Balthasar’s patristic studies (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) are examples of how a linguistic representative dramatically exchanges with its historical linguistic partners. Similarly, his narratives of the saints (Thérèse von Lisieux, Elisabeth von Dijon) parabolically exhibit the dramatic existence of the Christian life. In these, Balthasar witnesses to the present through his synthetic method with the past. Part of one’s place is not simply its immediate context, but the church’s tradition. Balthasar’s patristic studies and narratives of the saints re-present tradition by moving forward with it; a shared place between the tradition and a linguistic representative is inhabited in the present. Bieler says it this way, “This philosophy [metaphysics as re-enactment] makes clear that the goal of such a metaphysics is not to cancel out the others thoughts; instead, it represents the charge given to each of us to carry the burdens of others (Gal 6:2), interpreted even and precisely as the philosophical task.” This is why I am suggesting that one cannot receive Balthasar without understanding his dynamic relation to the tradition and his mentors and friends.
Furthermore, D.C. Schindler describes the importance to which Balthasar gave to his present social context in his theological formation and how it challenges Kilby’s critique of Balthasar noted in Chapter 3:
But Kilby has clearly not been to visit the archives in Basel, where decades have been spent trying to bring order and accessibility to the mountains of substantial correspondence Balthasar wrote in his lifetime. Rather than being narrowly obsessed with his own writing, Balthasar occupied the first hours of every day—the most important time for work—with the task of writing letters and responding to requests from others, whether those were famous theologians or first-year graduate students. The “colleagues” with whom he discussed not just his work but the problems facing the Church and the world, the great figures of literature and art, and the central questions of philosophy and theology, were some of the greatest minds and spirits of his time. The notion of truth as fruitfulness grew not only out of his long study of the tradition, but also out of his constant dialogue with others.
Balthasar’s linguistic acts are not done in isolation, but in encounters with others from the past and in the present. Even his writing was a means to the formation of place and actors, as explicitly stated in My Work:
The activity of being a writer remains and will always remain, in the working-out of my life, a secondary function, something faute de mieux. At its center there is a completely different interest: the task of renewing the Church through the formation of new communities that unite the radical Christian life of conformity to the evangelical counsels of Jesus with existence in the midst of the world, whether by practicing secular professions or through the ministerial priesthood to give new life to living communities. All my activity as a writer is subordinated to this task.
One can see here Balthasar’s dramatic mission to act in the world through the renewal of human and ecclesial communities. The display of Balthasar’s mission can be found in his formation of Weltgemeinschaften, also known as secular institutes, where perfection in Christ is fulfilled through engagement with the world, participating in the form of the concrete analogia entis by bridging the distance between the church and the world.
Acts of linguistic representation are theotic because they take place in one’s encounter of God in the Spirit. In such encounters, the Spirit imparts new language, proliferating in linguistic ascent. The continuation and personalization of the incarnate Logos is part of the activity of the Spirit to span the distance between the incomprehensibility of God’s being and the limitedness of finite knowledge. Language is the horizontal, theandric dimension of God’s encounter with humanity in time, yet is theotic or vertical because the Spirit unites it with Christ. Lewis Ayres notes how for Gregory of Nyssa the practice of language draws one into union with God, which Martin Laird describes as the movement from “apophaticism” to “logophasis” (the word speaking): “In this instance, the bride at the zenith of an apophatic ascent, in which she has let go of concepts, images, and all manner of knowing, exhibits, paradoxically, transformed discourse.” A. N. Williams draws similar conclusions in regards to Aquinas’s silence on the theme of theosis in the Summa: Theosis may not occupy much space explicitly in the project, but it is embedded in the overall practice and substructure of the entire work. The Summa is not a
system for a sake of a system…The very orderly structure of the Summa points to a larger than systematic purpose. The import of that structure is the thesis of a mystical theology. If in its particulars the Summa undoubtedly belongs largely to the genres of philosophical and systematic theology, its design identifies it as a mystical theology concerned with humanity’s union with God and with contemplation of God.
