A Theological Aesthetic of Memory: Blondel, Newman, and Balthasar

Jorge Louis Borges's man who can remember everything is "monstrous," rather than wondrous. The man himself in fact feels no wonder at all.¹ This is because memory is more than the mere notation of events, more than a mental etching of a period in time. It is far more active and alive, far more meaningful. Similarly, if sacred tradition is in some way the Church's memory of Christ, and if it is also in some way the Church's memory of its own past, then we are compelled to ask how this is so. We must ask how it is living and meaningful, how it is more than an etching.

This article is at once an excavation and an argument. In order to make the claims about tradition that I do, my argument appeals to resources that Hans Urs von Balthasar himself used in his "theological aesthetics" and elsewhere. Yet the purpose of such excavation is focused not on Balthasar, but on the problem of tradition. This is an article that makes an argument about the fundamental dynamics of sacred tradition. That is to say, this is an article on those founding principles that allow tradition to be, to exist. Tradition is, I argue, a kind of remembering. Further, I argue that the form that this remembering takes is coherently plural, at once many-faceted yet singular, a characteristic that I call symphonic remembering.

In order to make my argument, I move upward from tradition in human experience into increasingly "heightened" synthetic concepts. This concession of method follows Balthasar's own in Glory of the Lord, which begins with "The Subjective Evidence" and only later seeks the objective.² I begin, then, with a detailed study of human action from Maurice Blondel, followed by his reflections on tradition. Blondel argues convincingly that human action is both historical and metaphysical, and based on this, he successfully shows us how tradition mediates history and truth to one another on the plane of human experience. From here, Blondel needs several clarifications, and John Henry Newman serves as the central explanatory figure. Blondel is, for his part, unclear about what role history plays in ideas, and Newman's theory of the development of doctrine proves indispensable. Finally, I reflect on tradition as "memory" using several sources, chief among them Balthasar's sense of tradition, memory, and their role in theology. "Remembering" and human consciousness are, on his view, strong analogies for tradition, but not without weaknesses. The final movement (of the symphony) strives to integrate the various themes of the article with a fully theological aesthetic consideration of time, a consideration of time as "music" that is open to the eternity that it itself is not. The total argument is Balthasarian in its essential polarity, like a compass set to follow the fundamental direction of Balthasar's thought. It is at the same time a movement apart from him, an attempt to move theological aesthetics forward, asking questions and using sources that Balthasar himself did not.

Maurice Blondel

Human Action

Blondel's first and most lasting major work was L'Action (1893), which he presents as a study of the "science" of human action.³ He chooses this science before all the others because we are, always and before we know it, deeply involved in action. "I am and I act, even in spite of myself," he writes in his introduction; "I find myself bound, it seems, to answer for all that I am and do."⁴ So, he proposes to examine every detail of human action from the ground upward, as it were, since we are always caught up in acting. Even if I am a pure determinist or nihilist, after all, I still act. Action, then, "is the question, the one without which there is none other."⁵ Yet action, this elemental matter of willing and doing, is significantly more complex and elusive than it might first appear to us.

One of Blondel's major emphases is that human action is actually a composite of forces, influences, and...