Divine Erotic Wisdom; or, Misplaced Anxieties

David Bentley Hart and John Milbank beyond Erich Przywara, Hans Urs von Balthasar. and "Gnostic Modernity"

In 2020, a festschrift for the Roman Catholic theologian Cyril O’Regan was published under the title Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity. The volume was capacious enough to include, alongside contributions that cleanly continued and developed theses derived from Erich Przywara, William Desmond, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Eric Voegelin, two figures who engaged in a loving struggle with those premises: David Bentley Hart and John Milbank.

Island in the Attersee, Gustaf Klimt (1902)

Without ever violating the spirit of the dedication to the volume (the quote from Goethe that we learn only from those we love), both Hart and Milbank argued for a further expansion of the grammar of Christian theology–in particular beyond some of the boundaries set down in the writings of Przywara and Balthasar. Here I want to briefly outline the currents and provocations that are found in David Bentley Hart’s essay “Geist’s Kaleidescope: Some Questions for Cyril O’Regan” and John Milbank’s essay, “Orthodoxy, Knowledge, and Freedom”. The former prosecutes an argument about the category of Gnosticism while the latter analyzes Balthasar’s theological thought; both however, present a broad unified front against a certain ossified understanding of Christian dogma and history.

In brief, the main arena of contestation concerns O’Regan’s reading of Balthasar as presenting an antidote to philosophical modernity which has been fatally poisoned by Gnosticism. The poison chiefly is said to chiefly reside in German Idealism and Romanticism where the transcendent God is caught into the historical-cosmic world process of Becoming, confusing the Creator and the created. These in turn, are sometimes further suspected as being downstream of not only Gnosticism but Neoplatonism and possibly certain discourses deemed esoteric (Hermeticism, Kabbalah, theurgy, etc). All of these discourses are considered to be presenting “counterfeit doubles” of the true grammar of Christianity. Hart’s essay focuses on three major points of disagreement with this genealogy:

1) If we are to diagnose a “fall” in modern thought, the main counterfeit double of Christianity is not Gnosticism, but voluntarism and it is a fall that has taken place as much within Christian thought as outside of it (particularly with respect to accounts of creation that require a voluntaristic reserve of divine freedom and an infernalist soteriology which requires a voluntaristic reserve of creaturely freedom).

2) There was, historically speaking, no unitary “Gnosticism” of antiquity and when one gets into the weeds, it becomes much harder to segregate Pauline and Johannine themes cleanly from a category of “Gnosticism” that is supposed to be entirely alien and opposite to ancient Christian orthodoxy. And whatever deficiencies these various gnosticisms might genuinely have in comparison to nascent Christian orthodoxy it is certainly not exhibiting an account of theogonic divine process in history. As Hart says, while citing passages from Eugnostos the Blessed, The Apocryphon of John, The Tripartite Tractate, and The Three Steles of Seth: “If anything, ancient ‘Gnostic’ literature emphasizes the remoteness of God from every cosmic or even heavenly process to a more extreme degree than did most later ‘orthodox’ writers.” (211-212)

3) Whatever problem areas exist for orthodox Christian theology in philosophical modernity (and it should be noted that both Hart and Milbank have major objections to Hegel and the later Schelling), the ascription of a “Gnostic return” needs to be dropped or heavily modified. Pulling again from Hart:

It is a tragedy of academic history that the modern study of ancient Gnosticism–and with it the utterly fanciful concept of Gnosticism as a kind of precocious speculative precursor of the most daring of modern German philosophical schools was inaugurated by Johann August Neander, Jacques Matter, and (most disastrously of all) Ferdinand Christian Baur’s immense and immensely confused Die christliche Gnosis, oder die Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1835). (203)

And again talking about the total lack of any Gnostic account of suffering within the godhead:

Here, I earnestly believe, is where O’Regan’s terminology, more than in any other aspect of his project, goes amiss, and where I would entreat him to reconsider and ultimately revise it, for the sake both of historical accuracy and of a better genealogy of the heterodoxy he has set out to expose. True, I hold Neander and Baur to blame, not O’Regan; but O’Regan is definitely mischaracterizing Valentinian speculation when he speaks of it as inhabiting or promoting a theogonic genre, or as telling the tale ‘of the becoming of the perfection of the divine,’ or as presenting a ‘paradox’ in its account of the pleroma’s revelation of God as unrevealed (O’Regan, Gnostic Return, 45, 138-48). On these matters, Valentinianism is no less ‘orthodox’ than, say, the most recent edition of the Roman Catholic Catechism. (212)

Milbank’s essay, one that I have found myself returning to again and again, valorizes Hart’s objections and adds a new horizon. Why is it, Milbank asks, that the most interesting aspects of Balthasar’s thought are due to the discourses toward which he, on the surface, evinces the most anxiety? He catalogues these discourses as Neoplatonism, Romanticism, Gnosticism, apocalyptic, and esotericism which creates a “fivefold extreme tension–simultaneous fascination and revulsion in each case…” (230). He credits O’Regan with connecting Balthasar’s anxieties with a longer (now storied) tradition of Roman Catholic theological anxiety which is as old as the emergence of Hegel and Schelling and their wrestlings with Romantic Idealism in the Catholic Tubingen School. O’Regan also brings up anxieties Balthasar had about some of the greatest Greek fathers, anxieties which now seem embarrassing outside of the pressure of Barthian concerns. Ps. Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and even Maximus the Confessor are sometimes seen as being risky in their alleged “over-embracing of the speculative” or affirmation of divine necessity over divine freedom.

With the “esoteric” sources, Balthasar is similarly of two minds. His open use of Vladimir Soloviev and more subterranean (though equally great) borrowing from Sergius Bulgakov signals an openness to Russian Sophiology (to say nothing of his clear admiration for Valentin Tomberg). Yet the already qualified currents of German Idealism and Romanticism undergo a further pruning by Balthasar; leading to what I term Balthasar’s “bargain-bin Sophiology” but Milbank more diplomatically describes as follows:

Nevertheless, the Swiss theologian’s focus on the emanation of divine glory is a somewhat muted version of the Russian theologian’s concern with the divine Wisdom: Herrlichkeit is Sophia’s paler sister. Likewise, his entire linkage of the Trinity with the passion, by insistence (and rightly against the run of modern critical exegesis) on the continuity of Johannine Apocalypse with the Johannine Gospel, is borrowed from Bulgakov. The same is true–though ultimately after Nicholas of Cusa–of his Holy Saturday theology of Christ’s atoning suffering in hell. More absent, one might add, from Balthasar is the theurgic dimension, which arguably links to his playing down of liturgical synergism in favor of interactive cosmic drama. With Bulgakov there is surely more balance of the two…By anachronistically regarding such moves as tainted with later notes of idealism, pantheism, and left-handed occultism, Balthasar was somewhat failing to see..how Christian theology does require an account of the ultimate value of the creation (including each and every one of its creatures) and the finite totality of the cosmos in relation to God himself. It is not enough merely to ascribe this to the divine will and the divine generosity, because this still leaves the created order as somewhat accidental and therefore lacking in irreplaceable significance, which contradicts its absolute conjoining to the eternal godhead in the case of the incarnation. (233)

In a later section of the essay, Milbank connects the rediscovery of Sophiology by the Russian School as one of the advantages of using Hart’s eschatological account of doctrinal development over that of Newman’s:

Any ‘authentic’ line of accumulation can only be identified by the eye of discerning faith (which Hart of course does not deny) and would be invisible to the cold gaze of the objective historian. What is more, not all breaks and ruptures are progressive, as John Henry Newman too much assumed: a formal truth of ‘Protestantism’ is that there can indeed be fatal forgettings of older deposits, some of them biblical. The sophiological enterprise itself, which Balthasar somewhat echoes, is an attempt to do more justice to neglected biblical material concerning wisdom, the eschatology of the Spirit, and the Pauline teaching concerning the eternal Adam and the eternal humanity of Christ–which for Paul became also incarnate, along with the divine Logos, to which it was eternally conjoined. (238)

Milbank has concerns over Boehme but these concerns do not prevent him from giving him an important role in the modern transmission of Sophiology. In addition, he wants to locate an even further origin in Paracelsus and trace his legacy through German Pietism and Romanticism.

But it should be also here noted that Boehme is the main developer and transmitter of a sophiology that seems to have its origins with another Lutheran eccentric, Paracelsus, whose theology was arguably more exotic than heterodox. It is these specifically modern and Lutheran currents as also variously mediated by later ‘left Lutheran’ figures like Oetinger and Hamann and other pietists that both Bulgakov and Balthasar are crucially sifting. (240)

Milbank also takes Balthasar (and by extension Przywara) to task for a latent voluntarism regarding the divine act of creation. There remains in these figures an inexplicable anxiety about divine freedom that is constantly leveraged against supposedly necessitarian emanationist schemes. Yet emanatio is not a dirty word for Augustine or Aquinas.

Balthasar’s entire tendency to unleash finally a voluntarist mental reserve stands in contrast to later exponents of the nouvelle theologie like Jean Trouillard or Claude Bruaire who insist that the creation is not just a contingently willed divine arrangement, but necessarily follows an order of both derivation and self-government that proceeds from the intellectual through the psychic to the material, in accordance with Neoplatonic emanation or fluxus. Both Augustine and Aquinas thought of the creation in exactly this way. (242)

In fact, the need to make divine personal transcendence the dogmatic key for interpreting creatio ex nihilo is itself objectionable.

Indeed, it is in danger of falling into anthropomorphic idolatry by failing to see that if God is entirely simple and unified, then there cannot be for him, however incomprehensible this is for us, any division between freedom and necessity, or between willing and reasoning. Yet even at the human level, any absolute distinction is dubious, as the earlier Schelling showed in the case of the supreme liberty of art. (235)

Relieving this anxiety over “necessitarianism” allows Milbank to receive Eriugena, Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, and Cusanus as forms of hyperbolic orthodoxy rather than heterodoxy–something that always seemed more difficult for Balthasar and Przywara to do. And it also allows for an even deeper theological account of art in conjunction with Romanticism that misplaced concerns over a "religion of art” or “false sacralization” obscure.

This dubious tendency concurs with the false accusation that Balthasar makes against Romanticism of ‘reducing’ religion to art–perhaps neglecting the point now insisted upon by Olivier Boulnois that in fact ‘art’ is a Protestant invention once the icon has been both rejected and secularized. In that context it would rather seem that the Romantics (whether Chateaubriand or Novalis), by insisting on the religious character of the aesthetic, beyond the Enlightenment substitution of the latter for the former, were resacralizing art in a correctly integral gesture that effectively began to restore the iconic and the primacy of the symbolic. (246)

The fusion of the sensory and the cognitive, already the post-Kantian project seen in Hamann and further carried out in Schlegel, Novalis, and Coleridge, makes Romanticism a much more hospitable discourse for theology than is often acknowledged by Christian (and especially Catholic) writers. And the reticence to take up Romanticism more capaciously is also often related to a concern over “Eros” and “eroticism” as incompatible with Christian love (or at least inferior to it). Milbank represents the traditional Christian Neoplatonic tradition in dismissing concerns of the type made famous in Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros.

Unfortunately, O’Regan, along with William Desmond and even at times Josef Ratzinger represent a Roman Catholic continuation of this modern Lutheran (more specifically Lundensian) theology. Against this, the unifying eroticism of sense and intellect “should warn us against the slight tendency of both O’Regan and Desmond to subscribe (in contrast to either Dionysius or Augustine) to a duality of agape and eros.” Instead we should embrace “a divine erotic wisdom (fusing freedom and understanding) in which we can confidently participate.” (235-37) Without a more capacious link between natural and supernatural beauty, even the Sacred Scriptures are in danger of becoming symbols in the worst sense–a failure to grasp the Infinite.

We see one aspect of this danger in how Balthasar treats the religious history of humanity. Non-Christian religious attempts to unite the finite and infinite in manner which Christians accept the Incarnation are treated as noble failures and “the intimations in Jewish and Islamic mysticism of a personal and synergic communion with God which this Christian vision entails are strangely reproved by Balthasar.” Milbank argues that Balthasar gives a particularly inadequate treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Thus, for Balthasar, in the end, the entire point of the Old Testament would almost seem to be the futility of the mediating role of human reason and imagination–and how very sub-Coleridgean this is! And how lagging behind Eriugena, who saw the scriptures as the supreme work of the liberal arts! (244-245)

Wherever the reader might part ways with this counter-narrative, for myself I see a greater role for Joachim of Fiore and his theology of history, as well as further critical engagements with the later Schelling and Hegel, it is clear that Milbank and Hart are setting sail beyond the pillars of Gibraltar established by a conservative Thomist reading of the ressourcement, the monuments and boundary-stones established by Balthasar and Przywara. What archipelagoes we wish to survey, new sophianic Straits of Malacca, in paradisaical climes, remains to be seen. The loving struggle continues!