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    The Laity in the Life of the Counsels: The Church's Mission in the World
    The Laity in the Life of the Counsels: The Church's Mission in the World
    The Laity in the Life of the Counsels: The Church's Mission in the World
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    The Laity in the Life of the Counsels: The Church's Mission in the World

    By Hans Urs von Balthasar

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    Overcoming the dualism between the Church and the world requires a decisive engagement: the yeast must disappear into the dough in order to become bread, but this bread must in turn be consecrated to God. With his characteristic theological depth and historical breadth, von Balthasar discusses the development of secular institutes-groups of lay people who live the life of the counsels, poverty, chastity, and obedience, in the world-as a response to the problems of our time. In the process, he sketches the outlines of a theology of states of life in the Church, presents a fascinating account of the development of vows and the religious life in the history of the Church, and compares the new secular institutes with other lay movements in today's Church. This book, which is a collection of essays von Balthasar wrote over a period of forty years, makes apparent like no other the historical and theological significance of secular institutes, and their fruitful potential.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIgnatius Press
    Release dateSep 4, 2012
    ISBN9781681495095
    The Laity in the Life of the Counsels: The Church's Mission in the World
    Author

    Hans Urs von Balthasar

    Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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      The Laity in the Life of the Counsels - Hans Urs von Balthasar

      ABOUT THIS BOOK

      (Preface to the German edition)

      The author had planned a new edition of his book Der Laie und der Ordensstand [The laity and the religious state] before his death, with the new title: Der Laie und der Rätestand [The laity and the state of the counsels] and the corresponding adjustments in the text. Carrying out his plan has given us the occasion to include in this publication some of his earlier writings about the layman in the Church, especially about the consecrated layman. These writings are now very difficult to obtain otherwise. We have given the publication [the German edition] a new title, which likewise comes from the author himself: Gottbereites Leben [A life held in readiness for God].

      Der Laie und der Ordensstand appeared in 1948, in the place of the more comprehensive work Christlicher Stand [The Christian State of Life, 1983] (which was not made available for publication at that time),¹ immediately after Das Herz der Welt (1945) [The Heart of the World, 1979] and Wahrheit I: Wahrheit der Welt (1947) [Truth, I: The Truth of the World], as a third important accent in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s work, a kind of pointer to a possible answer man could make to this heart and this truth. The following of Christ was and remained for him in all its forms a most profound concern, to which he returned again and again; it is an idea that conditions the totality of his mighty oeuvre and gives it an ultimate pastoral orientation. A great inner joy streams out of these works, a deep love for reality: here a path emerges.

      The essays have been included without any changes in their chronological order. Two later writings, scarcely known in the German-speaking world, form the introduction and the conclusion to this volume: Gottbereites Leben: Uber den Sinn des Rätelebens heute [A life held in readiness for God: On the meaning of the life of the counsels today] (1971) and Laienbewegungen in der Kirche [Lay movements in the Church] (1987).

      Since the ecclesiastical documents concerning secular institutes (Provida Mater, Primo feliciter, Cum Sanctissimus, and other texts in the selection made by Jean Beyer, S. J.) have been published [in German] as a separate volume by Johannes Verlag in 1963, we have omitted the appendix to the Herder edition of Der Laie und der Ordensstand (1949). The texts from the ecclesiastical documents quoted in that book have been replaced by the translation by Hans Urs von Balthasar in the 1963 volume. As far as possible, the notes to the essays have been brought up to date and expanded wherever necessary.

      Despite a number of repetitions and thematic overlaps, which are scarcely avoidable in a publication of this kind, each of these essays contains a fullness of old and new insights; each has its own characteristic perspective on the one figure the author never wearied of contemplating: Jesus Christ, the one who calls us to follow him, who takes our following into his safekeeping, and who also makes it possible.

      Feast of the Visitation of Our Lady, 1993

      A LIFE HELD IN READINESS FOR GOD

      ON THE MEANING OF

      THE CONSECRATED LIFE TODAY

      1. "He called to himself those whom he wanted"

      The starting point decides everything in advance. If we begin—as usually happens in the postconciliar period—with the Church as a fully established and organized people of God, articulated in its various functions, then we have already decided to a great extent the answer to the question of the function that the life according to the counsels has within the ecclesial fellowship. To be sure, this presupposition allows many possibilities for determining its function: for example, one can speak of making places of silence available, of specialists in spiritual counseling, of models of liturgical life for the parishes; at best, one can even speak of prayer on behalf of the brothers who are actively involved in the world and who have ever less time, and perhaps ever less inclination, to carry it out themselves—although mentioning this function of prayer in isolation from action in the world will run up against scepticism and resistance. Is prayer, especially contemplative prayer in its pure form, which would form the basic content of a life, a function within the Church, or is it not rather something alien from without (Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Asian religion), which invaded the Church at a later date and which has fallen behind the times, given recent reflection on the mutual compenetration of theory and praxis, indeed on the priority that praxis must have over theory for a Christian? Is it genuinely meaningful to seek God in himself as one who exists eternally and to make him the object of our lifelong contemplation and adoration, when God after all has emerged from within himself and wants to be God with us: within history, sharing in suffering, sharing in the transformation of the world in view of a future that has not yet come? This question bores into the innermost core of the contemplative orders, creating an uncertainty, a disquiet that ultimately leads to a flight from the monastery into the Church’s service of the world. Pure contemplation—if we wish to use this unbiblical word—threatens to forfeit its own self-understanding; all that remains for the life of the counsels are the functions mentioned above, in which they can continue to carry out a service that is useful to the ecclesial organism.

      This is how things look the moment we take as our starting point the proposition that this social organism, this people of God, is an adequate characterization of the Church. But the perspective shifts as soon as we recall that the term people of God is derived primarily from the Old Testament, so that it does not at all express the decisively New Testament character of the Church, which rather can be seen properly in the two terms Body of Christ and Bride of Christ, both of which are closely linked to the mystery of the Eucharist; the Church becomes a body through sharing in the real, sacrificed flesh of Christ and in his blood that was shed—and this is not primarily an organizational, sociological body, but a real body that is brought into existence through the Eucharist (1 Cor 10:16ff.). A little further reflection shows that it is only on the basis of the Eucharist that it is possible to conceive of the mystery whereby Christ the Bridegroom is one flesh with his Bride the Church (Eph 5:21ff). Otherwise it would remain merely an edifying image, whereas for Paul it is the conjugal union that is the image, referring to the accomplished reality of the unification between Christ and the Church. One need not categorize the reality of the Church that lies in the terms Body and Bride as the ontological presupposition of the sociological level (Church as people of God); the word ontological is inappropriate here, because both descriptions possess an event-like character, just as both have to do with relationship; nevertheless, both descriptions, Body and Bride, make it clear that in relation to Christ, the Church possesses no autonomy of such a nature that she could achieve in herself or—still less—on her own terms a self-understanding that would permit her to define and organize herself. To be sure, one cannot reduce the Church to the pure event of her springing forth continuously at every moment from Christ, thereby neglecting her relative position over against Christ (as a body stands over against the head, and the woman is over against the man in their being one flesh); but since this juxtaposition is never more than something relative, one may never detach it from the event of springing forth. It is not the case that Christ first forms a partner for himself, in order subsequently to communicate himself to her: rather, in his act of communicating himself, he creates his partner for himself, an extension of himself, the fulness of him who fills all in all (Eph 1:23).

      Precisely at this point and in this context, we must recall that the Church does not emerge en bloc from her origin; rather, she is built upon apostles and prophets (Eph 2:20; 3:5). She does not in the least distribute these out of her own self: rather, they are the foundation upon which all distributions are able to follow. And just as the Church’s ontic existence in herself is never able to catch up with the continually occurring event of her springing forth from Christ, so, too, the fact that she is constructed upon the pillars (Gal 2:9) that support her is never superseded but rather repeats itself explicitly again and again (cf. Rev 3:12); the calling of the Twelve, which derives totally from Jesus’ own initiative (Mk 3:13), is only a foundational beginning; the concept of apostle is already broader than that of the Twelve, for the case of Paul shows that there are new callings, new designations through the Holy Spirit (2 Tim 1:6ff.); these also include the prophets who are mentioned alongside the apostles in Ephesians 2:20 and the evangelists, pastors, and teachers mentioned alongside the apostles and prophets at Ephesians 4:11—all of these are designated for the formation of the members of the community and for services within it. We see clearly here that the exalted Christ has not at all abandoned his activity of calling people to the Church and for the Church. Just as it will never be possible for the Church herself to get a precise grasp of the relationship between the Church and Christ (to what extent is the Church Christ himself; to what extent does she derive her existence from him; to what extent does she stand over against him?), so it will never be possible to calculate exactly the relationship between those called and the rest of the Church: To what extent are they a part of the Church; to what extent are they, in their relative juxtaposition to it, the presupposition for the community’s existence? At any rate, one may not think of the first reality without at the same time thinking of the second. Just as one may not consider ecclesiastical office in the postapostolic age as something bestowed by the Church, which possesses apostolic authority, so one may not reduce the ever-present event of the calling by Christ for the Church to a process that takes place completely within the Church, something that would He completely under the control of the plans of the Church as people of God. Just as office is established in her as an abiding and often uncomfortable sign of the fact that she does not belong to herself but to her Lord, so spontaneous, free vocations that cannot be manipulated are instituted within her by the Lord, which help her anew to achieve her own authentic self-understanding, that is, to realize her dependence on the Lord and her task of leading her brothers in and outside the Church to him.

      Despite this relative opposition, one must not make a sharp distinction between the immediate calling by the Lord for the Church and the articulation of charisms within the Church (which are likewise for the Church); there is a fluid boundary between these two events. But one must not overlook the point here that the charisms themselves are never allotted by the Church; rather, they are assigned by God to each individual (Rom 12:3) and realized by the Holy Spirit in keeping with his own free judgment (1 Cor 12:11), so that all the members of the Church share to some extent in the fundamental character of the apostles and prophets, who are called specifically and in a qualitative way. Nevertheless, despite this inherent analogy, one cannot construct any egalitarian identity in the Church’s structure. This is shown and guaranteed by the total expropriation of the Twelve and then of Paul and those who have to enter his expropriated form of existence through the holy calling (2 Tim 1:8; cf. Rom 1:1; Gal 1:15). While we cannot equate office and the call by which election is made, both are spontaneous founding actions by Christ and, therefore, display a relatedness, indeed a mutual complementarity, since they both ensure that the democratic element in the Church remains bound to an antecedent fundamental personal element that makes it possible—and this is a principle that holds good right into the structure of the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:10ff.).

      2. The Christological Foundation

      What has been said hitherto remains very formal, but it had to be said at the outset, in order to preserve for the life of the counsels a theological locus that would prevent it from being absorbed into a closed sociology of the Church. If the Church exists at each instant as something deriving from Christ, a reality that he entrusts to her, then nothing prevents this very formal element, which constitutes the Church, from being explicitly held up before her eyes again and again through the office and through the particular calling. Being compelled to look upon herself in this particular mirror, she sees at each moment her own being and event as a whole. But how (we are speaking now thematically of calling, no longer of the office) is such an existence theologically possible at all? No doubt, it is possible by virtue of being ordered to Christ and being drawn into the act whereby his gift of self establishes the Church. But what act is this, and how is it possible to participate in it in a qualitatively special way?

      The existential act of the Son is his permitting himself to be sent from the Father into human life and to be made incarnate by the Spirit in Mary’s womb and then to behave in all the situations of his human life as the one sent by the Father, the one made available to the Spirit and led by him in his mission. The fundamental act of his existence is that he does, not his own will, but the will of his Father, and all his individual tasks are specifications of this fundamental act, all of what he does and what he refrains from doing, all his dealings with those around him, but also his suffering and dying. One can call this fundamental act, which is antecedent to all the individual actions and passions, his abandoning of himself to the Father’s will, as this is made concrete and communicated to him in the Holy Spirit. Only this fundamental act supplies the key to the christological paradox that Jesus can appear with the highest claims and, at the same time, the greatest humility: where he apparently exalts himself in an inexplicable manner (Who do you claim to be?, Jn 8:53), he is utter transparency (My teaching is not mine, Jn 7:16); where the whole of his existence is taken up in an effort to allow God’s Word in itself to become flesh, it never points to its own self; rather it is true because it does not seek its own glory (Jn 7:18). Let us here note in parenthesis that the intermediate verse, 7:17, opens the possibility for others to enter into this form of existence and thus to test its truth from the inside; but first of all, we must draw another consequence, namely, that the Son’s possibility of carrying out every human existential act as a function of his (active!) availability to the Father allows him to transcend the boundaries that are otherwise imposed on man: at the point where man himself fashions his decisions and works out of his own spontaneity, this spontaneity in Jesus (which is certainly present) is embraced and determined by his deeper gift of himself to the Father. And at the point where man’s spontaneous working comes to its end, so that he must allow that which he does not want to befall him—opposition, suffering, dying, the experience that all he has done has been in vain, and so forth—this experience of boundaries, since it is accepted in the undiminished willingness to do the Father’s will, is endowed with an equal, indeed, with an intensified fruitfulness. The biblical word fruitfulness can be employed here, because it points beyond those expressions that have their validity in the active sphere where the world takes form: intention, goal, achievement, harvest, success. What these words express can be measured—how many sick people have been healed, how much bread has been gathered together for the brethren, how many lonely old people have been cared for, and so forth—and this is precisely why it is finite, something that can be assessed and defined. But it is impossible in principle to assess and define and measure an unlimited availability, like that of the Son to the will of the Father, and for this reason there is no limit to the use the Father can make of it. This availability is the most precious material that can be offered to him—since it is not a resignation, but a love that is active and burning—and he can fashion whatever he wishes out of this material. Indeed, one must say that without this material, he could not form everything he wishes: for example, he would not be able to reconcile the world to himself by making sin for our sake the total loving willingness of the Son who knew no sin (2 Cor 5:19ff.), for this mysterious transfer on the Father’s part needs precisely this boundless availability, that allows itself to be shaped into whatever the Father wishes. Otherwise, human plans and activities would always produce only finite human results (albeit good results pleasing to God), but never the kingdom of God. Finite human plans can make a contribution to the coming of this kingdom on the condition that they derive, not from the principle of one’s own finite planning, but from the principle of perfect availability to the Father, in the Holy Spirit. Everything in Christ’s existence is fruitful because, beyond all his own plans, he allows himself to be planned by the Father; he would never have been able to use himself so thoroughly as he is used and abused for the salvation of the world. For he would not have been permitted to take his own life (as the Jews suppose, Jn 8:22) for the sake of his brothers; such an act would have been of no use to anyone. Nor would he have been permitted to enter by himself into the experience of abandonment by the Father, for that would have meant setting limits to his love for the Father, or else discovering hidden limits that were already present, and once again, that would not have helped anyone. The decisive actions involved in the charge he has received can only be imposed on him by the Father, and naturally these could not have been imposed on anyone other than the one who makes known an infinite loving availability to the Father that allows the Father to do more with him than the Son himself would be able to do in his own power; this is the one a priori condition for the possibility of all the initiatives the Father takes for the reconciliation of the world. Thus, to take only one example, the lavish squandering of Jesus’ existence to the whole world as Eucharist—flesh that is slaughtered, blood that is shed—is possible only because it is the Father’s action that hands over the Son as the bread of life, because the Son came from heaven, not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent me (Jn 6:35ff.). The Son’s loving willingness to let himself be abandoned is no less infinite than the Father’s loving willingness to save the world through the abandonment of the Son, and it is through the equally great readiness in the opposition of the one who sends and the one who is sent (within the unity of the Spirit, who carries it out) that God’s plan can succeed. This one gesture of the triune God is his total, unsurpassable turning to the world; no individual Christian action directed to the world of his fellowmen deserves the term Christian, and none is fruitful in keeping with the mind of Christ unless it is built upon the foundation of Christ (1 Cor 3:11).

      3. The Life of the Counsels

      But how is it possible for a finite man, who of himself is unable to posit any infinite acts tending toward God, to enter into the form of Christ in order to share in the fruitfulness of his work? The answer to this question has various levels: fundamentally, through faith, which renounces its own measure for truth and the judgment of truth and allows that to be true which is true for God; through baptism, in which he makes the gift of his own existence into the event of the death and Resurrection of Jesus and becomes a function of this event through God’s act (Rom 6:3ff); through sharing in the Eucharist, whereby he hands himself over in body and soul to the Lord, as a member of his Body, which is fruitful in its being distributed (1 Cor 6:13-20; 10:16ff; 11:26; 12:12ff). But, contrasting to some extent to this general answer, there is a second answer, which consists in the life of the counsels, through which the act of self-expropriation in faith and of handing oneself over to God contains a completeness that cannot be surpassed by man himself. The first essential condition for this is that one can or may posit this act, not at his own disposal, but only on the basis of a particular condition of being disposed of being called, and receiving grace; otherwise this act would contradict itself as soon as it was posited. For it is not seriously possible to have control over the state in which one is totally subject to control by God; all one can do—though consciously, in love, giving one’s consent—is to allow oneself to be brought into this state. This insight forms the basis of the entire design of the Ignatian Exercises. It is demonstrated through Mary’s existence, with which the life of the New Covenant begins. Mary is made the mother of the Son in his Incarnation, and the grace bestowed on her makes her capable of uttering a boundless fiat to God, which is her fully activated faith (Lk 1:45; 11:2,8). This faith is offered, however, not in passive resignation, but with the active willingness of the handmaid for the action of the Holy Spirit, for something that she would never have been able to achieve by herself.

      The Marian availability is so indivisible and comprehensive that it is pointless and impossible to distinguish within it the elements of virginity, of poverty, and of obedience. These are integrated in the fundamental act to the point of mutual compenetration, and they could be seen as individual elements only if one element were to be detached from the others and made the object of a reservation. Mary might, for example, have said: God can have everything but my body, on the grounds that she was already promised to the man named Joseph; but she makes no such reservation. Just as

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