God's Glory Appears: Missioning and Fulfillment

RESPONDING TO THE GLORY of the Lord as one beholds the theodrama of the Christ-event is to submit, in a person-to Person confrontation, to the command of the Lord. Yet this submission is not the sort of submission that destroys the personality of the person submitting to God. The submission to the command of God in a convenantual pledge which shows itself in participation in the mission of the Son of God, both in his human mission and in his inner Trinitarian relationship, is the height of human fulfillment.

For von Balthasar, human fulfillment consists not in our human knowing and willing Absolute Being, but rather . . . in a personal relationship with the personal Absolute. God is the absolute "Thou" of the human "I," and the unique and irrevocable name by which God calls each person is the seal of that person's dignity. God's missioning name is not something additional to one's identity. . . . In short, it is the perfect, irrevocable, and fulfilling address of the absolute Thou. The questions of personal identity which the tension between the ambivalence and flux of infinite existence and the longing for the absolute now provokes has its adequate answer: in the mission, one's personal name is written on the absolute.

Steck, 87.   Von Balthasar is, like most moderns, keen to preserve human autonomy.  Yet he does not model it in any kind of form independent of God.  Indeed, human autonomy is oxymoronically or perhaps better, paradoxically, found in a human being's personal participation in his unique mission which is attached to the mission of the Lord.  "This unique mission grants individuals their true autonomy."  Steck, 87.  Anything outside of it is, by definition, slavery or heteronomy.

 Gisele Bauche, The Great Commission

There is a "narrative teleology" in man, one that finds fulfillment in submission to the narrative of the Christ-event.  We "see" ourselves, our own drama, within the greater theodrama which the Lord allows us to "see."  Thus we participate in a unique and fulfilling way our own reality:

Christians [are allowed] to see the diverse particularities of their lives as part of the biblical drama: the occasions of their success and failure, their acts of minor heroism and those of unnoted mediocrity, their rebellion against God and their repentance. The story of Christ, the Christians' story, offers a horizon that illuminates the who that Christians are within these fragments of particularity and points them to an identity that they can embrace with all their energy. In embracing the name the Father has given to the Christian in Christ . . . the Christian is moved to do more than put on a costume and memorize a part. In following the currents of the divine will, Christians eagerly engage in the task at hand with all their love and intellect, their passion and creativity. . .
[T]he Christ-event has really become, through the Christians' incorporation in Christ, their story, not just epistemologically (i.e., the lens through which they interpret their lives), as it might seem in some works of narrative ethics, but ontologically, as the fruit of the Spirit's power to "liquefy" the Christ-form, to use von Balthasar's language, by stamping it onto the lives of their followers.

Steck, 88, 89.

It is this drama-within-the-Theodrama that constitutes our "missioning," and this "missioning" is what is at the heart of the Christian ethical life. "The name that God gives the individual is a missioning name; the individual is sent to further the divine plans and hopes for creation by participating in the mission of Christ."  Steck, 92. This mission is Christological. It is eucharistic. It is not self-dissipating, but rather a self-enlarging expansion of one's life into the very heart of Trinitarian love.  And while this missioning participates in Christ's greater mission, it is for that no less personal, unique, or particular.  "The lives of the saints teach us one thing: growth in Christ is not growth into ethical sameness."  Steck, 91.

Yet, by incorporating themselves into the mission of Christ, all the "fragments" of mankind are "harmonized in the light of the divine economy," and it gives them lasting meaning in that they participate in the eternal relationship within the Absolute.  Steck, 91.  "This mission is not an additional task to one's identity; it is the one's name and identity as viewed from a different vantage, that of the Father lovingly beholding creation through his Son."  Steck, 92.

God's Glory Appears: Divine Obedience and Freedom

VON BALTHASAR'S ETHICAL THEORY is based upon a divine command theory, though it seeks to avoid the traditional problems that plague such theories. One way is to compare the submission to the command as analogous to the submission on experiences upon seeing a work of beauty, only instead of beauty, it is the Glory of the Lord to which one responds. The second way he softens the seeming external imposition of a divine command is with his notion of mission.

In our last blog entry we saw how the creature confronted with God's glory submits to the Lord in love.  Von Balthasar desires, however, to avoid this submission translating into a loss of human freedom.  Though he wants to preserve the notion of God's sovereignty, he also insists on human freedom.  Von Balthasar "maintains that it is the divine intent to bring forth such freedom" from the act of obedience to the sovereignty of God which manifests itself in glory, "a human freedom that is distinct from God's own."  Steck, 83.  This seems paradoxical: to exchange one freedom to gain one freedoms, but these sort of paradoxes are deeply scriptural.  "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."  (Luke 9:24; cf. Matt. 16:25, 10:38, Mark 8:35)

Von Balthasar tries to effect a reconciliation as it were between God's sovereignty and our freedom through the concept of mission.  Specifically, he tries to couple our freedom-giving mission with the freedom that is experience among the persons of the Trinity.  The relationship between the Son and the Father is clearly one of submission (e.g., "I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me.") (John 6:38), and yet there can be not question that, as God, the Son is sovereignly free.  It seems quite clear that God wants us to be free as well.  The classical referential text: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32)  "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free."  (Gal. 5:1)

 Crucifixion by William G. Congdon

To gain this freedom which God is desirous to give, the Christian must incorporate himself as it were into the very mission of Christ the Word..  "The task of Christians is . . . to shape their lives into a response in which the unique word that God has made them to be is given expression."  Though the image is "analogous" and "obviously imperfect," von Balthasar's ethics sees the mission of the individual as being one where he "becomes a christological 'person' of the Trinity," though it be in an adopted and not substantive sense.  Steck, 83.

This puts squarely into paradox: "autonomy is achieved by an ever greater dependence upon God."  Steck, 83.  God is able to achieve this, well, because he is God.  "The one, absolute freedom of the Godhead has room for the 'otherness' of human freedom because, as von Balthasar repeatedly stresses, God is already "Other" in the unity of the Spirit, and this divine otherness is the basis for every created otherness."  Steck, 84.

Von Balthasar's concept of mission, then, informs the ethical life:

Since the space made available to the individual through Christ's mission is not 'a mere fluid medium' but rather 'a personal and personalizing area' (TD3.249), the Spirit's prompting will direct the person to embrace more than just general ethical norms or universal principles. He will be called to the unique, personal norm that is his best particular way of freely and creatively participating in the divine interplay.

Steck, 84.*  What von Balthasar is seeking to do is to avoid the ethical life as being viewed as a submission to an impersonal law or impersonal code.  Though he is not advocating by any means some sort of Christian anarchy or Christian antinomianism, he is insisting (I think properly) that the Christian life is ultimately an encounter with a person, the person of Christ, and, moreover, it is deeply Trinitarian inasmuch as it participates intimately in the life-giving Holy Spirit and its unique promptings.  For von Balthasar the "norm must be personal," and the "only such norm is the Spirit."  Steck, 85.  And all this provides an authentic freedom, a freedom that is not contrary to Law, but a freedom that goes well beyond anything the Law can give.  "Through the personalizing presence of the Spirit, we reach into absolute freedom and form ourselves [or perhaps better, are ourselves formed] into the 'I' that God created each of us to be."  Steck, 85.

The ethical life is therefore intimately personal, and though it would be a mistake to attribute to von Balthasar any antinomian character, it is equally a mistake not to see the personal and freeing nature of the ethical covenant as each human person submits himself to the glory of the Lord seen most resplendently in the Christ event (and its apex being the Crucifixion), and in that submission participates in the very mission of the Son, and receives the gift of the Holy Spirit who, it has been promised, will guide us into all truth (John 16:13), including that truth that sets us free (John 8:32).

Thus the Spirit is the gift to us of both "a concrete plan of the future, in accordance with our own mission and hence our own personality, and the inner free spontaneity to carryout, recall, and follow this plan." (TD3.52) . . . Thus, through the Spirit, the Father gives Christians "an acting area in which they can creatively exercise their freedom and imagination." (TD2.273) In our ethical lives, we do not "trace a path already marked out for us, as if we were immature children"; rather, divine freedom "has 'prepared' a personal path for each one of us to follow freely, a path along which our freedom can realize itself." (TD3.52)

Steck, 85. To be sure, since we are inserted into Christ's mission (and it is thus that we obtain the Holy Spirit which gives us freedom), and Christ's mission is one, "the personal identity given to each person and the ethical path it entails will always be christomorphic."  Steck, 85.  Strictly speaking, one does not access the Holy Spirit and gain the freedom of the sons of God except through the channel of the Son's mission.

To be sure, von Balthasar accounts for both light and dark.  There are times when we walk and bask in the light of the Lord, and other times where we walk in the dark night of the soul.  Sometimes, the ethical life requires a sort of "prophetic obedience," one which "requires only word and hearing, not understanding or vision."  With "prophetic obedience," we enter into a sort of "'dark' obedience that God genuinely demands of the Christian."  Steck, 85-86.  This sort of "'dark' obedience" is best displayed in Christ's own "'dark' obedience" as manifested in his acceptance of his passion and death: Christians, along with their master, can have their own Gethsemane, their own via Dolorosa, their own Cross.

To sum up this part of von Balthasar's teaching, the Christian ethical, we might put it all together as does Steck in his synopsis:

The story of Christ draws the individual to enter its story (first level of obedience). Christ's narrative becomes his narrative. The Christian in faith moves from the immanent narratives available to him through his community, family, occupation, etc., and to the narrative that comes to be his in faith. Because he identifies himself entirely with its central character, the desires and wishes of the Father become, in divine obedience (second level), his own. The story that will be authored for him in God's command to him will always be the story of his Son. But in this story, there will also be moments of dark obedience, including the demands for acceptance of suffering and forbearance within it. . . . But this kind of blind obedience is not a self-violating obedience. God's commands will never, existentially or ontologically, direct the Christian out of the story of the Son or away from the idea of unique personhood eternally guarded for each person.

Steck, 86.*

This synopsis is deeply Scriptural, but it is also Ignatian.  "The Ignatian rhythm of indifference and engagement, of contemplation and action, that is part of this story forestalls any disruption by the divine command of the individual's most inward sense of self, since that self has in its deepest freedom identified itself with the personal freedom of God as displayed in Christ."  Steck, 86.

For von Balthasar, Jesus is the "concrete analogy of being," and is "the revelation of the relationship between divine and human freedoms."  As it has been revealed, "these freedoms must be characterized in personal and obediential terms."  Steck, 86-87 (emphasis added)  The Holy Spirit adds an entirely new dimension to this: through the Holy Spirit "God's freedom not only engages human freedom dialogically and interpersonally, but also comes to the individual as the one who bears his freedom."  Steck, 87.

All this participates in that paradox of the Christian ethical life that is captured in this couplet from John Donne's poem, "Batter my heart Three-Personed God":

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

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*The jarring (at least to my ear, and to traditional usage) female personal pronouns used in a generic sense have been substituted with traditional masculine form pronouns used in a generic sense.

God's Glory Appears: Submission to the Christ-Event

CONFRONTED WITH THE CHRIST-EVENT, specifically, the sacrificial death of Christ on the Cross, the Christian is presented with a theodrama, a drama which reveals the Glory of the Lord, and it requires a response. The proper response is a response of submission, or subjection, or obedience. But however one calls this act, one must not forget its person-to-Person quality.

For von Balthasar this act (in man) is a two-fold subjection, a creaturely one and a divine one.  There is a subjection "of our whole nature and person to the service of Christ inasmuch as we are made for him who is our divine head."  In the second subjection (which is simultaneous with the first) we internally adopt "the mind of Christ, whose divine inner freedom and personhood are identical with his obedience to the Father."  Steck, 80 (quoting Balthasar's Christian State of Life, 216-17)

We shall explore this first, creaturely kind of submission in this posting.  The second, divine kind of submission will explored in our next posting.

The first sort of obedient response, the creaturely, is the obedience of faith.  "[F]aith is 'demanded' by God from the one who perceives Christ-form not heteronomously but rather 'aesthetically,' as a free response of gratitude."  Steck, 80.  In other words, the obedience of faith requires us to see more than just a man dying on a cross.  We have to "look beyond" what we see with our eyes, "beyond" history, as it were, and recognize that before our eyes, and a certain time in history, something unique occurred: God gave the human life he had assumed for our sake up for us for our sake.  This is the "form" that must be perceived.  Once faith sees this, and understands the "why" of this dramatic event, this form, he is thankful.  This response is analogous to the aesthetic response, and so we have to recall that this "power of aesthetic expression is never overwhelming power."  Steck, 81 (quoting TD2.28)

Deus Pulchrum est! Venite! Adoremus!

This draw of the form of the Lord as he is found on the Cross is not overwhelming, and the divide caused by its lack of overwhelming nature and its respect of creaturely freedom is that two thieves hung with Christ have such disparate responses to the Lord between them.  One submits in faith.  The other mocks.

What of course the submitting thief learns and the mocking thief loses is that the submission to Christ yields in perhaps a paradoxical or oxymoronic character--it is certainly unexpected--a freedom.  This submission "grants freedom," and it "illuminates, in itself and in the man who encounters it . . . the realm of an infinite dialogue."  Steck, 81 (quoting TD2.28).  "Today you shall be with me in paradise."  (Luke 23:43)  There can be nothing more freeing, more life-giving that this promise obtained by the submission of faith.

The power of God which elicits and demands this response is not power in the way we might understand power.  It is wrong to use power--political, tyrannous--and our submission to it as the analog here.  (Matt. 20:25-29)  Jesus makes it clear that the power seen on earth is not the power he expects his disciples to exercise because it is not the power he will exercise when he gives his life as a ransom for many on the Cross.  This "power"--which Jesus compares to a power of service--is best understood in von Balthasar's eyes as a sort of aesthetic response to the divine Glory which (if one has the eyes to see) will see most vividly on the Cross.

"[T]he triune love of God has power [over us] only in the form of surrender (and in the vulnerability and powerlessness that is part of the essence of that surrender."  Steck, 81 (quoting Von Balthasar, "Eschatology in Outline," 435)  As Steck summarizes the issue: "Because it is not based on a power relation or demand of logic, but rather on an appeal to freedom, the aesthetic claim is both softer in its engagement with human freedom yet more effective."  Steck, 81.  It is through this particularly heuristic lense of aesthetics that von Balthasar is able to save his "command ethics" from "the mire of heteronomy which threatens Barth's ethics," and indeed any ethic based upon voluntarism, divine command.*  Steck, 81.

 The elevation by von Balthasar of the notion of "beauty" in the Christian ethical response to Jesus on the Cross--and the real meaning behind it--makes beauty in God (the divine Glory) a "theological category," and hence the response to such beauty--aesthetics--a "moro-theological category."**  This aesthetic component saves the divine command theory in Steck's view:

In pushing ahead to integrate the discontinuous and continuous themes in an aesthetics of the theological form, von Balthsar redeems divine command ethics for his Catholic audience. Perceiving the beauty of the human other always includes a moment of obedience or discontinuity, and this discontinuity is radicalized before the divine Other. Von Balthasar's theological aesthetics preserves the objective discontinuity of the divine and human judgments (divine glory is not earthly beauty) without postulating a disruption of human agency (i.e., mere hetronomous submission) in order to make this discontinuity tangible. His ethics offers an aesthetic version of what Paul Tillich describes as "thenonomous" ethics.***

Steck, 83.  By likening the ethical response to a human's response to beauty, i.e., by importing an aesthetics into moral theology, von Balthasar nimbly sidesteps some significant problems associated with the divine command theory will fully preserving the otherness and sovereignty of God.  Though submission to the Christ-event is wholly fulfilling, it is not--in the first response--fulfillment that drives our submission.  Though submission is to something "wholly Other," it is not a bowing down to a foreign power (which is at the heart of a religion such as Islam), but it is a sort of decentering of self when confronted with a sort of "hyper-beauty," the appearance of glory.  It is, nevertheless, a true submission, a recognition that we "could not construct its beauty on our own," yet it is a recognition that this Christ-form we see "transcend[s] our previous standards of beauty.  While there remains discontinuity between the nature of divien and earthly aesthetic claims, the heightened claim of the divine object is matched by its power to draw forth a human response of love."  Steck, 82.  We are not called to respond with a "Herculean attempt to meet its claim" (which would be a sort of Pelagianism), bur rather to respond with a "single-hearted recognition of its glory and majesty."

Succinctly: Von Balthasar's ethics might be reduced to the following: Deus pulchrum est!  Venite adoremus!  God is Beauty!  Come! Let us adore Him!

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*As Steck makes clear, Barth also recognized the beauty of the Christ-event, but he did not give it the emphasis that von Balthasar did.  "While both Barth and von Balthasar maintain the appropriateness of describing God's work in Christ as 'beautiful,' only von Balthasar pursues the full implicatdions of a characterization for ethics."  Steck, 81.  The matter is further treated by Steck in pages 81 through 82 amply supported by citations from Barth's Church Dogmatics, but will not be elaborated here.
**Steck suggests that this distinction between Barth and von Balthasar is even more fundamental than the well-known dispute between Barth and von Balthasar on the notion of analogy of being (analogia entis).  Steck, 82.
***Steck cites in footnote 56 (on page 186) Paul Tillich's definitions of autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy.  This is a very serviceable definition and will therefore be quoted here.  "Autonomy asserts that man as the bearer of universal reason . . . is his own law.  Heteronomy asserts that man, being unable to act according to universal reason must be subjected to a law, strange and superior to him.  Theonomy asserts that the superior law is at the same time, the innermost law of man himself, rooted in the divine ground which is man's own ground."  Steck, 186 (quoting Paul Tillich's The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) (trans., James Luther Adams)).  In his encyclical Veritatis splendor, John Paul II makes a very similar distinction, though John Paul II takes about "participated theonomy."

God's Glory Appears: The Ignatian Influence

FOR HANS URS VON BALTHASAR, the ethical response to Christ may be best likened to an aesthetic response to the theodrama of the Christ-event, in particularly to the revelation of God's glory in Christ on the cross. The aesthetic experience is a sort of "heuristic lense" or analog of the ethical response.  This response is a dynamic response, one ultimately that brings forth a loving response, perhaps first one founded in eros, dilectio, but one soon perfected in agape, caritas. There is love on both ends of the equation as man confronts the divine beauty, a love up and a love down: an Augustinian Neo-platonic love up which meets up with a Biblical kenotic love down.

In confronting and responding to the beauty, the glory that is found in the Christ-event, we put ourselves off-balance, as it were.  We must leave an ego-centrism and become other-centered.  At the same time, the movement is not uni-directional.  The Word of God, incarnate in Christ--indeed God the Trinity acting through the Word of God incarnate in Christ--has also in a manner of speaking become "other-centered."  God leans to us, as much (or perhaps more) a we lean to him.  "It is a fundamental principle of von Balthasar's aesthetics that human fulfillment is not found in an ek-static, one-directional movement of love toward the beloved.  Rather it is found in a bipolarity of receptivity and agency, as reflected in freedom's dismensions of relationality and self-possessions."  There is a certain "bipolarity" in von Balthsar's aesthetic (and, by extension, ethical) thought.

At the heart of this understanding is, if Steck is to be believed, the spiritual of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  "El hombre es criado para alabar, hacer reverencia y servir a Dios nuestro Señor y, mediante esto, salvar su ánima," states St. Ignatius in the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises.  "Man is created to praise, to reverence, and to serve God our Lord, and by doing so, to save his soul."  This simple view contains a clear bi-polarity: movement toward God and a reception of something from God (saving grace).  "For von Balthasar, these two movements reflect the bipolarity of personal love."  Steck, 77.

There is in St. Ignatius the notion of a "love up" and a simultaneous "love down."  It is phrased differently perhaps, as a love "from below" or de abajo, and a love "from above," de arriba.  But the meaning is the same, the love from below meets up with the love from above.  The Ignatian concept is without question Biblically steeped.  "The creature's surrender to God becomes a participation in God's surrender to it, and ultimately, in God's kentoic movement toward creation and its redemption."  Steck, 78.

The eros of the creature man (he has no other love) meets up with the agape love of God (he has no other love to give, except that it links up with the human eros of Christ which is in perfect conformity with the agape of the Son) and in that way, the eros gets caught up and "integrated into the divine, self-giving movement of agape (kenotic) love."  Steck, 78.

This mutual surrender is inter-personal: the personal God comes down from above, and the person of man reaches up from below.  Ultimately, there has to be a surrender or the creature to the Creator, the lover to the Beloved, but the marvel of it is that Creator has surrendered first, has loved first.

 St. Ignatius of Loyola

The Ignatian concept of response to God is a one-on-one notion.  Though it certainly does not ignore the Christian's obligation to abide by the natural moral law, it focuses one something beyond this bare minimum of obedience.  It seeks not submission to general law, but submission to the personal command of God to me.  As such, it is something that fits it with von Balthasar's command or covenantal view of ethics.

The Ignatian exercitant seeks to desire "solely according to what God our Lord will move ones will to choose."  The pilgrim seeks to have the desire, the affection to possess a created good or not to possess it with only one view in mind: según que Dios nuestro Señor le pondrá en voluntad, in whatever manner God our Lord informs his will.  This is a highly personal concept of ethics.

The ultimate ground of Christian love of the world is found [in Ignatius], not as for Augustine in the ontological participation of created things in the one goodness of God, but in the personal willing of God--a personal willing that, of course, includes God's decision to create, and his providential care of that creation. Christian love for the world contains an internal bipolarity: the movement of the creature de abajo, from below upward to the divine love and glory seen in the Christ-event, spontaneously issues forth into a movement de arriba, from above, where creation is embraced with the passion and intensity of divine love. Ethical judgmentsof the particular ways to love self, neighbor, and creation are complete and final only in light of this divine, personal willing.

Steck, 79. There is therefore a sort of indifference that must be developed to the things of this world, to creation (we must be, in Ignatian terms indiferentes).  But this is not some sort of Stoic apatheia.  This is an active effort to be indifferent so that we may use the things of this world (all of which in a certain particular way participate in the goodness of God) in the manner that God wills for us in our particular situation.  

For von Balthasar, Ignatian indifference is not so much a permanent stances vis-à-vis creaturely things, bur rather one moment in a dynamic posture toward them. Indifference moves back and forth, from an initial detachment in regard to earthly goods (in a flight from the world in order to make oneself available to divine movements), and toward a reengagement of those goods, now with the desires and love attuned to those of God.

Steck, 79.  It is here, in the middle of the indifference so that we may hear God's will, in the slight pause to our personal desires so that we have no desire, no tendentiousness, that God's will can be heard in its purity.  Once known, this personal communication of God's will is for me my will.  I am thus informed about what is my ethical norm.  It is, then, a response to a command, a command of a loving God, and interpersonal command-and-submission where eros and agape meet.  But it is not a submission to command which causes me to lose myself.  While perhaps in a way I do lose myself, it is a loss of self not in a Buddhist sense where I disappear into the Absolute, it is a loss of self in a Biblical sense where I am in the Absolute and the Absolute is in me.  "Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses it will save it." (Luke 17:33; see also Luke 9:24; Matt. 10:39, Mark 8:35; John 17:25)  It is a submission which confirms my personhood, not one which destroys it.

God's Glory Appears: The Moral Narrative

DIVINE COMMAND THEORIES OF MORALITY have a built-in problem arising from their premises. If morality is based upon God's will (and not reason), how do we link obedience to that command to human fulfillment, to happiness. Reason-based theories of morality rely on a direct relationship between the rule and nature so that following the reason-based rule, which is nothing other than conformity with God's design in nature, results in happiness. Divine command theories have difficulty aligning human happiness with God's will-based rule. It is nothing but the Euthyphro dilemma.* Does God will something because it is good, or is something good because God wills it. Reason-based moral doctrines opt for the former. Will-based moral theories opt for the latter.

As we have seen, von Balthasar's ethical theory, which is largely based upon covenant-thought, is a modified form of command-theory ethic.  Nevertheless, von Balthasar "argues that the ethical task given in God's call is precisely where human fulfillment is realized."  Steck, 72.  How does von Balthasar link the command to human fulfillment?   How does he overcome the discontinuity between the divine command on the one hand, and human obedience and fulfillment on the other hand?

"Even though von Balthasar's ethics incorporates the discontinuity between divine and human standpoints associated with divine command ethics, his ethics is ultimately teleological."  Steck, 72.  Von Balthasar, however, does not regard teleology in the traditional sense (conformity with nature's end), but rather he sees it in more personalist ways.  In general, von Balthasar views human fulfillment as "composed of two aspirations: the desire to overcome sheer and meaningless contingency and achieve a personal identity grounded in the absolute, and the desire to gain self-possession through interpersonal love."  Meaning and love.  It is the need for meaning and love that allows bridging the "discontinuity" gap between God's command and our obedience.  Obedience to the command is the only way for gaining such meaning and experiencing such love.

 "Tête à tête" by Fanny Allié

In accord with modern preoccupations, von Balthasar's ethics are more egocentric or existentialist than universal or essentialist.  They answer such questions as "Who am I?  What is my identity?  How do my finite choices establish that identity?  What role do the finite contingencies 'fated' to be part of my life have in making up my identity?"  Steck, 73.  Traditionally, Catholic thought views the matter in a more essentialist vein.  St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, focused "on the one, universal goal of all human agents and not on the unique 'I' that was in transition to the goal."  Steck, 73.  The "concern about how the unique, irreplaceable, and incommunicable core of the subject-self was to be realized in the moral life was not made an object of reflection."  The natural law, universal in character, and man's end--God was the focus.

For St. Thomas Aquinas, human fulfillment or happiness occurs as a by-product of conforming oneself to the divine plan as contained or written in one's nature.  Since all men shared one nature, all men ultimately had one and the same end: the beatific vision in God. According to Steck, there is sort of a "linear" notion in St. Thomas Aquinas that results from conformity to a rule, to a cannon, to a line. "Von Balthasar . . . interprets this purposefulness narratively.  For him, and individual's actions are given purpose by being united by and interpreted within a story that describes something 'true' about the agent-self and is therefore constitutive of the agent-self."  Steck, 73.  The moral life is not conformity to law, but participating in a meaningful story.

"Von Balthasar's ethics is teleological in this sense, that we week to fashion a completion of meaning (i.e., a narrative completion) out of the activities, accomplishments, and events of our lives.  Our ethical existence will correspond to the life story which embodies this narrative fulfillment." Steck, 74.

Since von Balthasar views ethics as "narrative," single acts do not play as much importance for von Balthasar as they do in St. Thomas and traditional ethics.  The ethical life is ultimately the amalgam, assembly, or combination of all the acts in our life's story.  "And if this life story is itself genuinely meaningful and fulfilling, then we can say that, prima facie, those actions which assist in shaping that identity are themselves good."  Steck, 74.  While as phrased, such a concept spells a recipe for disaster, we must remember that von Balthasar places this notion with the context of mission, and so the narrative of one's life is "formed around the unique christological mission given" to a person by God.  Steck, 74.

It is this link to the extrinsic concept of mission--something which comes to us from the transcendental God, the absolute God--that draws von Balthasar's ethics out of the immanent envelope of the "narrative I" and the "subject I."  Therefore, "for von Balthasar, it is becoming a 'self' [or more precisely a person] in relation to the [personal] Absolute, to relate the unique "I" that is one's identity to the [personal] Absolute."  Steck, 75.

Von Balthasar rejects any sort of incorporation theory in the sense of an individual incorporating himself either in a role or into a greater reality outside of himself.  He sees this sort of notion as confining, as trading in the person for abstractions, as robbing man of his freedom and autonomy.  The person is subordinated to something outside of him, and this bothers von Balthasar.

Rather than seeing the ethical life as conforming to something outside of one's self, von Balthasar prefers to see the entire process as a sort of invitation to the call of another: ethics are person-to-person, a tête-à-tête.  It is a tale of freedom:  

This is "God's masterpiece," to awaken through love a free response that embraces God's freedom and with it God's absolutely free "idea" for each individual. . . . We can then speak of two teleologies of human fulfillment: first, a narrative teleology where one's narrative identity is grounded in the absolute; and, second, a teleology of freedom, achieved in the interpersonal exchange [between a contingent person and the Absolute person]. The two movements both require a suspension of one's own agential aims and pursuits in order to receive what is other.

Steck, 76.

One's personal story (or narrative) and one's freedom is only fulfilled in the interpersonal exchange between the contingent person (me) and the Absolute person (God).  And in this interpersonal exchange, there is a sort of moral pause that is required of the contingent person as he listens to the invitation, to the command of the Absolute, a command that ultimately is grounded in love, love that is even self-abasing or kenotic.

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*Named so after Plato's dialogue of the same name where the matter is discussed.