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  • Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought by Jennifer Newsome Martin
  • David Bentley Hart
Jennifer Newsome Martin. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. xii + 310 pp.

Putatively a simple work of intellectual genealogy, delving down to a little-explored subterranean tributary of that vast ocean that is Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological project, Jennifer Newsome Martin's book is many other things beside: a reconstruction of the logic of some of the deepest themes in Balthasar's thought, an excellent introduction to the world of Russian "religious philosophy" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an extended reflection on freedom and necessity in the relation of creation to God, an essay on Trinitarian metaphysics in modern systematic theology, and even something of a theological manifesto (though perhaps a sometimes inadvertent one—it can be so hard to tell with scholars of the sober and scrupulous sort). It is also a book that, as only rarely ever happens, makes [End Page 114] substantial contributions to both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theological scholarship.

Balthasar is such a titanic figure in modern Catholic thought not simply because he was so enormously prolific, or simply because he was so intimidatingly erudite, but mostly because he was inexhaustibly imaginative and daring as a thinker. And he lived at a particularly fortunate moment; he belonged to that first generation of theologians fully able to enjoy the intellectual liberty recovered for Catholic thinkers by the rise of the ressourcement movement and of what came to be called (at first opprobriously) la nouvelle théologie, as well as by the defeat of the stultifying and degenerate Baroque "manualist" Thomism that had become dominant in Catholic thought by the end of the nineteenth century and that had had its final, cartoonish expression in the writings of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. And no theologian took more daring advantage of that freedom than did Balthasar. For him, the return to the patristic wellsprings of Christian thought was not a retreat to a body of static orthodoxies, but a rediscovery of the speculative and spiritual vitality of the church's first great intellectual golden age. And, like the fathers, he believed that all the riches of human thought could be explored by, and claimed for, theology. His conceptual world was not only vast but wild; he was at once classical, scholastic, romantic, modern, and perhaps even a little post-modern. As such, he was better prepared than any other Catholic thinker of his time to appreciate and learn from the even more adventurous Russian "religious philosophers" and theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Martin's book addresses Balthasar's readings, criticisms, and appropriations of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov, and in doing so provides a surprisingly thorough treatment of many of the principal themes of the writings of each of these thinkers. She also makes it quite clear that, in a sense, Balthasar was resuming and [End Page 115] qualifying the various attempts of the Russians to adopt what was best and to subdue what was worst in the brilliant, beguiling, and perilous thought of Schelling (in his middle and late periods), especially as regards questions of freedom and necessity within the life of the Trinity and in the relation between God and creation. In the process, she pursues her story through some of the deepest and most turbulent waters of modern Christian ontology and metaphysics, Trinitarian systematics and Christology, aesthetics and anthropology, without losing her way. Among the Russians in her story, Berdyaev comes off most poorly—and appropriately so—as repeating Schelling's most problematic, most incorrigibly mythological moments, without the compensating virtue of Schelling's immense speculative genius. For Balthasar, Berdyaev was more a spur than an inspiration. Soloviev, by contrast, with his far greater systematic and logical gifts, presented Balthasar with a model worthy of emulation, even if one also requiring some degree of diffidence. But, really, Balthasar's most consequential engagement with modern Russian theology lay in his encounter with Bulgakov. Martin's book lays out, probably for the...

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