Obituary: Erich Przywara

Prophets who are seized by angels and dragged by the hair before the throne of glory, there to learn how much they must “suffer for His name,” can only be solitaries. Solitaries in full missionary communication with the world: far away, yet mixed up in close combat with friend and foe, people and non-people; compelled into the distance to discern the spirits, yet acting on the strength of their first, unforgettable, unsurpassable contact with consuming fire. Their word burns; it baptizes not in water, but in spirit and fire; zeal for God’s house consumes them; they themselves are a flaming certainty. And when they give their weary souls back to God after a life-time of misunderstanding and underappreciation, of disregard, contempt, mockery, and betrayal by their own intimates, who is to say that the all-consuming Lord won’t send his fiery chariot to fetch them home?

Przywara’s center is not some secular or anthropological immanence, but the elusive point of encounter with the living God. This is the biblical point, the “covenant”-point, and it is not a place, but an unseizable exchange, an admirabile commercium. God’s overmastering inbreaking: sume et sucipe, man and world “as nothing” before this divine all, and yet empowered to self-being by its excessive power, ennobled to beloved status by the surging tidal wave of incomprehensible love. Przywara dubbed this impossible, yet necessary point the analogia entis. The word has entered into the general theological vocabulary, but the true pathos behind the term has not been understood or appropriated along with it. How could a pathos be systematized? In this toothless and no longer discernible scholastic form, the analogia entis was easily stigmatized by Karl Barth as “the invention of the Antichrist,” though at the time it was probably the one thing most akin to his own pathos: Both Barth and Przywara opposed Kantianism and Hegelianism, Schleiermacherhian and modernist methods of immanence, and they resisted every human attempt to take possession of the living God in whatever form, religious or otherwise. In light of Przywara’s radicalism, this inter⁠-⁠confessional controversy proves to be a misunderstanding (once his analysis of the original Protestant concern is seen to be correct).

Like everyone else placed in the presence of the living God and charged with making him known, Przywara is more than a mere “thinker.” True, he was also a thinker⁠—⁠one more acute and more relentless than any of his contemporaries⁠—⁠but this commitment represented only half of his nature, as it were. For him, to think meant to exercise the Pauline office of “casting down strongholds with weapons mighty for God, unmasking sophisms, razing every haughty fortress in rebellion against God, so as to capture every thought for the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:4⁠-⁠5). The passion with which he clears things up (and away), undercuts every possible system, and bends thought back under the yoke of relativity makes sense only as what he himself understood it to be: obedient service to the mystery that the work of intellectual clearance helps bring into view. It’s important to notice what stands at the beginning of the entire corpus: songs, poems, and dramatic scenes⁠—⁠followed by shorter religious writings in which thought and poetry still inseparably intermingle. Yet even these early texts amply evince a critical reduction that participates, servant-like, in what Eichendorff ascribes to God: “If you’re the hand who gently mars / the self⁠-⁠built walls before our eyes, / if thus we’re free to see the stars, / then far from me to mourn what dies.” To be shattered, here, is to be initiated into the “Kingdom of Heaven,” into “Love” as “Christianity’s Essential Core,” but also into the overwhelming pilgrim call in the “Church Year,” and, above all, into “Consecration”⁠—⁠the consecration that is existence before God and on the way to him. This last book is the key to the entire period.

In the next phase, marked by theoretical engagement with the philosophy and theology of the day, each new writing seeks more rigorously, sharply, and uncompromisingly than its predecessor to rout pretended systems, Christian or otherwise⁠—⁠hence the arc from “God: The Mystery of the World,” “Foundations of Religion,” and “God,” through “Kierkegaard’s Secret,” “Kant Today,” and the essays in “The Controversy of Our Time,” to the initial culmination represented by “Analogia Entis, Vol. I,” which is then followed by the texts that carry the project further: “The Scope of the Analogia Entis,” “Summula,” “Humanitas,” and, finally, “Man, Volume I” The reader should keep constantly in mind that this entire series is matched text for text by a second series quite different from it in terms of form: “Christ Lives in Me,” “Carmel,” “Homo,” “Hymn,” “Crucis Mysterium,” “Nuptiae Agni,” “Resurrection in Death,” “Humility, Patience, Love,” and “Hymns of Carmel.” The fact that the two series belong together, and that each writing in the first intentionally corresponds to another in the second, becomes clear in a third series. In this third series, which he produced alongside the first two, Przywara tests his own thought by holding it up to the judgment of the great ecclesial tradition: In the early period, we have “Newman,” who is present in “Christianity’s Essential Core,” but also in “Foundations of Religion,” insofar as it marks a turn from Scheler to Newman; in the middle period, there is Thomas Aquinas (in numerous essays and in “Analogia Entis, Vol. I”), but especially “Augustine,” whose “Gestalt” (to paraphrase the subtitle) Pryzwara selects and develops as a “Structure,” and, of course, John of the Cross, joined in his mind by Teresa of Avila and, even more importantly, Therese of Lisieux (from “Carmel,” “Hymn,” through “Crucis Mysterium,” to the “Hymns of Carmel”); finally, we find Ignatius of Loyola shaping the project as a whole (from “Majestas Divina: Ignatian Spirituality” and “Heroism,” through the three-volume commentary on the Exercises, “Deus semper major,” to “Ignatiana,” the three studies Przywara composed to honor the four hundredth anniversary of the saint’s death). Like the commentary on the Exercises, the portraits of saints contain almost nothing but biblical theology. In this respect, they point back to the works that represent something like an ultimate orientation on the part of their author: from his early “Kingdom of Heaven” (the Synoptics), through “Christ Lives in Me” (Paul), to “Johannine Christianity” (John), crowned, at last, by “Altar and New Covenant.”

Many who have attempted to follow the movement of Pryzwara’s thought have felt like Tantalus: It’s as if (to vary the metaphor) they had been endlessly, fruitlessly tossed to and fro by surging breakers imprisoned within the sheer, inexorable straits of finitude⁠—⁠over against a God who not only remains unknowable, but who answers every attempted approach on our part by suddenly withdrawing into an ever more transcendent unknowability. Now, one can and must wonder how Przywara’s relentless emphasis on the dynamism of the “ever more” might allow for, or be compatible with, any sort of authentic divine revelation. But at this point we need to recall the prophetic pathos that drives him; his one aim, pursued through all the wrack and ruin of foundering finitude, is to convey a feeling⁠—⁠in the total nullification of feeling!⁠—⁠for the fire of the living God. Were this not the case, the impetuosity of Przywarian analogy might inevitably plunge it headlong into a self⁠-⁠consuming dialectic. In that case, the Cross, where the lines of finitude meet in mutually cancelling sublation, would be the only valid manifestation of God (a claim that’s frequent enough in Przywara himself, but that mustn’t be isolated or abstracted from his vision as a whole). Yet Przywara, like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, reads this unique sign as the revelation of God’s love⁠—⁠ever more unseizable in its absoluteness⁠—⁠for the finite, sinful creature who has broken faith with the divine covenant of love.

On this reading, analogy becomes a “nuptial theology” in the sense of John of the Cross, but also of Luther, whom Przywara thus centers on this fundamental intuition: The night of thought becomes a night of ineffable union, not “mystically,” but in the “wondrous exchange” of the Cross, which precisely as night is the glory of love and precisely as abandonment the marvel of union. Resurrection doesn’t lie behind this union, but in it; the title “Resurrection in Death” says it all.

Przywaras’s work is impossible to classify or master. Most have therefore chosen the path of least resistance and ignored it altogether. But his former apprentices were forever changed by their encounter with him; regardless of where they have ended up positioning themselves, their thought and life bears his mark. And revisiting him today, they find themselves curiously unsettled. Is it because they realize how much more youthful this “old master” has remained in comparison to all the young voices making themselves heard today?