God's Glory Appears: Divine Drama and Divine Command

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR'S thoughts regarding aesthetics and our response to beauty (which is an analogy to our response to the glory of God) and its extension in the the dramatic art form (which is an analogy for understanding the "theodrama" of the Christ-event in its Trinatarian aspect) interplays with his voluntaristic or "divine command" ethical thought and so colors it and distinguishes it from more naked theories of divine command ethics such as Karl Barth's theory (which relies, of course, on its Calvinistic antecedents).

For von Balthasar, "the Godhead is already dramatic life, [and] God can encompass our drama into the divine dram.  This is the meaning and fruit of the Christ-event.  The drama of revelation is a new moment in the already existing drama among the processions" between the three persons of the Trinity.  Steck, 61.

A divine command theory of ethics "holds that the goodness of at least some acts depends in a nontrivial way on God's will."*  Steck, 59.  Von Balthasar appears to hold to a divine command theory of ethics, but it is radically colored or oriented by his  "divine address" theory.  Von Balthasar's divine command theory revolves around the address of God in the dramatic Christ-event.

"For von Balthasar and Barth, the new relationship that Christ effects between God and the human person is not at all peripheral to daily existence, but rather is an essential part of our manner of being in the world."** Steck, 59.  It, of course, involves a deeply personal encounter between one man and the one God.  It is an I-Thou ethic. 

Like any relationship, this divine-human relationship implies interchange, address, and response. And if our covenantal relationship with God is constitutive of our identity as a human person . . . then it follows that the address given us by God and our response to it affect us to our core; they establish us as persons.***

God's address to us in Christ, then, is not something extrinsic to us.  It is not simply carrying out something that God wishes; rather, it is something constitutive to the person, something that confirms us as persons, something that allows us to realize ourselves as persons in an authentic way.

Christ Calls Peter and Andrew by Duccio di Buoninsegna 

The notion of God addressing the human person in Christ is according to Steck something that fits neatly with a divine command theory of ethics, and this for a number of reasons.  First, divine ethics "understands moral action in terms of a response to God's personal call," and so shares in the quality of call-and-response that is central to Von Balthasar's view of the Christ-event.  It seems to be "word-based," not "thing-based" or "good-based."  Viewing the ethical life as call-and-response gives a personalistic ring to ethics, emphasizes the freedom in response, and avoids viewing ethics as involving obedience to "some kind of impersonally valid natural law."  (Steck, 60) (quoting TD2.292)  A command is different than a law.†

Second, a divine command theory is more easily fitted into a covenantal frame of reference.  The Christ-event is at root an invitation to a covenant, an invitation by a sovereign God to an insignificant man to participate in the Trinitarian life of God.  For von Balthasar, "obedience is not only a creaturely submission to God but also a participation in Christ's receptivity to the Father's will."  Steck, 60.  Such participation expands our personhood as it participates in divine personhood and so is ultimately freeing.  "[T]he address to the human existent, like the address of the Father to the Son, is autonomy-granting, personalizing, and indivudalizing."

This intimate, concrete, and covenantal view of von Balthasar's ethics makes it more mission-like.  The command that invites us into the Trinitarian life also invites us to share in the one mission of Christ.

God addresses humanity not only universally but personally, giving each of us a christological "name" that constitutes our idenity and the norm of our conduct. Thus, in describing divine desires for the human agent, von Balthasar rarely uses Barth's favored term, "command," preferring instead terms such as "call," "will," and "address," which have less punctualistic and occasionalistic connotations.

Steck, 60. 

A big distinguishing factor between Barth's ethics and von Balthasar's ethics may be what Barth (disparagingly) called the "damned Catholic And," das verdammte Katholische Und.††  In Barthian ethics, man is nothing next to the sovereign and infinite God.  In von Balthsarian ethics--which are founded within the Catholic tradition--man has his nobility even ad coram Dei. when face-to-face with God.  "For von Balthasar, however, the "And" is part of the glory--the "masterpiece," as he calls it--of God's act of establishing a covenantal relationship."  God "lifts up a genuine dialogue partner, by creating a space where divine and human freedom can encounter one another, without the latter becoming a moment in the former."  Steck, 61.

"The contingent, free [and autonomous] yes to God's address is the place where God's glory shines through in the earthly.  Eliciting this free yes is the goal of the divine drama in Jesus Christ."  Steck, 61.
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*This definition given by Steck seems to prove too much, as it suggests that all theologically-based ethical theories are voluntaristic or divine command theories.  For the will of God to be trivial (which would be required to have a theory that is not based upon divine command, i.e., one based upon God's reason or ratio) is close to suggesting that such theories must hold that the natural moral law is untied to God's will, which comes close to saying that God's will is irrelevant in morality. 
**This, of course, is true for any Christian-based ethic. 
***This seems like a problematic formulation.  The address by God to us through Christ does not "establish us as persons."  We are persons by God's creative act (persons by nature) before God addresses us in Christ.  We are  a person that Christ saves, not a thing saved to be a person.
†A command without law (i.e., not placed within a greater context of law or reason) runs the risk of being arbitrary.  Hence the danger of divine command theories, which tend toward occasionalism.
††I haven't been able to find where this is in Barth's writings.  However, it is quoted (without reference) by Hans Küng in his Theologie im Aufbruch: eine ökumenische Grundlegung as the Barthian response to the Catholic insistence that Revelation is found in both Scripture and Tradition ("das verdammte katholische Und").  See also the translation of that work, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View (the "damned Catholic And").

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 1

EVEN THE REDOUBTABLE Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar,* unquestionably one of the great Catholic theologians of the 20th century, shared in de Lubac's error on the distinction between nature and grace. De Lubac was not alone in his conflation of the orders of grace and of nature with the resulting deprecation of the order of nature. In his book Pura Natura, Steven A. Long shows convincingly that Balthasar's famous analysis of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth contains a deficient ("deeply flawed"), if at times, inconsistent notion of nature and grace, one that has abandoned the Thomist doctrine that accords both human nature and divine grace a separate, real order, with real separate ends, and attempts to reconcile them by subordinating, or perhaps better, superordinating, the natural to the supernatural. Steven A. Long's critique of Balthasar's work is respectful, even apologetic, but withering. It is perhaps this error in Balthasar's work, and the similar error in de Lubac's work, that explains, until rescued by John Paul II's encyclical Veritatas splendor, the weakness of Catholic moral theology over the last generation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Long focuses on Balthasar's work The Theology of Karl Barth.** Since the Protestant theologian Karl Barth was so uniquely hostile to the doctrine of the natural law, Balthasar's treatment of Barth would be an opportune condition for investigating Balthasar's own viewpoint, particularly the second chapter of section three of that work, entitled "The Concept of Nature in Catholic Theology." Long calls it the "mother load of Balthasar's rich reflections on nature and grace." Long, 54. In Long's view, nature for Balthasar is merely a "postscript," indeed, maybe not so much as that, perhaps more like "the equivalent of a theological vacuoule or empty Newtonian space, a placeholder for grace." Long, 55.

The best approach for synopsizing Long's critique is to identify those portions of Balthasar's work that are criticized, identify those portions with which Long is critical by number, and then summarize Long's observations of those portions.

VON BALTHASAR

[A]s a created being of nature, man has no other goal than the supernatural vision of God. It is essential to realize that Thomas does not regard this as a hypothetical goal. Indeed he knows of a finis naturalis, meaning a fulfillment corresponding to the immanent structure of human powers. But he sees this fulfillment either as a goal for this life as opposed to the next, in the Aristotelian tradition, the ideal of the seeker after wisdom. Or he sees it as the cognition verpertina [evening knowledge] [sic] [should be vespertina] as opposed to a cognitio matutina [morning knowledge], in the Augustinian tradition where this distinction first arose. Or finally, he might have meant it in the sense of a distinction between the praemium essentiale [essential reward] and praemium accidentale [accidental reward] internal to a supernatural glory. But Thomas never entertains, even hypothetically, a final goal that could be unmoored from the supernatural vision of God. According to his medieval presuppositions, it would have been impossible for him even to make the conceptual distinction implied by this problem.

"But Thomas never entertains, even hypothetically, a final goal that could be unmoored from the supernatural vision of God." This, of course, is a conspicuous error. St. Thomas explicitly "entertains . . . hypothetically" precisely this. In his Quodlibetal questions (I, q. 4, a. 3, resp.), St. Thomas says in no uncertain terms: *** "But because it was possible for God to have made man in a state of pure nature, it is useful to consider how far natural love could be extended." There are other examples which Long cites to and quotes. Long, 57. On this "strategic point" it appears Balthasar has "accepted an erroneous reading" of St. Thomas. Long, 57.

More generally, the three various interpretations of what St. Thomas may have meant by positing a natural end of man do not do justice to the Thomistic teaching, though they are not inconsistent with it. They just do not seem to go far enough to touch what St. Thomas intended. St. Thomas plainly sees the natural order as have a final end that specifies who man is, and and end that is wholly valid, entire, ontologically thick, and integral in itself, even though, by God's free gift, it is raised into the supernatural life. This rich understanding of what St. Thomas envisioned for the nature of man, particularly its theonomic nature, seems to be lacking or at least not entirely embraced by Balthasar. There is already a discomfiture with a theonomic order in nature. Whatever ordering or end is in nature is immanent, which suggests no natural ordering with the transcendent without recourse to supernatural grace.

VON BALTHASAR

To pose such a hypothesis, to maintain that a graceless order of nature or creation is at least possible, only became urgent for theology when a heretic wanted to make the fluid bond between nature and the supernatural a forced and juridic one.(1) This happened when Baius chose to derive a de jure compulsory right to grace understood as a strict requirement (debitum) from nature based on the de facto configuration of both orders, which were linked because of free grace, not necessity.(2) This conclusion gave birth to 'natural theology' in the modern sense of the term, that is, to a theology of "natura pura."(1)

(1) If Balthasar suggests that the first time the hypothetical notion of nature prescinded from a supernatural order came in response to Baius in the 16th century, he is clearly wrong. As Long observes and prior postings on this subject have made amply clear, St. Thomas entertained the concept of pure nature, a natura pura, in distinguishing between the natural orders and the supernatural orders which, at his creation, were joined in man. Therefore, this hypothetical conception is at least as old as the 13th century.

(2) Having erred on the position of St. Thomas, Balthasar appears to suggest that the notion of a hypothetical possibility of a "graceless order of nature or creation" first came to pass in opposition to the heresy of the Franciscan theologian Baius or Michel de Bay (1513-1589), a heresy called Baianism. Some of Baius's false propositions were condemned in the papal bull issued by Pope St. Pius V, Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567), which condemnation was reaffirmed by Pope Gregory XIII in his bull Provisionis nostrae (1579). Baianism, whose critical errors stem from the relationship between nature and grace within the contexts of man's Creation, Fall, and Redemption, seems to be a confused and unacceptable amalgam of unreconciled Pelagianism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Socinianism, which, of course is defining one ism with four isms and is not very helpful. But the topic of Baianism is for another day, since it is Balthasar we look at in this post.

Though Balthasar is correct enough when he states that grace cannot be considered a necessity of nature, but a free gift to nature, that may not be enough fully to quench the Baian flame. That the gift of grace may be free and not a necessity of nature, does not quite fully answer the question of, as Long puts it, "there is a necessity of justice that it [grace and supernatural life] be given." Long, 58. Is grace like oxygen, a free gift and yet an evident necessity to our nature? Withholding oxygen from a man would seem a punishment, perhaps even an injustice. Similarly, is withholding grace from man a punishment, or even an injustice? This would seem to be the conclusion if supernatural beatitude is man's natural end.

(continued)
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*I call Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) "redoubtable" because he is a formidable Catholic theologian and was deeply loyal to the Magisterium if at times, as may befit a speculative theologian, on edge, perhaps even with a foot over the boundary [I refer here to his controversial and "apocatastastical" Was dürfen wir hoffen (What Dare We Hope?) and Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (A Little Discourse on Hell)]. Balthasar was Swiss, having been born in Lucerne, and grew up in a Catholic family. He was a brilliant, cultured man, steeped in European classics, with a great love for music ("my youth was defined by music," he wrote), had a passion for Mozart, and had perfect musical pitch. (At one point in his life, he gave away his record player and entire works of Mozart because he had memorized the entire corpus and could picture both the scores and hear the music in his mind with completely fidelity.) He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1928, and, dissatisfied with the state of Thomistic scholasticism ("languishing in the desert of neo-scholasticism," as he put it) ventured, through the influence of de Lubac, "beyond the scholastic stuff to the Fathers of the Church," and into the nouvelle théologie. Balthasar was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936. His ventures in the at first distrusted nouvelle théologie, his support of the mystic Adriene von Speyr (for whom he was confessor), and his other activities found disfavor with his Jesuit superiors, and he postponed his annual vows to the Jesuits and later left the order in 1950. His post-Jesuit career met with practical difficulties which he eventually overcame. He devoted himself to teaching and to writing. His writings were prolific and immense in scope and in subject matter. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his fifteen-volume trilogy, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics). He was a peritus for the second Vatican Council, was a member of the papal International Theological Commission from its establishment in 1969, and was the founder of the St. John's Community (Johannes Gemeinschaft) and its publishing house. He also was a founder of the international Catholic journal Communio. In 1988, Balthasar was chosen by John Paul II to be a cardinal, but, two days before his elevation, on June 26, 1988, he died.
**Karl Barth was inveterately hostile to the concept of natural law. We have written about this in our postings, Karl Barth's Response to Natural Law: Nein!, Karl Barth's Tin Ear: Notes, But No Melody (which drew the ire of Barthian George Hunsinger), and Karl Barth: Rubbing Out the Image of God in Man.
***Sed quia possibile fuit Deo ut hominem faceret in puris naturalibus, utile est considerare ad quantum se dilectio naturalis extendere possit. Quod., I, q. 4, a. 3, resp.

Pietro Vermigli: Natural Law Makes us "Run to Christ"

(To see related posts, click on the title and scroll to the end of this post)

Pietro Vermigli by Hans Asper (1560)

THE REFORMER PETER MARTYR VERMIGLI presents us with a notion of the natural law that is more compatible with the Classical and Roman Catholic understanding of that doctrine. Far less pessimistic that his contemporary John Calvin, the Italian Reformer remained more faithful to his Aristotelian and Roman Catholic sources, at least in the area of the natural moral law, than Calvin. In the area of the natural law at least, he writes more in tune with the realism of the via antiqua than with the nominalism of the via moderna. In fact, contrary to so many of the Reformers, Vermigli did not disdain Aristotle, but even wrote a commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics. This stands in direct contrast with Luther, who claimed in his "Open Letter to the Christian Nobility" that "God has sent [Aristotle] as a plague upon us for our sins." Moreover, Vermigli's view in the area of natural theology is "broadly Thomistic with a strong Augustinian accent," thus assuring a more traditional bent. Grabill, 102.

Aristotle

Born in Florence, Italy, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1500-1562), originally Piero Mariano, was admitted into the Augustinian order, and was named after St. Peter Martyr. He was educated at the Augustinian friary in Fiesole, and then transferred to St. John of Verdara near Padua. Graduating in 1527, he preached in Brescia, Pisa, Venice, and Rome. In 1530, Peter Martyr was elected abbot of the Augustinian friary at Spoleto, and in 1533, prior of the convent of St. Peter ad Aram in Naples. Exposed to the influence of Protestant theologians' works, including Martin Bucher and Huldrych Zwingli, and eventually succumbing to their views, Peter Martyr drew the ire of authorities, including those of the Spanish viceroy of Naples and the superiors of his order. Summoned to appear before a chapter of his order and facing likely disciplining, Peter Martyr instead escaped to Pisa and then to Zürich and Basel, ultimately settling at Strasbourg where, in violation of his vows, he married his first wife Catherine Dammartin of Metz, and was appointed professor of theology. As Grabill summarizes it, "he was forced to move every five years on average . . . . [a]s a result, his institutional gravitas was in a state of near constant flux." Grabill, 99. Accepting an invitation by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Vermigli was appointed regius professor of divinity at Oxford where he was actively involved in a variety of theological disputes. When the Catholic Queen Mary assumed the throne, Vermigli returned to Strasbourg where he taught theology. Vermigli ultimately settled in Zürich accepting a chair of Hebrew, whence he spent the rest of his days. He participated in the Colloquy at Poissy, a failed effort in 1561 to reconcile the Calvinist Huguenots and Catholics in France. A prolific writer, Vermigli published Biblical commentaries and various treatises. He died in 1562.

Similar to Calvin, Vermigli did not undertake to fashion a synthetic analysis of the natural law in the manner of St. Thomas. Yet his attendance to the notion of a nature-based morality independent--yet consistent with--revealed morality was more focused than Calvin. Vermigli's treatment of the natural law is most manifest in his exegesis of the first two chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. This is not unexpected, since the first two chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans is the textus classicus when it comes to the Scriptural warrant for the natural law. In his treatment of this text, Vermigli shows marked differences from Calvin. "The fundamental differences between Calvin and Vermigli have to do with the latter's more extensive and disciplined use of natural theology/natural law. . . . While Vermigli acknowledges reason's post-lapsarian limitations, he is more sanguine than Calvin regarding its ability to grasp the precepts of the natural law through sense experience, moral intuition, and dialectics." Grabill, 102, 103-04.

St. Paul

Unquestionably, Vermigli believes in the existence of a natural theology: both the world and our minds are constructed so as to be able to glean from creation the existence of divinity. "God has planted prolepsis in our minds," Vermigli states, "that is, anticipations and notions through which we are led to conceive noble and exalted opinions about the divine nature." Grabill, 110 (quoting Vermigli, Romans, f. 21r; CP, 1.2.3).

That natural knowledge outside of revelation is also found in the area of morality. Vermigli suggests that there is a natural moral theology that finds its roots in the imago Dei, the image of God, that is in man, and which persists, albeit in an attenuated or weakened fashion, in post-lapsarian man. Since our souls are akin to God their creator, they reflect "justice, wisdom, and many other most noble habits," and "also the knowledge of what is right and honest, and what is wrong and unclean." Grabill, 111 (quoting Vermigli, Romans, f. 22v; CP, 1.2.4) Without doubt, Vermigli departs from Calvin's pessimistic assessment of man's ability to know of God and his law. Grabill, 113-14.

Following St. Thomas's commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Vermigli distinguishes between two types of knowledge of God. The first is "effectual," and second "frigid" or ineffectual. Effectual knowledge of God leads to spiritual transformation that is expressed by good deeds. Grabill, 114. Truth obtained through Faith, as distinguished from truth obtained through Reason or Nature, is "more likely to lead to action." Grabill, at 114. Therefore, he affirms with St. Thomas that, without Faith and the aid of God's grace, the "natural law is ineffective in leading human beings to the good." Grabill, 114. "Surely," states Vermigli,

this does not happen because one truth by itself and taken on its own is stronger than another. Truth has the same nature on both sides; the difference arises from the ways and means by which it is perceived. Natural strength is corrupt, weakened and defiled through sin, so that the truth that it grasps has no effect. But faith has joined with it the divine inspiration and power of the Holy Spirit so that it apprehends truth effectively. Hence the difference consists in the faculty by which truth is apprehended. This should not be taken to deny that more than we know through nature is revealed to us by the Scriptures, the New as well as the Old Testament. But we have drawn a comparison between the same truth when known by nature and when perceived by faith.

Grabill, 114 (quoting Vermigli, Romans, ff. 20r-21v; CP, 1.2.11) . To have effective knowledge of the natural law, that is, knowledge that results in an ability to follow that law, requires, in the ultimate analysis following the Fall, Faith and Grace in Christ. True: external compliance to the natural law may be found in other cultures and times:

[N]o nation is so savage or barbarous that it is not touched by some sense of right, justice, and honesty. . . . We might say instead that by this freedom our works may agree with the civil or economic law, which has regard to outward acts and is not so much concerned with the will.

Grabill, 117 (quoting Vermigli, "Free Will," f. 102, par. 4). While perhaps the natural law or even the Mosaic law may be followed externally and imperfectly or partially either as a result of natural goodness or the threat of human law, it is impossible for wounded, fallen man to follow the natural law perfectly, that is, with full internal assent. To follow the natural law with such full internal assent requires us to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength, clearly an act that requires Faith and Grace. Grabill, 116.

For Vermigli (and unlike Calvin), the natural law is not principally condemnatory, though it has a role in informing the conscience and the internal forum. "Vermigli contends that God did not reveal such natural knowledge for the sole purpose of establishing his wrath against the Gentiles," Grabill, 115, but rather to force us to "admit that they were too weak while knowing what they should do," and so to make then "run to Christ." Grabill, 116 (quoting Vermigli, Romans, f. 23v; CP, 1.2.8 "proinde necessarium esse, ad Christum confugere").

For Vermigli, the natural law has a more positive role of prompting man towards God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. This places him opposite Calvin. In almost a Kantian manner, Calvin appears to have maintained that although the natural law may be objectively manifest in the created order, since the Fall man had no ability subjectively to inform himself of that order. Thus, post-lapsarian man had no ability to know the moral Ding an sich that was vouchsafed us in the created order. Vermigli, on the other hand, contended that even after the Fall, man had the ability subjectively to comprehend and so to know the natural law manifest in the created order, but man's knowledge, though real, was not effectual without Faith and Grace. For Vermigli, the corruption of man, therefore, was more manifest in the will than in reason.

Vermigli properly insisted that the knowledge of moral good acquired by nature does not vitiate the need for revelation. "In Vermigli's judgment the phrase by nature [in Romans 2:14] should not be construed in such a way as to exclude divine revelation or assistance vis-à-vis the requirements of morality." Grabill, 117.

In sum,

Vermigli distinguishes two principal uses for why knowledge of the moral law was implanted in the human mind. The first, corresponding with a "frigid" knowledge of God, exists to nullify any excuse by providing objective and universally accessible knowledge of the moral law and the judgment to come. The second, corresponding with an "effectual" knowledge of God, exists to increase human "readiness" and "strength" to do that which is known to be just and honest. It is the second use, as Vermigli insists, that prods humanity to pursue true righteousness and that serves to renew God's image in us.

Grabill, 119-20.

To quote Vermigli:

The image of God in which man was created, is not utterly blotted out but obfuscated in the fall, and for that reason is in need of renewal by God. So natural knowledge is not fully quenched in our minds, but much of it still remains, which Paul now touches upon.

Grabill, 120 (quoting Vermigli, Romans, f. 44 r).

The contrast between Vermigli's teaching on the one hand with Calvin or Barth's teaching on the other hand is striking. If there is to be dialogue between the Classical and Catholic view of the natural law and the Reformed or Protestant tradition, it must be through the likes of someone like Vermigli, and not someone like Calvin or Barth. In the area of natural law, the latter two are simply too far down the path of error to allow for easy reconciliation or rapprochement.

Augustine: Natura Gratiaque aut Gratia Naturaque

The Catholic St. Augustine

THE DOCTOR OF GRACE, SAINT AUGUSTINE, SOUNDLY REJECTS Karl Barth's view of the total depravity or corruption of man's nature, the unreliability or irrelevancy of the natural law, and the doctrine of sola gratia. In this blog posting, St. Augustine's balanced viewpoint as found in his book Nature and Grace (written in response to Pelagius's book Nature) is presented as a balanced theory of the interplay between Grace and Nature, Grace and Law.

It should be kept in mind that Augustine's Nature and Grace was a polemic against Pelagius's book Nature (which essentially denied the need for supernatural Grace). (Barth's opposition to the natural law doctrine is that it detracts from the doctrine of Grace, and essentially leads to Pelagianism, and so it is interesting to compare Barth's response to St. Augustine's response.)

In his Retractions, St. Augustine discusses how Pelagius defended human nature "in opposition to the grace of God" (hominis naturam contra Dei gratiam), and how he sought in his response "not [to] defend grace in opposition to nature," but rather sought to show grace as nature's complement, a "grace by which nature is set free and ruled" (gratiam non contra naturam sed per quam natura liberatur et regitur) (I/23, p. 204, quoting Retractions II, 68(42)). Barth's mistake was to oppose grace to nature when confronting adversaries--real or imagined--that he felt opposed nature to grace. In contrast to Barth's either/or approach, St. Augustine chose a more balanced both/and response to nature's threat against grace, a via media that linked the two together.

St. Augustine views man's nature as vitiated, but not entirely destroyed, since Adam's fall. Man's nature is like that of a "man whom robbers left half-dead on the road" (semivivum latrones in via reliquerunt). "Injured and seriously wounded," gravibus saucius confossusque vulneribus, man's nature "cannot rise up to the peak of righteousness," non ita potest ad iustitiae culmen ascendere, as it was "able to come down from there," sicut potuit inde descendere, and even if at the inn, that is, even if Christian, "he is still undergoing treatment," etiam si iam in stabulo est adhuc curatur. Thus, for Augustine, all men are injured, and in urgent need of a divine Samaritan's and Physician's aid, to transfer them from the roadside, provide them medication, and assure them confinement in an inn while they heal. (I/23, No. 50(43), p. 250) Man's need for Christ the Divine Physician is essential, and the Cross of Christ is not rendered vain by a doctrine that salvation is obtained through natural means.

Man's wounded nature thus cries for a divine physician, and yet withal it does not decry its fundamental dignity:

The God who is his creator is also his savior. Hence, we should not praise the creator so that we are forced to say, indeed so that we are found guilty of saying, that the savior is unnecessary. We should, then, honor human nature with the praises it deserves, and we should refer those praises to the glory of the creator. But we should be grateful that he created us in such a way that we are not ungrateful that he heals us. We should attribute our defects which he heals, not to God's work, but to the human will and his just punishment. As we admit that it was within our power that they not occur, so we should admit that it lies in his mercy rather than in [our] own power that they be healed.

Ipse est autem Creator eius qui Salvator eius. Non ergo debemus sic laudare Creatorem, ut cogamur, immo vere convincamur dicere superfluum Salvatorem. Naturam itaque hominis dignis laudibus honoremus easque laudes ad Creatoris gloriam referamus; sed quia nos creavit, ita simus grati, ut non simus, quia sanat, ingrati. Vitia sane nostra, quae sanat, non divino operi, sed humanae voluntati iustaeque illius vindictae tribuamus; sed ut in nostra potestate fuisse ne acciderent confitemur, ita ut sanentur in illius magis esse misericordia quam in nostra potestate fateamur.

(I/23, No. 39(34), p. 244)

In his response to Pelagius, though he stresses mankind's need for Grace, Augustine insists on the value of Nature in a manner at odds with Barth. Augustine thus navigates between the Charybdis of Pelagius's sola natura, and the Scylla of Barth's sola gratia, preserving the role of the law of Grace and the law of Nature. Augustine's doctrine may therefore be summarized as natura gratiaque aut gratia naturaque. Augustine insists that the life of a Christian is nature and grace, grace and nature. Either way, nature was part of the equation. While St. Augustine insists on the necessity of grace in the matter of salvation and sanctification, he equally insists that man's nature, though severely injured by the Fall, retains sufficient amounts of its original image so as to be a natural source of God's law, that is, his reasoned, even naturally revealed will. For St. Augustine, the Christian life requires a cooperation between the Spirit and Grace, and the natural moral law.

In navigating between the shoals of grace and nature, St. Augustine is the better guide. If we follow Barth we shall founder and, in denying the Natural Law, ultimately deny the Gospel.

The Calvinist Karl Barth

(English translation is taken from Volume I/23 of The Works of Saint Augustine (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1997). Citations are to paragraphs and page numbers. The Latin text is taken from the excellent web page dedicated to the works of St. Augustine, http://www.augustinus.it/latino/)

Karl Barth: Rubbing Out the Image of God in Man

Karl Barth

THE FALL OF MAN IN ADAM according to Karl Barth wholly destroyed the image of God, the imago Dei, in man, and shattered thereby any ability of man naturally to know God and naturally to know the good and the right. Added to this, Barth had tremendous difficulty seeing how a natural theology and a natural knowledge of morality did not detract from Christ's exclusivity as God's revelation. For this reason, though perhaps with good intentions but nevertheless in error, Barth rejected any role of natural theology in the knowledge of God and natural law in the knowlege of the good. This position is against de fide Catholic teaching, and it is clear heresy.

Jacob Jordaen's Fall of Man

According to Stephen J. Grabill, for Barth the natural knowledge of God, while perhaps theoretically possible, was, in practice, absolutely foreclosed to man. Grabill, 24. "Between what is possible in principle and what is possible in fact there inexorably lies the fall," wrote Barth. Grabill, 24 (quoting Natural Theology, 106). Indeed, so extreme was this post-lapsarian chasm, that any natural knowledge of God "was nothing more than idolatry and superstition." Grabill, 25. A duplex cognitio Dei, a two-fold knowledge of God, natural and supernatural, was impossible. For Barth, Christ was the "exclusive epistemological point of entry into the knowledge of God." Grabill, 24.

In the area of morality, Barth's doctrine was similarly narrow. For Barth, the only source for our knowledge of the good and the right was God's revelation in Christ. The effect of the Fall was cataclysmic to the point where it erased any of God's image in us. There is less of God in us remaining after Adam's sin than there was left of Carthage after its sack and destruction by the Romans in the Third Punic War.

Aquí donde el romano encendimiento,
dond´el fuego y la llama licenciosa
solo el nombre dexaron a Cartago . . .

wrote the 16th century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega in his Sonnet, "A Boscán desde la Goleta" (Sonnet XXXIII). The fire and licentious flame of the Roman, the Spanish poet tells us, left but the name of Carthage. In like manner, the fire and flame of the fall, the Swiss theologian avers, left nothing but the name of man, an empty shell, a nature wholly rendered barren by the plowing of Satan's salt. The imago Dei was thus wholly rubbed out, leaving not the least smidgen of God's plan to be salvaged from the smoldering rubble. For Barth, there was "no Anknüpfungspunkt [German = point of contact], no relics of the imago Dei," remaining in us after the Fall." Grabill, 33. Our nature was natura deleta, natura corrupta, nature totally depraved.

[T]he image of God is not just, as it is said, destroyed apart from a few relics; it is totally annihilated. What remains of the image of God even in sinful man is recta natura, to which as such a rectitudo cannot be ascribed even potentialiter.

Grabill, 34-35 (quoting Barth's Church Dogmatics, I.1, p. 238-39).

There is no good to be found in human nature, even potentially. Any "direct discernment of the original relation of God to man, the discernment of the creation of man which is also the revelation of God, has . . . been taken from us by the fall . . ." Grabill, 33 (quoting Church Dogmatics, I.1.) It follows that any attempt independent of revelation to determine morality was doomed to failure because fallen man, man in status corruptionis, "sees and thinks and knows crookedly even in relation to his crookedness." Grabill, 30 (quoting Church Dogmatics, V.1, p. 361.) "Once we begin to toy with the lex naturae as the inner lex aeterna we are well on the way to [supplanting Christ with reason]. And once the reversal has taken place . . . there can be no stopping on this way." Grabill, 31 (quoting Church Dogmatics, IV.1, 373.) So for Barth, arguments based upon the natural law compromise Christ's message, are "Janus-headed," they lead to a "misty twilight in which all cats become gray," and simply result in a pagan opposition of Apollo to Dionysius, leaving Christ out of the equation.

Ultimately, the Barthian false opposition between Christ and Nature, Faith and Reason, leads to a horrible moral exclusivity, a tragic lack of solidarity between the Christian and his unbelieving brothers. There is a certain blindness in stubbornly maintaining that morality is either/or, when it is both/and. By the will and plan of God, morality is both Nature and Christ. There must be something good in the Nature of Man after the Fall, for what else did Christ assume? What else did Christ come to save? The Barthian pseudo-Christian--disdainful of the nature he shares with all men--shares nothing with his unbelieving brother except a lifeless, stinking corpse.

As to Barth's moral doctrine, I say we ought to sentire cum ecclesia: Anathema Sit!

Karl Barth's Tin Ear: Notes, But No Melody

IN THE PRIOR POST REGARDING KARL BARTH, we quoted Stephen Grabill's observation that the followers of Barth's theological and philosophical presuppositions regarding natural theology led them, as well as Barth, to reject a natural law theory of morality, and predisposed them toward a "divine-command ethic saddled with the concomitant problems of actualism and occasionalism." (Grabill, 23.)

The concept of actualism is a difficult one, but it is one of Karl Barth's principal motifs. George Hunsinger, the Director of Princeton Seminary's Center for Barth Studies, provides a lengthy explanation of this Barthian concept which warrants quotation in full:

Actualism is the most distinctive and perhaps the most difficult of the motifs [in Barth's theology]. It is present whenever Barth speaks, as he constantly does, in the language of occurrence, happening, event, history, decision. At the most general level it means that he thinks primarily in terms of events and relationships rather than monadic or self-contained substances. So pervasive is this motif that Barth's whole theology might well be described as a theology of active relations. God and humanity are both defined in fundamentally actualistic terms.

For example, when Barth wants to describe the living God in a technical way, he says that God's being is always a being in act. Negatively, this means that God's being cannot be described apart from the basic act in which God lives. Any attempt to define God in static or inactive terms, as is customary in certain theologies and philosophies, is therefore to be rejected. Positively, the description means that God lives in a set of active relations. The being of God in act is a being in love and freedom. God, who does not need us to be the living God, is perfectly complete without us. For God is alive in the active relations of love and freedom which constitute God's being in and for itself. These are the active relations of God's trinitarian self-differentiation. From all eternity the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. God is free to be God, to constitute the divine being, in this distinctively trinitarian way. God is the Lord, the acting subject, of this self-constituting, mysterious event. Although there is much more to it than this, the basic point of the actualism can already be suggested, as far as the doctrine of God is concerned. Actualism emphasizes the sovereign activity of God in patterns of love and freedom--not only in God's self relationship, but also in relationship to others (II/1, 257-321).

As far as human beings are concerned, the basic point is to understand them strictly with regard to the pattern of God's sovereign activity. Negatively, this means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into fellowship with God. An ahistorical relationship would be a denial of God's activity, and an innate capacity for fellowship would be a denial of God's sovereignty. Positively, therefore, our relationship to God must be understood in active, historical terms, and it must be a relationship given to us strictly from the outside. Our active relationship to God is a history of love and freedom; we are capable of it not because it stands at our disposal, but because we who stand at God's disposal are given it. Our relationship to God is therefore an event. It is not possessed once and for all, but is continually established anew by the ongoing activity of grace. Paradoxically, however although befalling us from the outside and exceeding our creaturely capacities, the event of grace deeply enhances rather than diminishes us. It draws us beyond ourselves into a relationship of communion, of love and freedom, with God. The sovereignty of grace is thus not the negation, but the condition for the possibility, of human spontaneity and fulfillment. God's sovereignty in our lives is enacted as God establishes us with a history of love and freedom.

Barth's theology of active relations is therefore a theology which stresses the sovereignty of grace, the incapacity of the creature, and the miraculous history whereby grace grants what the creature lacks for the sake of love and freedom. This pattern appears again and again in the Church Dogmatics [of Barth]. The church, the inspiration of scripture, faith, and all other creaturely realities in their relationship to god are always understood as events. They are not self-initiating and self-sustaining. They are not grounded in a neutral, ahistorical, or ontological relationship to God independent of the event of grace. Nor are they actualizations of certain ontologically given creaturely capacities. Rather, they have not only their being but also their possibility only as they are continually established anew according to the divine good pleasure. They have their being only in act--in the act of God which elicits from the creature the otherwise impossible act of free response. God is thus the Lord--not only of the mysterious event which constitutes the divine being, but also of the mysterious event which constitutes our being in relation to God.

This point may be drawn to a close with a simple but telling example. Barth's actualistic mode of thought enables him to explain why it is a mistake to reverse the biblical dictum that "God is love." (1 John 4:8, 16) so that instead it would say "Love is God" as though God could be equated with an abstract concept of love in general. As Barth carefully shows on exegetical grounds, "God is love" is a concise way of describing God's activity. It means that "God acts in a loving way." The statement cannot be reversed, because "God" refers to an acting subject, and "love" to the quality of God's activity. (Or more precisely, it could be reversed only one were to take this sense into account.) This example illustrates how Barth wants his actualistic sensibility to arise from and point back to scripture. The actualism is considered valid only insofar as it can illuminate scripture patters of thought (I/2, 374; II/1, 275, IV/2, 756)

George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 30-32 (emphasis added).

Occasionalism is a related concept to actualism. Occasionalism, as described by the Protestant ethicist James M. Gustafson, is "a view of moral action that emphasizes the uniqueness of each moment of serious moral choice in contrast to a view that emphasizes the persistent, perduring order of moral life and the continuities of human experience." In the context of morality, occasionalism results in a subjective morality, where "the moral life is without the props of principles of natural law, which have provided a basis for great objective certitude and for moral absolutes universally valid across time to all who share a common human nature." Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chichago Press, 1978), 71, 72 (quoted in Grabill, 204-05, n. 17.)

The problem with Barth's actualism and occasionalism is that it results in a lack of balance in his thought, a problem resulting from his overemphasis of act, and an underemphasis of being. There is a decided overemphasis of freedom and sovereignty of God, and an underemphasis of law and reason. It is the doctrine of a man who focuses on trees, and so is blind to the beauties of the forest; who focuses on the notes, and so fails to hear the song; who reads specific judgments, but is unable to distill therefrom the rule or law; it is the limitation of a child who mouths words using phonics, but misses the thought in the sentence, the paragraph, or the book. To such a man, God's relationship with creation and with man is, as it were, a series of discrete points instead of a continuum.

Perhaps the best analogy for understanding Barth and for revealing the defect of his actualism and occasionalism and the cul de sac to which they lead is to compare his thought to music. Under Barth's actualism and occasionalism, our relationship with God is one of infinite independent notes, each one free and sovereign. And yet there is no melody, there is no underlying music that we may discern. (Any melody suggests a self-limiting plan, an ordering of notes following a motif, phrase, or theme as part of a greater melody, which is not consonant with Barth's emphasis on freedom and sovereignty of God.) So our relationship with God is a series of ultimately arbitrary and discrete notes: events, acts, occasions, each one independent and not part of a greater whole. It is as if Barth advances a theory of morality which is analogous to the chance music of John Cage--the throw of dice, and not any plan, determines the next note. There is no relationship, no greater melody, that ties one note to the other.

Ultimately, Barth's overemphasis on act over being, on freedom and sovereignty over law, leads to a moral deafness. One becomes deaf to the whole moral song when one insists that our relationship with God is not a melodious relationship, where there are not only discrete or arbitrary notes, but there also is an overarching melody, a complex and orderly panoply of motif, phrases, and themes in a unified whole. For Barth, God, and our relationship with God and his relationship with us, is a series of notes, and not one of melody. And where there is no overarching melody, there is no rule or law to be found; where there is no rule or law, there can be no discernible melody. For Barth's theological tin ear, the statement "God is Law Itself," as found in the Mirror of Saxons, would be jarring, when, in fact, for the trained ear, it is nothing but the most beautiful of melodies.

Indeed, in the moral life of man there is an underlying dual melody. There is a biphony in the moral song that God plays out in his creation naturally and in his redemption of that world in Christ supernaturally. Barth could not, would not hear it. That underlying melody is the Eternal Law. Played out in our world, and in the inner ear of our heart, this underlying melody is heard in the voice of the Natural Law. Played out in revelation, and in God's Word, the underlying melody is heard in the Divine Law. This dual melody is composed by God himself in the act of Creation and the act of Revelation. It is through this lovely melody that God woos us. It is through this melody by which God, as a man might his wife, beckons us to dance with him. It is in the harmonies and rhythm of this melody that we dance with God in the pas de deux that is the moral life. A dance that is ever and eternally in step with the dual strains of the Natural Law and Divine Law, which together harmonize into the one eternal and echanting melody of the Eternal Law.

Karl Barth's Response to Natural Law: Nein!

THERE IS MUCH IN THE PROTESTANT THEOLOGIAN KARL BARTH that may be admired, particularly his courageous stance against Nazism. But from the perspective of an advocate of the natural law, Barth is an enfant terrible. Or perhaps Barth is not such much an enfant terrible as he is like the little boy who revealed that the emperor had no clothes; in this case, the naked truth that Protestantism or at least Calvinism, at least when pressed to its logical extreme, has no doctrine of the natural law, and is pure divine positivism, not unlike Islam (though for different reasons). Barth's vehement, even vicious, rejection of the doctrine of the natural moral law stems from his rejection of the notion of natural revelation, and hence a natural theology. Barth's "categorical rejection of every form of natural theology and natural law" may be found in what has become a classical locus of the natural law debate among Protestants, the debate between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner (translated and published under the title Natural Theology (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1946)). "The task of our theological generation," the Protestant Brunner suggested in his article "Nature and Grace," is "to find the way back to a true theologia naturalis." (quoted in Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), 21). To which suggestion, Karl Barth acerbically and succinctly responded: "Nein!" To Barth, the burden was to "learn again to understand revelation as grace and grace as revelation." To paraphrase Barth's view in the context of the natural law, Barth suggested that the age did not require Protestants to find their way to a doctrine of natural law, a lex naturalis, but to learn again to understand revelation as law, and law as revelation. Barth rejected the notion that God may be known by both Faith and Reason--he rejected a duplex cognitio Dei. Similarly, he may be said to have rejected a duplex cognitio legis Dei, a two-form way of knowing God's law, that is, a two-form way of knowing the good to which we are called.



As it turned out, Barth's position won out over Brunner's position. Barth's position has therefore been a motif or a "subtext of sorts in mainstream Protestant criticisms of the natural-law tradition." (Grabill, 22) As Grabill points out, Barth's loud rejection of the natural law on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the Reformer's teaching has had the unfortunate effect of blinding Protestant theologians from seeing the vestiges of natural law teaching in the early Reformers, and so there has been inadequate study of what part of the natural law teaching was accepted by the Reformers and what part was rejected or modified. As a consequence, instead of a natural law concept that would allow rapport with Catholics or non-Christians, Protestants to the degree that they have adopted Barth's unequivocal rejection of natural theology and natural law, "have tended to advocate a divine command ethic with the concomitant problems of actualism and occasionalism that are evident in Barth's theology." Grabill, 23.

Theologia Corporis-1-Ab Initio

TO ENGAGE US INTO CONVERSATION WITH CHRIST is what John Paul II asks us to do in approaching matters of marriage and family life. In sort of an Ignatian mediation, we are asked to imagine ourselves among the crowd in Judea. We have seen this God-Man heal persons of various ills, and he fascinates us. A small group of Pharisees approach Christ with questions of marriage, and, more specifically, its dissolution--divorce, but in a spirit of challenge, rather than as disciples open to his teaching. "Is it lawful," they ask him, "for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?" Matt. 19:3.

In response, Christ refers them to fundamentals, from the beginning, ab initio. Christ refers them to Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures. He refers them to the creation of man. He refers them to the creation of woman. He refers them to the first marriage. Ab initio. Christ does not refer to the Law of Moses to answer a question about the Law of Moses, of which the Pharisees are the greatest representatives. He does not refer his questioners to any divinely promulgated law, but to the First Law, the Law of Nature, the Law that inheres in the created order and reflects in a primordial manner, the Eternal Law, the law in the mind of God. His teaching is thus to all men, for all times, and not only to the Jews in Judea in the 1st century A.D. Were we to ask the Lord, "the laws of the State allow for divorce . . . ," or "Science has given us birth control . . . ," or "Advocates of human rights claim that two persons of the same sex may marry . . . " In arriving at answers, Christ would say, "Turn ab initio." Go back to the beginning, to the Natural Law in created nature.

To John Paul II, Christ's invocation of the beginning, his focus on the ab initio, is fundamental; it is the operative and normative basis for the entirety of Christ's teaching, and so John Paul II seeks to "try to penetrate into the 'beginning'" to which Christ appealed. [1.5, 133]

There are two narratives regarding creation in Genesis (Gen. 1:1-2:4, the so-called Priestly or Elohist version because it uses the word Elohim to refer to God; and Gen. 2:5-25, the so-called Yahwist version, because it uses the word Yahweh to refer to God). In his answer, Christ refers to them both. [As an aside, Christ's reference to both versions of the creation story may be something that biblical scholars of the critical school may keep in mind when they try to pit one version of scripture to another, as if putting truth against truth, seeking to separate and divide, instead of accepting both as God's word and finding the truth in a fruitful synthesis or harmony of truths.]

What does Christ teach by referencing the Elohist creation story? It is a reference to the objective order. He wishes to teach us that Man is in the world, part of created nature; yet he is also above the world, made in the image of God. He shares in the brute creation (that which is "separated" "called" "put" from chaos), and in the living creation (that which is "created" or "blessed"). [2.3 & n.1, 135] Yet when it comes to man, there is, as it were, a divine pause. "[T]he Creator seems to halt before calling [man] to existence, as if he entered back into himself to make a decision, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.' (Gen. 1:27)." [2.3, 135] Christ's reference to the ab initio in Genesis is therefore a reference to the rich ensemble that is man, who, at the instruction of the Lord, must answer questions about his end and the good by reference to cosmology, but also to theology; he must refer both to the natural and to the supernatural; he must refer to the physical and the metaphysical; he must refer to body and the soul; to the contingent here, and to the absolute beyond. He must also recall that he is both man, and woman.

Christ's invocation of the Yahwist creation narrative, on the other hand, is more a reference to the subjective order, the areas of psychology, of conscience. "One could say that Genesis 2 presents the creation of man especially in the aspect of subjectivity." [3.1, 138-39] But it is not as if the objective order is opposed to the subjective order. "When we compare the two accounts [of creation], we reach the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created in the 'image of God.'" [3.1, 139]

In referring back to the Yahwist creation narrative, Christ also places us within the context of man's own history, specifically, the creation of man and woman, and the narrative of the Fall. It is significant that the "beginning" to which Christ refers, the ab initio, is the reality of man before the fall. In answering the question the Pharisees posed to him regarding divorce, Christ refers to man in the state of paradise. There is sufficiently left of this order for us to be able to refer to it even now. Theologians distinguish the state of man before the fall, in his state of original innocence, his status naturae integrae, from his state after the fall, in his state of sinfulness, his status naturae lapsae. [3.3, 141] The following is key:

When Christ, appealing to the 'beginning,' directs the attention of his interlocutors to the words written in Genesis 2:24, he orders them in some sense to pass beyond the boundary that runs, in the Yahwist text of Genesis, between man's first and second situation. He . . . appeals to the words of the first divine order, expressly linked in this text with man's state of original innocence. This means that this order has not lost its force, although man has lost his primeval innocence. Christ's answer is decisive and clear. For this reason, we must draw the normative conclusions from it, which have an essential significance not only for ethics, but above all for the theology of man and the theology of the body . . . .

[3.4, 141-42]

One may note, that on this insight of John Paul II alone, the entirety of Calvin's (and to a slightly lesser extent Luther's) notion of man's "total depravity" is blown to smithereens and shown to be manifestly unscriptural. Similarly, the Lutheran theologian Karl Barth's vehement, even vituperative rejection of natural theology and natural law is found wanting. If you want better to follow Christ, throw away your copy of Christian Institutes Presbyterians, and your Church Dogmatics Lutherans! Instead, follow Christ's lead and

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), An Essay on Criticism, Part 1.

This includes the art of being human, which is what morality and the theology of the body is all about.