Thomistic-Balthasarian Comments on Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord

Abstract

Thomistic-Balthasarian Comments on Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord Angela Franks Reading thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is a very great pleasure. His carefully argued and measured theology draws on the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas in original and fruitful ways. As a lover of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, I must confess that my enjoyment was occasionally tempered with suffering—but, shall we say, only in the lower parts of my soul. Among the many things I appreciate in this book is Fr. White’s love of patristic and medieval sources. Following his guide, St. Thomas Aquinas, he combines precision with breadth of knowledge and depth of thought. Further, like St. Thomas’s generous reading of manifold sources, Fr. White makes frequent irenic gestures. I am thinking in particular of the emphasis on the filial mode of Christ’s obedience throughout, plus the gentle reading of Karl Barth’s treatment of obedience and the end of chapter 8 on the death of Christ. He and I share many points of agreement, almost too many to mention: the enduring importance of Chalcedonian Christological metaphysics; a suspicion of liberal historicism; and an opposition to theological anachronisms, in which the Person of Christ is interpreted according to contemporary mores rather than through revelation. I will expand on two areas of particular agreement (on analogy and on the Son’s obedience), before raising a question concerning the beatific vision, and then recording some criticisms regarding soteriology (specifically, regarding Christ’s abandonment and descent). [End Page 575] Praise for White’s Treatment of Analogy and Obedience Analogy The chapters pertaining to analogy, natural theology, and human nature continue the Catholic theological dialogue with Barth begun by thinkers such as Erich Przywara, Gottlieb Söhngen, and Balthasar. White reiterates many of the points that they made in the mid-twentieth century, in particular the necessity of some sort of similarity between human nature and God (200–201), and therefore between human language and revelation (228–32) for the Incarnation and revelation to occur at all.1 Given that these proposals have been rehearsed before, although too often lacking the careful argumentation that White brings to the question, I will merely indicate my appreciation for these pages and move to developing White’s overriding concern for the defense of metaphysics in general for the very possibility of Christology. As White points out in his chapters most dedicated to Barth, one’s rejection of analogy does not mean that one ceases to speak of God. On the contrary, the rejection of analogy only means that one speaks either equivocally or univocally—or, even more likely, oscillating between the two. A pure equivocity, also manifested as an extreme apophaticism, is well-nigh impossible to maintain, because the pole that is remote (the divine) usually becomes forgotten, practically speaking. And why would it not be? That of which we never speak, even if because we believe we cannot speak of it, becomes that which we forget. The pole that is close at hand fills our language and hence our thoughts. It becomes the only terrain we explore conceptually. This practical univocity manifests itself theologically as a reduction of God to our world when our world is all of which we can speak. Thus, it is no accident that White sniffs out some Spinozism in Barth’s metaphysics. Spinozistic univocity is the great alternative to analogical thinking. As Catherine Pickstock puts it, regarding the greatest recent exponent of such univocity, Gilles Deleuze, “the two philosophical options in consequence would appear to be Deleuzian [univocity] or Platonic [analogy], respectively.”2 One might argue that it is mere human reflection that has created these [End Page 576] alternatives of equivocity, univocity, and analogy. The Christian approach, it is argued, involves rejecting the commencement of thought on the human level and instead beginning with the divine, such that these alternatives are surpassed with the super-abundance of God as revealed in Christ. Indeed, one might see Barth’s project as precisely this attempt to bypass human constructions in pursuit of the divine excess. One might reply that such a method does not escape...