The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar is a figure at once admired and scorned in U.S. Catholicism. An ostensible “radical” before the Second Vatican Council, his postconciliar reputation has long invited the suspicions of liberal Catholics and the cautious, sometimes grudging respect of conservatives. Many theologians are deeply ambivalent about him. The surface of Balthasar’s texts seems to take different shapes depending on the light in which they’re read. It’s not that there’s no meaning there; it’s that his work is difficult and vivid enough to reflect our struggles openly.

Perhaps none of our present struggles is as urgent as the new visibility and stridency of the American Catholic right, which is made up of many different, even contrary factions. The specter of Balthasar haunts the American Catholic right. He also strangely unifies it. And as the American Catholic right has transformed in recent years, its reaction to Balthasar’s theology has also transformed. The latter transformation gives us insight into the former. Balthasar can help us understand the ongoing practical and spiritual crisis within the Catholic right. It is the crisis of proclaiming Christ crucified while peddling domination. It is the crisis of the will to power, of an American Volkskirche, and of what Charles Péguy calls modernisme du cœur (“modernism of the heart”). As America makes its frightful descent into crude authoritarianism, Balthasar can help us understand why so many American Catholics appear to welcome this descent. He can also help us resist it.

R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, an important venue for the American Catholic right. He has recently written an essay in praise of “strong religion,” a concept he also explored in the book Return of the Strong Gods (2019). Balthasar’s Razing the Bastions (1952) appears in a significant concluding section of the essay, where Reno praises Balthasar’s “theologically correct” call “for the church to forsake her fortress mentality, throw open her doors, and bring the rest of the gospel to the world.” Reno thinks it’s a good book. Balthasar wrote it “with characteristic brio” and “winsome rhetoric.”

But Reno manages to find his way out from under the call of the old master. He concludes that, despite its many virtues, Razing the Bastions is a “youthful manifesto” that betrays a “certain naïveté.” (Balthasar was, in fact, forty-seven years old when he wrote it.) Moreover, the book is from a bygone age “some eighty years ago.” Ours is a new age, one where the Catholic Church needs to raise its bastions once again. Reno has particular bastions in mind: the Church must adopt “outward signs of the church’s difference from the world,” which for Reno includes kneeling to receive the Eucharist, reading Thomas Aquinas, arguing about Calvinism, and praying in Latin. All this defends the Church from “the world’s seductions” by emphasizing supernatural difference through the medium of Christian cultural estrangement. Thomas Aquinas and Latin come from ages far more bygone than the 1950s, but that is their advantage. The older and stranger the bricks, the thicker and higher the bastion’s walls will be.

Balthasar was familiar with this kind of argument in his own time. “Tumbling walls can bury much that seemed alive as long as they protected it,” he wrote in Razing the Bastions. The real question, for him, was not a question of strength nor of how to reassure ourselves through the crude mechanism of difference. It was a question of truth and the manner of its transmission. “A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.” The foundation of all Christian truth is the Gospel, and so we must “plunge into the primal demands of the Gospel.” This Gospel is ever new. Balthasar argues that we must preach the Gospel as a Church already without borders, in a world already effervescent with the presence of the Church. “Where there is a Christian, there is the Church; he bears the light with him, and therefore (as long as he bears it truly) he never comes into an area outside the Church.”

Reno does not want to accede to Balthasar’s vision of a Church moving outward into the world like the breath of God. Instead of truth’s renewal, Reno promotes protection. Instead of saintly witness to the Gospel, Reno promotes alienation. And rather than call Balthasar wrong, Reno suggests that a middle-aged man writing in postwar Europe was “youthful” and “naïve,” and is therefore now irrelevant.

Reno’s is a brief but evocative engagement with Balthasar’s work. And it is a good illustration of how the right is “haunted” by Balthasar. Balthasar is a luminary—at least, that is the assumption. But Reno wants strong religion and Balthasar wanted something else. And that, in a way, is the main problem Balthasar poses for the American Catholic right. The things in Balthasar’s work that Reno has to dismiss as impractical haunt everyone on the Catholic right. It will be helpful, therefore, to understand why Balthasar wanted something else.

Balthasar insists that God is love, and that God’s love has a particular character. That character turns on two hinges. First, the mode of God’s self-revelation is essential to its content. Jesus Christ not only reveals to us that God is love, but also how God is love. Or, in Balthasar’s way of speaking, the form of Jesus’ life (how he lives it) cannot be separated from the truth it reveals. “Christ,” Balthasar argues, “is the form [of revelation] because he is the content.” Balthasar must make his case by describing the form of Jesus’ historical life. That leads us to Balthasar’s second point: God’s love is vulnerable. “His love is a love that breaks out of its security into defenselessness” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1).

Balthasar’s descriptions of the Crucifixion provide insight into his understanding of divine love’s particular shape. A statement like this one is typical: “When he takes on this solidarity with sinners, in their most extreme condition, Jesus carries the Father’s saving will to the end. It is an absolute obedience that reaches out beyond life and stands the test precisely in the place where otherwise only coercion and servitude reign” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7). Balthasar consistently paints the picture of a divine solidarity accomplished in the most extreme conditions. He connects that solidarity to Jesus’ free obedience to the plan of salvation. Jesus’ human obedience affirms the divine will for salvation, and Balthasar explicitly contrasts obedience with coercion.

One faction of the American Catholic right objects to Balthasar because it understands human obedience to God to involve securing a whole society’s obedience to God. “All things, including political life, have to be freed from the dominion of the prince of this world, and made subject to Christ,” Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., argues in a direct confrontation with Balthasar’s work. This position, Waldstein says, “is simply orthodox Catholicism.” It is Waldstein’s only positive reference to freedom or obedience in the essay, and subjecting all things to Christ is, in a real sense, the only freedom or obedience that matters to him. Human beings are not free as long as they continue to be enthralled to the world and its evils; they need to be freed from sin to be free at all. “The task of the Church is therefore not merely to enter into solidarity with the dynamic movement of the peoples of the world, and discern the movement of grace among them. It is rather to rescue them from the earthly city, subjecting them explicitly to Christ.”

Waldstein, a self-described integralist, takes particular umbrage at two essays (one from 1963, the other from 1988), in which Balthasar describes and condemns integralism. Again, for Waldstein, integralism is simply orthodox Catholicism. The Father put all things under Christ’s feet (1 Corinthians 15:28), and we must do the same as Christians. But Waldstein’s animus against Balthasar extends beyond his anti-integralist essays to the rest of his theology. His “theology of grace blurs the distinction between the City of God and the earthly city,” Waldstein says. “In Balthasar’s followers, this blurring of the distinction has led either to the acceptance of secular liberalism or to a Christian anarchism that denies the legitimacy of political power completely.” (One wonders how many Balthasarian anarchists Waldstein—or anyone else—has actually encountered.)

From Balthasar’s perspective, Christic obedience is the model for the Catholic understanding of human freedom and its ultimate divine purpose. Here he and Waldstein would agree. But for Balthasar, obedience to the will of God is the fulfillment of freedom, not a prerequisite for it. We can see this in Christ’s own life. “The obedience [of Christ] is freely given,” Balthasar explains. “While the world’s tragedy ‘oppresses’ the Suffering Servant under its weight, the prophecy of Isaiah 53 is fulfilled: he has ‘humbled himself’; ‘he makes himself an offering for sin’…. All norms, ultimately, come down to the Son’s (unlimited) capacity for obedience” (Theo-Drama, vol. 2). Here the issue is not whether obedience to God is difficult, but whether it is free.

This contrast between obedience and coercion is important. During his death, Jesus endures many coercive actions. He is the captive of Rome; he is condemned to death; he is lashed and pressed forward along the route to Golgotha. But if Jesus is entirely coerced, if he does not in the end agree to the whole thing (“not my will, but your will,” Luke 22:42), then, in the Catholic way of thinking, the Crucifixion is neither a sacrifice nor a surrender to the Father. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, without Jesus’ freedom, there can be no Eucharist. Indeed, Jesus’ freely intending will is expressed at the institution of the Eucharist: “This is my body, which is given up for you” (Luke 22:19). These words do more than interpret his future death; they carry the Last Supper into the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, binding them together as one event, which he shares with us in the Eucharist.

We often think of obedience as another form of coercion—even obedience to God. But human obedience is not like a dog’s obedience. Human obedience requires human freedom. “Without human freedom,” Balthasar says, “there is no responsibility, no ethics” (Theo-Drama, vol. 2). Marching an army into my living room and demanding that I obey the law is certainly one way to get me to follow the law. But I am not then really obeying the law. I’m just making sure that the army leaves my living room. Freedom makes the difference between a genuinely human obedience and fearful compliance. It is true that state force is sometimes necessary, but we truly obey human and divine laws only through what the old Scholastic theologians used to call “human acts,” which are, by definition, free.

The ultimate purpose of freedom, according to the Church, is to follow Christ, to move as God wills us to move. False freedom, particularly as conceptualized by the Enlightenment, is the illusion of complete independence and autonomy. Sometimes the American Catholic right adduces this long disagreement between Catholicism and the Enlightenment in order to excuse coercion. We see Waldstein making a version of this argument in the passage quoted above. It is not a violation of real freedom, they say, to deny or curtail an illusion. But this argument conveniently forgets that the Catholic definition of freedom also excludes coercion, or else it is not freedom to obey God at all. Even canon law, Balthasar points out, “must rest upon the far deeper willingness of the Christian to belong to the Church” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1).

Our familiarity with the events of Jesus’ life conceals their strangeness. Balthasar strips away this familiarity. This man is God, the creator of all things, but he was at one point a tiny, defenseless baby in his mother’s arms. At the very end of his life, he endures nakedness, humiliation, and fear. He is God, and as a man he is exposed to the whole world of human danger. For Balthasar, Jesus’ willingness to experience the vicissitudes of human life tells us something about who God is in eternity. The all-powerful God shows himself to us through the medium of vulnerability. We can see Balthasar trying to fit it together: “Without ceasing to be power, [God’s power] reveals itself as a willingness not to hold onto itself as a power: it becomes a powerlessness that characterizes God’s inner essence” (“What Is Distinctively Christian in the Experience of God?”).

Balthasar insists on surrender, vulnerability, and powerlessness in Christian life. These categories are essential to our lives, he argues, just as they were essential to Jesus’ life. This position has long made some theologians nervous. Feminist theologians, for example, express concern about the demands that surrender makes on human beings, especially on vulnerable groups and people. On this point at least, some of Balthasar’s most important and influential critics in the American Catholic right would agree: surrender can be too dangerous. But Balthasar’s work poses important questions about vulnerability—about why we resist it, about when we resist it, and about whether our resistance is always good. Fear of danger, after all, can motivate many awful deeds—especially on the part of the powerful.

But many of Balthasar’s fiercest defenders also come from the American Catholic right. Balthasar is a lodestone for those of us who worry about culture—about its purpose and its future. Many on the Catholic right yearn for an assurance that Balthasar may seem to represent: that Christian faith and Western culture stand and fall together. But for someone like Balthasar, Christianity’s origin is divine. Its reality is more than earthly. It is more than Plato and Aristotle, more than the cultural patrimony of “the West.” Of course, a Christian can care about beauty and poetry and culture, but the Christian cares differently. The Christian distinguishes and prioritizes the testimony of God, the form and content of revelation.

This is why Christians, when they accept the (“pastoral”) care for classical culture, and thus for the culture of humanity, also accept the responsibility to see that the [human] question remains open.… Where Christianity no longer asks with the world and more deeply and more persistently than the world, it will not even understand how to formulate the answer in the way that it understands itself, and wishes to be understood, as the answer made by God. (“Forgetfulness of God and Christians”)

When one no longer distinguishes between revelation and culture, then culture takes on an exaggerated importance. Losing hold of culture comes to mean endangering the Gospel itself. Culture becomes a series of answers rather than an open question emerging from the hearts of human beings. God’s own answer to the world is depersonalized into cultural forms, dismembered into objects and strategies and stances. The People of God is also depersonalized, divided into the righteous and the unrighteous, the truly spiritual and the merely fleshly. Such a division takes an axe to the root of the living, gathering Word. As Balthasar writes, “Even in the Catholic restoration [in France] it is not Christ himself who is contemplated, but rather the remotely derived cultural effects of Christianity…[such as] the poetic and mystical character of the Middle Ages” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1). And this very misunderstanding features prominently in the American Catholic right’s efforts to evangelize the culture, to unite faith and culture, to reunify theology and sanctity.

The argument goes something like this: since our culture is sick, we must transform it, or perhaps wage war against it. We have lost a world where religion makes sense, and we need that world back. “[We] must, therefore, resist and overcome this experiential-expressivist program,” says Bishop Robert Barron, a major architect of modern American Catholic evangelization efforts. “Christ, not experience, must be the starting point. As Balthasar saw so clearly.” Barron does not want to be misunderstood as claiming that “experience is not important.” He concedes that “theological liberalism can be useful.” But if an insistence on the importance of human experience is what makes for a theological liberal, then Balthasar was himself a liberal. The first half of his Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, is called “The Subjective Evidence.” Such evidence may not be Balthasar’s favorite kind, but he thinks it is necessary because it suits our modern starting points. And he acquiesces to this modern situation throughout his work. “[Impartiality] cannot refer to the epoché (or bracketing) of one’s own existence, which is precisely what Christ intends to reach and what he addresses and what must answer him” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1).

Balthasar can certainly be read as a great knight of theological objectivity if one’s purpose is to dismiss certain kinds of human experience as invalid, as monstrous deformations, and therefore as beneath the dignity of theology. But as St. Ignatius of Loyola reminds us, “God toils in all things.” We should never allow ourselves to be so distracted by, for example, women’s and girls’ sports and other culture-war issues touching on gender that we forget a prior and more fundamental idea: theology should be united to sanctity. We cannot do that without first making ourselves vulnerable to others, without exposing ourselves to the Spirit’s groaning in the world. We may be troubled or perplexed by the culture around us. But the more important question is what we do with such feelings. What we should not do is write flowery essays or lectures about the beauty of vulnerable self-gift as a theological concept while refusing to commit to it ourselves. “The Catholica has to share in her Lord’s birth pangs for the world.… Even the terrible gravity of the cross is a product of the perfect poise of divine love; and this love, so to speak, has a reckless courage” (In the Fullness of Faith).

In Balthasar’s thinking, surrender and powerlessness have an opposite. Let us call it “mastery.” Balthasar has many other names for it: “titanism,” “the titan’s dream,” “control.” His criticisms of mastery are wide-ranging. He criticizes knowledge that conceives of itself as mastery. He criticizes mastery over other people. “Beauty,” Balthasar writes in a typical formulation, “is in the first instance the immediate manifestation of the never-to-be-mastered excess…contained in everything” (Theo-Logic, vol. 1). The Christian must live a life counter to mastery in order to testify to the truth of that “never-to-be-mastered excess.” And this testimony requires that the Church should never make itself a master of societies or of the secular world. In fact, whenever the Church “reaches out to take hold of power…the face of Satan glimmers in her” (Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence).

Significantly, Balthasar associates the Christian will to power with a flight from the vulnerability of the cross.

The Church is tragic to the extent that she understands herself to be definitively redeemed and is always on the run, blindly, head over heels, from the cross that God intended for her—only to run with equal blindness into a cross that was not intended for her in this form and which she now rightly draws down upon herself; a cross that is dislocated and perverse as a result of her own guilt, a cross with hooks (swastika) [ein Hakenkreuz] on which she is entangled and remains hanging. A cross that ultimately is included and drawn into the Cross of Christ again only through a kind of exceptional grace.… This anxious flight of the Church and of Christians from the Cross was always, and is once again today, the flight into ideologies of world domination. (“Tragedy and Christian Faith”)

Balthasar’s critique of Catholic authoritarianism does not simply associate it with the will to power and contrast it with the powerlessness of the cross. His critique also shows us how the Gospel can be used to excuse the will to power and to rationalize a fundamental transformation of Christian action. “Christians,” Balthasar warns, “are confronted with a thousand pretexts for interpreting their own eschatological hope in purely mundane terms” (Theo-Drama, vol. 4). Despite its divine origin, one can make the content of Christianity subservient to worldly imperatives—and one can do so while pretending to build the Kingdom of Heaven. Who, after all, would not do everything he or she could for the Gospel, for the faith? But that is just the problem: not “everything” is permitted to Christians.

The American Catholic right is spiritually unwell. Flight from vulnerability is one of the symptoms of its illness. We can compare this illness to what Kierkegaard calls anxiety, which, as Balthasar explains, is “about being in the world, about being forlorn, about the world itself” (The Christian and Anxiety). The American Catholic right is anxious. It is afraid, not of what it claims to fear, but of what holy vulnerability demands of every Christian. It fears what such vulnerability exposes the Christian to: the mystery of other human beings, their secret inner lives where God is ineluctably at work, their freedom, and the difference between freedom’s divine purpose and helpless capitulation. As Maurice Blondel says, such fear sees “the spontaneity of the mind as an inexhaustible source of peril.”

Seizing power for the sake of religion might be an effective response to this fear, at least for a time, but the anxiety remains, the profound dis-ease with other people, including other Catholics, precisely in their otherness. Anxiety views such otherness not only as strange but also as threatening. From this point of view, the stakes are too high for the true believer to be squeamish about domination. One simply must seize power to protect the integrity of the faith, to protect the truth. So the American Catholic right has sought power and association with the powerful. It has done so with some success. But Jesus has already described success such as this: “Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matthew 6:2).

Balthasar resists the clawing protests of our anxiety. He suggests that our fearful tactics deny the truth of what we believe. He asks us to let go of the things that we think keep us safe and to prefer the God who is himself vulnerable love—and who asks the same outrageous vulnerability of us. Our failure to be vulnerable toward God, and our failure to be vulnerable with God toward those whom the world has made vulnerable, turns the Gospel, a story of divine self-gift, into a rationalization. In Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, God himself confronts us in exactly this: the moment of decision.

[Drama is] an opening up or a closing-off to the presence of some light that radiates from existence. Seeing or not-seeing; letting be or violently overpowering, imprisoning, extinguishing…. [It is] the confrontation of these two kinds of power, the succumbing of the vulnerable, defenseless power to the force of arms, revealing, as it succumbs, the inseparability within it of power and powerlessness. The vessel shatters, and finite speech with it, thereby opening up to an infinite speech that acts and suffers in it. “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19).