No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Balthasar’s Dramatics by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 319 No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Ba/thasar's Dramatics. By AIDANNICHOLS, O.P. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University ofAmerica Press, 2000. Pp. 268. $43.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0980-3 (cloth), 0-8132-0981-1 (paper). With this volume, following upon The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide through Balthasar's Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols continues his survey of Hans Urs von Balthasar's trilogy. Without excising any of the details of Balthasar's narrative, Nichols condenses Balthasar's five-volume Dramatics to a more manageable 248 pages. Nichols's lively style ensures that the spirit of Balthasar's prose is not lost in the presentation, and the clarity of his work enables the reader to grasp the key steps of Balthasar's argument without being distracted (delightful though such distraction usually is) by the lengthy excursuses that characterize Balthasar's volumes. Nichols does not here undertake an interpretation of Balthasar's work, beyond the sense in which any condensation must involve an element of interpretation. Instead, he provides a straightforward exposition of Balthasar's narrative. While he will at times add a clarification or direct the reader's attention to particular connections with other sections of the trilogy, he rarely probes beneath what Balthasar's narrative (and footnotes) offer. His tone is expository even when, as is usually the case, his language implies approval of the insights that he is describing. The rare exceptions to this expository, rather than evaluative, stance are uniformly brief, as befits his task. Occasionally he indicates his rejection of criticisms posed against Balthasar's theology, or registers his own criticism. Most frequently, his interjections are aimed at simply acknowledging that a particular theological position taken by Balthasar is controversial: for example, he describes Balthasar's opinion that John 19:26 (where Jesus entrusts his mother to the beloved disciple) records Jesus' utterly hopeless farewell to his mother as "a surprising twist of thought" (173). Given this (necessary) reticence, the best way to review the book may be to highlight the main themes of the exposition. Balthasar's first volume is devoted to the development of the new genre that Balthasar proposes for theology, "theological dramatics." The underlying concern of the volume is the nature of theology itself. Embarking on Balthasar's dramatics, the reader wants to know what is gained-and what lost-when theology conceives itself as in terms of dramatics. Likewise, how does this new form of theology differ from other modes of theologizing, and how does it arrive at insights that go beyond what is available to these other modes? Creating a theological dramatics, Balthasar argues, serves to unite the various ways in which contemporary theology has sought to display the meaning of Christian revelation. Balthasar lists nine such contemporary starting-points: event (Barth and Bultmann), salvation-historical, orthopraxy, dialogue, political theology, theology of hope, structuralism, role, and freedom. (The omission of any Thomistic approach is perhaps understandable given the situation of the day, with its emphasis on phenomenological rather than sapiential theology.) 320 BOOK REVIEWS In the first volume, the two main characteristics of theological dramatics become evident. First, "theological dramatics" will be recognizable as such because it will employ concepts drawn from the theater. Nichols writes that "the first requirement in writing Theo-Drama was to establish a repertoire of theatrical concepts which would play an analogous part in the composition of a theological dramatics to that of the fund of ontological concepts in the making of the theological aesthetics" (17). The goal is to identify "the key concepts of dramatic theory" and apply them, in an analogous way, to salvation history (ibid.). Theological dramatics transposes theological categories and ways of ordering theological topics into the categories and order provided by theatrical drama, among which Balthasar identifies "the world as a stage," the triads of "author, actor, director" and "presentation, audience, horizon," and the relation of "role" and "identity." Put another way, theological dramatics requires approaching the Bible as a "the libretto of God's saving drama" (7) and interpreting each of the characters-the Trinity, the created order as a whole, Christ, and human beings in Christ-in terms of...