Tag: academic

Introduction

St. John of the Cross, acclaimed by the Western Church as a true “master in the faith”^[i] and “guide of those within the holy Church who seek greater intimacy with God,”^[ii] teaches that all Christian prayer must undergo a process of maturation. In the early stages of the spiritual life, prayer tends to be primarily discursive, reliant on words and images, whereas more mature prayer tends to be characterized by wordless, loving attentiveness to the presence of God.^[iii] The decisive transition is described by St. John as an interior movement from “meditation to contemplation,”^[iv] that is, from prayer which is more active to prayer which is more passive and still. In one memorable passage, the Mystical Doctor compares this transition to God “weaning [the soul] from the delicate and sweet food of infants and making it eat bread with crust … the food of the strong.”^[v] St. Teresa of Jesus, for her part, describes the same transition as the change from laboriously drawing water from a well to receiving “heavenly water that in its abundance soaks and saturates”^[vi] the soul. In either analogy, it is clear that this maturation in prayer comes in God’s time and as a result of his initiative, not as something achieved by the one praying as a result of willpower or technique. 

The individual has an indispensable part to play, however, in disposing themselves to receive the gift of contemplation. St. Teresa notes that “in the beginning it almost always occurs after a long period of mental prayer.”^[vii]The practice of mental prayer is thus recommended by the masters of the spiritual life in order to dispose the soul to receive the gift of contemplation and advance to the more mature degrees of Christian prayer. The Carmelite doctors are careful to distinguish, however, that this mental prayer does not require one to abandon vocal prayer and seek some purely apophatic state of consciousness. “The nature of mental prayer isn’t determined by whether or not the mouth is closed,” St. Teresa of Jesus wryly observes: “If while speaking I thoroughly understand and know that I am speaking with God and I have greater awareness of this than I do of the words I’m saying, mental and vocal prayer are joined.”^[viii] Father Wilfrid Stinissen, a spiritual son of Saints Teresa and John, distinguishes

three degrees in the development of prayer. In the beginning, it is often a prayer with the lips. While the tongue repeats the words, the thoughts continue to swarm around. When you succeed in reaching the content of the words, you have reached the second degree—the prayer of understanding … As you rise up to this meaning with your whole essence and not only with your understanding … the prayer sinks down into the heart. This is the third degree. … To a certain degree, the entire spiritual development, especially for us Westerners, deals with this transfer from the head to the heart.^[ix]

When vocal prayer is prayed with understanding, and preeminently when it is prayed with the engagement of the heart, which is “the place of this quest and encounter”^[x] with God, “this vocal prayer is now in fact mental prayer.”^[xi]Progress in prayer, then, consists most essentially not in the renunciation of words and images, but rather in engaging the heart in what is said with the lips and meditated upon with the intellect: “to stand before God with the mind in the heart,”^[xii] as the Eastern spiritual master Theophan the Recluse has it. The one who begins to pray “whole-heartedly” in this way opens himself up in time to the possibility of a purgative interior transformation, effected by God, who leads the soul into new, supernatural degrees of prayer. 

In the Churches of the East and West, two highly distinctive traditions of prayer have arisen, reflective of deep and irreducible differences in their theological and devotional “styles.” Arguably the most characteristic devotion of the Western Church is the Holy Rosary, in which it meditates, with the words of Scripture, on the central events of the life of Christ. The Rosary is “a form of Christocentric contemplation,”^[xiii] according to the phrase of St. John Paul II; it is a meditative gaze fixed on Christ, seen through the eyes of his Mother. In the Christian East, the tradition of the Jesus Prayer likewise aims to maintain a simple, insistent focus on Christ the Redeemer by the repetition of His divine name, a repetition which “simplifies and unifies” the soul and “gathers everything into itself,”^[xiv] integrating body, mind, and heart in the loving contemplation of the Lord. These two forms of vocal prayer, with due respect to their irreducible distinctness in style, nonetheless have the same end, which is to integrate the whole person in prayer and so dispose the soul to receive the gift of contemplation. Furthermore, far from being mere culturally conditioned (and therefore interchangeable) expressions of a basic impulse of Christian prayer towards integration, contemplation, and union, the Holy Rosary and the Jesus Prayer are mutually enriching approaches in disposing the soul to receive those gifts. While it is no doubt true that “the best prayer is for everybody the prayer to which he or she is moved by the Holy Spirit,”^[xv] all Christians, whether in the East or in the West, ought to consider making use of these two priceless treasures of devotion, which so complement each other in the integration and maturation of the soul towards perfect prayer and union with God.

The Holy Rosary

The Holy Rosary is first and foremost a Marian prayer, yet it “belongs to the kind of veneration of the Mother of God described by the [Second Vatican] Council: a devotion directed to the Christological centre of the Christian faith.”^[xvi] In each decade of the Rosary, the faithful meditate upon one of the central mysteries of the life of Christ; each decade, in fact, is a “‘meditation’ with Mary on Christ.”^[xvii] This insight is the key to praying the Rosary with understanding. The style of the Holy Rosary is entirely Marian, inasmuch as it is prayed with Mary and in “the school of Mary,”^[xviii] but the content of the Rosary is entirely Christological.^[xix] The Rosary presents the mysteries of Christ to us precisely as seen “through the eyes of her who was closest to the Lord.”^[xx] Like the Mother of God herself, who at the Wedding of Cana pointed the servants toward her Son and instructed them, “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5), the course of Hail Mary’s repeated in each decade of the Holy Rosary bring the soul into “the constant contemplation – in Mary’s company – of the face of Christ.”^[xxi]

It is not accidental, then, that “the center of gravity in the Hail Mary, the hinge as it were which joins its two parts, is the name of Jesus.”^[xxii] Indeed, “when we repeat the name of Jesus – the only name given to us by which we may hope for salvation (cf. Acts 4:12) – in close association with the name of his Blessed Mother, almost as if it were done at her suggestion, we set out on a path of assimilation meant to help us enter more deeply into the life of Christ.”^[xxiii] This path is the way of deepening faith and maturation in prayer which Mary herself walked in the course of her earthly life, from the Annunciation (the first of the Joyful Mysteries) to the Crucifixion (last of the Sorrowful Mysteries), and which she completed in glory with her Assumption and Coronation in Heaven. Since Mary has gone before us all on this path, she who is now “more honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim,”^[xxiv] opens up “the possibility of us too becoming assenters”^[xxv] to the will of God for us. From Mary and with Mary, we learn to offer our own ‘fiat voluntas tua’ to the Lord, imitating her posture of confident faith, of “silent waiting, humble serving, ready praise.”^[xxvi] In the delightful phrase of St. John Paul II, “the Rosary mystically transports us to Mary’s side as she is busy watching over the human growth of Christ in the home of Nazareth. This enables her to train us and to mold us with the same care, until Christ is ‘fully formed’ in us (cf. Gal 4:19).”^[xxvii]

Indeed, it is only with Mary—not just by her example, nor even by her intercession, but by joining ourselves withher on this path of faith—that we can attain to the fullness of maturity in Christ.  “If it was only through prayer that Mary trained to utter her own word of assent,” Hans Urs von Balthasar observes, “then we are truly unable to accomplish our assent by our own power: we must remain in an attitude of grateful attention looking to her who has truly been able to assent.”^[xxviii] As we attend to Mary, contemplating Christ with her and through her eyes, we find that we are conformedto Christ with her; Mary, who formed the humanity of Christ in her virginal womb, forms Christ anew in us.^[xxix]

The Jesus Prayer 

At the outset of his classic work On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, Lev Gillet, a monk of the Eastern Church, notes that “the invocation of the Name of Jesus can be put into many frames … but, whatever formula may be used, the heart and center of the invocation must be the Holy Name itself, the word Jesus. There resides the whole strength of the invocation.”^[xxx] As St. John Paul II observed, the center of each Hail Mary and so the heart of the Rosary as a whole is the repetition of the name of Jesus. Thus, without in any way diminishing its unique and irreducible value in itself, one might call the Rosary an elaborate Marian “frame” surrounding the Name of Jesus, a characteristically Western “formula” of the Jesus Prayer; indeed, “it is, as Frithjof Schuon has stated, ‘the Jesus Prayer of the Western Church.’”^[xxxi]

Nonetheless, the Jesus Prayer as it is prayed in the Eastern Church has its own distinctive value, part of which “lies precisely in the fact that, because of its radical simplicity, it can be prayed in conditions of distraction when more complex forms of prayer are impossible.”^[xxxii] The spiritual masters of the East recommend that “we daily assign a certain time to the invocation of the Name (besides the ‘free’ invocation which should be as frequent as possible),”^[xxxiii]with the result that “in time … the Name of Jesus will spontaneously come to your lips and almost continuously be present to your mind.”^[xxxiv] This “one-word prayer”^[xxxv] is a concrete and eminently practical means of fulfilling the Lord’s command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:16), of keeping, as Bishop Theophan the Recluse recommends, “the hands at work, the mind and heart with God.”^[xxxvi] It is not always possible to meditate; it is always possible to pronounce the name of Jesus, whether with the lips or in one’s mind alone.

The practice of the Jesus Prayer differs most sharply from the Holy Rosary in that it is not meditation, but invocation. The late Bishop Kallistos Ware clarifies this distinction:

According to the teaching of Eastern Christianity, the faculty of the imagination by means of which we form more or less living images according to our aptitude, has only a very limited place in the work of prayer … ‘He who sees nothing in prayer, sees God.’ Our minds, habitually dispersed in a great diversity of thoughts and ideas, should be unified, brought back from multiplicity to simplicity and emptiness; from diversity to sobriety. It [sic] should be purified of all mental images and all intellectual concepts until it is no longer conscious of anything other than the presence of God, invisible and incomprehensible.^[xxxvii]

In the evocative phrase of St. John Climacus, “it is necessary to imprison the intellect in words.”^[xxxviii] Rather than meditating upon the individual mysteries of the life of Christ, then, the practitioner of the Jesus Prayer binds his mind in a resolute attentiveness to “the Mystery that surpasses all understanding (cf. Eph 3:19): the Mystery of the Word made flesh.”^[xxxix] Thus, Gillet’s classic introduction to the Jesus Prayer advises beginners, “Begin to pronounce [the Name] with adoration and love. Cling to it. Repeat it. Do not think that you are invoking the Name; think only of Jesus himself.”^[xl] The goal of the practice is for the words of the prayer, even the Name itself, to become imperceptible to the one praying, transparent to the presence of the One who is named. In effect, what is described by the eastern masters is the transition from vocal prayer to mental prayer and on to the prayer of the heart. One recognizes the same integration of the whole person, described by St. John Paul II as the goal of prayer in the school of Mary, in this description of the fruits of the Jesus Prayer: “The participation of the mind becomes more intense and spontaneous, while the sounds uttered by the tongue become less important … Like a drop of ink that falls on blotting paper, the act of prayer should spread steadily outwards from the conscious and reasoning center of the brain, until it embraces every part of ourselves.”^[xli]

To be sure, the indispensable Marian dispositions described in the previous section, particularly her posture “of faith, of silence, of attentive listening,”^[xlii] are not absent from the Jesus Prayer. Anyone who would be attentive to the presence of Jesus must do so, consciously or not, in the posture and attitude of Mary. Bishop Ware even indicates in passing that Mary is present implicitly every time “He is invoked by the human name, ‘Jesus,’ which His Mother Mary gave to Him after His birth in Bethlehem.”^[xliii] The distinguishing characteristic of the Jesus Prayer, however, is its unrelenting simplicity of focus on Jesus, leading to a state of “pure prayer”^[xliv] and union with God. This purity of focus can be a helpful complement and corrective to our more discursive forms of Western devotion. 

Conclusion

The most characteristic devotions of the Christian East and West, namely, the Jesus Prayer and the Holy Rosary, are irreducibly different yet deeply complementary forms of prayer. On the one hand, the “Marian posture” inculcated by the prayer of the Holy Rosary is a necessary disposition to receive the gift of contemplation. It is “a constitutive condition for the way which is Christ.”^[xlv] Thus the Rosary can enrich our practice of the Jesus Prayer, and indeed of all vocal prayer, by habituating us to the Marian dispositions so essential for progress in prayer and Christian maturity. On the other hand, the insistent focus on Christ alone instilled by the Jesus Prayer forms in the soul a habit of seeking Jesus, which can only lead to more fruitful meditation on His mysteries and encountering Him through the memories of Mary as we pray the Holy Rosary. May the Church strive with ever greater zeal to “breathe with her two lungs,”^[xlvi] and may Christians everywhere who desire a deeper life of intimacy with Christ make use of the treasures of her tradition, East and West, to attain to the fullness of life in God.

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^[i] John Paul II, “Master in the Faith” [Apostolic Letter on the 4th Centenary of the Death of St. John of the Cross] (December 14, 1990), §1, at http://www.ewtn.com.

^[ii] John Paul II, “Master in the Faith,” §17.

^[iii] See John Paul II, “Master in the Faith,” §13.

^[iv] John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), I, 10, 1.

^[v] John of the Cross, Dark Night, I, 12, 1.

^[vi] Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), 18, 9.

^[vii] Ibid.

^[viii] Teresa of Jesus, The Way of Perfection, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980), 22, 1.

^[ix] Wilfrid Stinissen, Praying the Name of Jesus: The Ancient Wisdom of the Jesus Prayer, trans. Joseph B. Board (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 1999), 92-93.

^[x] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 2710.

^[xi] Teresa of Jesus, Way of Perfection, 24, 6.

^[xii] Theophan the Recluse, quoted in Igumen Chariton of Valamo, The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, translated by E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 63.

^[xiii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ [On the Most Holy Rosary] (October 16, 2002), §12.

^[xiv] Lev Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus (Oxford: Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1949), 19.

^[xv] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 18.

^[xvi] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §4.

^[xvii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §13. Emphasis added.

^[xviii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §1.

^[xix] This language, however, leaves much to be desired, as the Marian style is itself Christological and the Christological content is itself Marian. “By divine choice,” writes Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis in his preface to von Balthasar’s Threefold Garland, the mysteries of Christ and Mary are “utterly inseparable from one another” (10). 

^[xx] Paul VI, Marialis Cultus [For the Right Ordering and Development of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary] (February 2, 1974), §156.

^[xxi] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §15.

^[xxii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §33.

^[xxiii] Ibid.

^[xxiv] “Hymn to the Theotokos,” Orthodox Church in America, accessed November 4, 2022, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/hymn-to-the-theotokos.

^[xxv] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Threefold Garland (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 20.

^[xxvi] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, “Preface,” in Balthasar, Threefold Garland, 14.

^[xxvii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §15.

^[xxviii] Balthasar, Threefold Garland, 23.

^[xxix] See John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §15 ff.

^[xxx] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 1.

^[xxxi] Jean Hani, “The Rosary as Spiritual Way,” in Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy, edited by Mateus Soares de Azevedo (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2005), 101.

^[xxxii] Kallistos Ware, “The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality,” in Ye Shall Know the Truth, 79-80.

^[xxxiii] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 7.

^[xxxiv] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 12.

^[xxxv] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 19.

^[xxxvi] Theophan the Recluse, in The Art of Prayer, 92.

^[xxxvii] Kallistos Ware, qtd. in Rama Coomaraswamy, The Invocation of the Name of Jesus as Practiced in the Western Church (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999), 245-246.

^[xxxviii] John Climacus, qtd. in Coomaraswamy, The Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 235.

^[xxxix] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §24.

^[xl] Gillet, On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 9.

^[xli] Ware, “The Power of the Name,” 88-89.

^[xlii] John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariæ, §24.

^[xliii] Ware, “The Power of the Name,” 82.

^[xliv] Coomaraswamy, The Invocation of the Name of Jesus, 246.

^[xlv] Balthasar, Threefold Garland, 23.

^[xlvi] John Paul II, Ut unum sint [On Commitment to Ecumenism] (May 25, 1995), §54.

The goal of every Christian life, however different they may be in concrete particulars, can be summed up in one phrase: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).^[1] This command, the crowning precept of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, is further specified by his teaching on the two greatest commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:36-39). As St. John Paul II affirmed in the first encyclical of his pontificate, Redemptor hominis, this “vocation to perfect love is not restricted to a small group of individuals,” as if Christ had proposed perfection to the Twelve Apostles alone as a kind of supererogatory goal; on the contrary, it is “meant for everyone.”^[2] Every genuine form of Christian life which has developed in the Church’s history, from the ascetics of the Egyptian desert to the Missionaries of Charity in the slums of Calcutta, from the ordinary parish priest to the families who fill the pews of his church, constitutes an attempt to live out this “vocation to perfect love” which is most essential to Christian discipleship.

It is from these fundamental teachings of her Lord that the Church derives the doctrine of the universal call to holiness, reaffirmed most recently by the Magisterium at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.^[3] This doctrine, however, stands in a certain tension with another teaching. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is approached by a rich young man, asking what he must do “to have eternal life” (Mt 19:16). The Lord seems to give a two-fold response. “If you would enter life, keep the commandments,” he says, but when the young man answers that he has kept them from his youth and inquires what he still lacks, the Lord further adds: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess … and come, follow me” (vv. 17, 21). Gradually, there developed from this Scriptural encounter the doctrine of “two ways” of Christian life, one suitable for the masses, the other intended only for a spiritual élite. The former way, which demanded only the keeping of the commandments, was the minimum requirement for salvation; the latter, distinguished by the supererogatory self-offering of evangelical poverty, chastity, and obedience, was the “path of perfection”^[4] leading to greater glory in the life to come. 

As early as the third century, the Alexandrian school cane to associate this “ordinary way” of Christian life with marriage and the way of the perfect with consecrated virginity. Thus Origen, the master of this school, teaches that “the benevolent God, who desires our salvation, has ordained two states of life for man: marriage and virginity, in such a way that he who is not able to rise up to the challenges of virginity, takes a wife.”^[5] By the fourth century, the Origenist bishop Eusebius of Caesarea taught an identical doctrine: 

Two ways of life were thus given by the law of Christ to His Church. The one is above nature … it admits not marriage, child-bearing, property nor the possession of wealth, but wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone … Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other more humble, more human, permits men to join in pure nuptials and to produce children.^[6]

Since marriage came to be considered the “common” or default Christian state of life, requiring only obedience to the precepts of the Decalogue, as opposed to the more perfect form of life lived by consecrated virgins, marriage naturally came to be regarded as lesser in dignity and sanctity than virginity. St. Thomas Aquinas, summing up the status quo ante of the tradition in the thirteenth century, identifies the “state of perfection” with the religious life, since the one who professes religious vows “bind[s] himself in perpetuity and with a certain solemnity to those things that pertain to perfection,”^[7] namely, the practice of evangelical poverty, chastity, and obedience. By “state of perfection,” St. Thomas thus refers to a stable form of life, freely chosen, by which individual members of the Christian faithful set out to grow towards perfect charity, having professed public and perpetual vows to make use of the means of perfection—the evangelical counsels—recommended by the Lord. Characteristically, St. Thomas is quick to distinguish that “some persons bind themselves to that which they do not keep, and some fulfill that to which they have not bound themselves … Wherefore nothing hinders some from being perfect without being in the state of perfection, and some in the state of perfection without being perfect.”^[8]

This doctrine on the state of perfection survived essentially unchanged in the life and teaching of the Church until the twentieth century, which inaugurated a true development of doctrine in the Christian conception of marriage, above all during the pontificate of St. John Paul II. As mentioned above, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church definitively proposed a new interpretation of Christ’s conversation with the rich young man. Radically prior to the distinction between the states of marriage and virginity, the Council implicitly recognizes one state of life common to all the Christifideles, marked by a common vocation: “In the Church, everyone, whether belonging to the hierarchy, or being cared for by it, is called to holiness.”^[9] This vocation to holiness is by its very nature one, that is, there is not one standard of holiness for religious and another, less exacting standard for married people; there is only “the holiness of the Church,” which “is expressed in many ways in individuals, who in their walk of life [vitæ ordine], tend toward the perfection of charity.”^[10] As St. Thomas teaches, “the perfection of Christian life consists radically in charity,”^[11] for “charity, as the bond of perfection and the fullness of the law, rules over all the means of attaining holiness and gives life to these same means.”^[12] Therefore, each Christian state of life which follows upon and specifies this first and universal state must be ordered to the perfection of charity, as a means is ordered to an end. 

The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church further links this universal call to perfect charity with “the practice of the counsels.”^[13] Indeed, as noted above by St. John Paul II in his commentary on the call to perfect love, “Christ proposes the evangelical counsels, in their great variety, to every disciple,”^[14] although “an eminent position among these [disciples to whom they are proposed] is held by virginity or the celibate state.”^[15] The “particular honor” and eminence afforded to the state of virginity is due to the Church’s grateful recognition that those who profess it “devote themselves to God the more easily, with an undivided heart,” that this undivided devotion is a most effective “incentive to charity, and is certainly a particular source of spiritual fecundity in the world.”^[16] It is certainly no incidental fact that the Lord Himself was celibate, nor that St. Paul counseled those who were unmarried to remain so, since “the unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34).^[17] Both the Church’s praise for virginity and St. Paul’s hesitancy towards marriage hinge on the recognition that the human heart is in some sense “divisible,” that the professed virgin, on the one hand, belongs entirely to God, while the married man or woman, on the other, seems to belong only partially to Him and partially to his or her spouse. 

What is most essentially praiseworthy in the state of consecrated virginity, then, is the integration of the heart that naturally results from its single-minded focus on the Beloved God: it is “the full flowering of the humanity given to us by God,” as one consecrated virgin puts it, “and the fulfillment of all of its authentic desires … through a super-affirmation that allows these desires to find their free expression and consummation on a deeper and even more real level.”^[18] It is above all the practice of the evangelical counsels in the state of virginity which affords this integration, since the human person, made in the image and likeness of the all-loving, self-giving God,  “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”^[19] Living the counsels means living a life of total self-gift, “offering to God all that one has”^[20]in a holocaust of love. Like Mary, the consecrated virgin who professes poverty, chastity and obedience gives God a “total ‘yes’ … a yes that wants to give everything to the beloved in order to become totally dispossessed of one’s self.”^[21] It is this dispossession of self at the deepest level of the heart which effects the integration of the human person and opens up into perfect charity and spiritual fruitfulness. The final and definitive words of Lumen gentium on the universal call to holiness, however, leave no doubt that the practice of the evangelical counsels, as the Church’s treasured means of integrating the human heart and nurturing perfect love, belongs not just to those called to the highly esteemed state of virginity, but to the common state of life of all the baptized:

Therefore, all the faithful of Christ are invited to strive for the holiness and perfection of their own proper state. Indeed they have an obligation to so strive. Let all then have care that they guide aright their own deepest sentiments of soul. Let neither the use of the things of this world nor attachment to riches, which is against the spirit of evangelical poverty, hinder them in their quest for perfect love.^[22]

“Even those in marriage,” Bishop Andrew Cozzens allows, “must learn not to be ruled by the threefold lust [of the flesh, the eyes and the pride of life] and live a kind of chastity, poverty, and obedience proper to their state.”^[23] We might go one step further and argue that Christian marriage itself presupposes and demands the practice of the evangelical counsels in order to attain the goal of perfect love. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, the attitude of absolute self-dispossession which is inculcated by the practice of the counsels and which integrates the human heart “has only one analogy: the indivisibility and indissolubility of the yes given in marriage.”^[24] Significantly, the praenotanda to the Rite of Matrimony teach that “the true development of conjugal love and the whole meaning of family life, without diminishment of the other ends of Marriage, are directed to disposing Christian spouses to cooperate wholeheartedly with the love of the Creator … They glorify the Creator and strive for perfection in Christ, as they carry out the role of procreation with generous, human and Christian responsibility.”^[25]

In order to realize this goal, the Church extends to Christian spouses the means of perfection, the evangelical counsels, to be lived in accord with their state in life. As one married couple remarks, “The family provides countless opportunities for practicing community of goods, for sharing, for poverty of spirit. It’s our house; not my house. They are our children, not my children,”^[26] and so on. Conjugal poverty is lived out in the willing dispossession of what was one’s own for the good of the family. Conjugal chastity entails a true “chastity of the heart: an undivided clinging to God with the affections of the heart,”^[27] such that the heart of husband and wife each remains united to God and “refrains from delighting in union with other things against the requirement of the order established by God.”^[28] In effect, the spouses must remember—and remind one another—that their final end and ultimate fulfillment lies in union with God, whose love is mediated through their chaste conjugal love for one another and for their children. Finally, Christian marriage is lived in mutual obedience: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). The same spouses remark, 

The myriad acts of self-denial demanded by family life may not be commanded by obedience, but … is it not true that the voice of God speaks to us, the married, no less authoritatively in the midnight cry of our baby in pain or discomfort, the hungry plea of our preschooler, the worried questions of our teenagers, the desire of our son to be read to or taken for a walk than it does in the measured tones of the superior?^[29]

Though Christian spouses do not profess the evangelical counsels as public vows, the whole orientation of their conjugal state in life, understood in light of the Magisterium of the Church in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, demands and indeed presupposes the exercise of the counsels in order to achieve their supernatural end. Therefore, while the state of marriage may not meet the formal definition of the state of perfection, it is certainly a state of life wholly conducive to the perfection of love for those called to live it. As St. Francis de Sales advised his lay directees, “it is not necessary that vows be made, provided they be observed.”^[32] May the Church in our century be enriched with the flowering of many holy Christian couples and families, following the example of Ss. Louis and Zélie Martin, for the building up of a civilization of love in anticipation of the coming Kingdom of God. 

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^[1] Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

^[2] St. John Paul II, Redemptor hominis [The Redeemer of Man] (4 March 1979), §18.

^[3] St. Paul VI, Lumen gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church] (November 21, 1964), §39.

^[4] Redemptor hominis, §16.

^[5] Origen, “Homily on the Renunciation of the World,” qtd. in Rev. Blaise Berg, lecture on Marriage and State of Life (Menlo Park, CA: St. Patrick’s Seminary & University, September 25, 2022).

^[6] Eusebius of Caesarea, The Proof of the Gospel, vol. 1, 8, trans. W. J. Ferrar (New York: Macmillan, 1920).

^[7] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 184, a. 4, corpus, trans. Rev. Laurence Shapcote, at https://aquinas.cc. 

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Lumen gentium, §39.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] ST,, II-II, q. 184, a. 1, corpus.

^[12] Lumen gentium, §42.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 915.

^[15] Lumen gentium, §42.

^[16] Ibid. Emphasis added.   

^[17] Emphasis added.

^[18] Joshua Elzner, “Spiritual Senses: You Touched Me and I Burned for Your Peace,” Thoughts in Solitude: Reflections of a Beloved Child of God, March 3, 2019, http://www.atthewellspring.com.

^[19] St. Paul VI, Gaudium et spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] (7 December 1965), §22.

^[20] ST, III, q. 186, a. 7, corpus.

^[21] Most Rev. Andrew Cozzens, A Living Image of the Bridegroom: The Priesthood and the Evangelical Counsels (Omaha, NE: Institute for Priestly Formation, 2020), 145.

^[22] Lumen gentium, §42. Emphasis added.

^[23] Cozzens, A Living Image of the Bridegroom, 152-3.

^[24] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Laity and the Life of the Counsels: The Church’s Mission in the World (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 188.

^[25] The Order of Celebrating Matrimony (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), no. 10.

^[26] Clarence and Kathleen Enzler, “Sanctity in Marriage: It’s the Same Difference,” in Sanctity and Success in Marriage (Boston: National Catholic Conference on Family Life, 1956), accessed at http://www.catholicculture.org.

^[27] Cozzens, A Living Image of the Bridegroom, 172.

^[28] ST, II-II, q. 151, a. 2, corpus.

^[29] Enzler and Enzler, “Sanctity in Marriage.”

^[30] St. Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1885), 154. 

^[31] José Cardinal Saraiva Martins, “Witnesses to Conjugal Love,” homily on the occasion of the beatification of Louis and Zélie Martin (October 19, 2008), at http://www.louisandzeliemartin.org.

^[32] St. Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1885), 154. 

On February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by announcing his resignation from the papacy. The historic moment was described by Cardinal Angelo Sodano as “a bolt from out of the blue,” underlined by a very real lightning bolt which struck the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica later that evening.^[1] With the subsequent election of Pope Francis, the Church has seen—for the first time since the Western Schism­­­—the spectacle of two living Popes, each retaining the title, style, and dress of the Roman Pontiff. Although Benedict has largely remained out of the limelight since the succession of Francis, to whom he has promised obedience,^[2] the novelty of the present situation has naturally prompted various attempts at theological explanation for the very existence of a “Pope emeritus.” One theory holds that in renouncing the Petrine office, Pope Benedict has in fact taken up a new office in the Church, a “Johannine office”^[3] complementary to that of Peter. Another theory maintains that the papal resignation has de facto effected an “expanded [Petrine] ministry—with an active member and a contemplative member.”^[4]

Although neither theory is entirely satisfactory and all speculation must remain provisional until the Church rules on the question, the better theological explanation seems to be the second. First, there is no such thing as a “Johannine office” in the history of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, the words of Benedict at the time of his resignation, as well as the testimony of Archbishop Gänswein, indicate that he understands himself not to have instituted a new office, but to have continued in a limited capacity to exercise the munus Petrinum, the office of Peter, in his service of prayer for the Church. Finally, the official legislation on bishops emeritus, issued by the Congregation for Bishops under Pope John Paul II in 2004, offers a possible theological parallel, insofar as those bishops are said also to continue to participate in the munus episcoporum after retirement.

The office of Peter is established by Christ himself: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church” (Mt 16:18). As the Second Vatican Council reiterated, Christ “placed Blessed Peter over the other apostles, and instituted in him a permanent and visible source and foundation of unity of faith and communion.”^[5] The Pope is “the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the visible Head of the whole Church.”^[6] This headship and primacy of Peter, attested since the earliest days of Christianity by such witnesses as St. Clement of Rome (c. 80 AD), is of necessity a unique office in the hierarchical constitution of the Church. As Pope Boniface VIII’s Unam sanctam has it, “This one and unique Church, therefore, has not two heads, like a monster, but one body and one head, namely, Christ, and his vicar, Peter’s successor.”^[7] There is neither historical precedent nor theological warrant for a parallel and complementary “Johannine office,” any more than a Matthean, Barnabite or Pauline office, alongside the munus Petrinum. On the contrary, these apostles and their successors exercise the common munus apostolorum cum et sub Petro, with and beneath Peter.^[8] Therefore, Robert Moynahan’s claim that Pope Benedict, after his resignation, “would now carry out a slightly different office, a ‘Johannine’ office,”^[9] raises more problems than it solves. There exists no such office for Benedict to accept, and the idea that the Pope emeritus “would carry out the office of John, not of Peter”^[10] effectively establishes a second “pontificate of John,” giving the body of Christ a second head.

At the time of his resignation, Pope Benedict indicated that his “strengths, due to an advanced age, [were] no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry [munus Petrinum]” and therefore declared his decision to “renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter.”^[11] He was clear about the juridical effects of his resignation: “The See of Saint Peter … will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked.”^[12] However, having once accepted the Petrine ministry, Benedict says, 

I was engaged always and forever by the Lord … The ‘always’ is also a ‘for ever; – there can no longer be a return to the private sphere. My decision to resign the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this. I do not return to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences, and so on. I am not abandoning the cross, but remaining in a new way at the side of the crucified Lord. I no longer bear the power of office for the governance of the Church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, in the enclosure of Saint Peter.^[13]

The active exercise of the munus Petrinum, then, including the power of governance proper to that office for the governance of the Church, belongs entirely to Benedict’s successor in the See of Peter: “The plena potestas, the plenitudo potestatis [full power, incarnate authority] is in the hands of Pope Francis. He is the man who has right now the succession of Peter.”^[14] Benedict, however, sees himself as retaining a principal part of the munus Petrinum, “the service of prayer” for the Church. This aspect of the Petrine ministry was bestowed by the Lord in his final commission to St. Peter: “Strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32). To pray for the Church as her head is not a new “Johannine office,” but the properly contemplative dimension of the one and only Petrine office. Therefore, Archbishop Gänswein maintains that Benedict “has not abandoned the Office of Peter — something which would have been entirely impossible for him after his irrevocable acceptance of the office in April 2005.”^[15] Rather, since the election of Francis, the Petrine office has become de facto an “expanded ministry—with an active member and a contemplative member.”^[16] There is indeed one head of the Church, Pope Francis, the legitimately elected Roman Pontiff who possesses the plenitude potestatis and exercises the active ministry of Peter. But there is also one “Pope emeritus,” sharing in the contemplative dimension of the Petrine ministry. 

For his part, Pope Francis has expressed his gratitude for this service: “Benedict is in the monastery praying … He is the wise grandfather. He is the man that protects my shoulders and back with his prayer.”^[17] Indeed, Francis has speculated in the future, there may be multiple Popes emeritus “like the bishops emeriti … Possibly there could be two or three.”^[18] Therefore, the task ahead for theologians and canon lawyers in the Curia is the official legislation of the ministry of “Pope emeritus,” as the Congregation for Bishops issued in 2004 for bishops emeritus. The Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops indicates that the reigning bishop and bishops emeritus are to maintain a fraternal relationship: “The diocesan Bishop will value the good that the Bishop Emeritus can accomplish, for the Church in general and for the local diocese in particular, through his prayer, perhaps through suffering accepted with love, through the example of his priestly life and through his counsel when it is requested.”^[19] The bishop emeritus, for his part, is instructed to “avoid every attitude and relationship that could even hint at some kind of parallel authority to that of the diocesan Bishop, with damaging consequences for the pastoral life and unity of the diocesan community,” since “the diocesan Bishop alone is the head of the diocese, responsible for its governance.”^[20]

In summary, to speak of a “Johannine office” is inappropriate with respect to the Pope emeritus. This office does not exist in the tradition of the Church, and its institution would only raise the difficulty of a novel “parallel authority” alongside that of Peter. The better theological interpretation, advanced by Gänswein and indicated by Benedict’s own self-understanding, is that the Pope emeritus continues to be of service to the Church in his prayer, suffering, example, and counsel, exercising the contemplative dimension of the munus Petrinum in strengthening his brethren, including his own successor. This situation, although unprecedented in the See of Peter, closely reflects the reality lived by diocesan bishops and bishops emeritus around the world.

The Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops specifies the “rights of the Bishop Emeritus in relation to the Episcopal Munera,”^[21] which include preaching and the celebration of the sacraments, as well as sustenance and a place to live within the diocese he has served. The question to be resolved in future legislation concerns precisely those rights of the Pope emeritus in relation to the munus Petrinum. Will future Popes emeritus be permitted to continue to live in the Vatican after retirement, or to speak publicly and publish written works, as Benedict has done? These are thorny issues that the Church must soon answer, guided by the principles of fraternal relationship and rights of bishops emeritus outlined above by the Congregation for Bishops, always taking care to safeguard the primacy of the one Successor of Peter as the source of unity of the Church.

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Footnotes

^[1] Diane Montagna, “Complete English Text: Archbishop Georg Gänswein’s May 20 ‘Expanded Petrine Office’ Speech,” Aleteia (blog), May 30, 2016, https://aleteia.org/2016/05/30/complete-english-text-archbishop-georg-gansweins-expanded-petrine-office-speech/.

^[2] “Full text: Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Armenia,” Catholic News Agency, June 26, 2016, https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/34103/full-text-pope-francis-in-flight-press-conference-from-armenia.

^[3] Dr. Robert Moynahan, “Letter #44, 2015: Benedict in Prayer,” Inside the Vatican (blog), October 15, 2015, https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-44-benedict-in-prayer/.

^[4] Montagna, “Gänswein’s May 20 ‘Expanded Petrine Office’ Speech.”

^[5] Paul VI, Lumen gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church] (November 21, 1964), §18.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Boniface VIII, Bull Unam sanctam (November 18, 1302), in Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum: Compendium of Creeds, Definitions and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, eds. Peter Hünermann, Robert Fastiggi, Anne Englund Nash, 43rd edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 872. 

^[8] Congregation for Bishops, Apostolorum successores [Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops] (February 22, 2004), introduction. See also §11.

^[9] Moynahan, “Letter #44.”

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Benedict XVI, Declaratio (10 February 2013). 

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Benedict XVI, General Audience (27 Feb 2013). Emphasis added.

^[14] Maike Hickson, “Interview: Archbishop Gänswein on Benedict, The Two Popes, and Prophecy,” OnePeterFive (blog), June 28, 2016, https://onepeterfive.com/interview-archbishop-ganswein-on-benedict-the-two-popes-and-prophecy/.

^[15] Montagna, “Gänswein’s May 20 ‘Expanded Petrine Office’ Speech.”

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] “Pope Francis’ in-flight press conference from Armenia,” Catholic News Agency.

^[18] Ibid.

^[19] Apostolorum Successores, §226.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Apostolorum Successores, §227.

Among the greats of modern Catholic theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar stands apart as “the twentieth century’s premier ressourcement theologian.”^[1] His theological work, radiating out from its radically Christological and Trinitarian heart, scanning the self-revelation of God according to the categories of the beautiful, the good and the true, and touching upon ecclesiology, missiology, eschatology and all the attendant concerns of the Church in the modern world, actively resists easy categorization. It is perhaps unsurprising that, “when set against the wider background of twentieth-century theology, the figure of Hans Urs von Balthasar comes across as rather isolated, even lonely.” Like the theology of the Fathers, Balthasar’s work is sui generis, occupying a niche of his own creation. However, he is no idle innovator; Balthasar is in fact “both intensely traditional (perhaps the most traditional of all twentieth-century theologians) and yet also astonishingly, startingly idiosyncratic.”^[2] His thought emerges from deep within the living tradition of the Fathers and of High Scholasticism, the sources from which he sought to renew the Church. This paper will trace Balthasar’s most significant “sources of renewal” among the Fathers, as well as the German Romantics, high culture and contemporary theologians, before concluding with a summary of his contributions to the development of theology today.

Balthasar was born in 1905 into a highly cultured family in Lucerne, Switzerland. His aristocratic origins and cultured upbringing may account in some measure for a deep, lifelong affinity for music, literature and the arts; his doctorate, for example, was in Germanistik, “a compound discipline of literature and philosophy … analyzing and evaluating texts in their philosophical, spiritual, and affective tenor, as somehow indicators of wider cultural trends.”^[3]Henri de Lubac is quoted as saying that Balthasar was “probably the most cultured man in Europe” at the time.^[4] This is significant since, as Aidan Nichols has it, “the style is the man,”^[5] and Balthasar’s unique style is deeply indebted to his cultural background. For example, a key theme of Balthasar’s theology is that “truth is symphonic,” that, just as “all the instruments” in an orchestra “are integrated in a whole sound,”^[6] so truth is a “polyphony of revelation,”^[7] a multiplicity of voices in a “unity of composition” which “comes from God.”^[8]

Balthasar’s lifelong attentiveness to cultural trends and questions may also provide an insight into his preference, when he later began his philosophical and theological studies, for the theological method of the Church Fathers over that of the Neo-Scholastics. The early twentieth century had made a clear “separation between ‘secular’ and theological studies,”^[9] resulting in a divorce between the real human questions arising in the broader culture and the abstract, often self-referential answers provided by academic theology. Balthasar, by contrast, felt that the urgent task of the theologian was to “respond,” from deep within the Catholic tradition and the sources of revelation, to the “cultural situation” of the modern world.^[10] For Balthasar, “theological questions were not separable from human questions.”^[11] It is unsurprising, then, that in addition to his extracurricular reading of contemporary philosophers such as Blondel, Bergson, and Heidegger, Balthasar came to favor the style of Patristic theology over the “sawdust Thomism”^[12] which comprised his official theological education: “For the Fathers, as for Balthasar, it was only obvious that Christ would have something to say to the philosophical questions of the day, insofar as, in Christ, God’s dialogue with humanity was now to occur in the context of human language and culture.”^[13] In his theology classes as a Jesuit scholastic, he was known to sit through lectures with his ears stuffed, reading the works of Augustine,^[14] and his earliest works as a theologian include monographs on Maximus the Confessor, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, among others. 

Far from merely historical explorations, Balthasar’s early efforts at ressourcement were marked very much by his concern to answer the live questions of his day: “Balthasar reads the Fathers from the setting of his own evangelical strategies, tailored as these were to modernity’s cultural situation.”^[15] He was critical of a certain naïve nostalgia in vogue among other ressourcement theologians, a tendency to “look on the time of the Fathers” with “an almost Romantic longing.”^[16] Rather than giving way to the desire to return to a former golden age of Christendom, Balthasar sought to apply the thought of past generations of Christians to the modern world, assured that the vitality of Patristic theology would take on a new relevance in the light of present questions. 

Inspired by German Romanticism since his Germanistik days, Balthasar was also keenly interested as a theologian in the potential of the affective faculties of the soul to discover truth, or better, to be impressed by the truth through a perception of its splendor. Conscious that “the exact sciences no longer have any time to spare” for beauty, “nor does theology, in so far as it increasingly strives to follow the method of the exact sciences and to envelope [sic] itself in their atmosphere,”^[17] Balthasar embarked on a sixteen-volume theological trilogy which would become his life’s masterwork. Beginning with The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Balthasar aimed “to complement the vision of the true and the good with that of the beautiful”^[18] and thereby to restore aesthetics to its rightful place within the science of theology. For Balthasar, beauty (pulchrum) is “the manner in which God’s goodness (bonum) gives itself and is expressed by God and understood by man as the truth (verum).”^[19] Beauty compels us, draws us out of ourselves spontaneously; it “brings with it a self-evidence that enlightens without mediation.”^[20] Here, too, one detects the Patristic influence on Balthasar, particularly that of Gregory of Nyssa, who understood that beauty is a transcendental and that the attractiveness of the beautiful has the power to draw the soul upward to the contemplation of divine truths:

When the soul is moved towards what is naturally lovely, it seems to me that this is the sort of passionate desire with which it is moved. Beginning with the loveliness it sees, it is drawn upwards to what is transcendent. The soul is forever inflaming its desire for what is hidden, by means of what it has already grasped. For this reason, the ardent lover of beauty understands what is seen as an image of what he desires, and yearns to be filled with the actual substance (χαρακτήρ] of the archetype.^[21]

Therefore, Balthasar chose to begin his theological trilogy by considering God’s self-revelation as beautiful, rather than as good or true, which the latter parts of the trilogy, Theo-Dramatics and Theo-Logic, would address. He was aware that “without beauty … the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out,” while the logic embodied in scholastic syllogisms becomes “a mechanism which no longer captivates anyone.”^[22] Together, theological aesthetics, dramatics and logic would offer a truly symphonic approach to Christian revelation: “The pulchrum, with which Balthasar opens his trilogy, is the primordial appearing of love’s gratuity, which, as such, contains both the good (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity) and the true (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity, which therefore appeals to logos).”^[23]

In addition to the Fathers, the Romantics, and the high culture of his youth, Balthasar was profoundly influenced by two contemporary theologians. The greatest influence on his early theological work was no doubt that of Henri de Lubac, the great patristic scholar and Balthasar’s “old friend and master”^[24] at Lyons, whose book Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme he regarded as “the key book of twentieth-century Catholic theology.”^[25] For Balthasar, it proposed a compelling answer to the problem of the place of Christianity in an increasingly post-Christian and secularized world. De Lubac traced the roots of modern secularism back to the medieval philosophy of nominalism, which first introduced the concept of pura natura, human nature without grace, and in turn gave rise to “the neo-scholastic notion that human beings have two separate ends, a natural end—happiness in this world—which can be achieved through their natural powers, and a supernatural end—the face-to-face vision of God—which can only be achieved through superadded grace.”^[26] For de Lubac, the divide between nature and supernature already contained the seeds of practical atheism; a straight line could be traced from the pura natura of the nominalists through the excessive rationalism and objectivism of neoscholasticism and on to the secularism of modernity. As a remedy, de Lubac proposed a return to the Alexandrian theology of nature and grace, which held that man is “inherently open to the supernatural”^[27] and that therefore, while grace is “a good superadded to the natural good,”^[28] the divine end to which grace is the means is not a “finality superadded to natural finality,”^[29] but present from the beginning. Human beings do not have two ends, but one, namely, to see God. Grace, therefore, was not something extrinsic to human nature, but in fact the fulfillment of that nature, which is “by nature ordered to an end that it is not equipped by nature to attain.”^[30]

Balthasar followed de Lubac’s theology closely and appreciated the potential it offered for dialogue with secular modernity: if man had a natural openness to the supernatural, then “the modern period … was not, for all of its forgetfulness of God, any more theologically neutral than any period before it.”^[31] However, he was not unaware of the difficulties presented by this revolution in the theology of nature and grace. In a book-length tribute to his former teacher, he offered a cautious critique, saying that de Lubac’s theory of nature and grace was “not completely rounded out,”^[32]and later wondered whether it “can hold up when all its implications are thought through to their logical conclusion.”^[33]In particular, he observed that it had the potential to undermine the gratuitousness of grace, “somehow making grace a requirement of nature”^[34] and collapsing the distinction between the two. 

Balthasar was also influenced by the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whom he came to know during his time as chaplain at the University of Basel and with whom he engaged in a kind of “dialectical relation,”^[35] culminating in his publication of a book-length treatise on Barth’s theology in 1951. Barth, like de Lubac, “saw modern secularism as a result of a failure at the level of Christology”^[36] and proposed a theology which took the person of Jesus Christ, rather than philosophical first principles or human subjectivity, as its starting point. Balthasar greatly appreciated Barth’s Christocentrism and the dynamic character of his theology, the awareness that “God acts in radical freedom, and is known in his acts … known better in narrated interaction than in abstraction.”^[37] On the other hand, he sought to purify Barth’s theology of “a certain disvaluing of creation,”^[38] which he detected especially in the latter’s dismissiveness of natural theology and the power of human reason to attain to knowledge of God. This fault arose from a false dualism in Barth’s conception of “the God-world relationship, and the interrelation of God and man in grace,”^[39] which Balthasar could correct largely due to de Lubac’s influence: 

Barth responds to an immanentized and secularized account of natural human capacity for God by a fierce assertion of divine grace, failing to appreciate that any such natural capacity cannot be conceived apart from divine grace. Balthasar’s counter-suggestion is that Barth’s objection to a degraded natural theology is better met by reaffirming the unity of nature and grace.^[40]

In this book, Balthasar also contributed to a resolution of the problem of nature and grace, still controversial today in Catholic theology, by proposing a reading of nature as a parable of grace: “The whole of creation and its order is undoubtedly the free gift of God,”^[41] Balthasar argues, which is not “to be equated [with] the actual grace of God’s supernatural self-disclosure,”^[42] but nonetheless is an appearing of the gratuity of love: “God could have ordered the world in many other different ways … That he chose this total arrangement that furnishes so much beneficence to the individual as well as to the whole can certainly be characterized as a ‘grace’.”^[43]

Finally, no account of the major influences on Balthasar’s theology would be complete without mention of Adrienne von Speyr, the Swiss Protestant doctor who converted to Catholicism under Balthasar’s direction during these same years of his university chaplaincy. Speyr was a recipient of mystical “graces not seen since Teresa of Avila,”^[44]according to Balthasar’s own reports, including the “yearly reliving of the descent of Christ into hell.”^[45] Meeting von Speyr introduced a mystical element into Balthasar’s theology and a lived sense of the dynamism of God, “the strange, transformative, and all-demanding impact of God’s self-disclosure on the believer.”^[46] It is no doubt due to her direct experience of the descent that Balthasar proposes that the Lord descended truly and fully into hell on Holy Saturday: 

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.^[47]

For Balthasar, there was no part of man’s fallenness, even the experience of death, that the Lord did not experience and take up into himself. Most indicative of Speyr’s influence on Balthasar, however, is his own statement at the outset of one of his final works: “This book has one chief aim: to prevent any attempt being made after my death to separate my work from that of Adrienne von Speyr. It will show that in no respect is this possible.”^[48]

The scope of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s contribution to the development of theology in the twentieth century is difficult to overstate. During the pontificate of John Paul II, von Balthasar was described by one journalist (perhaps somewhat polemically) as having moved from “an institutional misfit excluded from Vatican II, to the court theologian of today’s Vatican.”^[49] The Polish pope certainly held the Swiss theologian in high esteem, elevating him to the cardinalate mere days before his death. There are clear theological affinities between Balthasar’s theology and John Paul II’s magisterium, including the conviction that “beauty … as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal”^[50] and the understanding—following de Lubac’s theory of nature and grace and echoing the Christocentrism of Barth—that the saving mission of Christ brings “humanity to its fullness not only in terms of a future or separate eternal life but also as a hundredfold of fulfillment of our natural desire for God in this life.”^[51] One might even trace a direct line of influence in one key aspect of John Paul II’s ecclesiology, first proposed by Balthasar in 1986, that “the Church lives both by a Petrine principle of apostolic ministry and by a Marian principle of life and fruitful receptivity. Of the two, the Marian principle is primary.”^[52]

The influence of von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics can even be seen in the magisterium of Pope Francis, who claimed in his first encyclical that “every expression of true beauty can … be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus” and called for “a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it.”^[53] Of course, the mutual influence and lifelong friendship of Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger is well known; along with Henri de Lubac and other collaborators, the two friends co-founded the theological journal Communio in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The threads of influence between these two great theologians are too numerous and interwoven to enumerate briefly. It must suffice to quote the newly-elected Pope Benedict XVI’s remark, on the centenary of his friend’s birth, “that von Balthasar’s life was a genuine quest for the truth, which he understood as a search for true Life. He sought everywhere for traces of God’s presence and truth: in philosophy, in literature, in the religions, always managing to break those circuits that make reason a prisoner of itself and opening it to the spaces of the infinite.”^[54]

In a post-modern world increasingly hardened against the Gospel by secularism and atheism, Balthasar provides a compelling witness of the continued possibility of engagement between theology and culture. Twenty-first century man, despite the indifference or outright hostility he might exhibit at times to Christianity, is still made for the vision of God. Priests today would do well to follow Balthasar’s example of “theology on one’s knees,”^[55] drawing from the inexhaustible sources—above all in one’s individual life of prayer and meditation upon God’s self-revelation in Scripture and tradition—to address the real questions of post-modern culture with a fresh and vigorous proclamation of the Mystery of Christ. 

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Footnotes

^[1] Edward T. Oakes, SJ, “Balthasar and Ressourcement: An Ambiguous Relationship,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 288.

^[2] David Moss and Edward T. Oakes, SJ, The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 7.

^[3] Aidan Nichols, OP, Balthasar for Thomists (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020), 14.

^[4] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), back cover.

^[5] Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists, 31.

^[6] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 7.

^[7] Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, 11.

^[8] Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, 9.

^[9] Rodney A. Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 2.

^[10] Paul Silas Peterson, The Early Hans Urs von Balthasar: Historical Contexts and Intellectual Formation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 283.

^[11] Howsare, Balthasar, 3.

^[12] Moss and Oakes, Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 2.

^[13] Howsare, Balthasar, 2.

^[14] Peter Henrici, “A Sketch of von Balthasar’s Life,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 14.

^[15] Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists, 28.

^[16] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics and Ourselves,” Communio 24 (1997): 350.

^[17] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982),18.

^[18] Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 1:9.

^[19] Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 1:11.

^[20] Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 1:36.

^[21] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 2:231, trans. Anthony Meredith, S.J. (London: Routledge, 1999), 106.

^[22] Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 1:19.

^[23] Adrian Walker, “Love Alone: Hans Urs von Balthasar as a Master of Theological Renewal,” Communio 32 (2005): 532, fn. 28.

^[24] Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 48.

^[25] Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 71.

^[26] Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, 11.

^[27] Oakes, “Balthasar and Ressourcement,” 285.

^[28] Henri de Lubac, SJ, “Supernatural and Superadded,” in Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook, ed. Patricia Kelly (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 58-59.

^[29] De Lubac, “Supernatural,” 59.

^[30] Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, 15.

^[31] Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, 3.

^[32] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, trans. Joseph Fessio, SJ and Michael Waldstein (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 63.

^[33] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, SJ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 297.

^[34] Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 298.

^[35] Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists, 22.

^[36] Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, 25.

^[37] Ben Quash, “The theo-drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. and David Moss(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 145-146.

^[38] Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists, 21.

^[39] Ibid. 

^[40] John Webster, “Balthasar and Karl Bath,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, , ed. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 251.

^[41] Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 277.

^[42] Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 279.

^[43] Domenico Palmieri, Tractatus de gratia divina actualis (Gulpen: M. Alberts, 1885), 7-8, qtd. in Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 278.

^[44] Moss and Oakes, Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 4.

^[45] Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists, 29.        

^[46] Quash, “The theo-drama,” 146.

^[47] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 148-149.

^[48] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 13.

^[49] Margaret Hebbelthwaite, “Balthasar’s Golden Touch,” The Tablet (20 September 1997), 1208.

^[50] John Paul II, “Letter to Artists” (4 April 1999), §16.

^[51] Leahy, “John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 36.

^[52] Avery Dulles, The Splendor of Faith: The Theological Vision of Pope John Paul II (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 115. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). 

^[53] Francis, Evangelii gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel] (24 November 2013), §167.

^[54] Benedict XVI, “Message for the Centenary of the Birth of Fr Hans Urs von Balthasar” (6 October 2005).

^[55] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 206.

The offering of the Liturgy of the Hours is an essential part of the priestly vocation in the Roman Rite. Its place among the promises made by the ordinandi at the time of their ordination to the transitional diaconate reveals its foundational role in priestly identity and mission. After promising to embrace the celibate state “for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, in the service of God and man,” the candidates are then asked: “Do you resolve to maintain and deepen the spirit of prayer that is proper to your way of life and, in keeping with this spirit … to celebrate faithfully the Liturgy of the Hours with and for the People of God and indeed for the whole world?”^[1] The structure of the promises indicates that the prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours is the principal means by which the candidates are intended to live out their celibate commitment to the Kingdom of God. Far from an accidental part of priestly life, the Liturgy of the Hours belongs to the very heart of the priesthood. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that many priests find this connection between liturgical prayer and priestly life a difficult one to make. As few as one-third of priests in the United States are said to pray the Liturgy of the Hours regularly, and those who do not most often cite a lack of time and the pressing obligations of pastoral ministry as the principal reasons.^[2] Perhaps one reason for this widespread neglect is that priests simply do not know the foundational role which the Liturgy of the Hours is intended to play in their priestly life. To paraphrase Abbot Jerome Kodell, “We will not make time for prayer until we are convinced that there is no better use of our time than prayer.”

In this essay, then, we shall examine three reasons why the Liturgy of the Hours is priestly prayer par excellence. First, the Liturgy of the Hours is an extension of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout all the hours of the day. By praying the Liturgy of the Hours faithfully, the priest lives from the graces of Holy Mass throughout his many daily activities. Secondly, the Liturgy of the Hours is the prayer of true sacrifice by which the priest’s life, his time, his very breath is offered back to God out of love and made holy. Thirdly, then, the priest who prays the Liturgy of the Hours offers a worthy sacrifice on behalf of his people, the Church, and the whole world, fulfilling the command of St. Paul: “Through him [Jesus Christ] let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God” (Heb 13:15).  

In his Apostolic Constitution promulgating the revised Liturgy of the Hours in 1970, St. Paul VI referred to the Liturgy of the Hours as a “necessary complement” to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass “by which the fullness of divine worship contained in the eucharistic sacrifice would overflow to reach all the hours of daily life.”^[3] Contained within these words is an exhortation to priests and lay faithful alike not to allow the Mass to be simply one hour out of the day, distinct and essentially unrelated from the rest. Rather, from the Mass, “the center and apex of the whole life of the Christian community,”^[4]there is to flow a torrent of worship as from a mountain spring, which touches all the other hours of the day. This “fullness of divine worship” which springs from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is channeled through the day by the Liturgy of the Hours, which “extends to the different hours of the day the praise and thanksgiving, the commemoration of the mysteries of salvation, the petitions and the foretaste of heavenly glory, that are present in the eucharistic mystery.”^[5] To use a different image, favored by the Rev. Dr. Pius Parsch, “the Mass may be compared to the sun in the Christian day, a sun around which the hours of the Church’s common prayer rotate like seven planets. The ‘hour-prayers’ are a preparation for Mass, they hark back to it, they seek to garner its fruit and graces through the day.”^[6]In either case, the Liturgy of the Hours is the living link from the different periods of the day back to the Mass, the source of grace and divine life. This is of no small value for the parish priest with many pastoral duties! The Liturgy of the Hours is intended to be his companion, like “our own personal Angel Raphael who led the young Tobias successfully through all the dangers of his journey,”^[7] or like the rock which followed the Israelites through the desert, from which “all drank the same supernatural drink” (1 Corinthians 10:4). 

Furthermore, the Liturgy of the Hours is sacrificial prayer, that is, prayer which makes something holy [sacrum facere] by offering it to God out of love. This is clear enough from the fact that incense may be offered at the solemn celebrations of Lauds and Vespers, a liturgical expression always connected with the offering of sacrifice. However, it may not be immediately obvious how the Liturgy of the Hours is a sacrifice. All sacrifice entails “some aspect of life being made over to the deity … either the blood of a victim is shed, or something that sustains life is offered: corn or wine.”^[8] There is, furthermore, a mystical identification between the one offering the sacrifice and the oblation that is offered, since “the life principle surrendered is intended to be a substitute for the life of the offerer,”^[9]given back to God symbolically in the destruction of the sacrifice. The Liturgy of the Hours, as the prayer of the whole Church, is called by Parsch “the breathing of the mystical body;”^[10] the life principle offered to God in this sacrifice is the breath, which is “constantly consumed and used up in the service of God, winging its flight back to that mysterious Breathing which first set it in motion.”^[11] We may add that a holocaust of time is offered to God by the priest who faithfully prays his breviary, using up precious minutes and hours in a sacrifice of praise and trusting that the Lord will take care of his to-do list. Here there is not only a mystical identification between the gift and the giver, as in the animal sacrifices of the old dispensation; there is a physical identification: it is my breath, my time which is burned up like incense around the altar in praise of God. In offering this daily sacrifice, the priest accomplishes the principal purpose of the Liturgy of the Hours, which “includes the sanctification of the day and of the whole range of human activity.”^[12]

However, the priest does not offer the Liturgy of the Hours only for his own spiritual benefit. Unlike his own private or devotional prayer, indispensable as this is in the life of a priest, the Liturgy of the Hours is essentially public and liturgical. In fact, in the Liturgy of the Hours “the universal, objective, pastoral prayer [of the Church] is wedded with personal prayer,” such that “you can hear in the Breviary two distinct voices praying in unison: the Church and your own soul, now one, now the other.”^[13] Even when he prays on his own, the priest prays the Liturgy of the Hours in union with and on behalf of the entire Church, “lending the Church his tongue to pay God a tribute of praise and thanks, and to pray for the graces and needs”^[14] of the people of God. This prayer of the Church belongs to the essence of the priestly vocation; it is “the apex and source of pastoral activity.”^[15] In the words of Parsch, “it is through the breviary that we participate in the official ministry and care of souls … We have become pastors in our own living room, from early morning until late at night.”^[16]

At the heart of his vocation, the priest is one “chosen from among men … to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices” (Hebrews 5:1; cf. also 7:27, 10:11). We have seen that, far from an accidental obligation, the Liturgy of the Hours is an essential expression of this core principle of priesthood. It extends the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the source and summit of the Christian life, throughout all the hours and activities of the day, permeating a priest’s apostolic labor with the spirit of divine worship and the graces and fruits of the Mass. It is a sacrifice of praise in its own right, by which the priest offers his own life, his time, his breath to God; moreover, it is a sacrifice offered on behalf of the Church, by which the priest unites his own prayer to that of the people of God in his parish and throughout the world, interceding for their intentions and needs. 

Therefore, not overlooking the busy and often unfavorable conditions of modern ecclesiastical life, priests should take seriously their promise to offer this priestly prayer par excellence. The priest who prays the Liturgy of the Hours faithfully will experience not only the overflowing of the fullness of divine worship into all the areas of his apostolic labor, not only that sweetness of union with God which is the fruit of a sacrifice of love, but the faithfulness of the Lord who answers the prayers of his priests offered with and for His people: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). May the good Lord grant all His priests a renewal of the spirit of prayer and a resolution to offer this prayer of sacrifice more faithfully each day.

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Footnotes

^[1] “Rite of Ordination of Deacons,” no. 200, in The Roman Pontifical, 2^nd typical edition (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: 2002). 

^[2] Fr. Dennis McManus, lecture, “The Liturgy of the Hours in the Life of the Priest: How the Prayer of the Church and the Prayer of the Heart Come Together” (Menlo Park, CA: St. Patrick’s Seminary & University, March 1, 2021).

^[3] Paul VI, Laudis Canticum [Apostolic Constitution Promulgating the Revised Book of the Liturgy of the Hours] (November 1, 1970), at Adoremus.org.

^[4] Paul VI, Christus Dominus [Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops] (October 28, 1965), §30.

^[5] General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, §12.

^[6] Pius Parsch, The Breviary Explained, trans. William Nayden and Carl Hoegerl (London: B. Herder Book Co., 1952), 9.

^[7] Parsch, The Breviary Explained, 8. 

^[8] Vilma G. Little, The Sacrifice of Praise: An Introduction to the Meaning and Use of the Divine Office (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1957), 25.

^[9] Little, The Sacrifice of Praise, 25.

^[10] Parsch, The Breviary Explained, 5. 

^[11] Little, The Sacrifice of Praise, 26.

^[12] General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, §11.

^[13] Parsch, The Breviary Explained, 8-9.

^[14] Parsch, The Breviary Explained, 7.

^[15] General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours, §18.

^[16] Pius Parsch, “Introduction,” The Hours of the Divine Office in English and Latin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1963), 1-2.

“When the body of the Son prays, it does not separate its head from itself: it is the one Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, who prays for us and prays in us and is prayed to by us.”

St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 85:1

To an Adult Faith Formation Class

The Book of Psalms is a true school of Christian prayer. In. it, we find language to express all the emotions of our hearts to God. If we are joyful, we may “cry to God with shouts of joy” (Ps 47:1); if we are sad: “Listen to my voice, O God, as I complain” (Ps 64:1); if we are afflicted, we may cry, “Relive the anguish of my heart, and set me free from my distress” (Ps 25:17); if we are penitent of heart: “Do not remember the sins of my youth. In your love remember me!” (Ps 25:7). 

Learning to pray with the Psalms not only supplies us with words to express the depths of our human emotions. It teaches us that the Lord really cares about those emotions. He wants us to “pour out our hearts before him” (Ps 62:8), not only those feelings that we deem “acceptable” or religious, but to “call upon him in truth” (Ps 145:18), expressing our deepest longings, anguish, hope—the whole gamut of human feeling. 

Indeed, the Lord Jesus cares intimately about the state of our hearts because He Himself assumed a human heart, with all its depth and range of feeling, in His Incarnation. As man, Jesus learned to pray the Psalms of David, endowing these inspired prayers with a supernatural significance surpassing their considerable poetic excellence. Jesus prayed the Psalms as no one else has. As God the Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He prayed to the Father in the words of the Psalms, using human words to express the infinite, divine exchange of love which characterizes the inner life of the Trinity; as man, he poured out the depth of feeling of his human heart to God, and so our human feelings, too, are taken up into the mystery of divine love.

The way we Christians pray the Psalms is forever changed by this fact: Christ prayed them before us; He prays them now in us; we pray to Him in them. St. Augustine gives us a beautiful expression: in the Psalms, Christ “prays for us as our priest; he prays in us as our head; he is prayed to by us as our God. So we must recognize our voices in him and his voice in us.” 

In the Psalms, we recognize Christ praying to the Father, as when He said from the Cross: “Into your hands I commend my spirit!” (Ps 30:6) As we pray these verses, we lend Christ our voices with which to pray. As we pray in the words of Christ, He prays to the Father with our voices, and our hearts are drawn up into the pattern of His prayer: “we pray to him, through him, in him; we speak with him; he speaks with us” (St. Augustine).