TEXTS by HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
on the SACRAMENT OF PENANCE AND RECONCILIATION

 C. THE SACRAMENTAL FIGURE ^{[p. 576]}

Hans Urs von Balthasar The Glory Of The Lord:A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1. Seeing The Form tr. by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; ed, by Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches, Ignatius Press • San Francisco Crossroad Publications (New York. 1982: orig. publ. :Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Asthetik, I: Schau der Gestalt, Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln, 1961, 2^nd ed. 1967). Section:.III. The Objective Evidence; D Mediation of the Form, 2. The Medium of the Church, pp. 576-583

     The previous discussion has already given us an insight into the fundamental law which governs all sacramental form in the Church. It is that, in everything the Church, as the steward of the sacraments, does to give visible form, the manner and the measure of this form-giving is determined by the event which is to be made present in that form and which is itself the archetypal form of all revelation and, hence, also the primal sacrament. Nothing in the Church-not even the Church herself-can lay claim to an autonomous form that would compete with the Christ-form or even replace it. Nor is it as if through the sacraments a ‘formless’ grace, so to speak, were mediated for which the Church, as administrator of the sacraments, had to invent a fitting and adequate form starting from nothing. The fundamental figure of grace is Jesus Christ himself, and all sacramental forms are grounded in his form in a most concrete sense. The ecclesial and social shape that the form of the sacraments comes to have can occur only by constant reference to Christ, the fundamental form. There can be no res (gratia) which would not, in Christ, already be res et sacramentum. For this reason, every ecclesial sacramentum must adhere both interiorly and exteriorly to this archetype, which is both double and single. Both the ecclesiological and the personal-charismatic, missionary aspects (the two interwoven into one unique form) are, in every case, the expression of the christological aspect of each sacrament, in which also the aspects of communicated grace and of eschatological orientation (in themselves imageless and formless) are drawn into the form. All sacraments (and in this they are like the Eucharist) are a saving act that God performs in Christ Jesus for the ecclesial believer. They are distinguished from one another by the manner of this saving action, which is not primarily specified by man’s universal sociological situations and the context in which the believer finds himself, but by the ways in which Christ has brought us his salvation, which are the ways of his life in human form.

     He it is who in every case gives form. In matrimony, for instance, it is not the human event of a covenant entered into by husband and wife that specifies a grace which in itself is  ^[p.577] undifferentiated. Rather, this is effected by the nuptial relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church, which in turn is the perfection of the Old Testament marriage relationship between Yahweh and the people. The christological form is infused into the human form, and the first of these determines the form of the sacrament. That a final analysis of this form in a theological and anthropological sense is both possible and necessary does not contradict our assertion. A fundamental bridal and covenantal relationship exists between God and the world as such (compare the covenant with Noah) which from all time has arisen from the Logos’ mediation at the creation and from the Spirit’s hovering over the abyss. This fundamental relationship makes man, in the reciprocity of husband and wife, an image and a likeness of God: of the God who, in his eternal trinitarian mystery, already possesses within himself a nuptial form. But this final resolution of the image into a network of universal divine and creaturely relationships should occur, as we have shown, only simultaneously with the synthesis in Jesus Christ: ‘For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, . . . all things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things and in him all things hold together’ (Col 1.16f).

  The main text of Pauline baptismal theology makes particularly evident this creative and moulding form of the sacrament which derives from Christ. According to Paul, we ‘have grown (sumphutoi) into the likeness (tō homoiōmati) of his death, that we may also grow into the likeness of his resurrection’ (Rom 6.5). This ‘likeness’ or homoiōma connotes more than mere abstract similarity, for it contains in itself an element of form. Plato uses homoiōma together with eikon (Phaedr. 25ob) when he is describing the relationship of earthly imitative things to their heavenly archetypes. And the Septuagint employs the term even more emphatically in the sense of form, reproduction, image. In the New Testament it means ‘imitation’ (Rom 5.14) and, especially in Christology, also ‘form’: Christ appears in the ‘form of sinful flesh’ (Rom 8.3), in such a way, of course, that the element of dissimilarity is always in the background, excluding every possibility of sinfulness in Christ. We see something similar in ^[p.578] Phil 2.7, where Christ takes on the form (morphē) of a slave and enters into the form (ev homoiōmati) of man, again with the nuance that here one who in himself is not man becomes by this con-formation like us in all things that pertain to the human form (cf. Heb 4.15: (kat homiotēta kata panta). Rom 6.5, however, does not speak of his taking on our form but of our taking on his, and in fact not his form as such but the ‘form of his likeness’. Indeed, according to Rom 6.3, we have not simply been ‘baptised into his death’, but ‘towards his death’, in the direction of (sic) his death’, and have been ‘buried along with him by a baptism towards his death’. If the ‘likeness’ were nothing more than either the ceremony of immersion into the water or our own moral dying with Christ (which is what the ceremony means and is what somehow is morally experienced by us), then the relationship between archetype and image would remain merely external and exemplary-as external as in a doctrine of the Eucharist for which the bread and the wine are nothing more than the symbol of the Body and Blood of Christ. By homoioma, however, Paul doubtless wishes to say more than this, namely, the process whereby the thing itself impresses its form on us on its own initiative. The ‘thing’ is the dying of Jesus Christ as a historical reality; the ‘impressing of its form’ is its actualisation in the sacrament of baptism. The ceremony of immersion, which attempts to show this in sensible form, and the death and new life experienced by the catechumen certainly belong here, but only in so far as both these things come under the impress of the objectively actualised death of Christ himself. If homoioma were the sacramental death of the catechumen himself, then the sumphutoi [“having grown”]would make no sense. The sacramental death lies precisely in the sumphutoi, which, from the dative case it takes (tō homoiōmati), requires an objective content; it is in being conformed to this content that the catechumen undergoes sacramental death. This interpretation of the school of Marialaach (Casel, Stricker), to which Heinrich Schlier adheres for exegetical reasons, is the only one fully justified by the texts.48  ^[p.579]

     This image-form, which bears the impress of the archetype of the dying Christ and into which the catechumen is ingrafted with his whole existence, cannot at all be conceived as a separate and self-contained form; it exists only as the sacramentally realised event in which it mediates as form between Christ and man. This form, therefore, is an objective, ecclesial reality established by Christ, the archetype. The water (as a sign of the act: of washing and, at the same time, of death by immersion and flooding: 1 Pet 3.20f.; 2 Pet 3.6) is the sacramental pointer to this mediating happening, a pointer which is indissolubly united to the event which is the actual content of the sacrament.

     The sense in which the sacramental form is centred on the event which occurs in and through it leads us to see the similar relatedness of everything institutional in the Church to the events which they mediate, though this is not to deny that the institution constitutes a reality in its own right relative to the individual subject. But the event is nevertheless always aimed at the individual subject, who must discern the mediating, symbolic character of the form mediating the event if his conformation to Christ is to occur meaningfully and fittingly. A sacrament is an ecclesial gesture that Jesus Christ directs to man. In order to be understandable, this gesture clothes itself in a generally intelligible cosmic image (the elements) or human image (laying on of hands, the act of man forgiving man). But the image’s universally intelligible symbolic content is itself only a pointer to Christ’s corporeal and spiritual gesture, a gesture which the believer understands, both because of the pointer given by the earthly image and because of Christ’s unique symbolic power as God and man.

     From this it is clear that the baptism of infants is inadequate as a model for the sacramental event. To say that the entrance into God’s Kingdom occurs unconsciously-that is, in such a way that the subject involved neither perceives nor understands Christ’s gesture-is a fact so conspicuously alien to Scripture (and to the baptismal practice of the Old Testament and of John) that it must without question be regarded as an exception. The decision for infant-baptism was perhaps the most portentous decision in the entire history of the Church (and that, long before Constantine). This is so not only because infant-baptism ^[p.580] obscures the normal image of the personal encounter with Christ and the decision for Christ that take place in every sacrament (thus making of it merely an opus operatum),4949 but also

because all Christian existence is henceforth grounded upon a fact which is quasi-natural because it is not initially ratified by the subject. The subsequent ratification of this fact at the age of discretion always has something dubious and not quite plausible about it, since no decision whatever can now undo what has been done (signum indelebile). The sole theological justification could be found in the fact ‘that Christ died for us while we were still sinners’ (Rom 5.8) without obtaining our prior consent, something which is all the more true of the mystery of predestination ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1-4). If we were to justify successfully the incorporation of an infant into the visible Church on the grounds of this universal cosmic perspective, we would also by the same token have to bring to light the universal cosmic character of the Church and its responsibility towards all humanity; the reception of the sacraments before the age of reason would then have to be seen in the light of this responsibility. However, even so there are elements unaccounted for in this train of thought which cannot be overlooked.

     The sacrament of penance has the advantage that its sacramental figure does not lend itself to any such erosion. For here the acts of the penitent cannot be lacking, cannot be provided by any proxy, cannot be made up for later on. In the sacrament of penance the heart of the matter is, precisely, the sinner’s ‘conversion’ and his personal turning to the reign of God as it comes to him in Christ. Here the full form of the sacramental event is made evident, plausible, visible. For all these reasons this is the sacrament which could be taken as the model for a general doctrine of the sacraments, in so far as such a model could be sustained through all the individual sacraments, which are so different and yet interiorly analogous. Spiritually speaking, nothing is more eloquent than the Gospel stories that relate the encounter of sinners with Christ. Every single detail is both credible and indispensable: the fact that their sin must come out into the light whether they want this or not, whether the sinner himself confesses it or Christ draws it from him and confesses it in his place; the fact that embarrassment, contrition, tears of remorse are necessary; finally, the fact that the word of forgiveness, as a seed, is planted into the soul that has been ‘plowed up’ in this manner. On the other hand, in an interior sense nothing is at the same time more fitting, just, and compassionate than the fact that this forgiveness from God is linked to one’s own forgiveness of one’s fellow-man and that, contrariwise, the readmission of the sinner into God’s friendship goes hand in hand with the forgiving readmission of that same sinner into the community of those who love. Thus, it is not necessary to wait till the period of the Church before penance receives its social aspect; with the very existence of Christ penance has already received its full sacramental form: Christ is the offended God and the offended neighbour all in one. He is both marked out and known and, as ‘Son of Man’, anonymous. The Gospel image is not obscured by the fact that absolution is given through Christ’s delegate, who is empowered to bestow it in the name of the offended God and of the offended community of saints. This delegate concretises in a sacramental manner both the forgiving God and the forgiving Church, and it is necessary that the form of his image represent both these things in unity. This form, moreover, makes us see that the minister as officebearer (who in his person remains wholly irrelevant in his official function) still may exercise his official service precisely as one who loves: it is truly this priest who forgives my sins, not, of course, in the sense that he primarily shows me his love but rather that of God and of the Church. Perhaps nowhere does the double resolution of the ecclesial form, in the direction of God and in the direction of man, become more impressively evident than here, as well as the extent to which this form in reality represents nothing other than the focal point, the burning centre of the concrete conformation to one another of sinful humanity and gracious God.- 50

     It is not necessary to rehearse the rest of the sacraments in ^[p.582] turn; the principle is sufficient. Some of them take man not simply in his totality but in his concrete historical form: as a person growing to maturity who at a given moment has reached the stage of adult responsibility and hence, as if by natural right, is in need of an initiation ceremony. This ceremony-Christian confirmation-is not an amorphous and general divine blessing but the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the candidate, the event whereby Pentecost becomes an event for him. Here, too, this fact makes the universal human situation recede to the level of a secondary occasion for the free God’s sovereign action in salvation-history. Likewise, sociologically speaking, marriage and sacred public worship are to be found in every society. But these states and functions, universally exhibited by mankind, are events that offer occasions and signs in which the Christevent can take sacramental form and come to prevail over the occasion and the sign themselves. To Christ belongs the mystery of matrimony (Eph 5.32), to him belongs the true eternal priesthood (Heb 5. 10), and both things are the shaping form which must henceforth become actualised in the marriage of Christians and in the ecclesial diakonia of Christians. The anointing of the sick is also a universally understood sign, a help and a guide to death and to the judgment of the dead, a viaticum for the one departing that consists in the most precious thing the community has to give: prayer and supplication for the forgiveness of sins (Jas 5.14f.). But how different everything becomes when man’s ending thus becomes, in Christ, a new beginning and a sacramental expression of being fitted for eternal life, recognition of a capacity for Christian death and resurrection, the form of Christ in the clearest possible expression, human dying as a sign of the dying of God in Christ, which at the same time means the manifestation of eternal life for us!

     The sacraments are an essential part of ecclesial aesthetics. Not only does God’s invisible grace become visible and graspable in the Christ-form as such, but here, in the sacraments, the Christ-form itself in turn appears before us and impresses its shape upon us in a valid form which is free of all subjective ambiguities. But the sacraments would be radically misunderstood if one attempted in the least way to disjoin them from the Christ-form as instrumenta separata and ascribe to them an ^[p.583]

independent meaning and a form of their own. For the same reason, a description of the sacraments would be deficient which characterised their transitional and event-laden symbolic form as a spiritual work of art in itself. This might be done, for instance, in terms of form and matter, whereby the ‘matter’ would have to provide the somehow necessary symbolic sign for the form that is here expressing itself. But this would also be inadequate because the symbolic rites for individual sacraments have either developed historically or are the same for several sacraments (laying on of hands, anointing). We must constantly keep in mind the sacraments’ character as mediating between Christ and man: both together belong to the figure. The ‘matter’ that is to be formed is man himself in his concrete situation: as a person who is to enter into God’s Kingdom, as a person who is to be washed, nourished, anointed, as a human sinner to whom the great absolution of the Cross must ever anew be applied and who is to undertake the decision of Christian maturity, Christian matrimony, ecclesial ministry, as a person who stands before the gates of eternity. In this person a process of formation is at work whose form is Christ himself. The happening has an external and, hence, sensible and symbolic side: the water of baptism is important because it really washes, and so on. But we ought not to exaggerate the symbolism of the elements as such, statically considered; the continere gratiam (Dz. 849) should not have to suffer on this account.

     In the sacraments, all their theological form-quality and all the splendour of grace they contain derive from Christ, from the triune God in him. Only in this way are they religiously plausible and require no demythologisation and demagicisation. Their theological understanding and their liturgical execution will be most adequate when they make evident in the most incisive and sober way the gesture of Christ that comes to man through them.

2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, (Sheed & Ward, Inc., New York, 1963); tr. of Theologie der Geschichte, 2d ed., (Einsiedeln, 1959). pp. 90-97. Ch. 3, “Christ the Norm of History”.

THE SACRAMENTS

     Having got as far as this, we should not find any impenetrable obscurity in the second level of universalization, ^[p.91] the sacramental level. We shall take as our first principle that Christ’s existence, and hence his mode of duration, in the Eucharist and the sacraments is, as far as concerns himself, no different from that which belongs to the forty days. Here, again, he is the risen Lord, living in the eternity of the Father, his earthly time transfigured into his eternal duration, the eternal Christ accompanying “his own” throughout time. The new element of difference is only that whereas during the forty days he lets this companionship appear openly as fulfillment, in the time of the Church it happens in concealment under the sacramental forms. But the forty days were expressly intended as an introduction and initiation of the days of the Church.

     Yet their interdependence and relationship are even closer than this. For whereas before his Passion the Lord let himself be seen physically by any and every man, and for this very reason was still veiled to spiritual sight, after the sealing of the tomb he is visible in principle only to believers; either those who already believe, like the apostles, or those whom he brings to belief by appearing to them, like Paul. The dimension within which it is possible for him to appear is the dimension of faith-for his appearance now always implies the revelation of divinity in his humanity. And this faith is something issuing from the Cross, an objective, unalterable fact of the “new and eternal covenant,” an expression of the truth that this covenant is, on both sides, no longer subject to the vagaries of human infidelity. It is a faith that lies beyond all the vacillations of the individual subjects who participate in it; faith as an enduring medium within which the risen Christ ^[p.92] can be present without humiliation of the Passion; faith as that which is henceforward as steadfast as Revelation; faith as the trustworthy answer to Christ’s own word, necessarily guaranteed by the Redeemer himself; faith which co-operates in constituting dogma, and the Church’s teaching, and the Church herself as Bride. And it is in this medium, whose unfailing presence is assured by the Holy Spirit, that the Son can be present in the sacramental mode.

     Moreover, in saying that, as far as concerns the Lord himself, the sacramental form of existence does not differ from that of the forty days, we imply that he appears therein as interpreting, revealing and bestowing his earthly life, and in that sense bringing it with him, representing it, making it present. In this sense one may speak of a “mystery-presence”; and the main focus of interest in “mystery theology” should perhaps be sought in the fact that Christ’s presence in the sacraments, his gracious approach to man in the sacramental act, is qualitatively determined by himself personally, and is rooted in his earthly life. It would go beyond the limits of this study to apply the concept thus sketched to the sacraments individually. But we need to be clear about this much: we are not allowing the archetypal, formative power of the life of the God-man its full validity if we regard the sacraments as defined and differentiated not from within themselves but by various basic situations in human life and the life of the Church (with Christ’s grace applying and adapting itself to them, but with them acting as the specifying principle). ^[p.93]

     On the contrary, the Sacrament of Marriage is not some sort of neutral supernatural blessing on a “natural institution”; rather, it contains within itself the true meaning, the true substance of marriage, made living by Christ himself as the subsistent covenant; and this reality of marriage draws men into that relationship between the Lord and his Church which is the foundation and justification of every marriage. The sacrament of Penance is not primarily an application of general divine grace to some member of the Church who has fallen into sin; what it does is to draw the believer into an archetypal christological act: the disposition of the crucified Christ who bears all the sins of the world and confesses them before the Father, receiving visible “absolution” in the Resurrection.

     For each of the sacraments it would be necessary to point out in this same way the personal, temporal-historical reality which is thrown open to the recipient, offered to him, made available for his participation, assigned to him personally. By becoming contemporaneous with the believer in the sacrament, the Lord bestows upon him the possibility, given him in faith, of becoming like him who became man. The grace he communicates is inseparable from his incarnation, his relationship to the Church, his historicity. It goes without saying that his existence in the sacrament is made present not as it was in the historical past but in mysterio. Only one should not look upon the mystery as a mere sublimation of the historical into an “eternal content”-the person who acted still surviving after his actions themselves have become “past history”; what it is, on the contrary, is a permanently simultaneous ^[p.94] process of abstractio and conversio ad phantasma, the same thing being at one and the same time universalized and made historically concrete.

     In this light, the Mass, as the eucharistic action, can be viewed within the bounds of the sacramental, though the “making present” is here given a new intensity. It is not, as in the other sacraments, some one special aspect of Christ’s earthly existence which is here turned upon the Church and the individual, but his whole bodily reality in its supreme fulfillment as the bodily sacrifice on the Cross. In so far as the new and eternal marriage between Godhead and manhood was sealed in blood on the Cross by the loving sacrifice of that one individual whose dual nature was itself the center and source of the Covenant, to that extent his one sacrifice to the Father contains, from the very start, a duality within itself: it is the sacrifice of the Head and of the Body, of the Bridegroom and of the Bride. This one marriage in blood contains within itself in advance not only every bodily approach of the Lord to his Church until the end of the world but also every response on the Church’s part: the Church whom the Lord had already drawn into his liturgy of the Cross by the liturgical con-celebration of the Last Supper. When, in the Mass, the Church is granted a true, bodily contemporaneity with her Head in his sacrifice, something takes place not only from the Church’s point of view but from Christ’s: something for which the closest comparison we can find lies in those meetings of the risen Christ-which were real meetings for him, tool-with Mary at the sepulchre, with the ^[p.95] apostles, with Thomas and the others, or again in that breakfast by the lake-side.

     In this communion between the Lord and his Church there comes into existence a kind of time which is sacramental, and most especially eucharistic. Its peculiar character is that the eternal Lord is constantly coming afresh into contemporaneity with his Bride, but without becoming subject to or measurable by passing time. It is a time stripped of corruption, of everything negative, but containing everything positive which characterizes earthly time. Like earthly time, whenever it arrives at fulfillment it contains within it an element of openness without any corresponding closing down to cut it short. It cannot be said that the positive power which makes real the eucharistic presence of the Lord is offset by a sort of limiting nonpower, the mere action of the digestive juices working in the recipient to dissolve the species. In making himself present the Lord gives something eternal (himself), which he certainly does not withdraw on account of that dissolution. What the movement of opening leads to is not a closing and cutting short but an achieved event which cannot be nullified at any succeeding time: not even, most certainly and especially, by any subsequent communion, which is as much as to say that there can never be any purely quantitative adding together of the effect of sacramental acts. The most that can be said is that the Lord’s eucharistic time is “limited” for the individual by his death, and for the whole Church by the Last Judgment. But even then it is not that anything will be withdrawn or cancelled, it is only that this form of encounter will have ^[p.96] become superfluous, because the Lord will no longer need to give himself under the veils which have been instituted for this part of time, which is the time of the Church.

   The time of the sacraments has an eschatological orientation in common with that of the forty days: each is in a different way a pledge of eternity. But whereas the forty days anticipate the coming revelation with a certain unobscured clarity, our sacramental encounters with the Lord point towards it in a veiled manner. As the Cross anticipates the Last judgment, so the forty days are a foretaste of eternal life. And because these are the inauguration of sacramental time, they give it an eschatological orientation. This, again, is a special work of the Holy Spirit. Just as it is he who awakens the flesh to life, so it is he who brings about sacramental presence. The miracle that achieves the sacrifice, transubstantiation, must be ascribed neither to the Father, who receives the sacrifice, nor to the Son, who is the offering, nor to the Church, who, as a corporate community, prays and brings forth the offering, but to the Creator Spiritus, the creating Spirit (as was explicitly shown in the ancient epiclesis). Here, as everywhere, he is subsistent event: the liberator who charges the waiting form with infinite content. He is the Lord of the sacraments, because he is the Spirit who is both hierarchical and personal. As the Spirit of the Church, the hierarchical Spirit, he prepares the vessels, sets up the universal, valid framework, forming out of the life of Christ these seemingly rigid and lifeless images. As the personal Spirit of Love he breathes the life of Christ into them, and fills them with all the uniqueness and historical ^[p.97] reality of the divine encounter. This is the second level of universalization.

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