Analogy and Kenosis

The essay that follows deals with what, at first, appears to be a puzzle rather unrelated to kenosis, or to kenosis in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar: the analogy of being, what it "does" for Balthasar, and what it does not do. Nor is the essay a historical excavation of Balthasar's metaphysical roots, though it does touch upon key influences on his thought. Nor indeed does the essay strive to make kenosis appear as the appositive solution—the idea "next to" analogy, responding to its problems under another name—for those places where the analogy of being surrenders its effective power. The relation between the two horizons, analogy and kenosis, is much more compounded than this. We will see that kenosis and its economic correlate, obedience, serve a distinct role in Balthasar's thought, allowing him to pivot in directions that analogy cannot, or in any case does not, provide. Most markedly, kenosis assists Balthasar in moving decisively toward a theology of the Cross and the glorification of the world.

Beyond yet not apart from the effort of understanding Balthasar the historical figure, there is the task of understanding Balthasar's work, and of rendering it understandable through interpretation. It is this latter effort that is the focus of the essay here, and in interpreting Balthasar, I will move both toward and away from his own resources in order to study anew the puzzle that Balthasar is and that he presents to his readers. The essay, therefore, proceeds in the following order: first as an exploration of key elements of Erich Przywara's analogy of being, with essential contributions from Gustav Siewerth and Bernard Lonergan; then a study of Balthasar's metaphysical frame as it shapes the conclusion of his theological aesthetics, the transition to his theological dramatics, and founds his theological logic; finally, an examination of where the analogia entis "fails" at the last, whence kenosis rises in a provocative and complicated way.

In and Beyond the Analogy of Being

Przywara's analogy of being, as magisterially presented in Analogia Entis (1932), focuses on the "intrinsic breadth of tension proper to 'essence-in-and-beyond-existence.'"¹ How he arrives here, which is to say how he arrives at an analogy that has no "ultimate" middle term,² is fundamental to grasping what he does and not mean by "analogy." Przywara begins his argument with what he calls "meta-ontics" and "meta-noetics." In this, metaphysics faces a primordial decision, which is whether to ask about being with respect to the act of knowledge or being with respect to the object of knowledge.³ Przywara does not oppose meta-ontics and meta-noetics to one another so much as relate them each to the other as invested, differently, in the puzzle of being. Broadly speaking, the first finds its lineage in figures like Aristotle and Plato and others of the "classical" tradition, while the second operates in philosophers like Kant and Heidegger.⁴ Neither functions successfully without movement into the other, each moving from inverted directions, as it were. Meta-ontics asks about the categories of creaturely being "itself," and cannot help but work backward from this into questions about the knower of creaturely being; meta-noetics strives to understand consciousness, and yet transcends itself to ask what it is that consciousness knows. Both, for Przywara, can be brought together—yet not united or identified—in "the problem of the act."⁵ Or rather, metaphysics as a whole, a creaturely metaphysics, is engaged with the problem of the act, from which and toward which these two dynamic queries (ontic and noetic) move.

With "the act," metaphysics as a discipline cleaves itself both to consciousness and to being, to the act of knowing and the being that is known in the act, to the knower that knows only in the act of knowing being. The meta-ontic and meta-noetic thus interpenetrate. "If consciousness and being are thus connected to one another in the problems of both act and of being," writes Przywara, "then the final problem of metaphysics must be just this mutual belonging—this 'to...