The month of November starts with the solemnity of All Saints. As both the Bible as well as the Second Vatican Council tell us, we were created to be saints. Our call to holiness stems from the essential fact that we were created by God who is the Holy One. Hence, since holiness forms part and parcel of who we really are it is important to ask the question: Who are the saints? In order to answer this very important question Hans Urs von Balthasar (12 August 1905 – 26 June 1988), the famous Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is commonly regarded as one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, will help us reply our question.
Von Balthasar refrains from giving a straightforward answer of what he means by saints. Rather he gives us, as Matthew A. Rothaus Moser writes in his book Love Itself is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints, that Balthasar presents intimations of what or who a saint is: a lover of God who, marked by holiness, is commissioned by God for specific tasks in the world (p.xx). In our reflection we are choosing the path of the subjective approach, namely, as Rothaus Moser explains, that which is concerned with the manner in which the saints carry out the theological Task (p.xxi). Hence, holiness is being put within the three-fold movement of contemplation, receptivity and mission. In other words, the saint is the one who is enraptured by the beauty of Christ’s love via contemplation. Then, contemplation leads to receptivity to God’s will which, in the final analysis, bears abundant good fruit for both the Church and the world by the accomplishment of the saint’s God-given mission. Let us not forget that for Balthasar saints, on the one hand, influence history and politics however the existential foundation of their missions stay hidden from everyone, save those who were chosen for the same path. That is why saints are somehow enigmatic and look ‘strange’ to many people.
In Balthasar’s view, contemplation is a basic act which goes before any Christian effort. It is at the very core of the person’s holiness. Contemplation is a reciprocal act of God’s self-revelation and the person’s being enraptured by the inexplicable beauty of God’s love. In his book Prayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar says that contemplation demands from the person an act of readiness, attentiveness, perceptiveness, willingness to surrender to what is greater than he, to let the deeper truth prevail, to lay down his arms at the feet ofenduring love (p.19). Contemplation is the hub of every saint’s reality.
Furthermore, holiness cannot be examined, defined or classified. To understand a saint we have to experience his and her experience of this transformative beauty. In his book The Glory of the Lord I, Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: One must have seen the same thing as they if one is to understand them, and this, therefore, is the point where a certain esotericism is unavoidable and where the proofs for the truth contemplated necessarily bear the character of a ritual initiation, as the Symposium showed long ago. Even so truly a ‘church of the people’ as the Catholic Church does not abolish genuine esotericism. The secret path of the saints is never denied to one who is really willing to follow it. But who in the crowd troubles himself over such a path? (p.33).
Contemplation leaves its imprint within the person in such a way that that person starts interacting with God’s grace in order to dispose himself and herself to achieve more holiness. Both the intellect and the will are affected by contemplation. The intellect realizes that existence is a gift and that one cannot be in control of his and her life. On this point Melanie O’Hara beautifully writes: The experience of God’s personal love for him [the human subject] evokes a loving response. His response is like that of a child whose own love is naturally and effortlessly awakened by his mother’s love. He loves God in return not because he feels obliged or indebted to God for what God has done, or because he is awed by God’s power, but out of a deep sense of gratitude for all that has been given to him (see the book by Christina M. Gschwandtner, Marion and Theology, p.236).
Finally, true contemplation brings self-surrender, love of God and neighbor, poverty, chastity and obedience. Hence, it accompanies the person towards the acceptance and serene embracing of a God-given mission of love where these attitudes are incarnated into action. As Balthasar himself explains in his book The Glory of the Lord I, contemplation, which can be explained as the continual encounter of Christ’s love, becomes a movement of the entire person, leading away from himself through the vision towards the invisible God(p.121).
Contemplation makes space for the disposition of receptivity. For Balthasar receptivity makes up the basic Christian disposition and is at the basis of the person’s moral progress between the primary movement of contemplation and the subsequent acceptance of a God-given mission. The Ignatian formation of Balthasar as a Jesuit helped him unite the importance of receptivity of Christian and the mystery of any saint. For Moser, in his book Love Itself is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints, St Ignatius’ unique contribution to Christian spirituality is that he insists on a theology of response as an ever-actual event of freedom and love (p.11). In Ignatius of Loyola’s understanding, the proper disposition of the creature is… indiferencia: disponibility or self-abandonment (p.11).
Hence, this theme of Ignatian indiferencia strongly influences Balthasar’s theology of the saints. In the book which he wrote with Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, Mary: The Church at the Source, he manages to see this indiferencia throughout the Christian tradition. He writes: The Fathers called it “passionlessness” (apatheia); the Middle Ages, Gelassenheit (meaning not remaining attached to worldly things); and Ignatius of Loyola, indifference” (meaning being content in advance with everything God decides for us). All of these are merely variants on what Mary’s Yes has always already accomplished for all Christians, indeed, for all men… The one fundamental act can be accentuated in many ways and, in this sense, leaves room for many spiritualities, but they all proceed from the same center and must also go back to it – to the one Yes of Christ, of Mary, and of ecclesial man to the saving design of the Father for all and each (p.120-121).
Here we can also see Balthasar’s inference on Mary’s fiat which is at the very heart of this receptivity. According to Balthasar, Mary is the exemplar of the Christian striving for holiness. Mary’s Yes to God is the ideal of Christian holiness while at the same time it is the image of Christ’s complete Yes to the Father. That is why Balthasar writes in his work Mary in the Church’s Doctrine and Devotion: If everything in Mary rests upon her Yes to God, this Yes is nothing other than the perfect human echo of Jesus’ divine-human response to the Father: “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God” (Heb 10:7) (p.119).
All this leads us to say that of all Christian saints, Mary is the most perfect due to the fact that of her total receptivity to God’s word to her as well as her total acceptance of her God-given mission. Within the same work Balthasar says that thanks to her receptivity Mary becomes the perfect example of Christian holiness. She who for her Son’s sake was granted the highest believing and loving readiness, is therefore at once the archetype… that transcends us and the model… we are to imitate and that helps us to do so (p.110-111).
In this sense, Mary’s disposition of faith and receptivity is so complete that she now becomes a corporate person. Therefore, as he writes in his book Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of the Word, Mary’s own person, in its faith, love and hope, has become so supple in the hand of the Creator that he can extend her beyond the limits of a private consciousness to a Church consciousness, to what the older theology since Origen and Ambrose is accustomed to call anima ecclesiastica (p.160). Let us not forget that the latter’s title is available to every Christian. Yes, it is the reality of the saint. His and her ‘I’ makes sense solely inasmuch as he and she is in a mission.
The expansion of the saints to a collective personality is so important because no individual weaknesses can impede God’s mission to be fulfilled through that specific person. We can see this happening in the lives of the saints. Thus, we need to stress on what the saints are pointing us towards. In his book Two sisters in the Spirit: Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity, Balthasar writes that we must bring to light what they wished to bring to light, what they were bound to: their representation of Christ and the Scriptures… we should leave in obscurity what they wished to leave in obscurity: their poor personalities (p.26-27).
In itself, receptivity is always geared toward a God-given mission. Every mission which is truly its salt has to be constantly sustained by contemplation and receptivity. In his book The Marian Mold of the Church, Hans Uns Von Balthasar writes: For if this readiness is lacking, if the one sent is negligent or is not selfless or mixes other personal motives and aspirations with his mission, then even important missions can miscarry, and the injury to the Church is so much the greater. If, on the other hand, the two factors, the objective and the subjective, are in harmony, the result is a Christian life that the Church can hold up, can “canonize”, as exemplary and worthy of imitation, inasmuch as it reflects the splendor of the holiness of God and Christ (p. 137).
Obviously the subjective receptive disposition has to be united with the objective mission given by God to the Church. That is why, as Balthasar himself writes in his book Theo-Logic III: The Spirit of the Truth, that saints become fully incarnate, fully persons, to the extent that their spiritual mission becomes transparent in them (p.193). Thus, in Balthasar’s view, the receptive disposition as well as the mission come together in the life of the person to make him and her a saint. And the saints, in turn, who accomplish their God-given missions, make the Church and in perfect communion with each other.
On her part, the Church forms the saints through the gifts of contemplation and receptivity. In this way they gift the Church with legitimacy. In his book Love Alone Is Credible, Balthasar writes: The sole credibility of the Church Christ founded lies, as he himself says, in the saints, as those who sought to set all things on the love of Christ alone. It is in them that we can see what the “authentic” Church is, that is, what she is in her authenticity, while she is essentially obscured by sinners… (p.122).
From this short appreciation of the reality of the saints in the theological exercise of Hans Urs von Balthasar we can say that saints are both formed by the Church in the oasis of contemplation and receptivity. That is why they are enigmatic figures for the world. On the other hand, saints shine on us a ray of Christ’s splendour thanks to their missions. We can easily say with the late Pope Benedict XVI in his The Ratzinger Report, that the saints are the only really effective apologia for Christianity (p.129).
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s schema of contemplation, receptivity and mission gives an effective model for comprehending the subjective process of growth in holiness, as well as an innovative manner of comprehending the meeting of nature and grace in the making of saints. As Jean Daniélou wrote in his book Essai sur le Mystère de l’Histoire: La Sphère et La Croix, saints represent the highest things we know in the mundane realm (p.100).
