Theology and aesthetic

It is a great honor, indeed, to be awarded an honorary doctorate in humanities by the Catholic University of America. I ask you to accept my heartfelt thanks for this. Yet, I would not be surprised to find that you were not familiar with my—alas—quantitatively extended writings. The English and American translations represent a more or less arbitrary selection. And of my main work, in which I attempt a synthesis, nothing has as yet been translated. Therefore, in choosing the topic for my presentation, I take the liberty to acquaint you with my reasons for changing from the study of humanities to theology. I do not intend to give you an autobiographical sketch but will try to outline a pertinent problem which in my judgment is the central question, if not of humane letters, certainly of Christian theology.

For ten semesters I studied German philology and literature and finished with a doctorate. I never earned a doctorate in theology. During my studies, the question that claimed my thoughts most was this: There are many good works of literature, music and art, and of other spiritual or human activities. How can we recognize a masterwork that, though belonging to a particular category, transcends it and becomes unique? There are thousands of poems written about the night. Why then does Goethe’s “Nightsong” outshine them all? There are hundreds of Viennese musicals; why is Mozart’s “Magic Flute” so far superior? Many of Mozart’s youthful works were consciously conventional, in the style of the contemporary music of Italy or of the sons of Bach. How can we account for the qualitative jump in “Idomeneo” and the “Marriage of Figaro”? Why the difference between Kyd’s “Hamlet” and that of Shakespeare? Why does Plato rank so high among philosophers that a modem scholar could say that all later philosophers were merely commentators?

Please understand, I am not counterposing the individual to the general. Obviously, every individual has his particular characteristics. I am speaking about a work that becomes incomparable within its own genre. Yet, the incomparable usually rises out of a long progression of aspiring efforts. Shakespeare would not have become what he was without the history of theater that preceded him. Still, one can make thousands of comparisons yet never grasp the unique through these. Nevertheless, the expert must develop a sensorium, a certain ability to make such distinctions (mostly as a result of long practice). Generally, the layman does not have this capacity; he can give only subjective impressions such as, “I like this music,” or “that one does not please me.” The sensorium of the expert is objective: He apprehends the uniqueness of the quality. I was fortunate to have teachers who knew how to develop this sense in their students, leading us to happy discoveries in literature, art, history, and music.

It was during that time that I found the keynote that later became central in my theology as Gestalt, an expression hard to translate: form, figure, shape. Hopkins introduced the word “inscape.” The mind sees an organized whole, with all the articulation of detail necessary for the comprehension of the basic idea manifest in its fullness. A great work of art is not built from already coined words but creates from the imprinted language new, never-heard words which, when uttered, explain themselves to those who have eyes and ears for it. Every child gets the drift of Papageno’s arias while Pamina’s aria of desperation or the tercet of leave-taking remain wondrous even for the expert. One never gets enough of hearing such greatartworks as Bach’s fugues. Each time they reveal, even, for the “skilled senses” of gifted listeners, greater depth, deeper satisfactions. Philosophers of art, like Schelling or Hegel, will try to explain why a certain period was ready for a Sophocles, a Dante, or a Chopin, but that the work then really takes shape is inexplicable. Its necessity is preordained not from the outside but from within.

There is a parallel to this in personalistic philosophy’s insight with which I became acquainted first through R. Allers and later through Jaspers and Buber. The parallel lies in love where it rises above eros. True love can recognize and hold fast the beloved’s uniqueness within the species, even after the erotic fancy has faded. Things of the world do partake of the uniqueness of God not only by species but especially individually. The more spiritual they are, the more unique they become. The saints, for example, have formed a family, the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints. Yet each is incomparable. The uniqueness of the one God is expressed in them, again and again.

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You can see by now the transition from the arts to theology happens. The fascination does not originate from the religious sense that subjectively exists in every person. Since all are created for God, they possess the desiderium visionis bone absoluti (the desire to see the wholly good). This can lead to the pursuit of philosophy of religion or history of religion, neither of which has interested me much. The fascination is with Jesus Christ—if one sees Christ as he presents himself—with his uniqueness that cannot be compared to anything else in world history. The Fathers of the Church called this faculty to see the “eye of faith.”

Seeing the figure [Gestalt] of Christ means that we see the Word of God in its essential organic wholeness. For this we need first of all the Old Testament which has created in advance a vocabulary with which Christ could express himself: the covenant, the great prophecies of salvation and destruction; the messianic and the priestly; an ethics subject to God’s authority by obedience to God’s commandments; the liberation of mankind; witness that is to be given to the peoples; the suffering of the righteous, the obdurateness of the people in resisting God’s word—these are sometimes incompatible elements which become integrated in the figure [Gestalt] of Christ. To these belongs also the concept of the fruitfulness of the sterile: The line to the phenomenon of Mary issues straight from the Old Testament, from Sara through Hanna to Elisabeth.

But to return to what is more important, to the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus, because he is the one and only exposition of God (John 1:8), infinitely rich and of a paradoxical simplicity that integrates all the elements. He is absolute sovereignty and absolute humility; he is infinitely approachable who can be reached by everyone and infinitely inaccessible, ever beyond reach. Jesus’ word can be understood by all, but only in the light of his testimony of being the Son of God does it become truly clear. Moreover, only in relation to his death and resurrection does it attain the fullness of its meaning: Jesus’ entire being is one single Word. This perfect being becomes manifest only from the testimonials of faith: those of Paul which are as important as the ones in the Acts of the Apostles; John is as authoritative as the synoptics. They, all together, form a magnificent polyphony—not a pluralism in the contemporary sense. They can be compared to views of a free-standing statue that has to be observed from all directions to understand its self-expression. The more facets we can view, the better we can grasp the unity of the inspiration. The possessor of this inspiration is the Church, the early charisma of which was to compose the New Testament and establish its canon. Only her eye of faith, guided by the Holy Spirit, could see the whole phenomenon of Jesus Christ.

Hence the fundamental principle that exegesis—which is indeed a very valuable theological science—can be practiced meaningfully only within the comprehensive view of the Church. If one stands outside, one will—unavoidably—begin to break up the indivisible unity of the figure [Gestalt] of Christ by changing words to more fashionable ones which most likely do not mean the same, or to words that can be found also in other religions so that while one hears familiar expressions, these are merely generically religious and not uniquely individual to Christianity. Such manipulations are just as destructive as if, for example, someone would omit every fifth or tenth beat from a phrase of a Mozart symphony.

Please believe me that in stating this I do not defend some kind of fundamentalism or biblical literalism, but the inspired spiritual phenomenon, the active, unified comprehension that is gained from the New Testament. The issue is not the letter but the content. To give an example: Already in pre-Pauline tradition and then, even more, by him and by John, but also in some of the words of the synoptics, the meaning of the Passion is understood as Christ’s representative suffering for us (qui propter nos hominem and prater nostram salutem…). If you relativize and flatten these statements, the entire Catholic faith collapses; the Eucharist loses its meaning; the flesh given for us and the blood shed for us makes no sense. Neither is Christ’s divinity necessary because only by this can he carry the sins of the world in his incarnation. Consequently, the Holy Trinity is also eliminated, as well as the central postulate of the New Testament—that God is Love—because the proof of this, according to John, is that the Father gave his Son in a superabundance of love to this world. If we deny the pro nobis of the Cross, then we regress into being one of the general religions of history where God is either mythological in his involvement with the fate of the world (e.g. in process theology) or he hovers like a platonic sun of goodness above all the suffering of the world.

Moreover, if the integrity of the figure [Gestalt] of Christ is lost from view, it cannot be demanded that the faithful identify their lives with him and, under certain circunstances, even endure martyrdom. Everything that deserves the name of ecclesial sanctity originates from this unified view. Regardless of what particular facet of Christ’s figure [Gestalt] was reflected in an individual saint, he or she always points to the whole. Teresa of Avila demonstrates not only love of God but also love of neighbor. Teresa of Calcutta derives all her love of neighbor from the love of God.

My intention in the first part of my trilogy called “Aesthetik” was not merely to train our spiritual eyes to see Christ as he shows himself but, beyond that, to prove that all great and history-making theology always followed this method. Of course, it is evident that God cannot be limited to a system, that there are unforeseeably manifold approaches to the same central mystery. Therefore, I chose to present in the second volume of “Aesthetik” twelve approaches which appeared to me the most original and inspired. All lead to the dazzling weight, power, and light, the Kabod, the doxa-gloria of God revealing himself in Christ and, finally, in his Cross and Resurrection.

But how different is, for example, the way of Irenaeus—who pursues the gnostics’ philosophy of history ad absurdum and through this shows how the logos adapts himself to mankind’s history and gently converts this to God from within: gloria Dei vivens homo—from that of Anselm who sees some kind of necessity in the freest decisions of God—Incarnation, Cross, Virgin Birth—a free necessity, such as that of a perfect work of art. It differs again from the pilgrimage of Dante who, driven by Eros through hell and purgatory, cleanses himself by repentance and confession and reaches the heights of divine agape; or from the road of a Pascal who, in facing the laws of physics and all the modern natural sciences, recognizes the paradox of man that cannot be reduced to these but can only be resolved by the even greater paradox of crucified love. I do not want to enumerate more approaches. These few should suffice for you to share with me the recognition that all these ways run concentrically toward the one and same mystery that Goethe calls the “holy-public secret,” but which, despite all differences, never are contradictory.

It is the shortsightedness of some of modern theology to believe that its proponents say something new with their slogan of theological pluralism or that they have introduced a new period of theological thought. This belief is merely the outcome of a theological rationalism that thinks it can compress the mysteries of Christianity into a small textbook that can be taken in at a glance. Such fantasies burst like children’s balloons before the infinity of God and his self-revelation. As long as the manifold approaches all lead to the unfathomable mystery of the God who revealed himself in Christ, they are all open and permitted to me. That they really lead to the center depends on the condition that they abide within the Sancta Catholica, because all roads outside of this lose some essential aspect of the perfect whole.

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Alas, we see God’s glory only in reflections and riddles, even unto the greatest paradox, the abandonment of Christ by God on the cross. But what is unique in the Christian faith is that it really sees that this God who surpasses comprehension does not vanish in the twilight of the ineffable—as gods do in other mysticisms—where man can only stammer and finally fall silent, but that this ever-greater God comes towards us, drawing nearer and nearer, ever more giving and more demanding, until that which is understandable to man becomes so luminous, so dazzling, that it overwhelms him. Only in this way is negative theology Christian and the summit of positive theology.

This is what I intended to show in the first part of my trilogy that I called Gloria: A Theological Aesthetic.

But God does not show himself to us only to be admired. He wants to draw us into his own life. Therefore, the second part of the trilogy must show the drama of God’s struggle for the love of sinful man—the pathos of the indissoluble covenant made by God with man—through frighteningly increasing rejection by man of the divine offer. The more God offers himself, the more man turns away. (Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.) How can this tragedy end? Where are the limits of the action? I have not yet written the last act of this drama.

Only at the end, when we have seen the pulchrum and have experienced the bonum, can the trilogy be concluded in a manner that all can affirm as verum. This is the problem of “theo-logic,” the possibility of expressing the mysterium in humanly understandable and responsible language. The completion of this, the third part, will probably not be granted me. If it is not presumptuous, I would like to quote a poem of Rilke from the beginning of his “Book of Hours:”

My life I am living in circles expanding;
Everything is within their span.
Perhaps I shant run the last through to its ending,
Yet I’ll attain it if I can.

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In conclusion, I want to touch on two related points that have important consequences: Christianity and world religions and Christianity and apologetics.

One may safely say with Karl Rahner that all religions are “seeking Christologies,” that man’s religious predisposition and desire makes him strive toward a final union with God, which is God’s gift to us, called Jesus Christ. One may further say about the good tidings of Christ that God will not withhold his supernatural Christ-centered gift of grace from any man, not even the non-Christian man. Man is created by God to be a God-seeker. Paul said this in Athens, but he did not say whether man could find God all by himself. God created man as a God-seeker so that He may freely manifest himself as a finder of man.

Up to this point I do not mind following the present trend, seeing in all religions a foreshadowing of Christianity, logoi spermatikoi, as the Fathers called them. But there is an impassable obstacle, which can perhaps be best identified by the Old Testament prohibition: “Thou shall not make any graven images of God.” You should leave the place free and empty, to be filled by God as he wills it. Idols, however, are not only carved images. Idols that obscure God can be practices like Buddhist meditation, theories of how to experience the divine, speculations about the absolute in the manner of Hegel—anything that preempts the place where God plans to raise the figure in a shape [Gestalt] that is unguessable. Here is the limit of a transcendental theology of Christianity. He who does not see this will not be able to appreciate the uniqueness of the historical Christian event; he will not want to see it, for the sake of achieving some kind of harmony between expressions of general religious feeling.

I would like to clarify this somewhat more in my second point, Christianity and apologetics. If we review the attempts made in world history to come closer to the absolute from the relativity of the world and to anchor man’s being in it, there seem to be only two ways. The first may be identified as religious paganism: heart and mind trying to transcend the finite and perishable to move toward the absolute that is not “becoming” but “being,” infinite, indivisible, beyond all pretence and illusions. It is ihe way of the desiderium naturale, rising straight up or plunging straight down—a vertical movement that contrasts with history that runs its course horizontally in time. This is the way of all asiatic religions, as it is that of the pre-Socratics, the Platonists, Stoics, neo-Platonics, and also of the Islamic Sufis, even though Islam is a mixture of pagan and biblical elements. All strive to take roots in the absolute, physis or idea or logos, and to overcome from there the fate of the world. One should put a much stronger emphasis on the similarity of all natural religions in their final relevant forms. They all seek the source, the origin, the Alpha.

The movement that the Old Testament introduces is totally different: in the beginning there is a convenant initiated by God which, however, points essentially toward a historical future, a vanishing point, an omega, when the ever imperfect, again-and-again broken alliance becomes finalized, the messianic time arrives, the lines of God and people cross each other in a final event. The pathos of Judaism is immense; it permeates all world history. Judaic expectations became secularized, not only in Marxism. which forgets the basic convenant and acknowledges only prophetic movements, but also in the ideology of technical progress that fascinates all—the first, second, and third worlds.

My opinion regarding these two religious ideologies, the pagan one and the Jewish one, is that they are totally irreconcilable, like the vertical and the horizontal. One cannot be a Zen Buddhist and a Communist at the same time. One cannot devote one’s life for the furtherance of world progress and at the same time withdraw from the world. But what is irreconcilable in the world (the vertical and the horizontal) forms a cross, an empty cross that cannot be occupied by anyone. Jesus Christ alone can fill this empty space, because he is the fulfillment both of pagan human longing and of Jewish hopeful faith. He is the Word of God for all mankind. Therefore, the Christians alone are the “third gender,” the otherwise impossible synthesis of all religious humane letters. To show this as clearly as it would deserve would be a large new topic that I cannot attempt here. A few remarks will have to suffice.

In pagan piety, the knowlege is deeply imbedded that man is only a reproduction and not the original, and therefore man feels that the original must, by its own power, manifest itself to have hearts achieve peace in God. Jesus Christ is this original, he alone, because only he is totally God and totally man. Man does not want to be absorbed by God, but wants to find God and to retain and affirm his own humanity. Jesus’ resurrection is the salvation, the safekeeping of all that is human in God.

In the Jewish faith and hope there is an unsatisfied craving, an unrest which, moreover, is plagued by the awareness of some kind of banishment and rejection by God until the time the Messiah arrives. Paganism proceeds from radical criticism of human finiteness and attempts to rise toward the divine, while Judaism begins with radical criticism of all existing relationships and demands a change in all social and cultural structures urgently to bring about the reign of God. Christianity alone does not begin with criticism.

Jesus Christ brought to the Jewish criticism and unrest the blessing of peace: The world is reconciled with God in him; there is no more painful banishment of God’s children. The final coming of the Messiah is still in the future: in the already-now, there is still a not-yet; yearning and faith are still with us, but also an overwhelming awareness of God’s victory over the godless world and sin.

Nothing was more difficult for the young Church than to harbor both pagans and Jews. Nevertheless, she is the synthesis founded on the existence of Jesus Christ: And herewith she herself becomes in world history the figure, the form [Gestalt], the living witness to the unity and uniqueness of the Christ-figure [Gestalt]. In her unity lies her credibility. Her internal and external unity, to which also the unity of ecclesial office belongs is the only apologetic that Jesus Christ had in mind when he left us the words: “This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another” (John 13:35) In the office of today we say a prayer which sums up exactly all my concerns: “Deus, cuius ineffabilis sapientia in scandalo crucis mirabiliter declaratur, concede nobis, ita passionis filii tui gloriam contineri, ut in cruce ipsius numquam cessemus fiducialiter gloriam…”