A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. J.H. (Hans) Kouwenberg is editor of Channels.
Prayer, Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. (1955) 1986. 311 pp.
That this is a difficult book is true. It is not a book with several easy steps on how to pray or contemplate; it is a theological book. That is, it explores the meaning of the contemplation of God vis a vis the author’s reading and understanding of New Testament Scriptures. I came to it after I had some essay or “experimentation” with a single word or phrase, Benedictine-type of meditation (as taught by John Main O.S.B., Montreal). 1 was somewhat comfortable with this type of meditation because it seemed to me to be more of the negative or “apophatic” type of meditation; von Balthasar’s book seemed to me to focus more on “kata- phatic” or positive contemplation (see pp. 53-54), especially as the author focused on “the Word made flesh.” (I only learned how to “name” these different kinds of meditation along the way. I especially appreciated Eugene Peterson’s brief discussion of these terms and types of mediation or contemplation in his book Answering God, pp. 79-80 — which I read still later than Balthasar’s book.) It seemed to me that Balthasar finds Christian contemplation to be best if it is Scripturebased and Christ-centred and rooted in the community of the church. I found that I could identify with that. His “points of meditation” (p. 8) is suffused with New Testament Scriptural references and allusions. Further, his emphasis is on God’s initiating role in the “conversation” (p. 15). For me as a Protestant and Reformed evangelical Christian that is a good beginning.
As I reread the opening chapter I found that Balthasar said so many good things about the nature of contemplation that I wondered why I had not underlined this or that. He writes with a finely — and humanly — tuned and sensitive heart, ear and eye. For example, “We fail to listen where God speaks: where God’s word rang out in the world once for all, sufficient for all ages, inexhaustible. Or else we think that God’s word has been here on earth for so long that now it is almost used up, that it is about time for some new word, as if we had the right to demand one. We fail to see that it is we ourselves who are used up and alienated, whereas the word resounds with the same vitality and freshness as ever; it is just as near to us as it always was” (p. 16). The truth of this came especially home to me today as I participated with a colleague in a brief television interview series which was being taped this morning. My colleague prefaced and concluded each eight minute interview with me with a reflection on a saying of Jesus concerning a “fear” of one kind or another that we might possess. My colleague was deftly able, in a few words, to explore deep human depths in each of several sayings that I thought I had never seen or heard before. His contemplation on these passages and on the person of Christ moved me greatly. Rereading some chunks of Balthasar is doing the same thing for me.
I now see better what he meant in his “Preface” when he said that his writings are “presented in a terse and sober form, so that they can be used neither as a commentary on the scriptural text nor as spiritual reading (i.e. reading and experiencing the spiritual writings of others), but only as instrumental in the practice of contemplation” (p. 8). This may be a theological book but it is theology as poetry, theology as a way of understanding the language of the Scriptures as much as the doctrine of the Scriptures. Balthasar loves the words of Scripture. And yet Balthasar is not an English-Lit Pedant analyzing words in some artificial manner for their own sake. As he writes: “It is easily said: we are used to the words; but through hearing and contemplating the words we should unaccustom ourselves to them so that we can once more become aware of the gigantic implications of God addressing us” (pp. 38-39 my emphasis). Now having read both Balthasar and Peterson (Answering God) I see a connection: the text matters: imaginative, spiritually. I agree. But I need to slow down my reading to see it! I need to be lingering, tasting, thinking, note-taking, writing. I found that I underlined a fair bit and made notes in the margins of this book (The margins were often too small!)
Sometimes I would anticipate Scriptures that Balthasar would soon quote — that gave me a warm glow of companionship. Sometimes I would simply stop and reflect and pray — there are many passages throughout that are “Dali-esque,” “Lewisian” or “Tolstoy- ian”; that is the only way I can put it. (Occasionally he escapes me, as on p. 46, the discussion re: “parrhesia.”) Sometimes I would argue a little with Balthasar on points of theology, e.g. some although by no means all, of his Marian references, references to the Mass, etc., but on the whole I was amazed by his biblical, evangelical stance. Balthasar kept coming back again and again to a Christ-centred or incarnational kind of contemplation. Read in connection with several books on incarnational preaching his points were not lost on me. His emphasis on the particular, which simply echoed the Incarnation, was helpful; for example, “The truth of the kingdom of heaven does not overarch the earth like a vault of fixed stars of eternal Platonic truths, but hovers over it as something personal, clearly contoured, precise, dramatically alive, new and transformed every morning, in every new world situation. This precise thing is heaven’s will for me today” (pp. 102-103). I need to be sensitive to the here-and-now, the earthly as well as the heavenly, always to see Jesus Christ, and to hear God’s voice, to be “receptive to his will, his suggestions, his slightest movement” (p. 103). Only on a few occasions, especially in my early Christian pilgrimage, have I had these “intimations of the eternal.” I long to recover or receive them anew. Balthasar’s book has helped.
But I need to reread it, I think.