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by Tina Beattie
New Blackfriars, vol.79 no. 924 (February 1998),
pp. 97-105; here republished with permission of the author.
This
is probably best described as a marginal paper, given in one of the short slots
at the conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain on
the subject of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is deliberately provocative, intended
to raise questions about the relationship between von Balthasar and Adrienne
von Speyr in the presence of experts who are in a position to defend him
against my charges.
Von
Balthasar made extravagant claims about von Speyr’s influence on his work,
and they understood their relationship as the lived expression of their
theological insights ahout the significance of sexual difference. John Roten
writes that “the very concrete symbolism of man and woman was retranslated
into theological categories” (1) to such an extent that von Speyr
sometimes depicted herself as the Church to von Balthasar’s Christ. Given
that von Balthasar has become what somebody referred to as the “court
theologian” of the Vatican, is there an implicit suggestion in
neo-orthodox Catholic theology that the relationship between von Speyr and von
Balthasar embodies some kind of symbolic ideal, and what are the implications
of this for the theological understanding of sexual difference? In asking these
questions I draw on the insights of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the
work of Luce Irigaray, but I am not suggesting that theology should be
answerable to psychoanalysis nor indeed to any other non-theological
discipline. I do however believe that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual
difference, informed by her experience as a practising psychoanalyst, offers a
rich resource for those seeking to identify both the promises and pitfalls of
Catholic sexual symbolism, especially in von Balthasar’s theology.
At
first glance there is a striking resemblance between Irigaray and von
Balthasar, which attests to the influence of Catholicism on Irigaray’s
thought. Although her position in relation to Catholicism is ambivalent, her
use of the symbolics of the Catholic faith is so extensive that I would suggest
she is most fully understood when read within the broad framework of the
Catholic intellectual tradition. However, it is the difference rather than the
similarity between von Balthasar and Irigaray that is most revealing, because
ultimately, Irigaray’s symbolics of sexual difference exposes von
Balthasar’s theology to be the same old story of the same old sameness,
fetchingly disguised in the masks of femininity and not averse to the
occasional bit of cross-dressing.
Both
Irigaray and von Balthasar are sceptical about the claims of egalitarian
feminism, arguing that it can only gain women entry into a mascuhne,
technological culture that has eradicated femininity. Like Ingaray, von
Balthasar defends the irreducibility of the two sexes, and both argue that the
discovery or rediscovery of the significance of sexual difference is a vital
task if we are to avoid the cultural crises confronting us at the end of the
twentieth century. However, von Balthasar seems to think that he already knows
what sexual difference looks like and what it amounts to, whereas Irigaray
suggests we have only the vaguest of ideas. She argues that all present
constructs of sexual difference are products of masculinity, so that what poses
as the feminine in western culture is in fact the masculine imaginary—a
projection onto women of the desires and fantasies that must be repressed in
the acquisition of male subjectivity, in a way that denies women access to the
symbolics of their own subjectivity. The creation of a culture of sexual
difference would entail radical social change beginning at the level of
language, not just through cosmetic tinkering to meet the demands of political
correctness, but through a fundamental reshaping of language in its syntax as
well as its semantics. Irigaray calls for a “double syntax
(masculine/feminine)’’ (2) which can perhaps be imagined in terms of
creating a discursive dual carriageway where at present we only have a single
track road.
Irigaray’s work constitutes a textual weaving together of male and female
voices, with her feminine persona subverting the arguments of the men she
engages with by strategies of seduction, humour, flirtation and irony.
Symbolically, she is suggesting the possible fecundity of a culture of sexual
difference by opening the imagination to new visions and ways of understanding
when the woman’s voice speaks in distinction from but also in harmony with
the man’s. However, because our culture does not have a symbolics of
feminine identity women must strategically appropriate the language of the
unconscious, mimicking the roles of hysteria, mysticism and madness which have
been assigned to them: “One must assume the feminine role deliberately.
Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an
afíirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it."(3)
The
idea of a textual interweaving of male and female voices suffuses von
Balthasar’s theology after his meeting with von Speyr, and their
relationship amounts to an existential living out of their theology. Roten
suggests that they could be “a challenging illustration ... of the best
that the Church has to offer to men and women, granted that both be shaped and
permeated by the common fundamental Marian personality structure.”(4) This
quote encompasses the whole problematic that I now want to explore, in order to
ask what the implications are of setting up this particular relalionship as a
model for the Catholic community.
Christian anthropology is, in the case of von Balthasar and von Speyr’s
writings, fundamentally Marian. The significance of masculinity and femininity
with regard to the created difference between the sexes derives from a
supra-masculine and a supra-feminine principle which can be applied analogously
to relationships within the Godhead and between God and humankind. If
femininity is understood in terms of Mary’s active receptivity, obedience,
fecundity and nurture, then the human being is feminine in relation to God, the
originating source of life. To quote von Balthasar, “the creature can only
be secondary, responsive, ‘feminine’ vis-à-vis God.”(5)
Even Christ, as the Logos who “proceeds eternally from the eternal
Father,” is “quasi-feminine” in relation to the Father, although
“as a human being he must be a man if his mission is to represent the
Origin, the Father, in the world.”(6) Von Balthasar goes on to argue that
“just as, according to the second account of creation, Eve is fashioned
from Adam (that is, he carried her within him, potentially), so the feminine,
designed to complement the man Christ, must come forth from within, as his
‘fullness’.”(7 )
This
account of sexual complementarity entails not the affirmation but the
eradication of genuine difference. If woman is man’s fullness, coming
forth from within him, there cannot also be a “polarity of man and
woman.”(8) Woman is variously described by von Balthasar as man’s
“answering word,”(9) his “answering gaze,”(10) the
“vessel of fulfilment specially designed for him.’’(11) But an
answer, to be relevant and comprehensible, is defined by and bound to the
question. If woman is the answer to man, she can exist only within the
parameters of the man’s question. She must await his word and respond to
his initiative, but how can she then reveal her difference and her otherness?
And if woman is man’s answer, to whom does she address the question of her
own being? Likewise, if woman is a vessel designed for man, then she is, as
Irigaray points out, always the place for another, but has no way of exploring
the place of her own existence.(12) Moreover, von Balthasar risks advocating a
profoundly unethical relationship between the sexes when he says that Christ,
as a man, has active responsibility for carrying out the will of the Father
‘’while she (Mary), a woman, must wait until she has been touched and
taken possession of by him."(13) If this applies to the relationship between
Mary and Christ, it is because she is human and he is divine not because she is
a woman and he is a man. To describe a sexual relationship in terms of active
man taking possession of passive woman sounds dangerously close to offering a
theological justification for rape.
I
would also suggest that the idea of feminine passivity, silence and submission
which has pervaded Catholic theology and is perpetuated by von Speyr and von
Balthasar lacks scriptural justification, and bears little relation to the
actual experience of women and rnothers through history. Although I am not
always sympathetic to the appeal to experience that muddles so much feminist
theology, I wonder how many women would recognise themselves in the claim that
“The marian element holds sway in the Church in a hidden manner, just as a
woman does in a household ...”(14) Women with the means to live out this
kind of hidden domestic life are rare in both historical and global terms. If
Mary is to be identified with real women (and this quote suggests that she is),
then as a poor first century Jew she belongs among those who work from dawn to
dusk to provide for their children, and not with the kept wives of the European
bourgeoisie. The descriptions of women in the Gospels, including Mary, offer no
justification for the kind of feminine virtues advocated by von Balthasar and
von Speyr. Far from hiding in the home, the rnother of Jesus at times made a
public nuisance of herself. In Luke’s account of Christ’s conception,
the male priest Zechariah is silenced and we do not hear much from Joseph
either, whereas two pregnant women—Mary and Elizabeth—are given the
task of interpreting and proclaiming the significance of the event. The same
could be said of Mary of Magdala’s encounter with the risen Christ. All
this makes a nonsense of von Speyr’s claim that “Mary does not
herself take part in the revelation of God because fundamentally revelation is
no part of a woman’s task. Her characteristics are silence and
concealment, and they are the mark of all subsequent missions given to woman in
the Church.”(15) I think we need to recognise the extent to which this
idea of Christian womanhood is a cultural construct of nineteenth century
romanticism and far removed from the Gospels—although indebted perhaps to
some of the Pauline writings. As the foundation for a universal theology, it
risks colonising the world with the sexual values of a bygone western era. In
this respect, it is interesting that David Schindler entitles a Communio
article on von Balthasar, “Catholic theology, gender, and the future of
Western civilization.” ls the Catholic Church really in the business of
perpetuating “Western civilization,” and what does this say to all
the post-colonial Catholics of the Third World? Is it possible that von
Balthasar’s theology is by nature a theology of colonisation, not only
because of its dependence on the cultural constructs of a European elite, but
because of its colonisation of woman by man, dramatically enacted in the
colonisation of von Speyr by von Balthasar?
For
the most part, von Balthasar’s theology accords men mobility between
masculinity and femininity (indeed, they are Marian and therefore feminine in a
more profound way than they are masculine), whereas women are trapped within
femininity by virtue of the biological determinism of being women. Occasionally
however, he also seems to suggest that neither sex has such mobility, as when
he claims that “Every encroachment of one sex into the role of the other
narrows the range and dynamics of humanly possible love ..."(17) So here we
have a male theologian who recognises the necessity of his own Marian
anthropological make-up, who insists on the polarity of the sexes and the
apparently stable relationship between womanhood and femininity, and who seems
worryingly vague about how men, given their intractable masculinity, not only
can but indeed must also be primarily feminine, while women can never be
masculine. Paul McPartlan says that we might almost hear von Balthasar saying
that ”The poor man ... has to cope with a tension between actual
masculinity and spiritual femininity, and will always be inherently more
fragile. Not only was Adrienne telling him of the prerogatives of femininity,
she was profoundly impressing these mysteries upon him existentially. More than
that—she was his defence against his feminine fragility, the host body he
colonised in order to express a side of himself that he could not own. Roten
refers to von Balthasar’s “psychological and theological symbiosis
with Adrienne von Speyr and - largely hecause of this symbiosis - Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s profoundly Marian mental structure.”(19) 1 am suggesting
that the relationship was more parasitic than symbiotic.
In
her boök, The Interpretation of the Flesh—Freud and Femininity
Teresa Brennan argues that women sometimes take on the physical and
psychological manifestations of men’s projected femininity. In other
words, if I as a woman spend a great deal of time with a man who is projecting
rather than expressing his femininity, I will begin to exhibit the signs of his
femininity and reflect them back at him, so that he thinks they are actually
part of my make-up - which in a sense they have become. Roten’s essay on
the relationship between von Speyr and von Balthasar makes for depressing
reading when approached with this suggestion in mind. To give just a couple of
examples, Roten says that “the woman alone bears the fruit and brings it
forth, she even has to bear the man’s impossibility to participate in
these acts.”(20) Referring to von Balthasar’s Marian writing, he
suggests that von Speyr was the link between Mary and von Balthasar, having
already said that von Balthasar’s “personality structure and his
Mariology are intimalely related and concurrent.”(21) This implies that
von Speyr was the mediating presence that allowed von Balthasar to connect with
and express his own repressed femininity. When he marvelled at von Speyr’s
visionary insights and the compatibility of their theologies, perhaps he was
merely marvelling at his own “profoundly Marian mental structure”
projected onto his feminine mirror-image. Most bizarrely of all, Roten quotes
von Speyr as saying that she assumed von Balthasar’s physical
indispositions such as sore throats and nausea, to leave to him free to work.
The relationship between them operates almost like that between the ego and the
superego, with the uninhibited, non-rational, mystical dimension of von
Speyr’s visions filtered through the work of von Balthasar. (Roten refers
to von Balthasar as the “theological filter thanks to his knowledge,
wisdom, and caution”(22) of von Speyr’s work). This is not
Irigaray’s ironical mimicking of femininity as mysticism and madness, but
a woman’s entry, body and soul, into the space of a man’s unconscious
desire. Nor is it the pattern of the medieval women mystics, who experienced
their kenosis as women in relation to God. In von Speyr’s mystical
experience, von Balthasar inserts himself between the mystic and God, as a
self-appointed spiritual director who ultimately even decreed an end to her
mystical dictations. The fluid symbolics of gender which allowed both male and
female medieval mystics to describe their relationship to God in language which
assumed and subverted the feminine persona, becomes in the relationship between
von Balthasar and von Speyr a symptom of a dysfunctional and repressive sexual
relationship based on a too literal interpretation of sexual symbolism. Roten,
quoting from the collected volumes of biographical and autobiographical
writings on von Speyr, writes that “The spiritual fecundity of the man
will be put into the flesh of the woman, in order that it may become fruitful
."(23) This peculiar muddling of biological and spiritual categories is
indefensible from the point of view of the Catholic tradition and suggests how
impoverished we have become in our symbolism. Medieval art and devotional
writings sometimes portray Christ on the cross as giving birth to the Church
through the wound in his side, and there is no suggestion that the male flesh
needs to appropriate a woman’s body to manifest its spiritual fecundity.
Indeed, men such as St Bernard of Clairvaux sometimes described themselves as
mothers, just as St Anselm prayed to Jesus and St Paul as his mothers. The
relationship hetween the sexed symbol and the sexed body is poetic, endowed
with a fluidity of meaning that invites a certain sense of playfulness and
perhaps even irony and mimicry in the way we relate to sexual symbolism. At its
best, the Catholic tradition exploits the gap between word and flesh as a place
of theological creativity and artistic expression. Today, the body and the
symbol have become clogged together with biological glue, and maybe we need to
find a way to prise them apart in order to rediscover the creative space
between them.
It is
precisely here that I think there is potential in the theology of von Balthasar
and von Speyr, if we approach them in a spirit of healthy discernment with our
critical faculties alert. Their theology is easily appropriated by those who
seek to defend traditional gender roles, and I have argued that they themselves
rooted it too deeply in a culture-specific understanding of the relationship
between the sexes. But it also has to be said that this is no ordinary married
relationship, even although it is described in the theological symbolics of
marriage and fecundity. Von Speyr understood it in terms of the nuptial
fecundity of the complementarity of the sexes, resulting in the gestation and
birth of their child, the Community of Saint John. This virginal marriage
transcends the biological and social functions of marriage, in a way which
hints at the potential of Catholic symbolism if it is liberated from the
excessive literalism of contemporary moral doctrine. If fertility refers
primarily to the shared endeavour of man and woman to bring their gifts to the
spiritual regeneration of the world, then many of our present concerns about
human fertility and sexuality are misplaced. An incarnational theology requires
that we take the body seriously, but Christianity is also about the symbolic
transformation of the flesh. Christian sexual symbolism does not relate
primarily to the natural and biological functions of the human body but to the
relationship between God, the Church, Christ and Mary, in metaphors that are
informed and shaped by sexual difference but are not held hostage to the sexed
body. This dimension is not lacking from von Balthasar and von Speyr’s
theology, but in their case a particular relationship with alì its human
limitations has become too closely identified with the theological significance
of the symbol, just as the symbol has become too dependent on a particular
cultural context.
Yet
in appealing for a more creative use of sexual symbolism, I also want to
suggest that there are human experiences which do transcend gender, and perhaps
the ultimate among these are the moments of birth and death. In a mystical
identification with Christ on the cross, von Speyr says, “At present, the
bearing of sin is so much to the fore that I do not know whether I am a man or
a woman.” She goes on to say of Christ, “And since (on the Cross) he
gives his filial being back to the Father more and more, so that, increasingly,
he is purely a man, he somehow loses himself in the anonymity of a generalized
human nature. When he is scourged, he takes the sin of man and woman upon his
body, which thus becomes a ‘generalised’ body. Will the Father still
recognize and distinguish him, once he has submerged himself in this anonymous
state?”(24) This might be one of von Speyr’s most significant
insights for the dilemma facing the Church today—is the sex of Christ of
fundamental significance in the sacrifice of the cross? She seems to suggest it
is not, but this vision merits only a passing mention in a footnote by von
Balthasar, and does not seem to have prompted him to rethink his defence of the
essential masculinity of the priesthood.
As I
said at the beginning, this paper is intentionally provocative, and it invites
challenge and correction from others who are more familiar with von Balthasar
and von Speyr’s work. Von Balthasar seems to have been swallowed whole by
one faction of the church, and rejected in his entirety by another. This means
that in terms of sexual politics, the Church today is increasingly polarised
between the stylised guys and dolls of the Communio faction, and the
politicised androgynes of the Concilium faction. It seems to me that
both these options indicate an impoverishment of the Catholic symbolic
heritage. We have yet to rediscover the theological resources which might allow
us to say with Irigaray that “sexual difference would constitute the
horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date—at least in the
West—and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and
flesh. For loving partners this would be a fecundity of birth and regeneration,
but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the
creation of a new poetics.”(25)
1.
John Roten, S.M., “The Two Halves of the Moon” in David L. Schindler
(ed.) Hans Urs von Balthasar—His Life and Work (Ignatius Press
1991), p 73.
2.
Luce Ingaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One. (Cornell University Press
1985), p 132.
3.
Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One. p 76.
4.
Roten, “The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 86.
5.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama Volume III (Ignatius Press 1992), p
287.
6.
Theo-drama III. p 284.
7.
Theo-drama III, p 284.
8.
Theo-drama III, p 283.
9.
Theo-drama III, p 284.
10.
Theo-drama III, p 285.
11. Theo-drama III, p 285.
12.
See Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (The Athlone Press 1993),
pp 34-55.
13.
von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life (Ignatius Press 1983), p 202.
14.
von Balthasar, Elucidations (SPCK 1975), p 71.
15.
Adrienne von Speyr, The Handmaid of the Lord(The Harvill Press 1956), p
84.
16.
David L. Schindler,"Catholic theology, gender, and the future of Western
civilization" in Communio 20) (Summer, I993), pp 200-39.
17.
von Balthasar, “Women priests? A Marian Church in a fatherless and
motherless culture" in Communio 22 (Spring. 1995), p 169.
18.
Paul McPartlan, “The Marian church and women’s ordination” in
William McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock (eds.), Mary is for Everyone—Essays
on Mary and Ecumenism (Gracewing 1997), p 45.
19.
Roten, “The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 66.
20.
“The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 75.
21.
“The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 66.
22.
“The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 73.
23.
“The Two Halves of the Moon,” p 74.
24.
von Speyr, quoted in von Balthasar, Theo-drama III, p 241, fn 43.
25.
Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p 5.
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