Holy Saturday. Maximus does
not develop an explicit Christological approach to the descent into hell. But it
can be argued that Maximus’s typological approach to the descent hovers
significantly in the background of Balthasar’s theology of the descent, in at
least two ways. First, Maximus makes incipient analogies between the dynamics
of the spiritual life, including the “hell” of spiritual acedia and the
transcending of creaturely activity and intellection, and the narrative of the
paschal mystery, including—significantly—not just Cross and Resurrection but
“burial” and the grave. There is, therefore, a structural analogy upon which
Balthasar draws for his explicitly Christological and Trinitarian meditations on
the descent into hell. Secondly—and more generally—Maximus’s typological
reading of the descent exemplifies precisely the cross-fertilization of spirituality
and systematic theology which Balthasar himself espouses: mystical experience
is a reflection of the Christological reality which must ultimately be the source
of all such experience. Thus Balthasar says programmatically:
But it is the Church’s teaching on the second Person, christology, that stands to gain
from what the saints experienced. In fact, however, christology also has remained
practically static within the formal setting of Chalcedon; its further growth as a result
of the total experience of the Church’s faith is still awaited.83
This excursus on a rather subtle but not insignificant influence of Maximus on

Balthasar’s descensus-theology serves to qualify out more explicitly Christo-
logical examination of Balthasar, Chalcedon, and Maximus, acting as a
salutary warning that Balthasar’s appropriation of Maximus should not be
viewed narrowly in terms of material or verbal consistency with Maximus’s
dyothelite Christological doctrine. Although Nicholas of Cusa, Luther and
Calvin, the Carmelite mystics, and Adrienne von Speyr appear to have more
explicit influence on Balthasar’s theology of the Cross and descent, a
Maximian undercurrent should not go unnoticed. Georges de Schrijver, who
is, as far as I can tell, the only commentator to have elucidated this continuity
between Maximus and Balthasar, asks pointedly whether perhaps in his study
of Maximus Balthasar has discovered an incipient “structure” which he has
proceeded to develop more fully, namely the structure of Trinitarian mission
into the world and the complete assumption of human living, dying, and
rising into a dynamic of self-surrender.84 Despite the paucity of reference to
Maximus in Balthasar’s soteriology, one must surely answer de Schrijver’s
question in the affirmative.
The Person of the Son as Subject of the Paschal Mystery

If the Pauline claim that Christ died for our sins is taken to refer to a real,
ontological exchange of places between Christ and the sinner, to the extent of
Christ’s descent into the state of definitive alienation from God, Balthasar
argues that the person who steps into the place of the sinner must be fully
divine. Such an exchange of places with sinners and assumption of the guilt of
the whole world would not be possible for a mere human being.85 The divinity
of the Son, then, is the primary condition of possibility for such vicarious
representation: “Only God himself can go right to the end of the abandon-
ment by God.”86 More than that, it is not simply Christ’s divine nature qua
nature, but the Trinitarian mission constituting Christ’s person that grounds
the complete ontological exchange of places between Christ and the sinner.
Repeatedly, Balthasar makes the point that the person of the Son is the subject
of the exchange of places, and that the experience of sin and suffering entailed
by such an exchange cannot be limited to his human nature. Thus he
describes the “hour” in terms of Christ’s mission: “Here the God-man drama
reaches its acme: perverse finite freedom casts all its guilt onto God, making
him the sole accused, the scapegoat, while God allows himself to be
thoroughly affected by this, not only in the humanity of Christ but also in
Christ’s trinitarian mission.”87 Anselm of Canterbury highlights the innocence
of Christ, who accrues merit by his death from which he himself as God
cannot profit but which is made available to sinners.88 Thomas sees the fruits
of redemption extending from Christ to humankind in terms of the personal
grace and dignity of Christ as head, gratia capitis overflowing to the members
of the Body.89 For his part, Balthasar argues that the ultimate presupposition
for Christ’s complete taking-over of sin must be not an attribute of Christ but
the uniqueness of his very person:
The “hour” and the “chalice” became the entry of the sin of the world into the
personal existence, body and soul, of the representative Substitute and Mediator. It
does not suffice…to argue from the unique “dignity” of the substitutionary person,
and his innocence and freedom, in order to make acceptable the reality of his work
of atonement (whether ontological or forensic). It is much more important to offer a
deepened description of how the union constitutes the condition of possibility of a

real assumption of universal guilt.90
Balthasar cites two obstacles to a realistic interpretation of sin’s entry into

Christ’s person. In reverse order, the second was a doctrine of
predestination which denied the efficacy of expiation for the damned.
The first, more germane to our Christological inquiry, was the hypothesis
that Christ’s soul possessed the immediate (beatific) vision of God even
throughout the Passion, “something which appeared to exclude Christ’s
being the total subject and ‘experiencer’ of sin.”91 As we saw in the
previous chapter, Balthasar rejects the stratification of Christ’s human
consciousness such that he enjoys beatitude at the “apex” of his soul even
while suffering in his “lower parts.”92 Moreover, Balthasar points not only
to a unity of human consciousness but to the hypostatic unity which bears
this consciousness: to call Christ the total “experiencer” of sin is to say
that sin and its effects enter not only into Christ’s body or human soul
but into his very person as the Divine Word and Son. Here, the
soteriological impulse behind Balthasar’s position on Christ’s possession
of the beatific vision emerges with greater clarity. Balthasar writes in
Mysterium Paschale:
The possibility of such a real assumption of the sinful being of all sinners may be
rendered intelligible from three points of view:
(1) From the determination of the entire human consciousness of Jesus by the Logos
and his eternal attitude of love towards the Father.
(2) Through the absolute readiness, inherent in this determination, of Christ’s
human nature to be disposed of as a space for sheer (co-) suffering—a readiness to
serve which expresses the Kenosis of the Logos in absolute obedience.
(3) Through the real communication (solidarity) of the humanity assumed with the
reality of humankind as a whole and its eschatological fate.93
This passage forms a rather elliptical section-conclusion within the third

chapter of Mysterium Paschale, and Balthasar does not explain further how each
of these perspectives elucidates Christ’s assumption of universal sin. The third
point affirms Chalcedon’s teaching of Christ’s true and perfect human
consubstantiality, as a condition of possibility for Christ’s complete solidarity
with fallen humanity, to the point of co-experiencing death and the

consequences of sin. The first two points affirm the enhypostatic subsistence
of Christ’s humanity including his human consciousness in the person of the
Word. How does this invocation of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology help to
render vicarious representation intelligible? It suggests, I would argue once
again, that everything experienced by Christ in his humanity—and now this
includes God-forsakenness, death and complete alienation from community—
is at the service of the mission of the Son in loving obedience to the Father.
Christ’s human nature and consciousness are defined from the beginning by
complete receptivity and disponibilité, and this receptivity becomes also a
“space” for suffering.
Looking back to the historical development of the admirabile commercium,
we recall Balthasar’s criticism of the Fathers for setting an “unconscious limit”
on the exchange, such that “the Redeemer…does not completely fill out his
role of representing the sinner before God.”94 At a deeper level, this
unconscious limit is due to the failure of patristic theology to arrive at the
notion of the complete expressivity of the humanity of Christ as revelation of
Christ’s Trinitarian personhood. Balthasar argues that a similar lack of a
Trinitarian framework plagues Anselm.95 For Balthasar, the fullest account of
Christ’s literal exchange of places with the sinner is to be found in Martin
Luther’s theology of the Cross. In Luther, however, the exchange of places is
seen in dialectical rather than analogical terms, as a kind of inner struggle of
Christ as the archetypal simul justus et peccator.96 Christ’s experience of the
Passion is accordingly paradoxical: he experiences “a genuine fear of death and
hell”; on the Cross he is tempted to blaspheme God but “stifles and swallows
it.”97 This attribution of simul justus et peccator is purely formal and finds no
ontological grounding in Christ’s hypostatic unity: “Formally Luther holds fast
to Christ’s two natures, but he makes no connection between Christ’s
Incarnation and his ‘becoming sin.’”98 In Theo-Logic II, Balthasar expands on
this point:
[Luther] wants nothing to do with a single, unifying hypostasis in Christ or with

Christ’s humanity as an imago Dei (the humanity touches the divinity only at a
mathematical point, as it were) or, finally, with a theandric operation of the united
natures and, therefore, with a mission that accompanies the suffering Christ into his
Godforsakenness in the form of obedience.99
Balthasar’s sympathy with Neo-Chalcedonian Christology comes to light once

again here, where he affirms against Luther that the communicatio idiomatum
must be anchored in the perichoretic unity of the natures in the one hypostasis
of the Word incarnate. It is in this “theandric” operation that the humanity of
Christ is illuminated as the imago Dei, not merely as a passive element in the
drama of redemption, but fully activated by its subsistence in the person of the
Son.100 As I argued in Chapter 2, Balthasar maintains the priority of the order
of hypostasis in Christological predication, and only by way of the hypostasis of
Christ can attributes can be assigned to one or the other nature. The analogy
between the natures of Christ must be maintained even though Christ enters
fully into the place of the sinner, and Balthasar contends that the only way to
do this is through a theology of intra-Trinitarian difference.
Economic and Immanent Trinity

The negativity into which Christ enters can become the fullest revelation
of the identity of God only, Balthasar claims, if God is triune, and if there is
within the Trinity an alterity, an infinite distance, between the hypostases which
embraces negative distance but does not thereby make God subject to
negativity. Balthasar constructs his Trinitarian passiology in direct opposition,
on the one hand, to what he calls Rahner’s “formalism,” and, on the other
hand, to Moltmann’s tragic vision of the Trinity as realized on the Cross. He
criticizes Rahner’s dependence on the psychological analogy and insistence
that because God has only one self-consciousness following on the unity of the
divine nature, the Trinitarian persons, or modes of existence, “cannot address
each other as “Thou.”101 Rahner’s elaboration of the Trinitarian
presuppositions for economic kenōsis retains “a strangely formal aspect” and
insulates the immanent Trinity from the “self-squandering” witnessed in the
economy.102 In contrast, for Moltmann the abandonment of the Son by the
Father is “a directly Trinitarian event” and threatens divine aseity. For
Balthasar, Christ’s forsakenness and entrance into the state of sin does not
realize the Trinitarian relations but reveals their preconditions within the
immanent life of the Trinity: in the Cross the relationship of the Father and
Son in the Spirit is fully revealed as an infinite, positive diastasis:
It is only from the Cross and in the context of the Son’s forsakenness that the latter’s
distance from the Father is fully revealed; when the unity between them is exposed,
the uniting Spirit, their “We,” actually appears in the form of mere distance. The
surrendered Son, in bearing sin, that is, what is simply alien to God, appears to have
lost the Father; so it seems as if this revelation of the “economic” Trinity brings out,
for the first time, the whole seriousness of the “immanent” Trinity.103
Drawing on Bulgakov, Balthasar argues that kenōsis cannot be predicated

purely of the economic Trinity, but must have its presupposition in an intra-
Trinitarian kenōsis whereby the Father gives himself away completely in the
generation of the Son, to which the Son responds in total eucharistic self-
surrender. The procession of the Son “involves the positing of an absolute,
infinite ‘distance’ that can contain and embrace all the other distances that are
possible within the world of finitude, including the distance of sin.”104 The
Spirit, the subsistent “We” of the Father and Son, maintains the infinite
distance between these two and bridges it.105 The presupposition for a
Trinitarian interpretation of the admirabile commercium is not only that
creaturely alterity is grounded and encompassed within intra-Trinitarian
hypostatic distinction, but that even the negative distance of sin is
encompassed by Trinitarian difference:
This Son is infinitely Other, but he is also the infinitely Other of the Father. Thus he
both grounds and surpasses all we mean by separation, pain and alienation in the
world and all we can envisage in terms of loving self-giving, interpersonal relationship
and blessedness.106
That the Son’s otherness “grounds and surpasses” negative intramundane

distance means that the relationship between intradivine and worldly distance
is analogical rather than univocal. Balthasar loses no time in distancing
himself from any whiff of a process theology which would make God
dependent on the world or, as in Moltmann’s theology of the Cross, would
impute the suffering of the Cross to God univocally.107 To speak of an intra-
Trinitarian kenōsis as the basis for all intramundane difference and distance is
to speak analogically:
To think in such a way is to walk on a knife edge: it avoids all the fashionable talk of
“the pain of God” and yet is bound to say that something happens in God that not
only justifies the possibility and actual occurrence of all suffering in the world but
also justifies God’s sharing in the latter, in which he goes to the length of vicariously
taking on man’s God-lessness.108
Thus there exists in God not suffering tout court, but “something in God that
can develop into suffering.”109 Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology raises important
questions about the traditional doctrine of divine impassibility; questions have
also been raised concerning Balthasar’s strong emphasis on distance in the
Trinity and whether he has thus introduced a tacit tri-theism.110 But what are
the implications for Balthasar’s Christology, for the unity of Christ’s person
and consciousness, and for the status of Christ’s human nature?
The analogical relation between the economic exchange of places and
Trinitarian self-surrender means that Christ can experience a negative distance
from the Father in the economy and a narrowing of his freedom and activity,
but that this experience is grounded in the unity of Father and Son in the
Spirit and the “prior” free salvific decision of the Trinity. Thus, Balthasar says:
If the person who lowers himself to the condition of a servant is that of the divine
Son, with his entire servant-existence remaining, therefore, the expression of his
divine freedom, in unanimous accord with the Father, then the obedience which
determines that whole existence of his is not simply a function of what he has become
(en homoiōmati anthrōpōn, schēmati hōs anthrōpos and thus “existence unto death”). It is
also a function of what, in his self-emptying and self-abasement, he willed to become.
By letting go of the “form of God” that was his (and so his divine power of self-
disposal) he willed to become the One who, in a remarkable and unique manner, is
obedient to the Father—in a manner, namely, where his obedience presents the
kenotic translation of the eternal love of the Son for the “ever-greater” Father.111
Jesus’ human existence in humility and obedience is the economic form of a

prior freedom of the divine hypostasis of the Son in union with the Father. To
reiterate what was said in the previous chapter, the constitution of Christ’s
person by his missio, and this missio as the economic translation of his processio
from the Father, exclude any heteronomy in the redemptive works and
sufferings of Christ, even though in the Passion Christ experiences his unity
with the Father’s will as a rupture and abandonment. Balthasar draws on
Anselm’s notion of necessitas sequens, a necessity which follows upon the free
Trinitarian decision for the salvation of the world, a decision that is the Son’s
no less than the Father’s and the Spirit’s.112 All of Christ’s actions and
passions have their source in his voluntary self-surrender in union with the
Father and Spirit. Thus, in the economy, the obedience of the Son requires
him to ratify and specify the saving will which was already his in unity with the
Father and Spirit:
Indeed, it cannot be the Son’s will to appear before the Father bearing the No of the
whole world; his will is only to carry out the Father’s will—his mission—into ultimate
darkness. This will is the sponte of which Anselm continually speaks; according to
Anselm, the Son exhibits it in heaven (in the trinitarian decision concerning the
Incarnation), in becoming man and in suffering. But because, in the economy of
salvation, the trinitarian decision can only be carried out by the Father making the
divine will known to the incarnate Son through the Holy Spirit (in the “trinitarian
inversion”), the impression is given that the Father—cooperante Spiritu Sancto—loads
the Son with the sins of the world.113
On account of the analogy between the theology and economy, mediated by

Trinitarian inversion, Christ’s experience of God-forsakenness does not reveal
a rupture of divine unity, but rather expresses this unity: “The Son’s missio is
his processio extended in ‘economic’ mode; but whereas in his processio he
moves toward the Father in receptivity and gratitude, in his missio (thanks to
the ‘trinitarian inversion’), he moves away from him and toward the world,
into the latter’s ultimate darkness.”114 Indeed, the correspondence of economy
and theology is so close that the death of the Son on the Cross is revelatory of
the eternal “now” of the Son’s procession: “The Son does not cease, even in
dying, to be generated by him and to convey his eternal gratitude to him, in a
love that expresses its utmost intensity precisely now.”115 The Passion becomes
the economic mode of the eternal event of the Son’s procession from the
Father, not as an epiphenomenon but as the analogous expression of
Trinitarian self-surrender, and thus grounded not in Hegelian necessity but in

the always prevenient (unvordenklich) freedom and love of the Trinity.
The Positive Soteriological Function of the Humanity of Christ

If in the hour of Christ’s passion and in his going to the dead, Christ
arrives at the “end” of being human, to the point where human activity is
superseded by an obedience that manifests itself as passivity, what role does
the humanity of Christ play in the drama of redemption?
It is already clear from all that has been said in previous chapters as well as
in the previous section that Balthasar rejects a quasi-Nestorian account of
Christological obedience which views the human nature of Christ as self-
subsistent and therefore active in its own right. Balthasar refers to the
“hypostatic obedience” of the Son, an obedience which expresses his freedom
in unity with the Father and Spirit, the obedience which effects his kenōsis and
Incarnation.116 The antecedent obedience of the Son in becoming human and
his obedience as a human being belong to the same subject. Therefore,
we would be wrong to suppose that the Son made two decisions, separated in time;
that is, the first as God, in eternity, and the second as man, in time. The Son’s
eternal decision includes his temporal one, and his temporal decision holds fast to
his eternal decision as the only one that matters.117
But the hypostatic obedience of the Son always requires a ratification within
his human existence: “His human will has limits just as does his human nature
as a whole, and he will constantly have to take care—not least through his
prayer—to ensure that this limited will continually finds its place at the center
of the unlimited will of his Father.”118 Jesus’ sinless humanity takes on the
meaning for Balthasar of a complete and unwavering identification with his
divine mission—“he does not go astray in his mission; he does not part
company with it at the point when, in indifference, he can ask himself
whether he will carry it out or not.”119 But Jesus is subject to temptation, and
thus must “search for ways of implementing [his mission] in detail.”120 Jesus’
non-anticipation and commitment to his mission while not knowing its
outcome are most apparent, of course, in his Passion, where temporality and
nescience become not merely fitting signs of his fully human existence, but the
necessary conditions under which Christological obedience is brought to
perfection. As we have seen, Balthasar emphasizes, together with von Speyr,
not only that Christ does not know the full meaning and outcome of the
“hour,” of his suffering and death, but indeed that he must not know, for in
Balthasar’s account, the highest form of obedience entails not seeing, not
knowing.121
In the previous chapter, I introduced the theme of obedience. Here, it is
possible to deepen our analysis of Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s human
freedom and obedience with reference to Theo-Logic II and to Maximus’
theology of the agony of Christ. The heart of Balthasar’s Christological
exposition in Theo-Logic II is the meditation on Verbum caro factum est (John
1:14). Balthasar affirms that the caro (sarx, flesh) assumed by the Word is a
rational humanity endowed with freedom, and so he asks, “How is the
freedom of the ‘flesh’, in other words, the rational humanity of Christ, secured
within what he himself calls the command (mandatum) of the Father?”122
Thomas Aquinas spoke of the human nature of Christ as an instrumentum
conjunctum, an organ conjoined to the Divinity;123 Balthasar regards this
description as a reduction of Christ’s humanity. But he has already affirmed
an original hypostatic freedom belonging to the divine Logos in becoming
incarnate. Thus, “if…free obedience lay already in the Logos’ decision to
become incarnate, what is to prevent all the actions he will carry out in virtue
of his human freedom from being predetermined by this prior decision?”124
Balthasar adds that the human freedom of Christ appears to be reduced even
more by Maximus’s distinction between the natural will and the gnomic will.
The gnomic will is subject to the Fall and therefore involves deliberation
between good and evil; Maximus denied that the gnomic will could be
ascribed to Christ. But if a spontaneous, non-deliberative “natural will,” then,
says Balthasar, “the question arises whether Jesus’ will has any ‘choice’ but to
execute, almost mechanically, the will of the Logos, which as such has always
already chosen the Father’s will?”125 By denying the gnomic will of Christ,
Maximus preserves the humanity of Christ from a fallen will that is subject to
deliberation and thus wavering; as Balthasar says in Cosmic Liturgy, the gnomic
will is present in Christ “as something already surpassed.”126 The natural will
present in Christ is not, then, simply the faculty of the will which is controlled
hegemonically by the Logos. Rather, Christ exercises a concrete human
freedom by which he commits himself to the divine plan of salvation “as the
highest good for the world and for the man Jesus.”127 Thus, Jesus exercises “a
supremely free choice, knowing full well that his human freedom could and
should unfold only within God’s absolute freedom.”128 The difference between
Christ and other human beings is not that his human will is overwhelmed by
his divine will or that his human will is less concrete or less active, but rather
that his human will is a redeemed will, elevated into perichoretic union with
divine freedom in the one person of Christ.
At another point in Theo-Logic II, Balthasar endorses the work of François-
Marie Léthel on Maximus’s theology of the Agony of Christ. Balthasar
summarizes Léthel’s argument thus:
We cannot read the Agony in the Garden as if Jesus’ human will had first balked at
the imminent Passion and had then been overpowered and brought back into line by
the divine will, but that, on the contrary, it was none other than his human will that
had to give its free consent to the Father’s plan. Only thus is Chalcedon brought to
its logical conclusion; only thus does the man Jesus really cooperate in effecting the
redemption of man in his Passion. Maximus thus supersedes in advance all
Christologies that would speak of Jesus as the empty vessel of the divine will—or, at
least, gives them their correct interpretation as describing an active operation of the
man Jesus that remains so even in his kenosis.129
Earlier patristic commentators on the Agony in the Garden portrayed it as an

overcoming of Jesus’ human will (“that the cup should pass”) by his divine will
(“not my will but your will”). Cyril, for example, sees the two moments, of
horror and acceptance, in these terms.130 Maximus was the first to argue that
both moments, the human horror at death and the acceptance of the Father’s
will, belong to the human will of Jesus in concord (symphyïa) with his divine
will.131 Although Balthasar speaks often of Christ’s hypostatic obedience—his
obedience as Son—it cannot be doubted that in the economy this means with
his human will, and not with his human will as merely a natural faculty or
instrument (the Scholastic voluntas ut natura), but as genuine human freedom
in actu. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick is wrong to find in Balthasar a “de facto incon-
sistency” with Maximus on the question of Christ’s wills, just as she has read
Balthasar too literally when she says, “If the mission is the procession, and
Jesus is the Word become man, then His human will is the only will He has.”132
She claims that for Balthasar, “the human will of the Son is in accord with the
divine will not as two separate powers that intend the same object but because
His divine will becomes and has always intended to become His human
will.”133 Pitstick reduces “become” to a monophysite merging of wills at the
level of natures. For Balthasar, the distinction of hypostatic and natural orders
is always operative, as well as the analogical relationship between the natures
of Christ. Therefore I would argue that Balthasar does not deny of Christ
either a human will or a divine will, but insists that the economic revelation of
the Son’s Trinitarian freedom, his sponte, takes place exclusively within his
exercise of human freedom. Like Maximus, Balthasar affirms that it is the Son
who obeys humanly. Pitstick represents Maximus’s position thus:
In a theology following St. Maximus, this submission involves a distinction of

subjects in every case but one. In Christ alone can the subject obey Himself, because
He alone has two wills. With His human will, He submits to what He Himself wills
with His divine will; or, what is the same, He as man obeys Himself as God.134
Apart from the difficulty of having to imagine what such solipsistic obedience
to oneself would look like, and the distance between this representation of
obedience and Jesus’ prayer to the Father as portrayed in the gospel narratives
of the Agony, Pitstick has misrepresented Maximus. As Léthel says, Maximus
describes Christ’s obedience with reference to the Father, not to Christ
himself: “The precision of Maximus—‘obedient to the Father’—is important
because it shows that the accord between the two wills of the Son is lived out
in relation to the Father, and not in a relation between himself as man and
himself as God.”135 Léthel further notes that Maximus does not speak of the
accord between the two wills of Christ in terms of obedience, but rather
“concord,” symphyïa.136 Thus, when Balthasar says, “the subject undergoing the
‘hour’ is the Son speaking to the Father” (here, Balthasar quotes the
Theopaschite formula), he has in no way contradicted Maximus, for he also
says of Jesus, “He has a human horror of this hiatus but resolutely transcends
it by committing himself to his Father.”137 To claim, as Balthasar does, that the
human obedience of the Son brings to light his Trinitarian freedom and his
Trinitarian obedience to the Father, is not equivalent to rendering the kenotic
becoming-human of the Son an admixture of natures. Rather, in the terms
which Balthasar draws from Maximus, it is to say that Christ’s human will
maintains its own logos tēs physeōs while being drawn into the tropos tēs
hyparxeōs of the Son.
Other concerns about Balthasar’s theology of the Incarnation can be
raised, however, with respect to his theology of the descent into hell. In two
texts in particular, Balthasar describes Christ’s entry into the condition of
death and hell as the extremity to which Christ has gone in being incarnate
and in solidarity with sinners. Here, hell signifies the term of the Incarnation.
As the term of the Incarnation, however, the state of hell also connotes a kind
of ablation of Christ’s humanity. In Glory of the Lord VII, Balthasar says of
Christ’s obedience:
If we use our earlier terminology, we may say that on the far side of the boundaries of
earthly existence, Jesus’ authority and poverty, but also his self-abandonment, exist
no more, but are comprised within his obedience; but this is possible only if the
whole structure of his being and his time is built upon the foundation of the free act
of obedience that is his kenosis. In this deeper sense (not in a psychological sense),
he is inter mortuos liber, “free among the dead” (Ps 87.6 LXX). He is bound, in
powerlessness: but this is due to his own free obedience, the only obedience that
deserves to be called “the obedience of a corpse” in the theological sense. Thereby,
with the removal of the whole superstructure of the Incarnation, the eternal will of
the Son within the Trinity to obedience is exposed, as the substructure that is the
basis of the entire event of the Incarnation: and this is set face-to-face with the
hidden substructure of sinful existence, exposed in Sheol, as the state of separation
from God, the “loss of his glory.”138
The hypostatic union is visualized here in terms of a “superstructure” of the

humanity of Christ, “the whole structure of his being and his time,” which is
entirely conditioned by his mission and by the “obedience” which belongs to
the Son by his inter-Trinitarian procession and by which he empties himself
and becomes a human being. Christ’s un-freedom as a man is the consequence
and expression of his Trinitarian freedom, which constitutes the “sub-

structure.” The superstructure of Jesus’ human existence is removed by his
going to the dead, and what is revealed, says Balthasar, is the confrontation
between the “naked” God and “naked” sin.139
In another passage, in the essay, “Descent into Hell,” Balthasar uses
similar language to describe what happens to Christ in hell:
A question on the boundaries occurs here: If “man” is the living and mortal being
composed of body and spirit in a unity whom we know and if this man ceases to be
in death (whatever might become of him after death), then Jesus has gone to the end
of his being human and, having become human, he has gone to the limits in his
surrender of himself (Jn 10:17). And in his being dead with the dead, the attitude
and stance of the divine Logos has been stripped away, as it were. For it was in the
extremities of this death that the Logos found the adequate expression of this divine
stance; letting himself remain available for the Father in everything, even in the
ultimate alienation. The stripping away of the man Jesus is the laying bare not only
of Sheol but also of the Trinitarian relationship in which the Son is entirely the one
who springs forth from the Father. Holy Saturday is thus a kind of suspension, as it
were, of the Incarnation, whose result is given back to the hands of the Father and
which the Father will renew and definitively confirm by the Easter Resurrection.140
Pitstick has carefully analyzed this passage and rightly found the published
English translation wanting. The German original runs:
Ein Grenzgedanke drängt sich hier auf: wenn “Mensch” im Tod aufhört zu sein (was
immer aus ihm nach dem Tod werden mag), so ist Jesus in der Hingabe seiner selbst
(Jo 10, 17) bis an Ende seines Menschseins und Menschgeworden-seins gegangen,
und in seinem Totsein mit den Toten entblößt sich gleichsam jene Haltung und
Gesinnung des göttlichen Logos, der in diesem Äußersten ihre adäquaten Ausdruck
fand: sich verfügen lassen durch den Vater in alles, auch in die letzte Entfremdung
hinein. Die Entblößung des Menschen Jesus ist nicht nur die Bloßlegung der Scheol,
sondern auch die Bloßlegung des trinitarischen Verhältnisses bis zum reinen
Entspringen des Sohnes aus dem Vater. Darin ist der Karsamstag gleichsam eine
Suspension der Menschwerdung, deren Ergebnis dem Vater in die Hände
zurückgelegt wird, und die der Vater durch die österliche Auferweckung erneut und
endgültig bestätigen wird.141
As Pitstick correctly notes, the first part of the passage should be rendered
something like, “Thus has Jesus, in his self-surrender, gone to the end of his
being human and having-become-human.”142 Furthermore, the next clause is

given rather ambiguously in the published English translation as, “the attitude
and stance of the divine Logos has been stripped away, as it were.” I suggest
that this clause is better rendered, “in his being dead with the dead the
attitude and stance of the divine Logos bares itself, as it were.” Pitstick charges
that Balthasar separates the humanity and divinity of Christ in the descent
into hell, but in the first part of the passage, Balthasar has not divided Jesus
and the Son as separate subjects: the single subject Jesus is the one who goes to
the end of being human and having-become-human. And while Pitstick argues
that “entblößt sich” should be translated “strips itself,” and regards this
stripping as the ablation of Christ’s humanity, Balthasar himself does not
quite make the humanity of Christ the object of “stripping.” Rather, it is the
obediential stance of the Son that reveals itself in Jesus’ being dead. Pitstick
argues that the “stripping away [Entblößung] of the man Jesus” is equivalent to
the stripping of Christ’s humanity; within the context of the immediately
preceding text, however, such a “stripping” seems to be equivalent to Jesus’
going to the end of being human and having-become-human. Entblößung
describes Jesus’ obedient going-to-the-dead rather than an ontological ablation
of the humanity assumed by the Son.
Certain turns of phrase in the two passages at hand nonetheless can still
seem somewhat suspect with regard to Chalcedonian Christology. In the
passage from Glory of the Lord VII quoted above, Balthasar refers to “the
removal of the whole superstructure of the Incarnation” (Wegziehung des ganzen
inkarnatorischen Überaus).143 In the passage from “Descent into Hell,” Balthasar
speaks of a “kind of suspension of the Incarnation,” albeit with qualifications
to clarify that the phrase is not to be taken literally. Pitstick interprets
Balthasar here to mean a literal ablation of the humanity of Christ, which
“does not achieve the integrity of the Church’s doctrine…that Christ’s human
nature remains subsisting without interruption in its perfect entirety in the
Person of the Word from the moment of His conception.”144 Apart from the
fact that Chalcedon did not elaborate a theology of death in establishing
formal bounds for Christology, Pitstick misreads Balthasar’s “removal of the
incarnational superstructure” and “suspension of the Incarnation” as
metaphysical statements, rather than as fitting within Balthasar’s narratival,

dramatic Christology. Within this narrative context, Balthasar intentionally
eschews metaphysical questions regarding Jesus’ death, such as the question of
how the divine Logos maintains contact with separated parts of the man Jesus,
with human soul descending to Hades and body remaining in the tomb: “The
condition of being dead, and not the ‘separation,’ is what is essential; for this
truly being dead is a function of the total surrender of the Son.”145 The subject
who goes to death and into the place of the sinner is the Son, who is
personally identical to Jesus. Balthasar does not posit the ceasing of all the
human powers of Jesus while the Son, now once again asarkos, continues in an
active mode of obedience. It is the Son who has gone to death and passivity,
and can exercise only the “obedience of a corpse,” and it is precisely in this
passivity that the “substructure” of Trinitarian freedom and obedience is
revealed as the basis of Jesus’ whole (mortal) existence.
Thus, the “stripping” of the man Jesus is not a shedding of the humanity
as a kind of disguise, but the stripping of all active, human powers for the sake
of an obedience beyond human powers. Balthasar says that a caesura occurs
between Jesus’ active life and his “hour,” in which infinitely more is demanded
of him than any human action could accomplish. In what sense, then, can the
humanity of Christ be said to have a positive role in the “hour” when it
becomes passive? Is it not the case that where human effort leaves off, divine
activity comes into its own? In the Passion, Christ is given up, and the descent
into hell is described in passive terms—not so much a “descent” as a passive
“going to,” or “sinking into” hell. In Theo-Drama III, Balthasar describes Jesus’
hour of suffering thus:
His suffering and dying is not a mere passion but a super-action, which he certainly
does not carry out like his earlier deeds on the basis of his active spiritual centre;
rather, he is stretched beyond all finite proportions…identifying him quite literally
with the “curse” (Gal 3:13) and “sin” (2 Cor 5:21) and putting him in their place.146
It is important to note once again that the subject of the Passion remains the
Son, such that the shift from active fulfilment of his mission to the state of
letting-go is not predicated of the man Jesus with respect to God, but of the
incarnate person of the Son who surrenders himself to the Father. This self-
surrender of the Son, however, transforms humanity:
Christ’s passion does not mean that the man Christ is more and more reduced and
hollowed out so that God can increasingly take over. It means, first of all, that
human possibilities which men fear, despise, and try to hide, are now seen in their
true light: it means that Christ can keep going even when his positive and active
energies are spent.147
Balthasar thus affirms to its fullest extent the expressivity of Christ’s human
existence, even (or indeed, especially) in the failure of his human activity and
the ultimate passivity of death. The hypostatic freedom and self-surrender of
the Son can take on the form not only of creaturely activity but, moreover, of
creaturely suffering and the state of being dead. Pitstick charges that
ultimately, given the centrality of the descent in Balthasar’s soteriology, the
humanity of Christ is rendered passive and has no positive soteriological
function: “But if Christ’s human nature (or His being man) has no role to play
at the key moment, why does the Son bother to become incarnate at all?” she
asks.148 I would suggest by way of response that she has wrested this one
“episode” (albeit a central episode) from a much more multifaceted dramatic
narrative in which the humanity of Christ need not exercise the same kind of
active redemptive role at every step of the way. What matters here is that his
passivity as one who is dead is the direct consequence of his complete self-
abandonment, and thus in a sense a continuation of his obedience, of what
Balthasar calls Christ’s “super-action.” Freedom, obedience, and the rhythm of
activity and passivity are predicated of Christ as both human and divine, as
one theandric person.
Conclusion: Registers of Christological Discourse

My intention has been to offer a reading of the overall structure of
Balthasar’s Christology as narratival and dramatic, and in this sense
structurally concordant with Neo-Chalcedonian Christology. I have argued for
an interpretation of particular Christological and soteriological claims within
the context of Balthasar’s overall Christological structure, even certain state-
ments that prima facie appear problematic in light of dogmatic tradition. It

must also be acknowledged that there are tensions in Balthasar’s Christological
discourse, particularly with respect to the Passion and descent into hell, which
resist integration into a single structure. For instance, a shift is perceptible
between Theo-Drama III–IV and Theo-Drama V, the last volume being more
explicitly indebted to von Speyr. What Balthasar himself phrases as a principle
of the human consubstantiality of Christ, of which his nescience is an
important element, is highlighted in the quotations from von Speyr as
necessary for the greater suffering of Christ. Hence, Balthasar quotes von Speyr’s
statements, “Any admixture of divine knowledge would be like an anaesthetic
preventing him from experiencing human suffering to the limit,” and, “As
man [the Son] does not wish to know what, as God, he knows, so that he can
be fully man and can suffer in total self-surrender.”149 It seems to me one thing
to insist on Christ’s nescience based on his perfect human consubstantiality,
another to make it a condition of his salvific obedience (as Balthasar most
characteristically does), and yet another thing—and more problematic—to
make the heightening of Christ’s suffering the primary soteriological
motivation for his nescience. I consider that on the whole Balthasar is
committed to Christ’s obedience as the principle of salvation, not Christ’s
suffering per se, and the von Speyrian quotations introduce an unfortunate
tension within Balthasar’s soteriological framework.
The imagery of the descent into hell presents further difficulties. Balthasar
explicitly distinguishes his theology of the descensus from mythological
approaches in devotional and liturgical tradition which suggest a post-mortem
“journey” of Christ into Hades: “But is he, we must ask, really alive? Is he
active? Or is he not actually distinguished from all the other pilgrims into
Hades, from Orpheus and Odysseus to Enoch, Jonah, Aeneas, and Dante,
precisely in this: that he is truly dead?”150 Balthasar appeals, however, to the
visions of von Speyr to describe Christ’s experience of hell, and many of these
descriptions suggest a re-mythologization of the descent. In a passage quoted
earlier from Theo-Logic II, drawing heavily on von Speyr, Balthasar speaks of
Christ’s “taking stock” of the abomination of the world, of a “‘mechanical’
inspection” of sin: “The I becomes a pure impersonal ‘one’; the thing becomes
purely neuter.”151 This reification of Christ’s person in hell seems to exceed

the bounds of dogmatic Christology, or at least to have very little to do with
them. Von Speyr is again cited in reference to “effigies” which Christ
encounters in hell in addition to the substantial form of sin. These effigies are
“what a man has given from his own substance to the sin he has
committed…like a hollow impression, as when a body has lain in the sand.”152
They include effigies of those still living, of which Balthasar says, “when the
Lord lies upon them, like the man upon the woman, in a spousal embrace,
they receive a share in the salvation worked on the Cross for them.”153 It is
difficult to integrate such images into Balthasar’s statements about the passivity
of Christ in death as the final and definitive revelation of his divine
obedience. A particularly blatant example of apparent re-mythologization is in
Balthasar’s suggestion of a kind of post-mortem detour whereby Christ
“deposits the Good Thief in the promised paradise” before entering into
hell.154 Such a notion seems as mythological as the journeys to the underworld
that Balthasar seeks to avoid. Other statements appear contradictory. While
Balthasar speaks of the “stripping” of the man Jesus, at another point he says
that in his death “the Son becomes mere man,” a Christological statement
which appears at odds with Balthasar’s theology of the Incarnation and his
commitment to the personal unity of Christ.155 Finally, Balthasar quotes von
Speyr as saying, “His being God is relegated to the margins by obedience; it is
no longer relevant for him…. The Son alone achieves this absolute obedience
as God-man, in that, as God, he concedes to his human existence the amount
of room that the Father wills.”156 Such a turn of phrase suggests a competitive
spatial relationship between the natures of Christ, and does not sit easily with
Balthasar’s more characteristic language of the complete (enhypostatic)
expressivity of Christ’s human nature.
There appears, then, to be a lack of critical control particularly with regard
to Christ’s descent into hell, where Balthasar is most dependent on von Speyr.
An assessment of von Speyr’s influence on Balthasar, is, as I have stated,
beyond the scope of our study. I would hesitate to endorse Kevin Mongrain’s
general a priori judgment that von Speyr exerted a “deforming” influence on
Balthasar’s theology.157 But I would concur, again, with Mark McIntosh’s
questioning of Balthasar’s passiology: “Is [Balthasar] really talking about the

actual historical human being Jesus or a kind of mystical-theological
construct?”158 This question is particularly relevant to Balthasar’s theology of
the descent into hell. In as much as this theologoumenon stems predominantly
from the visions of von Speyr, a certain excess of language and tension with
the apophatic and formal statements of canonical Christology is not sur-
prising. Balthasar embodies this tension between sources of theology within
his own work, wanting to clear a path for the spiritual theology of Adrienne
von Speyr even when her characteristic discourse is not coterminous with his
own characteristic Christological language. Gerald O’Hanlon describes this
tension as a positive tension between conceptual and metaphorical modes of
theology:
A conceptual approach on its own fails to convey the unique and personal
dimensions of mystery; it tends to systematise too easily and so to resolve paradox by
abstracting from differences…. But neither is an exclusively metaphorical, pictorial
approach sufficient: the ultimate reality of God is unimaginable, besides which
images may be inexact in a way which leads to misunderstandings and error. There
remains, then, a combination of the two approaches, which involves an enriching
and corrective complementarity.159
O’Hanlon notes that Balthasar does not specify the contours of a theology
which embraces both conceptual and metaphorical modalities, and that there
exists in his theology “an inbuilt imprecision.”160 In particular cases, it may be
more or less difficult to ascertain what constitutes analogy and what
constitutes metaphor.161 Yet perhaps the most important point is that as a
matter of principle Balthasar’s Christology should not be read as univocal. The
descent into hell is more difficult to assess along the lines of dogmatic
Christology, and in particular along the lines of fidelity to Chalcedon, than
other dimensions of Balthasar’s Christology (such as his theology of
personhood). A significant failure of interpretation on the part of Pitstick is
her treatment of all Christological discourse as univocal: this is precisely what
Balthasar’s Christology is not. Balthasar’s Christology operates in several
registers, sometimes overlapping, and it is difficult to distinguish where
analogy and metaphor shade off into the other. It would appear that Balthasar
has fully appropriated the tension between a radical and maximalist reading of
New Testament soteriology, coupled with the vivid visionary reports of
Adrienne von Speyr, and the guarded and apophatic language of dogmatic
Christology.
Having affirmed such theological multivalency in principle as a creative
and positive dimension of Balthasar’s Christology, it is still clear that some of
Balthasar’s Christological discourse can come across as infelicitous and
inconsistent with other statements and with his overall Christological
priorities. I would suggest that one can withhold judgment on the more
imagistic and mythological aspects of the descent into hell in Balthasar’s
theology and still recognize that the Chalcedonian affirmation, of the unmixed
and undivided union of human and divine natures within Christ’s single
hypostasis, stands unvitiated as a source and criterion for Balthasar’s soterio-
logy. He grounds his theology of Christ’s death in the full solidarity of Christ
in the Incarnation with the sinner, to the point of vicarious representation,
thus pushing the admirabile commercium to its soteriological limit. He maintains
the hypostatic unity of the incarnate Son, and makes this unity the basis for
the analogical predication of obedience to the Trinitarian relations, thus also
making a theology of Trinitarian difference the explicit condition of possibility
for the redemption of the world, and affirming in the strongest terms the
Theopaschite formula, Unus ex Trinitate passus est. Balthasar’s theology of the
descent emphasizes Christ’s passivity, his truly being dead as the end of his
earthly human existence, but this passivity is not that of the humanity only,
but that of the Son incarnate, therefore becoming the revelation sub contrario
of Christ’s unity with the Father in the Spirit. Maximus remains an important
figure in the background of Balthasar’s theology of the Cross, particularly in
the recognition that Christ’s human will belongs to the person of the Son who
wills humanly to be obedient to the Father and thus to cling to his original,
Trinitarian, hypostatic freedom. Balthasar’s continuity with Chalcedonian and
Neo-Chalcedonian Christology cannot, however, be confined to textual
consistency. It is in the narrative structure of his Christology and soteriology
that Balthasar sustains the greatest continuity with Neo-Chalcedonian
Christology, and if he “frequently does not specify in virtue of which nature he
affirms or denies something in Christ,” 162 it is because such distinctions do

not do justice to the hypostatic freedom fully revealed in Jesus’ human
obedience.
Notes
1 See for instance, Krenski, Passio Caritatis; Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans
urs von Balthasar (New York and London: Continuum, 1994), esp. 229–249. A lucid
introductory exposition is provided by Anne Hunt, The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery: A
Development in Recent Catholic Theology (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997), 57–
89. The most vigorous recent critique of Balthasar’s theology of the descensus is offered by
Pitstick in Light in Darkness, which provoked a series of responses and counter-responses
between Pitstick and Edward T. Oakes; see for instance Oakes, “The Internal Logic of
Holy Saturday in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” International Journal of
Systematic Theology 9, no. 7 (April 2007), 184–199.
2 E.g. GL VII, 140.
3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Work and Suffering of Jesus,” in Faith in Christ and the
Worship of Christ: New Approaches to the Devotion to Christ, ed. Leo Scheffczyk, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 17.
4 TD III, 110.
5 Ibid.
6 TD IV, 237.
7 TD III, 113.
8 MP, 46, n. 69.
9 Ibid., 93. Balthasar cites as an example the title of a book by the Dominican Thomas
Leonardi, Christus crucifixus sive de perpetua cruce Jesu Christi a primo instante suae conceptionis
usque ad extremum vitae.
10 GL VII, 216.
11 MP, 94.
12 TD IV, 234.
13 Ibid., 232.
14 Balthasar, “The Work and Suffering of Jesus,” 18.
15 Ibid., 18. On some influential positions on Jesus’ interpretation of his death, see John P.
Galvin, “Jesus’ Approach to Death: An Examination of Some Recent Studies,” Theological
Studies 41, no. 4 (1980), 713–744.
16 TD IV, 239, with reference to Martin Hengel, “Der stellvertretende Sühnetod Jesu,” in
IKZ Communio 9 (1980), 1–29, 135–147. Cf. TD III, 244–245, with reference to the work
of Eduard Schweizer and Oscar Cullmann.
17 TD IV, 239.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 240.
20 Ibid., 241.
21 Ibid.

22 Antoine Birot, “‘God in Christ Reconciled the World to Himself’: Redemption in
Balthasar,” Communio 24 (1997), 263.
23 TD IV, 242, with reference inter alia to Col 1:13 and 1 Thess 1:10.
24 Ibid., 242–243.
25 Ibid. 243.
26 Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54, cited in TD IV, 246.
27 TD IV, 247, 249.
28 In MP, 20–23, Balthasar highlights a rightful staurocentrism in both Eastern and Western
Fathers.
29 TD IV, 250.
30 Ibid. 254.
31 Ibid., 250, with reference to Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 30., PG 36, 108C–109C.
32 See TD III, 239.
33 CL, 267.
34 Ibid., 267–268, with reference to Maximus, Opusc. 16, 17 (PG 91, 84BC, 196D).
35 TD IV, 253.
36 TD III, 239.
37 TD IV, 260.
38 Ibid., 263. I omit Balthasar’s discussion of Thomas’ soteriology. In some ways Thomas re-
affirms themes from Anselm, including the emphasis on divine freedom as revealed in the
Cross. Thomas emphasizes more than Anselm the “grace of sonship” and the organic link
between Christ as Head to the members by grace (TD IV, 262–263). We have already
examined Thomas’s approach to Christ’s knowledge and the beatific vision in the previous
chapter.
39 Ibid., 268.
40 Ibid., 270–271.
41 Ibid., 271.
42 Ibid., 273.
43 Mark A. McIntosh comments perspicaciously on Balthasar’s incorporation of “solidarity”
(including “social” solidarity) into his soteriology: “The suffering which Jesus undergoes is
only the outcome of his solidarity with sinners all along. His commitment to them causes
him to share, to the ultimate degree, their experience of rejection by others and the
judgment of God which falls upon their sin. The substitutionary or representational force
of Jesus’ death derives from his desire to embrace, ‘voluntarily and lovingly, all that which
in his brothers is opposed to God’. Here, then, is the linking of Jesus’ solidarity and his
suffering in terms of the sinful existence that Christ enters” (Christology from Within, 106).
44 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Does Jesus Know Us? Do We Know Him? trans. Graham Harrison
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 32.
45 TD IV, 297, citing Galot, La Rédemption, mystère d’alliance (Paris and Bruges: Desclée de
Brouwer, 1965), 268. In Mysterium Paschale Balthasar writes, “To become solidary with the
lost is something greater than just dying for them in an externally representative manner. It

is more than so announcing the Word of God that this proclamation, through the
opposition it arouses among sinners, happens to lead to a violent death. It is more than
just taking a universally unavoidable mortal fate upon the self…. For the redeeming act
consists in a wholly unique bearing of the total sin of the world by the Father’s wholly
unique Son” (MP, 137–138).
46 Ibid., 337. See also GL VII, 207.
47 Ibid., 336; see also 333, 356.
48 MP, 104.
49 TD IV, 336–337.
50 Ibid., 338.
51 Ibid., 345.
52 Balthasar, “Descent into Hell,” in ET IV, 408. See also GL VII, 229; MP, 148–149.
53 MP, 168. See also Balthasar’s criticisms of Rahner’s theology of the death of Christ, MP,
146–147, n. 106.
54 GL VII, 230.
55 MP, 148–149.
56 TD IV, 334–335.
57 MP, 168–174.
58 Ibid., 173.
59 Ibid.
60 GL VII, 232.
61 TL II, 348.
62 MP, 76. See also TD IV, 337.
63 GL VII, 230–231. See also “On Vicarious Representation,” in ET IV, 422; Hans Urs von
Balthasar, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, trans. Antje Lawry and Sr. Sergia Englund,
O.C.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981), 66.
64 TL II, 350. “Es gibt nur die rein objektive Kenntnisnahme des Ungeheuerlichen, das die
Weltsünde ist, eine geradezu ‘mechanische’ Einsicht, da der Schauende (der ja tot ist)
nicht weiß, wer er ist und ob er überhaupt ist, und in einer Art ‘Automatismus’ ohne
‘Inwendigkeit’ und deshalb auch ‘ohne Schmerz’, als ein bloßes ‘Relikt’, das Vorhandene
zur Kenntnis nimmt. Das Ich wird zum reinen ‘Man’, die Sache wird zum reinen
Neutrum, zum ‘Es, das tut’, and ‘Das, das getan wird’, aber keines von beidem ist
feststellbar” (Theologik, vol. II, Wahrheit Gottes [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985], 319).
65 Balthasar, “On Vicarious Representation,” 422.
66 TL II, 354.
67 Balthasar, “Descent into Hell,” 412.
68 McIntosh, Christology from Within, 176, n. 1.
69 For an illuminating discussion of these sources for Balthasar’s passiology, see ibid., 94–
104.
70 Balthasar, First Glance, 65–66.
71 TL II, 345.

72 Ibid., n. 75.
73 MP, 21–22.
74 Maximus, Gnost. Cent. I, 66, PG 90, 1108B.
75 KL2, 638–629: “Die Menschwerdung Gottes ist Sinn und Ziel der Welt; Tod und
Auferstehung Christi sind die konkrete Form des Weltgesetzes überhaupt, da…das
geschöpfliche Sein als solches in diesen Rhythmus des Sterbens (für sich selbst) und
Auferstehens (für Gott) hineingeschaffen ist—auch abgesehen von aller Sünde.”
76 MP, 76.
77 Ibid., 78, with reference to Maximus, Centuries on Charity IV, 96 (PG 90, 1072BC [the
citation is misprinted in the first English edition of MP, 87, n. 67]) and Maximus’
treatment of the mystical descent into hell in Amb. 59 (PG 91, 1384C).
78 Translation and commentary is included in the second edition published in 1961: KL2,
482–643. Balthasar treats Gnost. Cent. 1, 66–67 under the thematic heading, “Die Drei
Erlösungstage” (624–631).
79 Balthasar, Man in History, 283; see also CL, 279.
80 Ibid., 283.
81 Ibid.
82 See De Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 246.
83 Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in ET I, 199.
84 De Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord, 248: “Serait-il hazardeux d’affirmer que, dans la genèse
de sa pensée, Balthasar en étudiant Maxime le Confesseur, aurait découvert une ‘structure’
à laquelle il a donné son plein développement dans ses oeuvres, par exemple à partir d’une
réflexion sur la part prise par chacune des personnes de la Trinité dans l’économie du
salut.”
85 In Balthasar, “On Vicarious Representation,” 415–422, Balthasar argues from an
anthropological perspective for the possibility of vicarious representation, but sees all
worldly instances of one person taking on the fate of another or of a community as only
distant analogies to the absolutely unique case of the assumption of universal guilt: “But
there is no continuity from this [anthropological] basis to the heights of the event of the
Cross, only a leap. For now it is a question of taking over the fate not only of an individual
or a polis or a people but rather of all men, and of all not only in their external distress but
in the guilty fallenness of their personal and social existence” (420–421).
86 GL VII, 211.
87 TD IV, 335.
88 See ibid., 260.
89 Ibid., 263.
90 MP, 101.
91 Ibid.
92 See for example TD III, 196.
93 MP, 104–105.
94 TD IV, 254.

95 Ibid., 261.
96 See ibid., 286–289.
97 Ibid., 287.
98 Ibid., 290.
99 Ibid., 340.
100 Thus too in TL II, 341, Balthasar says of Luther’s soteriology, “The communication of
idioms always takes place only from nature to nature and…the identical Person of the Son
does not effect the mediation between them.”
101 TD IV, 321.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid., 320.
104 Ibid., 323.
105 Ibid., 324.
106 Ibid., 325.
107 Ibid., 324. Balthasar repeatedly abjures univocal “entanglement” of God in the world
process or suffering: see TD IV, 321–323 (on Moltmann), 327, 331, 333.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., 328: “In Gott ist der Ansatzpunkt für das, was Leiden werden kann” (Theodramatik,
vol. III, Die Handlung [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980], 305).
110 See for example Pitstick, Light in Darkness, 144–146; Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and the
Trinity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J.,
and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50; David Coffey, Deus
Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 143–148.
111 MP, 90–91.
112 TD IV, 258.
113 Ibid., 335. See also MP, 89: “Since for the eternal Son, who is the subject here, there can
be no question of a subsequent confrontation with the Father’s command, which he then
might decide to obey, Chrysostom, Anselm and Thomas sought to illuminate the perfect
unity of the wills of the Father and the Son, and therewith the voluntary (sponte) character
of all the Son’s acting—something which Thomas rates higher than obedience to an order.”
114 Ibid., 356.
115 TD V, 327. Matthew Levering has noted Balthasar’s heightening of Christ’s nescience on
the Cross. On the Cross, Levering summarizes, “Jesus’ lack of hope, his conscious not-
knowing, is total. Yet Jesus’ will is still perfectly in accord with the divine will.… at the
moment when his mission is most fully ‘opened up’ and made explicit to him, he knows
absolutely nothing” (Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian
Theology [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004], 129). Thus, says Levering, the intellectual
distance between Father and Son enfolds and redeems the unholy distance of human sin.
But, Levering notes, “the problem nonetheless remains: how does a fundamentally
“intellectual” distance—it has to be such, since the divine Persons never hate each other—
encompass a willful distance constituted by hatred of God?” (130, n. 98). Levering has

rightly pointed to a problem in Balthasar’s (and von Speyr’s) insistence on absolute
nescience for the sake of absolute obedience. But the problem is perhaps mitigated by the
distinction between immanent Trinitarian relations and the economy, and by Balthasar’s
emphasis on the unbroken dynamic of self-surrender between the Father and Son in the
Spirit. The wilful separation of the sinner is not encompassed directly by an intellectual
distance of the Father and Son, but by their infinite hypostatic diastasis as a co-condition of
Trinitarian unity and mutual self-giving.
116 See for example TL II, 354.
117 TD III, 199.
118 TL II, 286.
119 TD III, 200.
120 Ibid.
121 See for example TD IV, 346: “In fact, since all is obedience, he is moving toward the
Father through this utter estrangement, but for the present he must not be allowed to
know this.”
122 TL II, 291.
123 See ST III, q. 49, a. 1 and q. 50, a. 6.
124 TL II, 291.
125 Ibid.
126 CL, 271.
127 TL II, 292.
128 Ibid.
129 Ibid., 69–70.
130 PG 75, 396D–397B. See Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 145.
131 Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie, 95–96: “Les deux parties de la prière de Jésus: le refus et
l’acceptation, doivent être nécessairement comprises comme l’expression de la volonté
humaine du Seigneur.” See also Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 146–147, with reference
to Maximus, Opusc. 6, PG 91, 65A–69B.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., 146.
135 Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie, 99: “La précision apportée par Maxime: obéissant au Père, est
importante car elle montre que l’accord entre les deux volontés du Fils est vécu dans sa
relation au Père, et non pas dans une relation entre lui-même comme homme et lui-même
comme Dieu.”
136 Ibid., referring to Maximus, Opusc. 6, PG 91, 65B.
137 TD III, 226.
138 GL VII, 231.
139 Ibid.

141 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Abstieg zur Hölle,” Pneuma und Institution: Skizzen zur Theologie
IV (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1974), 397–398.
143 GL VII, 231; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit, Eine theologische Ästhetik, vol. III/2.2,
Theologie: Neuer Bund (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1969), 214.
146 TD III, 113. I have altered the wording of the published English translation to maintain a
parallelism between “carrying out” (vollzieht) and “being stretched” (beansprucht wird),
whereby “being stretched” can be seen as another mode of the “carrying-out” of Jesus’
mission. This nuance is missed in the published translation.
147 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1986), 174.
149 TD V, 259.
150 Balthasar, “Descent into Hell,” 407–408.
151 TL II, 350.
152 Ibid., 355–356.
153 Ibid., 356.
154 Ibid., 348
155 Ibid., 354.
156 Ibid., n. 152.
157 Kevin Mongrain, The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval.
(New York: Crossroad, 2002), 11–12.
158 McIntosh, Christology from Within, 176, n. 1.
159 O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God, 141–142. See also Dalzell, Dramatic Encounter, 169–
171.
160 O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God, 142.
161 Dalzell suggests that Balthasar’s description of the Trinitarian life as an eternal “I-Thou” is
“properly analogical discourse,” while the specification of this intersubjective relationality
within the Trinity as “suffering,” “joy,” and “wonder” is metaphorical. Dalzell notes
ambiguity in the interrelationship between these two modes of discourse: “Here one might
well ask if he applies sufficiently the metaphysical corrective to his use of metaphor”
(Dramatic Encounter, 170–171). It is not clear to me, however, that such a clean distinction
can be made between the interpersonal analogy as analogy and suffering, joy and wonder
as metaphors: Christ’s passion is not merely a metaphor for the Triune life, but its
supreme analogical expression.

Conclusion
I have endeavoured in this study to present Balthasar’s Christology as a

nuanced appropriation of the dogmatic Christological tradition. To reiterate
the thesis stated at the outset, Balthasar works out the principles of his
Christology in his engagement with Maximus the Confessor, and a Maximian
Neo-Chalcedonian Christology grounds Balthasar’s approach to the
consciousness of Christ. The first task required in arguing this position was to
present a fresh historical-critical understanding of the Council of Chalcedon,
and to show on historical and theological grounds that Chalcedon belonged to
a Cyrilline tradition that continued in “Neo-Chalcedonian” Christology and
found its supreme exponent in Maximus the Confessor. Second, I have
endeavoured to show how such a revised understanding of Chalcedon can
become fruitful in modern Christology, using Balthasar as a notable example.
This second task has involved attention not only to how Balthasar transposes
the metaphysical terminology of Chalcedon and Neo-Chalcedonianism into a
modern “Christology of consciousness,” but also how a Cyrilline-
Chalcedonian logic is operative at a deeper structural level in Balthasar’s
Christology. Although Balthasar’s theology has been labelled “Neo-
Chalcedonian” for its Trinitarian passiology, I would like to retrieve “Neo-
Chalcedonianism” as denoting a more complex, sophisticated development
that transcends theological sloganism. It denotes a genuine advance in
Christological thinking in the sixth and seventh centuries, an attempt to draw
together Trinitarian and Christological discourses, to distinguish hypostatic
and substantial orders of ontology, and to reassert the narrative particularity of
Jesus Christ. Maximus brings all of these impulses to a higher synthesis.
Balthasar, through his engagement with Maximus, draws richly on these
intuitions in his own Christology and effects an ambitious transposition of
post-Chalcedonian Christology into terms of consciousness, existence, and
history. Although Chalcedon, Maximus, and Balthasar each deserve far more
intensive attention than is possible within the parameters of this study, my
hope is that discussion of all three together has served to re-orientate and
revise certain common perceptions of each.
What to Make of Chalcedon

In the Introduction, I posed a methodological question about conditions
for the appropriation of Chalcedonian doctrine and ontology in modern
theology. In charting the development of Christology from Cyril through to
Neo-Chalcedonianism and Maximus, I argued that such an appropriation
must build on a close historical-critical reading of theological and conciliar
texts. Such a reading of Chalcedon challenges the “pendulum theory” which
sees Christology swinging between an Alexandrian unitive Christology
(Athanasius, Cyril, Ephesus, Constantinople II) and an Antiochene-Western
Christology-of-distinction (Chalcedon, Maximus, Constantinople III). The
definition of Chalcedon is often portrayed as a consensus document, carefully
balancing Antiochene, Alexandrian and Latin Christological dialects;
sometimes it is viewed as a needed Antiochene-Latin neutralization of
Alexandrian Christology. Scholars and writers of textbooks often refer to the
“two-natures doctrine” of Chalcedon. But the “two-natures” doctrine and Pope
Leo’s agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est by no
means exhaust Chalcedon’s teaching. Even as the council forged an
Antiochene-Alexandrian-Latin consensus to exclude Nestorianism and Eutych-
ianism, Cyril remained the touchstone of orthodoxy, after Nicaea and
Constantinople I, and Chalcedon itself must be interpreted in light of Cyril’s
“economic” Christology and Christ’s hypostatic unity.
Recent history reminds us that an ecumenical council is not a discreet,
closed event; rather, councils need to be received, if often only with the
greatest difficulty. My contention is that what has come to be known as “Neo-
Chalcedonianism” was not a retrenchment into a pre-Chalcedonian unitive
Christology, but a further development of the implications of Chalcedon
itself. Modern historians have attempted to identify various theological parties
after Chalcedon: “strict” or “pure” Chalcedonians, anti-Chalcedonians, Neo-
Chalcedonians (extreme and moderate). Modern theologians, most influential-
ly Rahner, have endorsed these distinctions as theological, not merely
Conclusion 207
historical, options. But such distinctions give a somewhat false impression of

well-defined theological “schools” of equal weight in the wake of Chalcedon. It
should not be forgotten that “Cyrilline Chalcedonianism” constituted the
majority position in the wake of Chalcedon, leading to the theological
development and dogmatic endorsement of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology in
the sixth century. To cast “strict Chalcedonianism” and “Neo-
Chalcedonianism” as two equally legitimate Christological options is to risk
misreading Chalcedon itself, its Sitz im Leben, and its reception. A renewed
recognition of the development of Christology after Chalcedon is a much-
needed corrective to histories of Christology that end with “the Chalcedonian
settlement” of 451. A renewed understanding of post-Chalcedonian
Christology in the West is of enormous ecumenical import, for Eastern
Christianity has never forgotten that Chalcedon was part of a much broader
history of Christological reflection.1
We have also seen that the Christological controversies of the fifth
century were not fought with any unanimity regarding philosophical
terminology, and that Chalcedon itself employed but did not define physis,
prosōpon and hypostasis. There is good reason to regard Chalcedon’s language as
symbolic and heuristic.2 This is not the same thing as regarding Chalcedon or
all dogmatic statements as purely grammatical, as forms of “linguistic
regulation.”3 The bishops at Chalcedon were reluctant to say more than
Scripture and the Nicene creed had already said, but when compelled to say
more, the “more” was not merely a matter of formal rules for Christological
discourse, but an attempt to say something metaphysically intelligible about
the Incarnation. Balthasar understands Chalcedon in this sense, as a straining
toward conceptualization of a mystery which cannot be fully expressed. As
Balthasar himself says, commenting on Karl Barth’s Christology, “The
teachings of the Council of Chalcedon still hold true and are binding, which
implies the same for the concept of nature, physis. Of course, the concept
cannot dissolve the lasting mystery of revelation and Incarnation. But, based
on this mystery, it can depict it.”4 And in Mysterium Paschale he writes:
If we look back from the mature Christology of Ephesus and Chalcedon to the hymn
of Philippians 2, and do so with the intention of not exaggerating its capacity for
“dogmatic” assertiveness, we can hardly help registering a “plus factor” in its archaic
language—stammering out the mystery as this does—to which the established
formulae of the unchangeability of God do not really do justice.5
Chalcedon is heuristic in the sense that it opened up new possibilities, indeed

demanded them, in Christian metaphysics and theology. “Without
confusion”—asynchytōs—was to become in Maximus a principle for
understanding all created being. In making explicit the identity of Christ’s
single hypostasis as the eternal Son of God, Neo-Chalcedonian proponents
moved away from the notion of hypostasis as specification of nature, toward
the notion of hypostasis as the self-subsisting subject within the realm of free
activity. Given its philosophical legacy, Chalcedon was not apophatically
restrictive but generative.
Christological Particularity
As the passage quoted above from Mysterium Paschale signals, the dogma of
Chalcedon is heuristic and apophatic in a further significant sense, in that it
sends us back to the scriptural narrative of the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, in continuity with the Cyrilline
majority at Chalcedon, sought to highlight the narrative agency of the
incarnate Word, who freely unites in his own hypostasis a complete, individual
human nature with his divine nature. Thus, as David Yeago says:
The subject-matter of christology is not “natures” and their possible or actual

synthesis, but rather a person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is confessed to be the Son of
God. The one Jesus Christ is the datum, the presupposition, given in Scripture and
the doxology of the Church; the starting-point for christology is the single ascriptive
subject of the Gospel narratives and the praise of the community.6
Maximus too has the one ascriptive subject of the drama of salvation at the
centre of his Christology, such that Christ can be said to bear “a new
theandric energy” and do “human things divinely and divine things
humanly.”7 It is because of the clearer distinction between hypostatic and
natural order, complemented in Maximus by the distinction between logos tēs
physeōs and tropos tēs hyparxeōs, that the unabbreviated individual humanity of
Conclusion 209
Christ, with its natural energy and will, can be affirmed as such and yet belong
to none other than the person of the Son of God. The primacy of the
hypostatic order signals that Christology does not begin with a consideration
of created and uncreated natures in abstracto, followed by the problem of how
contraries can be conjoined in one final composite “product.” To think from
natures to person in this fashion leads to a kind of Christological parallelism
that is foreign to Maximus, foreign to the intentions of Chalcedon. Rather, it
is the concrete, historical narrative of Jesus that reveals fully what it is to be
genuinely human and what God is like. It is thus, in his hypostatic
particularity and the particularity of his living and preaching, dying and rising,
that Christ reveals what humanity is and is for: “It is Christ, the last Adam,
who fully discloses humankind to itself and unfolds its noble calling by
revealing the mystery of the Father and the Father’s love.”8
For Balthasar too, the person is not to be read out of the natures, but
rather the natures out of the person. Rather than speaking of creaturely
passibility, in univocal contrast to divine impassibility, and human
vulnerability in contrast to divine omnipotence, one must speak of Jesus’
obedience to the Father, which positively images “something like” obedience
within the life of God. Rather than an importation of suffering and need into
the life of God, Balthasar speaks of the conditions of possibility, the infinite
variety of modes, within the life of God that ground God’s appearance in
Christ. Christ is the concrete analogia entis—not a static exemplar of created
and divine natures, but a dramatic enactment of created and divine freedom
in his single hypostasis. And in the economy, he is experienced as a single
hypostasis ensarkos, never asarkos: it is Christ incarnate who as concrete universal
recapitulates all created being and constitutes the norm of history.
Balthasarian apophaticism is not primarily a scepticism about the possibilities
of linguistic representation of God; rather, it is marked by Christological
concentration and, to use Cyril O’Regan’s helpful term, “incarnational
saturation.” It says that whatever we can say about God must be grounded in
the particularity of the story of Jesus.
Such Christological concentration also entails the full recognition of the
human existence of Jesus. Thus, when Balthasar speaks of the “consciousness
of Christ,” he is referring not to a hegemonic divine consciousness nor to a

mixed human-divine consciousness, but to the human consciousness of the
incarnate Son. It is only and precisely by means of this human consciousness
of Jesus, his consciousness of always being the one sent, that Jesus reveals his
identity as eternal Son of the Father. As fully human, Jesus’ consciousness is
complex and variegated, and not coterminous with thematized conceptual
knowledge. For Balthasar, it is limited not only by temporality and historical
circumstance, but by Jesus’ mission and kenōsis: the life of Jesus is characterized
by poverty, obedience to the One who sent him, and by the darkening of “the
hour” of his redemptive death. While on certain points Balthasar will venture
further than many exegetes, for instance on the centrality of vicarious
representation in the gospels, his characterization of Jesus’ consciousness as
fully human and uniquely kenotic allows him a degree of flexibility in
appropriating biblical data and scholarship. No need, suggests Balthasar, to
ascribe all explicit New Testament titles to Jesus himself, or to neutralize
passages suggestive of a “low” Christology; rather, it is Jesus’ actions, the
impact of his authority wedded to poverty, the irreducible eschatological
urgency of his mission, that reveal who he must have understood himself to
be.
Contemporary theologians have been right to question whether Jesus
could be fully human without being a human person. They note the great
divide between classical ontological definitions of person and modern
psychological notions of person, such that the identification of Christ’s person
with the pre-existent Logos would seem to rob Jesus of genuine human identity
and activity. Balthasar’s consideration of person, however, does not move from
the general to the specific, from anthropology to Christology, but rather from
Christology outward. If Christ reveals to human beings the fullness of
humanity, he discloses also the fullness of personhood. He is the archetypal
person, in whom mission and conscious subjectivity are one. Yet all the
faculties of the human person as commonly conceived—individuality, freedom,
consciousness and self-consciousness, relationality—are included in Balthasar’s
notion of Geistsubjekt, the conscious subject, and Jesus as theandric person has
sublated all that belongs to human conscious subjectivity for the sake of his
Conclusion 211
mission. Or again, Jesus acts as this human conscious subject who is also the
incarnate person of the Son of God. Balthasar’s dynamic theory of
personhood transposes the Neo-Chalcedonian enhypostasia-doctrine such that
Christ’s humanity is constituted, particularized, and rendered fully active by its
complete assumption into his divine salvific mission. Conscious subjectivity is
not a set of instrumental faculties activated by the divine person of the Son:
the Son acts in and through his human conscious subjectivity. This sublation of
conscious subjectivity into Christ’s mission-personhood structurally replicates
Maximus’s theology of Christ’s energies and wills: the natural human will of
Christ is fully operative, maintaining its logos tēs hyparxeōs, but the hypostatic
principle is the person of the Son, who elevates Christ’s humanity into a new
tropos.
E nhypostasia, Receptivity and Prayer

Balthasar also effects an existential modulation of the Neo-Chalcedonian
notion of enhypostasia by reframing it in terms of receptivity, and perhaps the
leitmotif of receptivity is one of Balthasar’s most original contributions to
Christological discourse. Jesus has received his identity from the beginning
along with his mission; the mission is, as Balthasar frequently reiterates, the
economic translation of the Son’s procession, which itself is a reception of the
Father’s self-giving. Jesus’ human consciousness of his mission and identity is
awakened, receptively, by the mother’s smile. And even in the final “hour,”
when obedience takes the form of passivity, death, and separation, Balthasar
speaks of this definitive reception of the Father’s will as a “super-action” and
the economic revelation of the Son’s eternal act of gratitude. The enhypostatic
humanity of Christ, then, is not violently seized and manipulated as a passive
instrument of God. It is already constituted as receptive without being passive,
and is caught up the perichōrēsis of the Trinitarian hypostases that is itself
archetypally receptive. Indeed, one might say that the Son does not so much
assume as accept his humanity in his act of kenōsis.9 In his portrayal of Jesus’
life and death Balthasar thus subverts the active-passive dichotomy that haunts
anthropology and Christology: in Jesus are found both active and passive
manifestations of his fundamental receptivity to the will of the Father.
In Balthasar’s writings, this fundamental receptivity that constitutes

Christ’s person has another name: prayer. Jesus’ existence is not only an
“existence as mission”10 but equally an “existence as prayer.” In Jesus there is
no diastasis between his divine and human existence, and no dichotomy
between action and contemplation—his whole existence is an unbroken
looking-to-the-Father, an unbroken prayer. In A Theology of History, Balthasar
describes the man Jesus as participating in the primal unity of the Son’s intra-
Trinitarian being and consciousness:
Upon that identity depends the whole of salvation; it is what makes the whole tragic
element in the duality between God and creatures fruitful, for God and for us. It is
because of this identity, closing nothing and opening everything—identity as prayer—
that history can be as truly as it is an image and expression of God.11
The humanity of Christ is enhypostatically elevated into the Trinitarian

dynamic of the Son’s receiving from the Father all that he is. Pope Benedict
XVI echoes Balthasar in his personal reflections on Jesus, commenting on
Jesus’ prayer in Luke’s Gospel:
Again and again the Gospels note that Jesus withdrew ‘to the mountain’ to spend
nights in prayer ‘alone’ with his Father.… This ‘praying’ of Jesus is the Son
conversing with the Father; Jesus’ human consciousness and will, his human soul, is
taken up into that exchange, and in this way human ‘praying’ is able to become a
participation in this filial communion with the Father.12
Such a dynamic also shapes the eschatological destiny of the finite creature:
through mission, prayer becomes “a fundamental act of finite existence.”13 To
highlight prayer as the ultimate form of creaturely existence is also to recall to
mind Maximus’s theology of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane. In this moment
of darkness Jesus exercises supreme human freedom in openness to the divine
will of the Father, and thus restores true human freedom. In Maximus and in
Balthasar, seeming passivity can bespeak “super-action” in accord with God’s
active love, and the freedom of the creature is brought to its perfection not
ultimately in competitive self-assertion but in receptivity and communion with
the triune God.
Conclusion 213
Notes
1 See Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve,” 162.
2 See O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval,” 246; Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon
Solve?” 160–163; Yeago, “Jesus of Nazareth,” 167.
3 See Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve?” 149.
4 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 115.
5 MP, 26.
6 Yeago, “Jesus of Nazareth,” 166.
7 See Maximus, Amb. 5, PG 91, 1060A–C; Maximus the Confessor, trans. Louth, 178–179.
8 Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium
et spes) §22; Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 1081.
9 See TL III, 49.
10 See Marc Ouellet, p.s.s., “L’Existence comme mission: L’Anthropologie théologique de
Hans Urs von Balthasar” (S.T.D. diss., Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 1983).
11 TH, 33, n. 2.
12 Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the
Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York, Doubleday, 2007), 7.
13 TL III, 151.

Bibliography
1. Primary Literature: Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar
For a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Balthasar, see Cornelia Capol, Hans Urs von
Balthasar. Bibliographie 1925–1990. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990.
The Christian State of Life. Translated by Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1983. [Christlicher Stand. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1977.]
Christen sind einfältig. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1983.
“On the Concept of Person.” Communio ICR 13 (Spring 1986): 18–26.
“La conscience de Jésus et sa mission.” In Nouveaux points de repère, edited by Georges
Chantraine, 161–174. Paris: Fayard, 1980.
Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Translated by Brian E. Daley. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003. [Kosmische Liturgie: das Weltbild Maximus des Bekenners. 2nd
ed. Einsiedeln & Trier: Johannes Verlag, 1988.]
“The Descent into Hell.” In Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit and Institution. Translated by
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., 401–414. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [“Abstieg zur Hölle,”
in Pneuma und Institution. Skizzen zur Theologie IV, 387–400. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1974.]
Does Jesus Know Us? Do We Know Him? Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1983.
Epilogue. Translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.
“Exegese und Dogmatik.” Communio: Internationale katholische Zeitschrift 5 (1976): 385–392.
Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh. Translated by A. V. Littledale with Alexander
Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. [Verbum Caro. Skizzen zur Theologie I. Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1960.]
Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of the Word. Translated by A. V. Littledale, Alexander Dru,
Brian McNeil, C.R.V., John Saward, and Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1991. [Sponsa Verbi. Skizzen zur Theologie II. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961.]
Explorations in Theology III: Creator Spirit. Translated by Brian MacNeil, C.R.V. San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1993. [Spiritus Creator. Skizzen zur Theologie III. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1967.]
Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit and Institution. Translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Pneuma und Institution. Skizzen zur Theologie IV. Einsiedeln:
“The Fathers, Scholastics, and Ourselves.” Communio: International Catholic Review 24 (1997):
347–396. [“Patristik, Scholastik, und Wir,” Theologie der Zeit 3 (1939): 65–104.]
First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr. Translated by Antje Lawry and Sr. Sergia Englund, O.C.D. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981.
“Fides Christi: An Essay on the Consciousness of Christ.” In Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of
the Word. Translated by A. V. Littledale, Alexander Dru, Brian McNeil, C.R.V., John
Saward, and Edward T. Oakes, S.J., 43–79. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.
La Foi du Christ: Cinq Approches Christologiques. Paris: Aubier, 1968.
“Gekreuzigt für uns,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Adolf Deissler, Walter Kasper, et al.,
Diskussion über Hans Küngs “Christ sein,” 83–94. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976.
The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form. Translated by Erasmo
Leiva-Merikakis. Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark and San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982.
[Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. I, Schau der Gestalt. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1961.]
The Glory of the Lord. Volume II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles. Translated by Andrew
Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark and San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. II/1, Fächer der
Stile: Klerikale Stile. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962.]
The Glory of the Lord. Volume III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles. Translated by Andrew
Louth, John Saward, Martin Simon, and Rowan Williams. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. II/2, Fächer
der Stile: Laikale Stile. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962.]
The Glory of the Lord. Volume IV: In the Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity. Translated by Brian
McNeil, C.R.V., et al. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.
[Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. III/1.1, Im Raum der Metaphysik: Altertum.
Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1967.]
The Glory of the Lord. Volume V: In the Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. Translated by
Oliver Davies, et al. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.
[Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. III/1.2, Im Raum der Metaphysik: Neuzeit.
The Glory of the Lord. Volume VI: Theology: The Old Covenant. Translated by Brian McNeil, C.R.V.
and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1991. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. III/2.1, Theologie: Alter Bund. Einsiedeln:
The Glory of the Lord. Volume VII: Theology: The New Covenant. Translated by Brian McNeil,
C.R.V. and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1989. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik. Vol. III/2.2, Theologie: Neuer
Bund. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1969.]
“God Is His Own Exegete.” Translated by Stephen Wentworth. Communio: International Catholic
Review 13, no. 4 (1986): 280–87.
Heart of the World. Translated by Erasmo S. Leiva. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979. [Das Herz
der Welt. Zürich: Arche Verlag, 1954.]
Bibliography 217
“Homo creatus est.” In Homo Creatus Est. Skizzen zur Theologie V, 11–25. Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1986.
Liturgie cosmique: Maxime le Confesseur. Translated by L. Lhaumet and H.-A. Prentout. Paris:
Aubier, 1947.
Love Alone Is Credible. Translated by D. C. Schindler. San Franciso: Ignatius Press, 2004.
[Glaubhaft is nur Liebe. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1963.]
Man in History: A Theological Study. London and Sydney: Sheed & Ward, 1968. [Das Ganze im
Fragment. Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1963.]
Mysterium Pascale: The Mystery of Easter. Translated by Aidan Nichols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1990. [Theologie der drei Tage. Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1969.]
Origen. Spirit and Fire. A Thematic Anthology of His Writings. Translated by Robert J. Daly, S.J.
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984. [Origenes. Geist und
Feuer: Ein Aufbau aus seinen Schriften. Salzburg: Müller, 1938; 2nd ed., 1952.]
Our Task: A Report and a Plan. Translated by John Saward. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984.
[Unser Auftrag: Bericht und Entwurf. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1984.]
Prayer. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. [Das betrachtende
Gebet. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1955.]
Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa. Translated by Mark
Sebanc. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie
religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Beauchesne, 1942.]
“Das Selbstbewußtsein Jesu.” Communio: Internationale katholische Zeitschrift 8 (1979): 30–39.
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. I, Prolegomena. Translated by Graham Harrison.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988. [Theodramatik. Vol. I, Prolegomena. Einsiedeln:
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. II, The Dramatis Personae: Man in God. Translated
by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990. [Theodramatik. Vol. II/1, Die
Personen des Spiels: Der Mensch in Gott. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976.]
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. III, The Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ.
Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. [Theodramatik. Vol.
II/2, Die Personen des Spiels: Die Personen in Christus. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1978.]
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. IV, The Action. Translated by Graham Harrison.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. [Theodramatik. Vol. III, Die Handlung. Einsiedeln:
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Vol. V, The Last Act. Translated by Graham Harrison.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998. [Theodramatik. Vol. IV, Die Endspiel. Einsiedeln:
Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory. Vol. I, Truth of the World. Translated by Adrian J Walker.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000. [Theologik. Vol. I, Wahrheit der Welt. Einsiedeln:
Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory. Vol. II, Truth of God. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. [Theologik. Vol. II, Wahrheit Gottes. Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1985.]
Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory. Vol. III, The Spirit of Truth. Translated by Graham Harrison.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. [Theologik. Vol. III, Der Geist der Wahrheit. Einsiedeln:
A Theology of History. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963. Reprint, San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1994. [Theologie der Geschichte. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1959.]
The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation. Translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. [Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie. Köln:
Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1951.]
The Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism. Translated by Graham Harrison. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987. [Die Wahrheit is symphonisch: Aspekte des christlichen
Pluralismus. Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1972.]
“On Vicarious Representation” In Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit and Institution, translated by
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., 415–422. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [“Über Stell-
vertretung.” In Pneuma und Institution. Skizzen zur Theologie IV, 401–409. Einsiedeln:
You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Radio Sermons. Translated by Graham Harrison. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. [Du kronst das Jahr mit deiner Hul”: Radiopredigten.
“The Work and Suffering of Jesus.” In Faith in Christ and the Worship of Christ: New Approaches to
the Devotion to Christ, edited by Leo Scheffczyk, 13–21. Translated by Graham Harrison.
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986.
Zuerst Gottes Reich: Zwei Skizzen zur biblischen Naherwartung. Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1966.
2. Primary Literature: Patristic Sources and Translations

Texts from Maximus and other ancient Christian sources are cited from J. P. Migne, Patrologia
Graeca (PG) and Patrologia Latina (PL). Maximian texts are found in PG 90 and 91 (Paris: Petit-
Montrouge, 1865). In addition, the following translations in French and English were
consulted:
Athanasius of Alexandria. Select Writings and Letters. Edited by Archibald Robertson, A Select
Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 4. Reprint,
Edinburgh: T&T Clark and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.
Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril of Alexandria: Select Letters. Translated and edited by Lionel Wickham.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
Denzinger, Heinrich, and Adolf Schönmetzer. Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et
declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 34th ed. Barcelona: Herder, 1967.
Bibliography 219
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua. Introduction by Jean-Claude Larchet. Translated and

annotated by Emmanuel Ponsoye. Paris: Ancre, 1994.
———. La Dispute de Maxime le Confesseur avec Pyrrhus. Translated by Marcel Doucet. Montreal:
Université de Montréal, Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1972.
———. Lettres. Introduction by Jean-Claude Larchet. Translated and annotated by Emmanuel
Ponsoye. Paris: Cerf, 1998.
———. Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings. Translated by George C. Berthold. Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press, 1985.
———. Maximus the Confessor. Translated and edited by Andrew Louth. Early Church Fathers.
London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
———. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor.
Translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken. Paul Crestwood, NY: St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
———. Opuscules théologiques et polémiques. Introduction by Jean-Claude Larchet. Translated and
annotated by Emmanuel Ponsoye. Paris: Cerf, 1998.
Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. London: Sheed & Ward and
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
Theodoret of Cyrus. Eranistes. Translated by Gerard H. Ettlinger, S.J. Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 2003.
3. Secondary Literature
Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint
Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Birot, Antoine. “‘God in Christ Reconciled the World to Himself’: Redemption in Balthasar.”
Communio ICR 24 (1997): 259–285.
Brambilla, Franco Giulio. “Gesù autore e perfezionatore della fede,” in La fede di Gesù: Atti del
convegno tenuto a Trento il 27–28 maggio 1998, edited by Giacomo Canobbio, 69–124.
Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2000.
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to New Testament Christology. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1994).
Bultmann, Rudolf. Faith and Understanding. Vol. 1. London: SCM Press, 1969.
Cathechism of the Catholic Church, rev. ed. London: Geoffrey Chapman and Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 1999.
Coakley, Sarah. “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It not? Some Reflections on the
Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition.’” In The Incarnation: An
Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God, edited by Stephen T. Davis,
David Kendall, S.J., and Gerald O’Collins, S.J., 143–163. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Coffey, David. Deus Trinitas: The Doctrine of the Triune God. New York: Oxford University Press,
1999.
———. “The Theandric Nature of Christ.” Theological Studies 60 (1999): 405–431.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Notification on the Works of Fr. Jon Sobrino, S.J.:
Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórico-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret (Madrid, 1991) and La
fe en Jesucristo. Ensayo desde las víctimas (San Salvador, 1999), November 26, 2006.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc
_20061126_notification-sobrino_en.html.
Daley, Brian E., S.J. “Nature and the ‘Mode of Union’: Late Patristic Models for the Personal
Unity of Christ.” In The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the
Son of God, edited by Stephen T. Davis, David Kendall, S.J., and Gerald O’Collins,
S.J., 164–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
———. “Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von
Balthasar, edited by Edward T. Oakes, S.J., and David Moss, 187–206. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Dalzell, Thomas G. The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans
Urs von Balthasar. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.
De Schrijver, Georges. Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez
Hans Urs von Balthasar. Leuven: University Press, 1983.
Dickens, W. T. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critical Biblical
Interpretation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
———. “Balthasar’s Biblical Hermeneutics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von
Donneaud, Henri. “Hans Urs von Balthasar contre saint Thomas d’Aquin sur la foi du Christ.”
Revue Thomiste 97 (1997): 335–354.
Donnelly, Veronica. Saving Beauty: Form as the Key to Balthasar’s Christology. Oxford, Bern, et al.:
Peter Lang, 2007.
Dupuis, Jacques, S.J. Who Do You Say I Am? Introduction to Christology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1994.
Essen, Georg. Die Freiheit Jesu: Der neuchalkedonische Enhypostasiebegriff im Horizont neuzeitlicher
Subjekt- und Personphilosophie. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2001.
Gagey, Henri-Jérôme, and Vincent Holzer, eds. Balthasar, Rahner: Deux pensées en contraste. Paris:
Bayard, 2005.
Galot, Jean, S.J. Who Is Christ? A Theology of the Incarnation. Translated by M. Angeline
Bouchard. Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1980.
Galtier, Paul. L’Unité du Christ. Paris: Beauchesne, 1939.
———. “L’Occident et le néo-chalcédonisme.” Gregorianum 40 (1959): 54–74.
———. “La conscience humaine du Christ.” Gregorianum 32 (1951): 525–568.
Galvin, John P. “Jesus’ Approach to Death: An Examination of Some Recent Studies.”
Theological Studies 41, no. 4 (1980): 713–744.
Bibliography 221
———. “From the Humanity of Christ to the Jesus of History: A Paradigm Shift in Catholic
Christology.” Theological Studies 55, no. 2 (June 1994): 252–273.
———. “‘I Believe...in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord’: The Earthly Jesus and the Christ of
Faith.” Interpretation 50, no. 4 (October 1996): 373–382.
Garrigues, Juan-Miguel. “La Personne composée du Christ d’après Saint Maxime le
Confesseur.” Revue Thomiste 74 (1974): 181–204.
Gockel, Matthias. “A Dubious Christological Formula? Leontius of Byzantium and the
Anhypostasis-Enhypostasis Theory.” Journal of Theological Studies 51 (2000): 515–532.
Gray, P. T. R. The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553). Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979.
Grillmeier, Aloys. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451).
Translated by J. S. Bowden. London: A. R. Mowbray, 1965.
Grillmeier, Aloys, with Theresia Hainthaler. Christ in Christian Tradition. Vol. 2, part 2, From the
Council of Chalcedon (451) to Gregory the Great (590–604): The Church in Constantinople in the
Sixth Century. Translated by John Cawte and Pauline Allen. London: Mowbray, 1995.
Guillet, Jacques. La Foi du Christ. Paris: Desclée, 1980.
Haight, Roger. Jesus Symbol of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999.
Hays, Richard B. The Faith of Christ: An Investigation into the Narrative Substructure of Galatians
3:1–4:11, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002.
Healy, Nicholas J. The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Heinz, Hanspeter. Der Gott des Je-Mehr: Der Christologische Ansatz Hans Urs von Balthasars. Bern:
Herbert Lang and Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1975.
Heinzer, Felix. Gottes Sohn als Mensch: Die Struktur Des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus Confessor.
Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1980.
Heinzer, Felix, and Christoph Schönborn, eds. Maximus Confessor. Acts du Symposium sur Maxime
le Confesseur. Fribourg, 1–5 septembre 1980. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1982.
Henrici, Peter, S.J., “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life.” In Hans Urs von Balthasar:
His Life and Work, edited by David L. Schindler, 7–43. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.
Hunt, Anne. The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery: A Development in Recent Catholic Theology
Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997.
Hurtado, Larry W. How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest
Devotion to Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005.
International Theological Commission. “The Consciousness of Christ concerning Himself and
His Mission.” In International Theological Commission. Texts and Documents, 1969-1985,
edited by Michael Sharkey, 305–316. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989.
———. “Select Questions on Christology.” In International Theological Commission. Texts and
Documents, 1969–1985, edited by Michael Sharkey, 185–205. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1989.
Kannengiesser, Charles. “Listening to the Fathers.” In Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work,
edited by David L. Schindler, 59–63. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.
Kasper, Walter. “Christologie von unten? Kritik und Neuansatz gegenwärtiger Christologie.” In
Grundfragen der Christologie heute, edited by Leo Scheffczyk, 141–170. Freiburg: Herder,
1975.
———. Jesus the Christ. Translated by V. Green. London: Burn & Oates and New York: Paulist
Press, 1976.
———. “‘One of the Trinity…’: Re-Establishing a Spiritual Christology in the Perspective of
Trinitarian Theology.” In Theology and Church, translated by Margaret Kohl, 94–108. New
York: Crossroad, 1989.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. London and New York: Continuum, 1977.
Krenski, Thomas Rudolf. Passio Caritatis: Trinitarische Passiologie im Werk Hans Urs von Balthasars.
Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990.
Küng, Hans. On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. London: Collins, 1977.
Lebon, Joseph. Le monophysisme Sévérien: étude historique, littéraire et théologique sur la résistance
monophysite au Concile de Chalcédoine jusqu’à la constitution de l’Église jacobite. Louvain: J. Van
Linthout, 1909.
Le Guillou, Marie-Joseph. “Quelques réflexions sur Constantinople III et la sotériologie de
Maxime.” In Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg, 2–5
septembre 1980, edited by Felix Heinzer and Christoph von Schönborn (Fribourg: Éditions
universitaires, 1982), 235–237.
Léthel, François-Marie. Théologie de l’agonie du Christ: la liberté humaine du Fils de Dieu et son
importance sotériologique mises en lumière par Saint Maxime le Confesseur. Paris: Beauchesne,
1979.
———. “La prière de Jésus à Gethsémani dans la controverse monothélite.” In Maximus Confessor:
Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg, 2–5 septembre 1980, edited by Felix
Heinzer and Christoph von Schönborn, 207–214. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1982.
Levering, Matthew. “Balthasar on Christ’s Consciousness on the Cross.” The Thomist 65
(2001): 567–581.
———. Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004.
Lonergan, Bernard. “Christology Today: Methodological Reflections.” In A Third Collection:
Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., edited by Frederick Crowe, 74–99. New York and
Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985.
Löser, Werner. Im Geiste des Origenes: Hans Urs von Balthasar als Interpret der Theologie der
Kirchenväter. Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1976.
———. “Trinitätstheologie heute. Ansätze und Entwürfe,” in Trinität: Aktuelle Perspektiven der
Theologie, edited by Wilhelm Breuning, 19–45. Freiburg: Herder, 1984.
Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1974.
McIntosh, Mark A. Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in Hans Urs von
Balthasar. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
———. “Christology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Edward T.
Bibliography 223
Oakes, S.J., and David Moss, 24–36. Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Macquarrie, John. Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. London: SCM Press and Phildadelphia: Trinity
Press International, 1990.
Madden, Nicholas. “Composite Hypostasis in Maximus Confessor.” In Studia Patristica,
vol. 27, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 175–197. Leuven: Peeters, 1993.
Mascall, E. L. Christ, the Christian and the Church. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1946.
Marchesi, Giovanni. La cristologia trinitaria di Hans Urs von Balthasar: Gesù Cristo pienezza della
rivelazione e della salvezza. Brescia: Editrice Queriniana, 1997.
McDermott, Brian O. Word Become Flesh: Dimensions of Christology. Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical Press, 1993.
McGuckin, John A. St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and
Texts. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1994.
McNeil, Brian, C.R.V. “The Exegete as Iconographer: Balthasar and the Gospels.” In The
Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by John Riches, 134–146.
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986.
Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1987.
Moeller, Charles. “Le Chalcédonisme et le Néo-Chalcédonisme en Orient de 451 à la fin du VIe
siècle.” In Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 1, edited by Aloys
Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, 637–720. Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1951.
Moloney, Raymond. The Knowledge of Christ. London: Continuum, 1999.
Mongrain, Kevin. The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval. New
York: Crossroad, 2002.
Naduvilekut, James. Christus der Heilsweg: Soteria als Theodrama im Werk Hans Urs von Balthasars.
St Ottilien: Verlag Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 1987.
Nichols, Aidan, OP. Scattering the Seed: A Guide through Balthasar’s Early Writings on Philosophy and
the Arts. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2006.
Norris, R. A. “Christological Models in Cyril of Alexandria.” In Studia Patristica XIII: Papers
presented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1971. Part II:
Classica et Hellenica, Theologica, Liturgica, Ascetica, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 255-
268. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975.
———, trans. and ed. The Christological Controversy. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980.
Oakes, Edward T., S.J. Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. New York
and London: Continuum, 1994.
———. “Balthasar’s Critique of the Historical-Critical Method.” In Glory, Grace, and Culture: The
Work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Ed Block, Jr., 150–174. New York and Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist Press, 2005.
———. “The Internal Logic of Holy Saturday in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.”
International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 7 (April 2007): 184–199.
———. Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B. Eerdmans, 2011.
Oakes, Edward T., S.J., and David Moss, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von
Balthasar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
O’Collins, Gerald, S.J. Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
O’Collins, Gerald, S.J., and David Kendall. “The Faith of Jesus.” Theological Studies 53 (1992):
403–423.
O’Donnell, John J. The Mystery of the Triune God. London: Sheed & Ward, 1988.
O’Hanlon, Gerald. The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Cambridge:
O’Keefe, John J. “Impassible Suffering? Divine Passion and Fifth-Century Christology.”
Theological Studies 58 (March 1997): 39–60.
O’Regan, Cyril. “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval: Post-Chalcedonian Symphonic Theology.”
Gregorianum 77, no. 2 (1996): 227–260.
Ouellet, Marc, p.s.s. “L’Existence comme mission: L’Anthropologie théologique de Hans Urs
von Balthasar.” S.T.D. diss., Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 1983.
Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Jesus—God and Man. London: SCM Press, 1976.
Piret, Pierre. Le Christ et la Trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur. Paris: Beauchesne, 1983.
Pitstick, Alyssa Lyra. Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s
Descent into Hell. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007.
Plaza García, Inmaculada. “La autoconciencia de Cristo: El pensamiento de Hans Urs von
Balthasar en el contexto de la teología contemporánea.” Revista agustiniana 45 (2004): 383-
424.
Rahner, Karl. “Chalkedon—Ende oder Anfang?” In Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und
Gegenwart, vol. 3, edited by Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, 3–49. Würzburg: Echter-
Verlag, 1954.
———. “Current Problems in Christology.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 1, translated by
Cornelius Ernst, 149–200. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961.
———. “Dogmatic Reflections on the Knowledge and Self-Consciousness of Christ,” in Theological
Investigations, vol. 5, translated by Karl-H. Kruger, 193–215. Baltimore: Helicon Press and
London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966.
———. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Translated by
William V. Dych. New York: Seabury Press, 1978.
———. “Jesus Christ—The Meaning of Life.” In Theological Investigations, vol. 21, translated by
Hugh M. Riley, 208–219. New York: Crossroad, 1988.
———. Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965–1982. Edited by Paul Imhof and
Hubert Biallowons. Translated by Harvey D. Egan. New York: Crossroad, 1986.
Rahner, Karl, and Wilhelm Thüsing. A New Christology. New York: Seabury Press, 1980.
Ratzinger, Joseph. “Zum Personverständnis in der Theologie.” In Dogma und Verkündigung, 205-
223. Munich and Freiburg: Erich Wewel Verlag, 1973.
———. Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology. Translated by Graham
Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986.
Bibliography 225
——— [Benedict XVI]. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration.
Translated by Adrian J. Walker. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Richard, Marcel. “Léonce de Jérusalem et Léonce de Byzance.” Mélanges de science religieuse 1
(1944): 35–88.
———. “Le néo-chalcédonisme.” Mélanges de science religieuse 3 (1946): 156–161.
Riches, Aaron. “After Chalcedon: The Oneness of Christ and the Dyothelite Mediation of His
Theandric Unity.” Modern Theology 22, no. 4 (April 2008): 199–224.
Riches, John, ed. The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark, 1986.
Rosenberg, Randall S. “Christ’s Human Knowledge: A Conversation with Lonergan and
Balthasar.” Theological Studies 71, no. 4 (2010): 817–845.
Salvadori, Ivan. L’autoconscienza di Gesù: “in tutte simile a noi eccetto il peccato.” Rome: Città
Nuova, 2011.
Schillebeeckx, Edward. Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. Translated by Hubert Hoskins. New
York: Seabury Press, 1979.
Schindler, David C. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical
Investigation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.
Schindler, David L., ed. Love Alone Is Credible: Hans Urs von Balthasar as Interpreter of the Catholic
Tradition, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2008.
Schönborn, Christoph. God Sent His Son: A Contemporary Christology. Translated by Henry
Taylor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010.
Schoonenberg, Piet. The Christ: A Study of the God-Man Relationship in the Whole of Creation and in
Jesus Christ. Translated by Della Couling. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971.
Schwager, Raymund. Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption.
Translated by James G. Williams and Paul Haddon. New York: Crossroad, 1999.
Seifert, Josef. “Person und Individuum: Über Hans Urs von Balthasars Philosophie der Person
und die philosophischen Implikationen seiner Dreifaligkeitstheologie,” Forum Katholische
Theologie 13, no. 2 (1997): 81–105.
Sherwood, Polycarp. “Survey of Recent Work on St. Maximus the Confessor,” Traditio 20
(1964): 428–437.
Sobrino, Jon. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological View. Translated by Paul Burns and
Francis McDonagh. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2003.
Studer, Basil. Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of the Early Church. Edited by Andrew Louth.
Translated by Matthias Westerhoff. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993.
Ternus, J. “Das Seelen- und Bewußtseinsleben Jesu: Problemgeschichtlich-Systematische Unter-
suchung.” In Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, edited by Alois
Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, 81–237. Würzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1954.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor.
2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court Press, 1995.
Törönen, Melchisedec. Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Vandevelde-Daillière, Guy. “L’‘inversion trinitaire’ chez H.U. von Balthasar.” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique 120 (1998): 370–383.
Weinandy, Thomas, O.F.M.Cap. Does God Change?: The Word’s Becoming in the Incarnation. Still
River, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1985.
———. “The Beatific Vision and the Incarnate Son: Furthering the Discussion.” The Thomist 70
(2006): 605–615.
Welte, Bernhard. “Homoousios Hemin. Gedanken zum Verständnis und zur Theologischen
Problematik der Kategorien von Chalkedon.” In Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und
Gegenwart, vol. 3, edited by Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, 51–80. Würzburg:
Echter-Verlag, 1954.
Wesche, Kenneth Paul. On the Person of Christ: The Christology of the Emperor Justinian. Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991.
White, Thomas Joseph. “The Voluntary Action of the Earthly Christ and the Necessity of the
Beatific Vision.” The Thomist 69 (2005): 497–534.
———. “Dyotheletism and the Instrumental Human Consciousness of Jesus.” Pro Ecclesia 17, no.
4 (Fall 2008): 396–422.
Williams, Rowan. “Balthasar and the Trinity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von
Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.
Yeago, David S. “Jesus of Nazareth and Cosmic Redemption: The Relevance of St Maximus the
Confessor,” Modern Theology 12, no. 2 (April 1996): 163–193.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.

Index
Page references enclosed in square brackets indicate textual references to endnotes.
analogy (analogia entis): as christologically Bérulle, Pierre de, 162

determined, 80–84, 92–96, 98, 103– Birot, Antoine, 165
104n73, 116, 136; as dynamic, Brown, Raymond E., 148n11
104n89, 104–105n95; primacy of Buber, Martin, 73, 133
analogia proportionalitatis, 84–88 Bulgakov, Sergei, 162, 180
anhypostasia, 35–36, 65, 139. See also Bultmann, Rudolf, 2, 109, 163
enhypostasia Cappadocian Fathers. See Gregory of
Anselm of Canterbury, 167–168, 176, Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa,
178, 182 hypostasis
Apollinarianism, 22, 23 Chalcedon, Council of (451 C.E.):
Arius, Arianism, 89, 122 doctrine, 3, 20–21; diachronic
Athanasius of Alexandria, 19, 24, 48, 166, christology, 18, 22–26; influence of
206 Cyril of Alexandria, 24–26, 206; as
Balthasar, Hans Urs von: appropriation of heuristic, 207–208; reception, 26–
Chalcedon, 8, 66, 89–90, 93, 27, 206–207; as theological synthesis,
105n101, 116, 135, 146, 177–178, 18–19, 21–22, 206. See also
195–196; appropriation of Maximus, christology; Cyril of Alexandria;
7–10, 30–49, 55n52, 88, 92, 98–99, Eutyches; Leo I; neo-
100–101n17, 106n113, 167, 173– Chalcedonianism; Nestorius
175, 184–187; biblical inter- christology: Alexandrian, 18–26, 43, 47,
pretation, 108–117, 134–135, 160– 53n16, 60n137, 101n29, 206;
165; on being and consciousness, 62, Antiochene, 4, 18–26, 28, 33, 42–43,
66, 71, 74, 76, 102n48, 132; on 47, 53n16, 93, 124–125, 206. See also
divine impassibility, 90, 95–96; on Apollinarianism; Athanasius of
fourfold difference, 74, 76–77; and Alexandria; Chalcedon; Cyril of
neo-Chalcedonian christology, 9, 36, Alexandria; hypostasis; Jesus Christ;
45, 50–51, 61–62, 66–68, 79–80, logos-sarx/logos-anthrōpos distinction;
123, 146–147, 179; patristic studies, nature; neo-Chalcedonianism;
4–7, 15n33; plurality of theological Nestorius; Theodoret of Cyrus
registers, 191–196; Unvordenklichkeit, Coakley, Sarah, 17, 54n50
121–123, 138, 141, 146 communicatio idiomatum: Antiochene
Barth, Karl, 5, 80–81, 104n74 opposition to, 19; in Balthasar, 92–
Bathrellos, Demetrios, 47, 54n38, 60n137 96, 98, 112, 178–179; in neo-
Chalcedonianism, 9, 26, 29; in Chalcedonianism, 27–28; on

Maximus, 41–42 enhypostasia, 36
conscious subject (Geistsubjekt). See person Günther, Anton, 103n57
Constantinople, Second Council of (553 Haight, Roger, 22
C.E.), 26–28, 49, 54n50 Healy, Nicholas J., 79, 82, 102n48, 140,
Constantinople, Third Council of (681 153n102,
C.E.), 28–29, 125 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 72–73
Cyril of Alexandria, 18–29, 33–35, 43, 48, Henrici, Peter, 5
54n50, 55n52, 70, 101n29, 185, 206 Holy Spirit, 138–140, 180
Daley, Brian E., 5, 6, 23, 57–58n98 hypostasis: Cappadocian definition, 30–31,
Dalzell, Thomas G., 84–85, 203n161 69; composite (synthetic), 31, 35, 67–
Déodat de Basly, M., 124–126 68, 93; ontological priority of, 32–34,
De Schrijver, Georges, 59–60n135, 82, 47–48, 56n65, 56n67, 72, 140, 179,
85–86, 175 208–209; as possessing being, 32–33;
Dodd, C. H., 113 as self-subsistence, 31. See also
Donneaud, Henri, 133–134, 155n127, enhypostasia
155n133 Ignatius of Loyola, 8, 103n69, 153n113
Dupuis, Jacques, 28, 141 International Theological Commission, 1–
Duquoc, Christian, 168 2
dyophysitism, 25–27, 49 Irenaeus of Lyons, 19, 83
dyothelitism, 30, 50, 125, 147 Jeremias, Joachim, 110, 114
Ebner, Ferdinand, 73 Jesus Christ: agony of, 44–45, 95–96, 161–
Eckhart, Meister, 72 162, 167, 184–187; approach to
enhypostasia, 35–38, 59–60n135, 64–66, death, 160–163; as archetypal
88, 123–124, 127, 146, 178, 211 person, 78–80, 91–92, 97, 106n113,
Ephesus, Council of (431 C.E.), 20, 21, 210; beatific vision, 2–3, 125, 127,
28, 105n101, 166, 206–207 131, 134–135, 143, 152n90,
Essen, Georg, 100n1 154n121, 155n133, 177; cardiognosis,
Eutyches, 20, 46 111, 130, 147; claim to authority,
Evagrius of Pontus, 174 111–113, 147, 148n19, 160; as
extra calvinisticum, 90 concrete analogia entis, 80–84, 86–88,
Galtier, Paul, 124–127, 151n78, 152n84, 98; consciousness attested in New
152n90 Testament, 108–117; consciousness
Garrigues, Juan-Miguel, 57n82 of mission, 93–94, 117–124, 128,
Gray, Patrick T. R., 25, 27–28 132, 141–145; descent into hell, 4–5,
Gregory of Nazianzus, 2 9, 115, 170–175, 187–191, 192–196;
Gregory of Nyssa, 5, 6, 31, 39 divinity, 19–20, 43, 47, 78, 89,
Grillmeier, Aloys: on Council of 105n112, 126, 129, 176, 189; faith,
Chalcedon, 17, 21, 25; on person 133–137, 144, 154n121;
(prosōpon), 24, 69; on neo- incarnation, 20, 23, 34, 81, 88, 90–
92, 128–129, 137–140, 144, 166,
Index 229
173; nescience, 130–133, 135–136; Loofs, Friedrich, 45

140, 143–144, 162–163, 171–172, Löser, Werner, 8–9
183–184, 192, 201–202n115; Lossky, Vladimir, 59n127
obedience, 44, 86, 88, 94–96, 118, Lubac, Henri de, 5–6
120–121, 125, 129, 133, 137–140, Luther, Martin, 175, 178–179, 201n100
171–173, 181, 183–187, 192–193, Madden, Nicholas, 31, 33, 38, 42, 51
209; positive soteriological role of Mary, 19, 20, 122–123, 126, 128–129,
humanity, 43–44, 88–90, 125, 135– 153n102
136, 166, 178–179, 183–191, 209; Mascall, E. L., 3, 108
pre-existence, 23, 28, 34, 65, 110, Maximus the Confessor: on agony of
123, 144–145; temporal horizon, Christ, 44, 167, 184–187;
113–116, 160–163; titles, 110, appropriation of Chalcedon, 30, 36–
148n19, 210. See also christology, 40, 42, 45–46, 55n52; diachronic
kenōsis, trinity christology, 48–49; on energies and
John Damascene, 93, 167 wills of Christ, 40–45, 47, 58n111,
John of the Cross, 171, 172 185–187; on hypostasis, 31–33, 36–
John the Grammarian, 26–27, 29, 31, 35 38; logos tēs physeōs/tropos tēs hyparxeōs
John Paul II, 2 distinction, 30, 38–40, 57n92, 57–
Jugie, Martin, 47, 60n137 58n98, 146–147; on natural vs.
Justinian (emperor), 26, 55n52 gnomic will, 184–185; on natures of
Kannengiesser, Charles, 6 Christ, 33–34, 56n69; and neo-
Kasper, Walter, 17, 63, 100n13, 138–139, Chalcedonianism, 30, 31, 36, 42, 61;
kenōsis, 90, 112, 140, 143–144, 177, 179– on psychosomatic analogy, 34,
180, 211 57n96; spiritual interpretation of
Küng, Hans, 119, 168 paschal mystery, 173–175
Leo I (pope), 20–21, 24–25, 50, 206 McGuckin, John A., 21, 52n11
Leontius of Byzantium, 23, 29–31, 34–35, McIntosh, Mark A., 7–8, 103n69, 142,
45, 54–55n51, 55n52, 56n74, 145, 172, 193–194, 198n43
57n82, 57–58n98, 70 Moloney, Raymond, 151n83
Leontius of Jerusalem, 26–27, 29, 30, 35– Mongrain, Kevin, 193
36, 45, 54–55n51, 70 monophysitism, 18, 21, 24, 29, 50, 54n38,
Léthel, François-Marie, 44, 185–186, 143, 146, 186
202n131 monothelitism, 3, 125
Levering, Matthew, 201–202n115 Moltmann, Jürgen, 96, 179–180
Locke, John, 63 nature (physis): 20, 24–25, 26, 32–35
logos asarkos, 90, 99, 143, 144, 157n168, neo-Chalcedonianism: definition, 27–29;
173, 190, 209 as dialectical theology, 27–28. See also
logos-sarx/logos-anthrōpos distinction, 19, 21– Balthasar, Hans Urs von;
22, 60n137, 69–70, 101n29 enhypostasia; hypostasis; John the
Lohmeyer, Ernst, 135 Grammarian; Leontius of Byzantium;
Lonergan, Bernard, 152n88
Leontius of Jerusalem; Maximus the Riedlinger, Helmut, 126

Confessor Riesenfeld, Harald, 109
neo-scholasticism, 2, 4–5, 108–109, 128 Rosenzweig, Franz, 73
Nestorius, Nestorianism, 19–24, 46, 50, Schillebeeckx, Edward, 17, 168
69, 89, 105n101, 123, 143, 144, Schoonenberg, Piet, 17, 64–66, 71,
152n84, 183 100n13
Nicaea, First Council of (325 C.E.), 20, 22, Schürmann, Heinz, 110
122, 206–207 Schweitzer, Albert, 2, 113
Nicholas of Cusa, 171, 172–173 Sempiternus Rex (Pius XII), 124, 152n84
Norris, Richard A., 22–23 Seifert, Josef, 101–102n37
Oakes, Edward T., 197n1 Seiller, Léon, 124
O’Collins, Gerald, 154n121 Severus of Antioch, 26, 29, 34
O’Hanlon, Gerard F., 9, 96, 157n169, 194 Sherwood, Polycarp, 15n33
O’Regan, Cyril, 6, 90, 209 Sobrino, Jon, 154n121
Origen of Alexandria, 5, 7, 15n33, 54n51, soteriology: admirabile commercium, 166–
56n74, 58n103, 114, 123, 145 169, 173, 178–180; ransom, 118,
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 125, 147, 152n86 163; solidarity, 119–120, 168–171,
perichōrēsis, 42, 44–45, 58n108, 146–147, 177–178, 198n43; representation,
179, 211 159, 164–169, 176–177, 198n43,
person: Boethius on, 70; vs. conscious 198–199n45, 200n85
subject, 71–73, 210–211; and Speyr, Adrienne von, 5, 133, 144,
intersubjectivity, 73–75; and mission, 153n112, 156n156, 159, 171–175,
75–78; modern psychological 184, 192–195, 201–202n115
definitions, 62–67; Rusticus on, 70; Theodoret of Cyrus, 22
as theological concept, 67–71. See theopaschite formula, 9, 26, 29, 94, 186,
also hypostasis 195
Pseudo-Dionysius, 5, 43, 55n52, 93 Thomas Aquinas: on analogy, 84–85, 93;
Pitstick, Alyssa Lyra, 9–10, 50, 60n143, on faith of Christ, 134, 155n127,
186, 188–191, 194, 197n1 155n133; on humanity of Christ as
prayer, 132, 183, 212 instrumentum conjunctum, 184; on
Przywara, Erich, 5, 80, 84–85, 103– incarnation, 138; on knowledge of
104n73 Christ, 128; on mission and
Rahner, Karl: Antiochene sympathies, 50, procession, 78–79; on obedience of
60n139, 125–126; on Balthasar, 145; Christ, 201n113; on redemption,
on Chalcedon as end and beginning, 168, 176, 198n38
17; on divine impassibility, 95–96; Thunberg, Lars, 45, 55n53, 61, 100n1
on human consciousness of Christ, Tixeront, Joseph, 47, 60n137
125–127, 130–132; on hypostatic trinity: cross as trinitarian event, 164–165,
union and divinization, 151n83 179–183; hypostatic distance, 170,
Ratzinger, Joseph (Benedict XVI), 50, 179–181, 201–202n115, 203n161;
101n24, 212 trinitarian inversion, 137–140,
Index 231
156n153, 162–163; unity of

procession and mission, 78–79, 93,
95, 119, 122, 182, 186
Vatican II (council), [209n8]
Walker, Adrian, 122
Weinandy, Thomas G., 127, 152n90
Weiss, Johannes, 113
White, Thomas Joseph, 152n90
Wright, N. T., 148n19
Yeago, David, 8, 208
Zizioulas, John, 56n67

Existence As Prayer: American University Studies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Existence As Prayer: American University Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S

MARK L. YENSON holds degrees in English literature and a Ph.D. in the-

University College, London, Ontario, and an active member of the Von

MARK L. YENSON holds degrees in English literature and a Ph.D. in the-

This book is a volume in a Peter Lang monograph series.

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The Scripture quotations contained herein (except those within citations)

© 2014 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

1 Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian Legacy 17

2 Person, Mission, and the Analogy of Being 61

3 The Consciousness of Christ 107

4 Christ’s Consciousness and the Cross 159

Feast of St. Dominic

Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Chalcedonian Christology and the Consciousness of Christ

Gregory of Nazianzus, “No person of sense would place his hope in an

some essential aspects of Jesus’ self-understanding as the precondition of his

centre.10 It is important to note the clear line of continuity between the

Hans Urs von Balthasar as Patristic Interpreter

companion, Adrienne von Speyr. Herrlichkeit (Glory of the Lord) is a magisterial

In the breadth of their theological reflection, engagement with philosophy and

Balthasar rejects an anachronistic approach that would find in the Fathers

Balthasar, this “essence” of Christianity is expressed in terms of the analogia

Balthasar, Chalcedon and Maximus

Christology. My contention is that the principles of Balthasar’s Christology are

Balthasar’s Christology has frequently been described as “Neo-

Chalcedonian Christology, renders a clarification of Balthasar’s position on

Aim and Methodology

Chapter 4 focuses on the consciousness of Christ on the cross. I argue

Maximus and the Neo-Chalcedonian Legacy

I will argue for a renewed understanding of Chalcedonian Christology in

approaches, the Antiochene logos-anthrōpos approach represented by Theodore

The Council appeared to have achieved a synthesis of Antiochene and

Chalcedon: The Triumph of Antiochene-Latin Christology?

In passages such as this, Norris finds a “quasi-narrative account of the

Nestorius, in contrast, wants to emphasize “the concrete, intelligible, visible

Nestorius characteristically use the term prosōpon to describe the union of

Finally, although the statement ultimately adopted by the council incorporated

approach to Christology, which understands the person/hypostasis of the Logos

that pre-Chalcedonian Antiochene theologians could not have found

Second, this “conservative majority” could lay claim to fidelity to both

A shift in emphasis is perceptible: pressure was exerted on the bishops at

Maximus the Confessor and Neo-Chalcedonian Theology

H ypostasis. It fell to Neo-Chalcedonian theologians to find a definition of

Fathers of the fourth century, hypostasis represents the “individual form,”

“ From which, in which, and which he is.” The interpenetrative but

reduced to one case among other cases of created being. As Balthasar

T he Enhypostatic Humanity of Christ. With the identification of the

particularized in the same act of assumption by the Logos.86 The hypostasis of

Balthasar affirms Maximus’s doctrine of the enhypostatic humanity of Christ

T he logos/tropos Distinction. Maximus sharpens these distinctions and

The passage is of particular note for its use of explicitly Chalcedonian

It is therefore according to the mode of existence that Christ’s humanity is

The logos-tropos distinction offers a way of describing the preservation of the

T he Energies and W ills of Christ. Maximus further shifts the focus of

not purely notional: it is grounded ontologically in the union of natures with

Here Maximus extends the logos-tropos distinction to show that there is a

The humanity of Christ, therefore, becomes expressive in its entirety of

Here we find Maximus at once overcoming the limitations of Alexandrian and

Balthasar’s Maximian R essourcement

which Balthasar calls “the structure of finite being” in Maximus’s

As Demetrios Bathrellos has noted, this tendency to reduce Christology to the