Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Preoccupation

1 An Unlikely Friendship: Balthasar’s “Conversations” with Barth

1 An Unlikely Friendship: Balthasar’s “Conversations” with Barth Barth and Balthasar’s friendship was unlikely, but theologically significant. The friendship was unlikely for several reasons. When they first met Karl Barth was already fifty-four years of age, a well-known theologian and a professor with an international reputation. Having been removed from his teaching post at the University of Bonn in 1935, he had resided in his birthplace, Basel, Switzerland, for five years, taking up a position at the University of Basel. From Basel he was politically active in the church struggles, writing, lecturing, and forming associations to challenge the church’s accommodation to National Socialism. Balthasar was thirty-four, a Jesuit, and taking his first appointment as campus minister at the same university. He was much less visible than Barth, and much less engaged in the political struggles of the times. As a Jesuit it was difficult, even illegal, to do so in Switzerland. He was not disengaged. He even worked to find places for Jewish refugees. Both Barth and Balthasar recognized that resistance to National Socialism was a Christian obligation. Barth was staunchly Reformed, Balthasar a devout Roman Catholic. Balthasar was known for encouraging, sometimes goading, Catholic laity to profess the evangelical counsels (poverty, celibacy, obedience) and for making converts from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Converting Barth had to be at least in the back of his mind when he arrived in Basel. Balthasar came to Basel from working with the Jesuit Erich Przywara in Munich. When Barth was teaching at the University of Münster, he had invited Przywara to his 1929 seminar. Three years later Przywara would publish the first volume of his Analogia Entis, setting forth the metaphysics of Christianity. During that same year Barth published his well-known introduction to the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, where he claimed that the analogia entis was the reason he could never become Roman Catholic.1 Balthasar arrived in Basel prepared to show Barth how he misunderstood this essential Catholic teaching. 7 If this were the sole reason for not being Catholic then to show Barth his error would take away that singular reason. The discussion that ensued never found agreement on whether Barth understood the analogia entis or whether it contained the grave theological errors Barth attributed to it in the 1930s. After Vatican II, Balthasar expressed concern about its misuse, but he never relented on its importance for Catholic theology. Their debate has generated ongoing discussion for nearly a century now. Resolution is not forthcoming, which is unsurprising.2 As we shall see, Catholics disagree among themselves whether Przywara was correct in his claim about the analogia entis. Devout Thomists still disagree on exactly what the analogia entis is. If Thomists themselves don’t agree, surely Barth could be forgiven for misunderstanding a debate about which there is still great misunderstanding and controversy? The debate may have been misplaced altogether. Balthasar thought Barth misidentified the error Barth rightly sensed in modern Catholicism. It was not the analogia entis; Balthasar thought Barth tacitly affirmed it throughout his Church Dogmatics even if he failed to admit it as such. Instead, the error was a doctrine of pure nature.3 Balthasar would learn the hard way that the analogia entis was not the only reason Barth rejected Catholicism. At the 1948 World Council of Churches, Barth argued, in good Swiss Protestant fashion, that no freedom-loving person 1. We have no evidence Barth read Przywara’s Analogia Entis. According to Hans Anton-Drewes, Barth most likely gave it to a student to read and inform him about it, who was living with him at the time, Frederick Herzog. Keith Johnson has demonstrated, however, that Barth and his students read carefully through the first two sections of Przywara’s Religionsphilosophie and discussed it, along with his teaching of the analogia entis, prior to Przywara’s visit to his seminar. See Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 87–88. 2. Keith Johnson argues Barth did understand it and rejected it for essentially Reformed theological reasons. The analogia entis failed to acknowledge the sinfulness of human beings and argued to God from an analysis of human consciousness. It also failed to maintain that God always remains in control of God’s revelation and never gives it over to human agency, including that of the church. See Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, 87–99, 119. Johnson assumes Przywara’s interpretation of...