Suffering and the search for wholeness beauty and the cross in h

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2009 Suffering and the Search for Wholeness: Beauty and the Cross in Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Contemporary Feminist Theologies Elisabeth T. Vasko Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.edu/luc_diss Part of the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Vasko, Elisabeth T., "Suffering and the Search for Wholeness: Beauty and the Cross in Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Contemporary Feminist Theologies" (2009).edu/luc_diss/282 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact ecommons@luc.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3. Vasko LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO SUFFERING AND THE SEARCH FOR WHOLENESS: BEAUTY AND THE CROSS IN HANS URS VON BALTHASAR AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEOLOGIES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN THEOLOGY BY ELISABETH T. VASKO DECEMBER 2009 Copyright by Elisabeth T. Vasko, 2009 All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I want thank my doctoral committee at Loyola University of Chicago. I am grateful to all three for their time, commitment, and investment in my development as a scholar and as a person. As my director, Susan Ross saw me through the best and worst parts of this process. She not only taught me the value of thorough and carefully nuanced scholarship, but also the importance of listening to one’s own instinct along the way.

Susan’s commitment to women’s leadership in the academy and in the church is reflected in her own scholarship and teaching. Early on in my career at Loyola, Jon Nilson taught me the importance of human authenticity in scholarship and how to spot scotosis. His continual encouragement and support sustained me in times when I doubted my own capabilities. It was Mark Bosco who first introduced me to theological aesthetics.

His keen insight, expertise, and willingness to “think aloud” with me made this dissertation a much stronger project. In addition to my committee members, I want to thank all those in Loyola’s Theology Department who supported me along the way. John McCarthy taught me how to analyze arguments and appreciate theological methodology. Catherine Wolf and Marianne Wolfe helped me to navigate logistics of the doctoral program at Loyola.

This dissertation would not be what it is without the support of all those women who “heard me into speech.” In a special way, I wish to thank all the women of Piper Hall, including Dawn Harris, Betsy Hemenway, Nicole Meehan, and Carol Coyne. The iii Gannon Scholars not only kept me on my toes, but also continue to give me great hope for the future. Finally, I am grateful to the members of Women in Theology at Loyola, especially Melissa, Jeanine, Rachel, Teresa, Mary, Kathryn, and Emily. Your friendship strengthened my spirit and enriched my scholarship.

I want to thank my family for their patience and support throughout this process. Michael Stevens encouraged me to follow my dreams, even when it meant taking the road less travelled. Without his copy-editing assistance, this project would surely be less clear. I am also grateful to Therese Stevens.

She is the one who has taught me to seek wholeness even in the midst of brokenness. Thank you to Emily, Martha, Ellen, and Dee for believing in me and celebrating my accomplishments along the way. I also want to thank my friends in Chicago and beyond for keeping me and my scholarship grounded in the present moment. Finally, I want to thank Scott, my life-long partner, for his patience through the ups and downs of my studies and for his willingness to learn alongside me.

Your unconditional love and support has given me new eyes to see beauty—in people and in myself. iv Dedicated to the Women of Success in Kenya TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. ix CHAPTER ONE: GOD-TALK, BEAUTY AND THE CROSS. …1 The Return of Beauty to Theology: The Rise of Theological Aesthetic Discourse.

3 What is Theological Aesthetics?. 5 Beauty and Aesthetics. 6 Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics: Form and Splendor. 10 The Beauty of the Cross: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Trends.

15 The Cross, Spiritual Beauty, and Moral Beauty: Augustine. 15 The Attractiveness of Divine Glory: Karl Barth. 18 The Beauty of the Cross as a Response to Secularism. 20 The Beauty of the Cross and Human Suffering: A Way of Solidarity.

25 Statement of the Problem. 27 Dissertation Methodology: Feminist Hermeneutics. 30 Christian Feminist Theological Discourse: On the Non-Neutrality of God-Talk. 34 Edwina Sandys’ Christa.

40 CHAPTER TWO: BALTHASAR’S THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS: NUPTIALITY AND THE CROSS. 42 Aesthetics and the Need for New Perception. 44 Participation as Rapture and Beholding. 46 Receptivity and Grace.

50 Revelation, Metaphysics, and the Analogy of Being. 57 vi Identity-in-Difference and Sexual Difference. 63 Sexual Difference and Theological Personhood. 90 CHAPTER THREE: THE DRAMA OF REDEMPTION: THE POWER OF LOVE AND VIOLENCE.

93 Divine Glory and the Drama of Redemption: Transitioning from Aesthetics to Dramatics. 94 Revelation as a Battlefield. 99 Humanity’s No: The Apocalyptic Rhythm of Sin. 102 Going to the Cross: Balthasar’s Soteriology.

107 Abandonment, Representation, and Obedience: Christ’s Pro nobis. 108 Cross, Eucharist, and Ecclesia .110 Salvation as a Work of Love .111 Love as Kenosis: Self-Emptying and Receptivity .111 Kenosis, Impassibility, and Suffering .115 Heresy and Harlotry: The Battle of the Logos. 126 Suffering, Punishment, and the Aesthetics of Atonement. 139 CHAPTER FOUR: CHRISTA: CONTEXTUALIZING BEAUTY AND THE CROSS FOR THE SAKE OF SUBJECTIVITY.

142 Feminist Theological Methodology Revisited: The Power of Naming. 147 The Silence/s Patriarchy Keeps and Feminist Speech about the Cross. 149 Idolatry, Representation, and the imago Christi. 157 Female Symbols for God.

159 vii Womanism and the imago Christi. 165 Redemptive Suffering and the Quest for Wholeness. 170 Divine Suffering as God’s Compassion Poured Out. 170 Christa/Community and the Embodiment of Eros for Mutual Relation.

188 CHAPTER FIVE: TO BE CALLED BELOVED. 195 Female Fleshliness: The Devil’s Gateway. 199 John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and the Spousal Nature of Redemptive Love 206 Maternal Sacrifice and the Vocation of Women. 216 Maternal Sacrifice and the Cross.

224 To Be Called Beloved: Beginning with Original Grace. 231 Conclusion: The Beauty of Whole-making Work. 264 viii ABSTRACT The tension between the beauty of the cross and the violence of the crucifixion creates a dissonance within Christian theology. In terms of atonement theologies, this dissonance has been interpreted through the development of a converted sense of beauty in which the ugliness of the crucifixion of Christ, as perceived and interpreted by the believer in the context of faith, expands Christian aesthetics.

One of the more prominent examples of this construction can be found in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, wherein divine beauty culminates in Christ’s kenotic self-surrender at the cross. In a feminist hermeneutic, the identification of divine beauty with crucified love is dangerous, as it runs the risk of glorifying suffering and self-sacrifice. This dissertation brings a feminist hermeneutic to bear upon the way in which the beauty of the cross patterns right relations and the praxis of faith in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and dramatics. I argue that this construction of aesthetics, when paired with the gender symbolism and violence implicit in Balthasar’s dramatic narrative of redemption, mutes the embodied subjectivity of women by sanctifying the wounds of violence and eclipsing human possibilities for wholeness.

Drawing upon the soteriological contributions of feminist and womanist theologians, I argue that beauty must stake a claim in human flourishing, in particular the spiritual and material well- being of women. The project concludes by offering a critical reconstruction of aesthetics and atonement rooted in embodied original grace. ix CHAPTER ONE BEAUTY, GOD-TALK, AND THE SYMBOL OF THE CROSS In the Christian tradition, to speak of God’s presence in the world is to ask about the meaning of the incarnation. It is to ask, what does it mean for the Christian community to confess that God is God-with-us? This task becomes particularly difficult in the face of human suffering and pain.

As Gustavo Gutiérrez writes, “there is no greater challenge to our language about God than the suffering of the innocent.”1 He puts the question, “How can we understand a God of love in a world that bears the stamp of poverty, genocide, terrorist violence, [and] disregard for the most elemental human rights?”2 How can we speak of God’s graced presence in the face of immense human tragedy? Today, this remains an inescapable question for all “logos about theos.” This, I believe, is the crisis of faith that theology must address.3 Theology must speak “aloud 1. Gustavo Gutiérrez, “Theological Language: Fullness of Silence,” in The Density of the Present: Selected Writings, trans. Nickoloff and Margaret Wilde (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 193. The phrase “crisis of faith” is Johann Baptist Metz’s, as found in Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans.

As reported in a 2007 progress report of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, over 980 million people in the two-thirds world live in dire poverty (i. live on less than $1 per day). The consequences of this are wide- ranging and include: a lack of access to education, basic health care, sanitation, and work. This struggle hits women and children the hardest due to structural gender inequalities.

See “The United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report 2007,” 1 2 about the right of all to be happy” and to have fullness of life; otherwise, it “betrays the very nature of God of whom we speak.”4 In the context of Christian theology, this demands taking a radical posture of responsibility in the face of violence, including the patriarchal ways in which Christian tradition has been used to sanctify this violence. If theology is about “the good and the beautiful in the work of God, in human life,” then we cannot overlook “that which breaks the beauty of this world and strangles the expression of human joy and happiness.”5 Theology cannot ignore suffering bodies. Christian theology must find new ways of speaking about God’s presence that take suffering seriously. This conversation cannot happen only at the level of intellectual abstraction because life, in its fullness and in its pain, is both physical and spiritual.

As Emilie Townes argues, conversations about human flourishing and human suffering must be rooted in “concrete existence (lived life).”6 In other words, theology must be developed in conversation with the concrete context and knowledge of particular communities.7 As Townes contends, theological discourses that remain at the “thinking http://www.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/mdg2007. In this context, to engage in rhetoric that articulates the problem of faith in terms of secular unbelief is to trivialize the suffering of millions and to distance the responsibility of the Church in seeking the dignity of all persons. Gutiérrez, “Theological Language,” 194. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), 48.

Townes argues that theory should never be divorced from praxis. It must arise in conversation with concrete human existence. 3 stage” risk committing the same “death-dealing errors found in modernist assumptions of rationality, objectivity, and value-free established knowledge.”8 Theology needs more than theory in order to reckon with the concrete and thorny ways in which “the radical nature of oppression and devaluation of the self and the community” are structurally embedded and embodied.9 Theology also needs more than theory to witness to the unexpected and unprecedented ways in which God’s grace is encountered in the world.