One “cannot argue with a song,” claims Maurice Bloch. 1 How could one? Perhaps, only by staying silent or by singing another song, a different tune, in a different modulation, or out of tune? Perhaps, the same holds true for doxologies. How can one argue with a profoundly learned and insightful text that its author explicitly frames as an oblation of praise, where his voice interlaces with other men’s prayerful rigorous thought?

I take solace in Andrew Prevot’s choice of identifying Thinking Prayer as precisely that, his prayer. This choice allows me to listen for and be moved by the register of affect suffusing his thought. And thus I feel invited to respond to his doxology, in a similar manner, i.e., with personal thought albeit in a modulation that, while hopefully attuned to his call, will nevertheless appear to be out of tune. Particularly, I hope to pick up strands in his thought that seem essential to his project and have not perhaps found enough attention: these are the strands of the affective, liturgical and, gendered nature of prayer.

Vignettes

Saying the rosary over and over at the bedside of a man dying in his thirties.

Being the guest of a group of homeless squatting in Berlin and praying the assigned psalms from the liturgy of the hours while the police in riot gear get ready to evict them.

After a long silence listening to a woman tell me: “For the longest time I prayed that I was not infected but now I realize, I am who I am with the virus. And I don’t want to be different.” She taught me what Ignatius could have meant with the third degree of humility in the contemplation for love. And my prayer returned to her time and again.

At 2:40 p.m. in a freezing Trappist church the realization that the discipline of breathing and presence required in ministering to the dying similar to that required of praising G-d in the grueling cycle of monastic contemplation.

The Ignatian lineage in Prevot’s thought (Przywara, van Balthasar, Rahner, Ellacuría) rekindled in me these memories from a time when for slightly more than a decade I submitted to the disciplines of liturgical prayer and of contemplation in action. Fifteen years ago, I left this discipline, the Roman Church, and moreover a life of prayer anchored in, what Zubiri calls “transcendent transcendence” (255).

Yet, memories like these have not left me—and with them their affective imprint that returns to consciousness if I sit in a certain manner or breath in deep yet measured ways. Sometimes the touch of a rosary bring back—like a mnemotechnic device, one fate for each bead—the voices, faces, or stories of the men and women—mostly from my time in hospice ministry—with, by, and for whom my prayer lived. Thus prayer appears to my mind as memory of practices that are profoundly situational, affective, embodied, and communal, dare I say liturgical.

Consequently, Prevot’s chapter on Ellacuria resonates particularly with me, notably the following claim: “Ellacuría offers a general account of Christian spirituality as an integrated, nonreducitve, discerning, theological, pneumatological, christological, solidaristic, and holistic prayerful way of life” (263). But what is the role of affect in such a way of life?

Prayer as Schola Affectus

In describing Ellacuría’s theology of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises Prevot resorts to the affective language of longing and fulfillment in the register of desire—language that later reappears powerful in his chapter on prayerful song. Yet, Prevot does not explore the role of affect for Ellacuría in more detail, despite the fact that the disciplining of affect is so important to Ignatian prayer and Jesuit life.

Ignatius calls the school of affectivity (schola affectus) the final stage of Jesuit formation. During this so-called Tertianship, a phase that Ellacuría underwent like many others, Jesuits in training should

“apply themselves in the school of the heart [schola affectus], by exercising themselves in spiritual and corporal pursuits which can engender in them greater humility, abnegation of all sensual love and will and judgement of their own, and also greater knowledge and love of God our Lord: that when they themselves have made greater progress they can better help others to progress for glory to God our Lord.”

This is a condensed formulation of the integrative understanding of spirituality that Prevot celebrates in Ellacuría’s work, one that sees progressing toward doxology as requiring a holistic discipline of the body and soul. And the schooling of affect is a central part of this progress.

The goal of this schooling is similar to that of the final contemplation for gaining love that together with the “Foundation and Principle” bookends the Exercises: the attaining of a bodily, disciplined affect and attitude of humility. How does the contemplation go about achieving this goal? By engaging the sensual body. This is the same process that, rooted in the insights of the so-called devotio moderna, Ignatius recommends for the first three weeks of the Exercises. For example, we should contemplate on the smells, the tones of voices, etc., that suffuse a particular biblical narrative and scene. Spiritual work thus requires bodily work through the nexus of our affectivity.

This nexus has not only pedagogical but also epistemological relevance. At stake in this discipline of desire is “greater knowledge and love of God our Lord [sic!].” This epistemological point has consequences for the project of Thinking Prayer by implying that theological epistemology has to be affective and thus attuned to the substantial role of disciplined desire. Thus, it appears to me as well that theology as corporeal work intersects intimately with our erotic bodies (cf. 14f.).

Prayer as Queer Eucharistic

Doctrinally, the Eucharist constitutes the most privileged site of body discipline in the Roman Church. It is the performance where human bodies are fused with and into the body of Christ, where imitation of Christ and intimate affiliation turns into becoming Christ’s multifaceted, ecclesial, and eschatological body. Read through the register of desire, queer readings of this church and Christ constituting performance reveal a great affinity with Prevot’s doxology while also problematizing the question of agency in our acts of knowing G-d and ourselves in the divine light.

The theologian Ángel Méndez-Montoya argued most recently that the “Eucharistic body is queer in the sense of imagining a body politics of radical inclusion.”2 Understood as a public and thus political act, both the Eucharist and queer theologies aim for a performative body theology of hybridized and displaced body identities that enable a particular desire. This desire, according to Méndez-Montoya is a hunger for both a particular type of body and for a particular type of communion.

It is a desire for a form of embodiment where identity is “exceeding itself,” where “one is in the Other without overcoming differences and without annulling self-presence” (336f.). Drawing on Marcella Althaus-Reid, he describes the Eucharistic hunger therefore as a desire for a “queer, radical love that has the courage to welcome those whose bodies are labeled ‘indecent’” (339).

This particular desire for a queer body and community contrasts with Western Christendom’s “predominant appetite for global expansionism, for wealth, violence, and control over the Other” (330). Analyzed through the focus of “appetite” and “desire,” Eucharistic desire appears as a queer performance of a counter-political imagination to colonial and economic violence. Thus, alterity lies at the heart of Eucharistic normativity, because a boundary-transgressive, embodied divinity motivates this passion play of feeding and desire.

At this point, Prevot’s reading of Ellacuría allows us to see that part of such a critical political theology must be not only the expression of queer longing but also the witness of glory, and we may qualify, queer glory (264).

However, such queer glory is constituted in the Eucharist through the imbrication of bodies and agencies that the liturgy provokes.3 Mark Jordan argues that in the Eucharistic feast we take on each other’s bodies, become one another, in becoming one with the one who we are and are not, the divine body of Christ (Jordan, 1997, 2000, 2001a). Patrick Cheng comments that “these substitutions point to the ultimate instability of identities” and to the sacramental power to “dissolve the boundaries between female and male, divine and human, guilt and innocence . . . and other binary categories, and therefore provide us with a foretaste of the radical love to come.”4

Queer glory therefore questions the oppositional structure of human agency in the contrast between human desire and divine fulfillment. Desire, agency, vulnerability, and divinity cannot be clearly located on one or the other end of Eucharistic action, but are, as it were, smeared over the continuum of the liturgical relationships. The concomitant ontological picture is not a processional understanding of analogia entis but rather one of erotic interbeing.

Erotic Foundation and Principle of Doxology

In my reading of Wittgenstein, the goal of philosophizing is to free us from captivating pictures of the world and ourselves (Phil. Inves., 115). These are pictures that we inexorably reinscribe on our bodies through language and that limit our thoughts and ability to live fuller human lives.

Inspired by Prevot, I might say that the goal of queer erotic liturgical thinking then is to help free the liturgist from language and body practices that disable a full-throated doxology in our spiritual-material and divine-human entanglement.

Returning to the opening memories of situational prayer it seems to me that the question of what prevents us from doxology can not be answered in abstract by pointing to “prayer as such,” as it were. So let me offer another memory:

As a German whose parents belong to the generation enmeshed in responsibility for the Holocaust, I felt particularly attentive to Prevot’s insightful reading of Metz’s insistence that we must pray because “they did” pray in the midst of the horrors of the Shoa. These passages reminded me of David Weiss Halivin’s autobiography The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction.5

As a survivor of the camps, David Wesiss Halivini argues that he cannot read the Talmud in the same way as before and yet he has to preserve it as refuge. The horrors of the Shoah require him to acknowledge that something is wrong with tradition or the Talmud. At the same time, the horrors of the Shoah require him to hold onto the tradition or the Talmud. “Personally, I found this balance in the critical study of Jewish texts, in a combination of criticism [of their veracity] and the belief in the divine origin of the text. [. . .] I undertake critical study of the Talmud and at the same time the Talmud is my bastion which I can always come home to and find solace in” (162).

Critical study of the divine revelation involves, as we may say, a queering of agency. Halivni reminds us that once the rabbis of the Talmud rejected G-d’s attempt at intervening in a dispute about how to interpret the Torah.6 “Man exercises, as it were, leverage over him. Man controls His Torah. Gaining hegemony over a text and at the same time insisting that it is a divine text [expresses the following contradiction]: that tradition failed, and yet there is a need for right and wrong to be continuous” (162).

I cannot claim Halivini’s words but I feel claimed by his insistence that tradition failed and by Prevot’s insight that Ellacuría’s work is distinct by marrying longing and glory (269). Thus, I wonder: Who controls G-d’s words that Her gift of self releases to us to speak/sing Her glory?

Traditional Eucharistic theology sees this ritual as the source of the church’s power to speak as the body of Christ and speak itself into being as that body. If we follow the queer readings of the Eucharistic body performance, then the principle and foundation of such speech is unstable in a particular way. Glory, the Eucharistic body, divine agency are not unproblematic sources from which speech proceeds. They are fraught gestures in a weaving performance offering refuge and denying it.

Praying is an activity irreducible to any other. Whether faithfully practiced or entirely neglected, it shapes human experience in definitive ways. In what may seem like a surprising contention about what is at stake, Andrew Prevot suggests that the presence of violence and suffering in the world can even be an index of how we pray. The problem is that we have such a thin conception of what prayer is and does, of what it means to pray and what happens when we pray, that it is no longer immediately obvious for us what difference prayer could make in our intellectual and moral life. Thinking Prayer demonstrates that fundamental philosophical questions must be raised about the practice of prayer in the face of widespread human suffering, but it also proposes that only the act of prayer, in itself and of itself, holds promise to counteract it.

Prevot defines prayer primarily in terms of doxology. To pray, in the fullest and most active sense of the term, is to receive, offer, and desire the glory and word of God. The doxological shape of prayer has a dynamic all its own. It is a dramatic site where divine freedom and human freedom meet. Prevot expresses lucidly why it matters for theology: “The relation of divine and human freedom,” he says, “is Christian theology’s own innermost possibility” (175). Offering the widest scope for thought and action, doxology is the context in which human freedom (“integral liberation,” as Prevot also calls it) is most fully realized. Prayer matters and should matter to all of us, because apart from it entire possibilities for human existence, perhaps even those most proper to it, go unrealized.

Prevot’s far-reaching appeal to prayer may seem surprising, not least in the context of the contemporary university, which tends to ignore prayer and forget its ancient bond with knowledge. Prevot demonstrates, on the contrary, that prayer does not replace the normal demands of intellectual rigor, but adds a further set of obligations to them. Rightly understood and consistently practiced, prayer opens distinct possibilities for life that thought cannot attain on its own. At the same time and with equal rigor, he shows that prayer involves thinking, and requires it to clarify, refine, and even deepen what prayer discloses. Prayer and thought belong together, therefore, but neither is reducible to the other.

While I cannot hope to do justice here to the immense new terrain Prevot’s work opens for theology, I would like to focus my remarks on a central claim that touches on all the others and binds them together: In itself and of itself, prayer bears a power to bring into manifestation. Prayer discloses. It uncovers and manifests what, without it, remains concealed and unnoticed. Prayer “shows itself from itself,” as Prevot puts it (48). This determination of prayer brings it into affinity with phenomenology, a genre of philosophy whose first task is not merely to describe particular phenomena as they give themselves, but “givenness” itself, and what it means to be given at all. So close is their affinity that it can be difficult to see where prayer begins and phenomenology ends. Prevot is masterfully attentive to this question and offers a remarkably sophisticated way of negotiating it.

But if phenomenology is particularly suited to disclosing prayer’s contours, to saying or clarifying what it is that prayer shows of itself, then a very significant question, or set of questions, can be posed about the relationship that arises between these two modes of thought: How it is possible for such a relationship to arise at all? What is it about the categories, concepts, or methods of a phenomenological approach that makes it suitable for such a task? Is prayer the final aim or fulfillment of phenomenology? Or does prayer on the contrary qualify or limit the claims of phenomenology as merely of regional interest? In order to develop these questions further, it is necessary take brief note of where they fall within the broader context of the book. This will also allow us to highlight several other achievements of Thinking Prayer that also merit attention.

Prevot seamlessly and elegantly weaves together several discreet lines of analysis, uniting a wide spectrum of philosophical, theological, political, and spiritual texts that may seem at first glance in tension or even opposition—Heidegger, Balthasar, and the phenomenological tradition, on one side; political, liberation, and black theology, on the other. At one level, Prevot argues that these modes of thought are mutually enriching, that their methods and goals are not nearly so opposed as one might assume. It is a significant feat to demonstrate this, and Prevot does so persuasively. The polarities of orthodox or liberal, conservative or progressive, Western or non-Western do not exactly lose their meaning, but they are not the first or final terms of analysis, which remain thoroughly doxological.

Prevot’s theological acumen is exemplary in this respect. Thinking Prayer proposes that prayer, and specifically doxology, offers a ground, context, and hermeneutic through which it is possible to recognize the prayerful voice that ties these traditions together. If what one might call a doxological imperative governs Prevot’s interpretive decisions, the act of prayer itself is what unites and gathers them, both as a mode of intellectual agency, and as their shared, concrete content. This is a proposition about the methods, concepts, and norms that govern, or should govern, theological work. It deserves attention in its own right, because it demonstrates how classical theological orthodoxy can be practiced alongside, indeed makes possible, the rigorous analysis of a wide range of contemporary forms of thought.

At still another level, Prevot advances a set of diagnostic and prescriptive arguments about what he calls the “crises of modernity” (violence, poverty, oppression, alienation, degradation) and about the solution to these crises. Here the diagnostic side of the argument is less argued than one might wish, but nevertheless provocative. Prevot takes the so-called “history of Western metaphysics” as the primary culprit for the crises of violence, and on this point he seems to follow Emmanuel Levinas somewhat less critically than he approaches other authors. Prevot does not wish to ignore the concept of sin, but it does not intervene as an explanatory principle in his account. Instead, it is against the backdrop of metaphysics as a form of thought, and as a counterproposal to this thought-form, that Prevot casts his vision of doxology.

The resources of phenomenology offer Prevot a means of thinking doxologically without recourse to metaphysics, of saying what doxology makes possible for thought. But at the same time, and in return, doxology feeds a specific interpretation of phenomenology and governs choices about what forms of phenomenology are more or less suited for it. The dynamics of prayer, and not any supposedly independent or autonomous phenomenological given, remain normative for the analysis. We can fully acknowledge the theological necessity of this approach. And yet it is possible to wonder whether other interpretive decisions are possible with respect to the kind of phenomenology that is most suited for doxology, and for the doxological reading of political, liberation, and black theology that Prevot initiates.

Prevot begins aptly with Heidegger and Balthasar and shows that a kind of doxology is common between them. But whatever minimal formal autonomy Heidegger leaves open for faith, he too quickly reduces Christianity to an ontic science and fails to consider its doxological dimension. His thought is “impure,” corrupted by a kind of autochthonous inhospitality. Balthasar provides a fuller model for the kind of doxological aesthetics Prevot envisions, and it is also in dialogue with Balthasar that Prevot interprets French phenomenology after Heidegger. While he finds significant resources in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste, it is Jean-Louis Chrétien that gives the fullest articulation of phenomenology inflected in a doxological idiom. Nevertheless, while these phenomenological approaches offer formal resources for doxology, they remain incomplete in themselves.

The second part of Thinking Prayer aims to address this insufficiency in a radical way by incorporating and privileging the perspectives of the poor, the oppressed, and the suffering. In a remarkable reading of James Cone, to name just one example, Prevot demonstrates that, far from constituting a peripheral form of spirituality, the prayers of lament and petition embodied and expressed in the spirituals of black slaves must become, indeed are, essential to doxology as such. They are determinative for what it means to pray. On the other hand, Prevot also argues that political, liberation, and black theologies could gain in subtlety by engaging more directly with phenomenological modes of thought, even if what they gain thereby they possess already in potentia. Prevot’s analysis here remains balanced, yet at no point gives way to vacuous neutrality. His way of integrating doxology and phenomenology is compelling and groundbreaking.

Nevertheless, it is possible to raise a question about the role reason plays in phenomenology and in doxology as Prevot presents it. Following Heidegger, and contra Husserl, Prevot seems to want to abandon the project of a phenomenological science, and even a conception of theology as a scientia. Prevot argues, for example, that a kind of epistemic ambition, and a decision to downplay “epistemologically troubling regions,” or “disconcertingly apophatic aspects” of prayer (87), leads Balthasar to overstate in some respects how far the divine mystery reveals itself. Parallel criticisms arise about the middle work of Marion, which Prevot questions for tying phenomenology too closely to “typically modern phenomenological principles of epistemic certainty” (160). It is Chrétien’s poetic mode of phenomenology, one perhaps the least enamored with reason, which Prevot finds most suitable for doxological aesthetics.

Several factors seem to explain these decisions about phenomenology. They stem first from an understandable resistance to a practice of philosophy that would be independently regulative for theology. But they also seem rooted in a somewhat wide conception of metaphysics that may encompass, and thereby risks disqualifying, “knowledge” as such. On the other hand, Prevot’s approach is rightly motivated by a conception of theology as a normative discourse flowing freely from the divine logos (even while, as Prevot says, the cries of the poor and of those in solidarity with them can nevertheless influence divine freedom). And the preference that must be given to the poor and those who suffer does qualify the enterprise of knowledge. What good does it do me to achieve a correct description of the experience of prayer, or even to pray, all the while ignoring the plight of my neighbor who is suffering? No faithful account of Christian doxology could admit such a neglect of charity. “First be reconciled to your brother,” Jesus tells the crowd, “then come and offer your gift” (Matt 5:24).

And yet a difficult question remains about the specific manner in which theological norms come into contact with philosophy. The possible danger of this approach, be it ever so slight, even unapparent, is that it models a vision of doxology in a way that can seem somewhat inhospitable to reason. Here, a longer discussion about the meaning and abiding significance of “modernity” would be worth having, but for our present purposes it is worthwhile to remain focused on the place of rationality within post-metaphysical doxological theology. Is it not, at least in part, because God reveals Godself as reasonable that the divine overture is not violent, but recognizable as desirable and as desired, and as capable of free reception and offering?

At the same time, throughout Thinking Prayer one finds a preference for the “concrete” and “historically rooted” over the abstract or ideal. Perhaps these polarities are overladen. One of the ways phenomenology offers an advance beyond idealism is that it forges new categories for thought starting from what gives itself, from the “concrete.” A phenomenologically rigorous theology can privilege concrete historical circumstances, the real lives and real suffering of real people, without framing the reasons for this preference in opposition to rational, or even transcendental aims or arguments. This does not mean that responsibility or hospitality must be subordinated to a rationalist scheme or argument. But it does mean that the imperative of hospitality and the fact of my responsibility do not cut against my reason or my freedom, but call upon them, appeal to them, and condition them.

Prevot’s argument can seem to tend in more apophatic direction than it wishes to at face value. A “comprehensive system of theological knowledge,” he says, “is not even something that one can any longer reasonably desire” (324). At a purely descriptive level, one might say the theological doxology advanced here is a kind of fundamental theology in an un-apologetic mode. It does not aim to persuade of the truth of any theological proposition, but nevertheless does make theological claims and, at least in general terms, offers recommendations for action, which it takes to be normative, both theologically and ethically. It is not a question of the orthodoxy of the approach, which gives voice to doxology in a way that is cogent and indispensable. Rather, it is a question of how theology as a discipline of both faith and knowledge proceeds in response to the modern situation of reason.

It is not the least achievement of phenomenology to show that the autonomy of reason can be qualified. But to be qualified is not to be abolished, for in that case, the paradoxical result is that ethical imperatives become normative without being rational. At issue here, perhaps, is the way in which divine and human freedom meet in prayer, and at the limit, the theology and phenomenology of incarnation. If my obligation to alleviate the suffering of others remains imperative, my response to the divine initiative nevertheless remains free. In carrying out this imperative, it is not I who incarnate the Word in my flesh by my action or struggle, not even in the most ascetic of practices. If the Word moves me to suffer with those who suffer, our mutually interacting freedoms are not mutually exogenous. If I am deaf to the cry of the poor, it is the Word in them I no longer hear.

How my deafness can be turned to hearing is now an open question, and Andrew Prevot has brought it into relief with his excellent new book. If my remarks offer him anything of value, then my hope is that it will be only to advance what he has already done and said.

“Prayer—and I think only prayer—gives Christian faith its most critical and productive force. The most critical element in belief in God does not come from a political theology but fundamentally from the articulation of faith in prayer, from prayer as an act of faith.” —Edward Schillebeeckx1

Prevot’s hypothesis of thinking prayer as the neglected source of theological and spiritual resistance amid the crises of modernity is a welcome invitation to reread the writings of other theologians who have not a prayerful reputation at all. I think of the notorious theological rebel from my own context: Schillebeeckx. Both his supporters and detractors simply overlook how action and contemplation, the political and the mystical, are deeply intertwined in the work of this Dominican monk. Significantly, the title of the book out of which I quoted, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World, is obscuring the integral sense of the Dutch original. “Gerechtigheid en liefde: Genade en bevrijding” literally translates as “Righteousness and Love: Grace and Liberation.” Hosea 12:6 serves as the book’s epigraph:

So you, by the help of your God, return,
hold fast to love and justice,
and wait continually for your God.

Postsecular readers are likely to miss the spiritual heart of his theology, and the task Schillebeeckx has in mind for political theology, which is “to safeguard prayer in a reflexive way,” by articulating how this act of faith becomes “indirectly effective” in political activity.

#prayforbrussels: Theology in Times of Terror

When I was reading Prevot’s book, my country was shocked by the terrorist attacks in Brussels, March 22. As had been the case at similar events in Paris, people were expressing their solidarity using the hashtag #prayforbrussels. This hashtag was shared by young people who do not define themselves as belonging to any religion. As a Belgian theologian I was surprised by seeing “prayer” as the first gut reaction to horror in a highly secularized context. Prevot gave me words to flesh out the questionable nature of this hashtag. What is the kind of subject that shares this hashtag? What kind of solidarity is expressed here? Where is the prayer for the thousands of innocent victims in Syria, Iraq, and other regions? And is the lack of concern about the violence that is daily reality for so many people living outside of the Western comfort zone, not at the very root of insecurity which all of a sudden emerged in our streets?

I do not want to belittle the authentic longing for peace and the impressive gulf of self-giving solidarity. Catastrophes awaken the deep desire for the common good, which is slumbering in our individualist consumer culture. Many people sensed the need for spiritual resources to resist the fear and despair in the face of crisis. The impulse #prayforbrussels was translated into spontaneous vigils and interreligious prayer services. There was even a praiseworthy attempt to widen the circle of solidarity by launching the hashtag #prayforourworld. A secularist tabloid headlined “The Whole World Is Praying for Us Today,” quoting the tweet, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other” (Mother Teresa).

In hindsight I have to admit there has been little reflection to think through what the event of March 22 reveals about the world we live in. Soon the Belgian media and public sphere were again the space of polarization between communities. The latest controversy was about the alleged “Islamization of Catholic schools”—in response to theologian Lieven Boeve’s suggestion to consider sharing prayer rooms among Christians and Muslims at school.

Becoming Black

I found Prevot expressing many intuitions which resonated with my own often implicit theological convictions. The only moment I felt reluctance to follow his call was when he defended James Cone’s demand that white theologians become black. Is becoming black not simply impossible for a white theologian? The very question betrays a profound asymmetry in my own theological institution. In Leuven, where we have a Centre for Liberation Theologies, we are hosting many students from the Global South. To be honest, my colleagues and I are teaching them most of the time white theologies. And it works. Our students are able to learn these theologies and appropriate them as fruitful resources for developing their own theology. Why am I not prepared to go for the reverse learning experience? We take for granted that white theology is significant for black students, but are not even considering the mirror idea that white theology as much needs black theology.

A genuine practice of mutual listening would include a reversal of roles in which, for instance, as Prevot suggests, the black doxological tradition is respected “not merely as a guest but also as a host” (322). This would involve not only a change of attitude from the European partners in the theological process, but also from our guests. Our non-European students are stimulated to learn and speak for their own people and culture, as if the ideal would consist of creating a range of particular theologies—black theology for blacks, Dalit theology for Indian Dalits, feminist theology for women, . . . Our well-intended encouragement blindly obeys the logics of representation, typical for contemporary identity politics. The net result might be the fostering of ghetto theologies and theological ghettoes. Prevot’s book is a great example of a different, boundary-breaking theology.

The journey to this more universal theology goes not by the road of transcendental introspection. Just like the hashtag #prayforourworld might remain an abstract cry, breathing an illusory universalism, Prevot holds that the only access to a truly universal prayer is by becoming black.

“Here to “become black” means nothing other than to enter into the spirituality of oppressed black people, to pray and struggle with them for their freedom, to welcome their beauty as an indispensable element of Christian doxology, and—as a matter of sheer consistency—to abolish every form of “white” domination, including overt acts of violence and the more hidden dimensions of privilege and harm that are expressed “through marriage, schools, neighborhood, power, etc.” (Prevot, 321)

It is about accepting “to enter into the ‘wounded words’ (Chrétien) of the black community” (322–23), and to “share deeply in the passions, sorrows, and resilient hope of [my] black brothers and sisters” (323), to participate in their lament and praise. In a Western European context the radical conversion this involves could be provoked by the mere suggestion to substitute for a moment “black” by “Muslim.” There might be a way in which, to become a European Christian in the current crisis of violence and counter-violence, is to become Muslim in a sense analogical to Cone’s “becoming black.”

Overcoming the Incapability to Love

Back in 2008 I lived seven months of exposure to the African megacity Kinshasa. My wife and I had deliberately chosen not to live in the expat circles, but in a Congolese religious community in a poor neighborhood. The plan was to become friends with our black neighbors, but the hard reality was that I felt myself for the first time of my life a white man, to my own exasperation reproducing some neo-colonial prejudices. Part of my frustration was that our relations with our neighbors, which we intended to entertain in a spirit of mutual encounter, were often overshadowed by the hard economic inequality—“being white” turned out to mean “potential financial resources.”

But the problem was more fundamental. After I returned to the university of Leuven, a fellow researcher, Joseph Drexler-Dreis, drew my attention to a lesser-known theme in Frantz Fanon. This black intellectual saw it as his mission to fight for

“the restoration of the conditions that enable us to love authentically. This is where Fanon becomes relevant within theology, and especially a theological consideration of reconciliation. A key term within Christian theology is love, but theologians often fail to consider love as a contextual notion determined by the conditions that facilitate or prohibit its realization. Fanon’s thought contests theological discourses on reconciliation that employ a theology of love that is not aware of the structures that constrain our desire and capacity for communing with others.”2

In an existential way I had become painfully aware of “decolonial theorists” insight that “coloniality,” the underlying cultural and thought structures of colonialism, did not end with political decolonization.” Like many theologians I had overlooked the fact that the underlying colonial logic persists today. My desire for reconciliation had blinded me for the reality that there are structural impediments to love, which call for a consistent decolonial praxis, seeking to restore the material and spiritual conditions that enable people to be subjects and objects of love.

In Need of Vicarious Prayer

Being in Africa made me aware of my being white. In a way it forced me to become white, i.e., to recognize my responsibility in an ongoing history of domination. Prevot indicates with Cone that I needed “to die to my anti-black ‘whiteness’ and ‘become black with God’” (321). Part of my becoming black was the concrete experience of me, a critical theologian trained at the faculty of theology of Leuven, sitting there every evening praying the rosary with orphans and other kids who were rejected by their families. The children’s love of Mother Mary also inspired them to sing songs of praise, which opened a horizon of “joyful resistance” (216) in the midst of a violent context.

In Kinshasa I found myself speechless before God, I needed their prayer, their lament and hope, their joy and trust. For me, becoming black was maybe first of all to recognize that a crucial part of my faith, my trust and hope in God, were stored in the prayers and songs of those young black children. I experienced a kind of listening similar to what I encountered in the commentary of Henk Leene on the third song of the suffering servant (Isa 50:4–9). Identifying himself with the people listening to Isaiah’s song—the people of God in exile wherever they happen to live—Leene writes:

“We are no longer able to hope but merely to hear the song of someone else’s hope. We ourselves are no longer able to trust in God, but the message reaches us about someone who trusts. At the very moment that we allow this strange voice to speak, this voice of his suffering servant (Is 50:10), we trust nevertheless, although we don’t. Our trust has assumed the form of listening to a song. In this way the song becomes our salvation. Tired though we are, we experience God’s saving power in and through the song.”3

Leene explains that the function of the song is the mediation of trust. The servant trusts for us. His or her witness offers refuge and support to the hopeless. We, who listen, are carried by his or her vicarious trust through the night until the day dawns and their resilience has grown so that we ourselves themselves become part of the chain of suffering servants.

Next to Prevot’s critical retrieval of petitionary prayer, I would like to draw attention to intercessory prayer. My own prayer experience in Kinshasa led me to face the fact that the “courage to pray” (Metz) implies sometimes the surrender to let oneself be “prayed for.” Prevot refers to Metz’s call for a mystical-theological practice of prayer, “in which one would ‘pray not only for the poor but with them’” (198, italics mine). I would add, in a radical spirit of poverty, that often I do not know how to pray as I ought, but have to accept the black spirituals, those great “songs of the Spirit,” to pray in me, for me, “to intercede with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 6:28).

As a theologian who spends probably too much time contemplating what it means to write theology, I couldn’t help but read Prevot’s tour de force Thinking Prayer as a book not primarily about prayer, but about theology: what it thinks it is, what it really is, what it could be. Prevot writes that theology, when it is properly rooted in prayer and doxology, has the potential to become “an intellectual practice that aspires to glorify and contemplate the divine well-spring of eternal freedom and love without becoming too satisfied with its own conceptual formulations or impervious to the horrors of reality” (332). I want to write that kind of theology.

Considering the potential of prayer in response to crisis through thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Balthasar, Chrétien, Metz, Gutiérrez, and Cone, Prevot’s work crosses boundary lines of theological discourse that, due to educational silos and the prevalent practice of theological inhospitality and judgment, are not always easy to cross. I’m sure this has all already been said. But it’s worth noting that this boundary crossing is exciting not just because it is unusual but also because it incites a creativity of thought and opens up a broader discourse about prayer to which an unusually diverse group of theological thinkers have been invited. We find ourselves at the table with each other. This kind of theological hospitality changes the way we think about things. It can change the way we see and hear things that otherwise appear to be utterly familiar. I want to write that kind of theology.

Following Prevot’s narrative for a moment, prayer is in a precarious position in light of the crises of modernity: its viability challenged by the rise of secularity, its intelligibility challenged by the crisis of Western metaphysics, its integrity challenged by global structures and individual acts of violence (5, 19–28). Yet prayer is not just the helpless victim of these crises, it is also Prevot’s hopeful response. Prevot helpfully summarizes:

“Prayer resituates and thereby significantly qualifies the meaning of secularity by affirming humanity’s critical freedom and locating it in interactive relation with God; prayer opens a doxological path beyond the potentially nihilistic trajectory of metaphysics without losing the holistic sense of wonder and keen theoretical insight that have been generative of this tradition; and prayer inspires liberative movements of personal and social transformation in resistance against the violent structures of the world, while awaiting God’s definitive victory over them.” (6)

This thread of prayer-as-response-to-modern-crises is woven through a fascinating discussion of some power-house thinkers of the modern era. Prevot patiently draws out a doxological response to the challenges of Western metaphysics through conversation with Heidegger, Balthasar, and Chrétien; and a spiritual response to the many forms of worldly violence through conversation with Metz, Gutiérrez, and Cone (in both cases, among others). This culminates in Cone’s theology, where the “strong and sanctified and Spirit-filled songs of the slaves” are taken not just as an important instance of black doxology but as a framework for theological thinking as such (325). More than just a statement critiquing the sidelining of black spirituality in contemporary theological discourse, Prevot is also making an epistemological claim. If contemporary theologies and spiritualities wish to fruitfully respond to the crises of the modern era, they would do well to center the voices of those whose lives were witnesses to the horrific outcomes of whiteness—both its metaphysical idolatry and its structural, cultural and individual violences. If theology wishes to faithfully speak of God, then theology must be the kind of thought that does not just arise from any prayer, but the kind of thought that arises from “prayer haunted by the memory of the slaves and their divinely sustained and divinely ordained desires for freedom” (280–81). These “wounded words” (323, cf. Chrétien) are not incidental elements of theological history, they are the “interpretive framework that knits everything together and, moreover, raises our understanding of the significance of prayer to a higher level” (12).

This is a creative and exciting work and I am fully on board with what I take to be at the heart of Prevot’s proposal: that the spiritual and theological hospitality that can be inspired by prayer can seriously challenge both conceptual idols and violent structures of injustice. In light of the theological hospitality already offered by Prevot, I would like to offer two sets of questions that arose for me as I worked through this text that, I think, are not unrelated. The gathering themes for these questions are theological hospitality and the language of crisis.

Theological Hospitality

In Prevot’s writing, theologians are regularly described as “prayerful” or “not prayerful enough.” Doxology is described, at times, as “pure” or “impure.” To give a few examples, Cone’s thought is described as “profoundly prayerful” (12); Heidegger’s thought is “more prayerful than most of its modern predecessors,” “(something like) prayerful thinking,” and yet, “by Christian standards, not prayerful enough” (37), and is “an instructive example of doxological impurity” (37); Balthasar’s thought is described as being “deeply saturated with prayer” (109); liberation theology, Prevot states, “can take a variety of forms, some of which (e.g., Dussel and Segundo) are underdeveloped or problematic with respect to the task of thinking prayer, others of which (e.g., Gutiérrez, Boff, and Ellacuría) more adequately perform this task in continuity with the best of the Christian doxological tradition” (274). Despite serious discussion in the text of what prayer is, of what doxology is, I still at times found it hard to know what these judgments about this wide range of thinkers might mean. What is the statement being made implicitly underneath the naming of thought to be “prayerful” or “not prayerful enough,” and the naming of doxology to be “pure”’ or “impure”?

Let us return to Prevot’s definition of prayer from the introductory chapter. Prayer is “the love-oriented interaction of Trinitarian and creaturely freedoms in the context of our severely damaged world” (3), the fulcrum of divine-human communication that drives prayerful thought (theology) and prayerful life (spirituality). Where some might object that this does not line up with a “simpler and more exact meaning of prayer as the making of a request,” Prevot argues that prayer has long been thought, theologically, to be both more specific and less restricted than a purely petitionary understanding would suggest (13–14). Prayer is specifically addressed to God and prayer actually encompasses a much broader range of interaction between human beings and God than simple petition. However, I wonder whether there is another simplistic notion of prayer that is getting a bit lost here. The way the terms “prayer” and “doxology” are used in practice often refer to (for want of a better word) “external” acts of prayer and worship—perhaps participation in liturgy, personal acts of spoken and contemplative prayer, etc. But the terms also implicitly point to something more personal, something more hidden—the mystery of each individual’s relationship with God. While it seems reasonable to make judgments about the former, it seems troubling to make judgments about the latter.

While I remain confident that Prevot does not intend this level of judgment, and though it perhaps seems particularly inhospitable to suggest that this is even being implied in this work, I do think that there is a hidden danger in the way that these terms are being used. Is it possible that by defining prayer and doxology so particularly, something important is being lost in our usage of these terms? When we talk about whether someone’s thought is “prayerful enough” and whether someone’s doxology is “pure” or “impure,” I think this raises red flags. If the judgment is that certain ways of thinking about either prayer or doxology do or do not line up with Prevot’s proposed understanding of prayer and doxology, then this is one kind of statement. To say that someone’s thought is not adequately grounded in a life of prayer and doxology is another kind of statement—one that makes an implicit connection between the existence of practices of prayer and worship and right theology. I find the latter implication not only impossible to judge, but also rather disconcerting (more on this in the next section of this response).

This is magnified, I think, by the very definition of prayer being used by Prevot: as that divine-human communication that is directed according to divine, other-welcoming, love. To leave a space of no-judgment in the way we relate to and interact with our perceptions of other people’s relationships with God is a basic act of other-welcoming hospitality that I think is encouraged by Prevot’s notion of prayer. It is a hospitality to the humanity of the other person and a hopeful belief in the fundamental hospitality of God to that other person, too. This is not a hospitality that is averse to critique—as Prevot notes in his discussion of Cone’s theology, hospitality done well is hospitality that makes space for honest critique (322). This is a critical hospitality that is fuelled by hope in a God who desires and works for transformation, for new life, even in the most despairing of circumstances.

Prevot highlights the need for openness to the spirit, to that which we do not yet know, in order to be faithful theologians (29). He also acknowledges that he shares a commitment to “‘right’ doctrine” that places him in line with Radical Orthodoxy (28), allowing him both to say that liberation theologians who are more “adequate” in terms of thinking prayer are those who are in continuity with the Christian tradition (274), and that “the purest and most Christologically focused thinkers of doxology will tend to be the most reliable” (24). My first question, then, is about how these aspects of faithful theological reflection are to be balanced. How do we balance the need for openness—because we do not know what we do not know—and the desire for right doctrine that is in line with tradition?

It is clear that Prevot’s desire in this work is to carefully critique each thinker, to take them on their own terms, and to be faithful to both those aspects of their work that are useful and those that are not (for a beautiful summary of some of the most positive aspects of each thinker he engages, see p. 324). This is a hospitality that embodies hopeful critique. My worry is that the ability to name thinkers as “prayerful” or “not prayerful enough,” and their doxology as “pure” or “impure,” betrays a small crack in this critical hospitality. A crack that reopens the dormant desire for boundaries that can lead to exclusions, of “right” doctrine that can lead to closed conversations. Perhaps Prevot is more hopeful than I find myself to be about the possibility of humanity to avoid the reproduction of these exclusive judgments once they have been recognized as such. Perhaps I have been a part of too many theological conversations in predominantly white Christian communities that all too easily make judgments about the integrity of the faith of another person or group of people to the extent of the exclusion of their experiences, voices, and concerns. In these conversations, I take this kind of exclusion not only as a result of their idea of what counts as theology, prayer, and worship, but as a result of the way in which these practices of exclusion are sanctified by these very theological judgments. My first question then, invites more conversation about what a critical theological hospitality requires in order to be both critical and also hospitable. Are there limits to the judgments we can and should make about the prayer, thought, or spirituality of other people? If so, what are these limits? If not, how do we continue to cultivate an openness to the necessary critique that comes to us from other voices and perspectives while also retaining a real concern for theological orthodoxy?

The Language of Crisis

The predominant framework of Prevot’s discussion of prayer is that of crisis. The viability, intelligibility, and integrity of prayer is challenged by the crises of modernity: the rise of secularity, the crisis of Western metaphysics, and the crisis of spiritual, cultural, and physical violence (5, 19–28). What is particularly helpful about this framework is that it enables a constructive evaluation of the usefulness of a broad range of thinkers as responses to (and perhaps also creators and perpetuators of) these crises. My second question revolves around this language of the crises of modernity. How does this language—and framework—of crisis shape the resulting analysis and conversation? Are we really living in a particular time of crisis? If so, are these crises particular to our age? I don’t ask these questions to be facetious. I by no means intend to undermine the fundamentally critical challenge that the metaphysical, spiritual, cultural, social, and physical violence of our time puts to our generation, and to theology in particular. In fact, I ask these questions about the appropriateness of the framework of modern crisis for this conversation because I want to take the challenge of structural and individual sin and injustice with utmost seriousness.

I worry that the language of modern crisis leads to a discourse in which the problem and the solution are too easily identified. Perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that my concern with the language of crisis is that it encourages that desire in us to all too quickly find reassurance for ourselves by defining the problem and identifying a solution. Non-doxological, post-metaphysical thought, and (non-prayerful) secular thought, for example, implicitly become a part of the problem. Non-doxological, post-metaphysical thought (of which something like social theory might be an example) is not dismissed (22), neither is secular thought (science, the humanities, etc.) (10), but Prevot argues that if they are to be useful to theology, they can only be so insofar as they do not challenge a fundamentally prayerful orientation (32). Prevot writes, “An interdisciplinary approach, in which the resources of history, psychology, sociology, and other areas of scholarship might be employed freely, in whatever ways they prove useful or necessary, can be entirely incorporated into this unified theological and spiritual space, so long as these other disciplines are not used in a way that contradicts the basically prayerful orientation of this space” (32). This suggests that there is something about prayer—about our understanding of this kind of prayerful orientation—that is beyond critique (or at least beyond a critique that does not appear through prayerfully oriented means). Prevot agrees that prayer, if it wishes to be faithful, must allow itself to be “interrupted by suffering” (216), but can this interruption extend to forms of thought that appear un-prayerful? Can “secular” critique undermine our understandings of prayer, theology, and spirituality in ways that are theologically necessary? I believe we must at least remain open to this possibility.

The language of modern crisis also encourages our desire to find (or be reassured by) a solution. The solution, for Prevot, or at least a significant aspect of it, is thinking prayer. Prevot writes that prayer, at its best, works against violence by providing “unparalleled training in the ways of hospitality and responsibility,” through its ability to “cultivate subjects who are prepared to resist unjust structures of power and who are likewise capable of understanding why this resistance is necessary regardless of the costs” (25–26). Through regular prayer, Christians “learn to see who we are, what we have done, and what we are meant to do,” offering us “a lesson regarding loving receptivity to the other, while simultaneously granting us a disambiguating perspective on our obligations, and perhaps serious shortcoming, in the midst of this violent world” (27). Before I go any further, let me just state that I want all of these things—for myself and for the world. Let me also state that I believe prayer to be a crucial aspect of Christian life and human sanctification. However, I can’t escape the thought that it is, all to often, those who pray regularly who are also the ones who perpetrate and reinforce violence in the world.

Prevot acknowledges the deep distortions of prayer that have been a part of so many of the most horrific acts of structural and individual violence that our culture has known: “Baptized and believing Christians who prayed to a nominally Christian God have murdered Jews, brutalized indigenous communities, let the poor starve and die, and sold shackled black bodies to the highest bidder” (27). Prevot calls this the “idolatrous and violent falsification of prayer” and argues that “such distortions need to be identified and combated with great urgency, wherever and however they occur” (28). Moreover, he states that the reality of the human distortion of prayer does not imply that prayer itself is the problem. I agree that the horrific reality of the sins of confessing Christians does not mean that prayer is the problem. But I do think that it should make us pause before offering prayer as the solution. Not because I don’t believe that God really reveals things to human beings in prayer, but because I know all too well the very human propensity to stubbornly refuse to see what is being revealed, and—more than this—to think that they actively hear that which justifies violence and suffering.

Perhaps, once again, Prevot’s assessment of humanity is more positive than my own. Perhaps I am bound by my situation as a white thinker in a predominantly white and privileged academic space and church community. For white Christians, prayer and “right doctrine” has long walked hand-in-hand with horrific acts and structures of violence. Prayer and “right doctrine” has not just been blind to these acts and structures of violence, it has called them right and holy. This is not just about the large abuses of power, acts of exploitation, and de-humanization that (I hope) we can all now agree are not of God. I’m not directly talking about slavery or Jim Crow or the KKK, although this thought process is informed by these realities. I am most concerned about those ways in which we participate in ongoing structural and individual acts of violence in ways that we appear to be entirely oblivious to. Some examples might include the many-layered ways in which people participate in white privilege; our perpetuation of unsafe working conditions through our uncritical consumerism; the ways in which our working, housing, and worship choices perpetuate economic and racial disconnects.

I worry that the language of modern crisis, in the way it encourages the desire for reassurance that comes from easily identified problems and solutions, can both isolate us from critical challenges arising from thought which has been deemed to be “secular” or “non-doxological,” and also make us too comfortable with the idea that prayer itself is the appropriate solution. My concern does not arise from a disagreement about what I think prayer is in its ideal form, but from a feeling that the only way we begin to do differently in this regard is not just to pray but to open ourselves to the critique of our prayerfulness, of our “right doctrine.” This is a critique that may well be given to us in prayer, but which may not be received until we are willing to be confronted by the voices which challenge us at the most foundational, theological, spiritual, prayerful level.

I don’t think Prevot and I disagree on this. I think this is why Prevot thinks theology can learn so much from Cone and why he believes that theology needs to recognize the doxological wisdom of the slaves as itself an “interpretive framework” for theological thinking (12). The theological critique of both metaphysics and violence that comes from the centering of the songs of the slaves is both necessary and also effective not just because these are songs that arise in situations of great suffering, but because this suffering reaches to the heart of ongoing, far-reaching, and deeply complex structures and acts of violence and suffering in our current age. Theology and prayer find their critique in these voices not just because they are challenged by human suffering, but because in these voices they are critiqued by the suffering in which they are complicit. I don’t think Prevot and I fundamentally disagree on this. I do think that I am more concerned about the potential of Christian communities to refuse to engage the interruption from suffering as the necessary critique of their theology, prayer, and spirituality. I think I am so concerned about prayer as the problem that I’m not ready to admit prayer as the solution. Looking at it from where we stand, we might decide to call this problematic prayer “distorted” prayer or “falsified” prayer, but as it happens in our own lives and communities, and as far as we know, it is just prayer. And that is the problem.

My second question is, then, given that it is (distorted) prayer, (falsified) theology, and (counterfeit) spirituality that “continually produces the sorrow of the world” (28), how can we build a discourse of prayer-as-solution that takes this danger seriously?

Introduction

Andrew Prevot’s Thinking Prayer seeks to address a profound trouble in modern academic theology. Where his contribution marks itself out from other attempts is in his concern for “liberative movements of personal and social transformation in resistance against the violent structures of the world.” (8) Prevot convincingly shows how prayer can, and often does, rest at the heart of what we might very broadly call liberation theologies.1

In my response here, I take some time to offer a critique and a contribution to Prevot’s work. I provide an interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar that in many ways runs counter to Prevot’s, and in that sense serves as an attentive critique. In other words, I think Prevot fundamentally misreads Balthasar in certain important respects. At the same time, my interpretation pays particular attention to aspects of what I take to be Prevot’s central concerns, and in that effort I conscientiously work to be constructive. That is, I attend to his concern for “counterviolent spirituality,” (5, 166, 326) and the hope of a theology that does not set itself up as a demagogue of control. (71, 192) As a point of clarification, it should be noted that not everything I establish about Balthasar is in contradistinction to Prevot. Our difference is not total.

Fragments and Form

Balthasar’s Theological Anthropology (1963), Das Ganze im Fragment, gives us some key insights into Balthasar’s foundational ideas. That the book’s title is in fact The Whole in the Fragment should already alert us to Balthasar’s sensitivity to partial understanding, to mystery, to finitude before infinity.2 A particular passage is relevant for us here. In it, Balthasar reflects on how the various questions born from suffering find their way into Christ’s cry of dereliction:

“The end of the question is the great cry. It is the word that is no longer a word, that therefore can no longer be understood and interpreted as a word. It is the monstrous thing that still remains after everything moderate, understandable, and attuned to the hearing of men has faded away. In truth, one should hear in every clothed word what breaks out naked in this cry. It is something literally unsayable, which comes from infinitely further than is comprised in the finite dialogic situation, and is directed infinitely further than can be expressed in the creaturely word in fully formed words.”3

Balthasar describes the shattering of human words on the cross, a destruction provoked by the incomprehensible immensity of suffering. There is a point at which even our questions collapse, and here Jesus endures it. This moment on the cross is diametrically opposed to nihilism because, where words fail, still the Word speaks, if only in a cry. Because he is Word as well as flesh, Jesus is able to utter that “monstrous thing” burdening all human meaning as well as voice his own suffering.

There is a tension in Balthasar, the pull of two contrary positions whose ultimate synthesis is not to be found in the created order. As much as he stresses form (Gestalt), he also struggles to make sense of the loss of form. This loss cannot be merely resolved by form, swallowed by a higher order in an imperious Hegelian gesture. “The hideous form [Ungestalt],” he writes, “is part of the world’s form [Gestalt], and so it must be included, essentially, among the themes and subject matter of artistic creation.”4 The Ungestalt of the world is taken up not only by art, but also on the cross. Balthasar asks, “Can the concept of ‘form’ [Gestalt] cope with the monstrous form [Ungestalt] of sin, suffering, and Cross?”5 So, nearly incomprehensibly, Balthasar is willing to say that Christ on the cross is in some manner un-form (Ungestalt). That is, Balthasar wonders whether the form of theological aesthetics can survive theological dramatics, or if—particularly in the face of human suffering—beauty gives way to horror.

There are more positive ways in which Balthasar grapples with form and the unsayable. In his aesthetics, before he writes Das Ganze im Fragment, Balthasar reminds us that the form of beauty is always accompanied by splendor and delight. We are enraptured, or ecstatically brought beyond ourselves, by the splendid appearance of the form. “But,” he says, “so long as we are dealing with the beautiful, this never happens in such a way that we leave the (horizontal) form behind us in order to plunge (vertically) into the naked depths.”6 First, then, Balthasar insists that the beautiful is accompanied by an excess of meaning, by the appearance being itself, which we cannot control or divide. Second, he warns against a perspective outside of the finite form by which we perceive being. Indeed, without splendor and form together, without mystery beheld under the limits of our contingency, we lose even our own materiality.7

There are deep resonances here with Prevot’s other sources. Metz gives us a theology that refuses to look away from the incomprehensibility of Auschwitz, and for him the response needs to be Christological. For phenomenologists like Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien in particular, the appearance of the phenomenon is “saturated,” even over-saturated, by meaning (Marion), or so profound that it hints at an unexpected transcendence (Chrétien).

It would seem questionable, then, to claim that “Balthasar may risk contemplating the divine mystery as though it were nearly as evident as the event of being itself.” (91, 100) This critique resembles that of Karen Kilby, 8 and in both cases there threatens to be an elision of form and being, an identification of form and splendor, that Balthasar himself does not condone. Forgetting splendor reduces beauty to what Balthasar might negatively call “aesthetic theology,” or at the very least it renders Balthasar’s theology of mystery either absent or incomprehensible. The error threatens to strip Balthasar down into a stereotypical phantom of German philosophy, a creature feigning control and comprehension where humility ought to rule. But this is arguably to see through a fear rather than a reality.

The pattern, for Balthasar, is a continual tension between fragmentariness and wholeness. In the created world, this tension is never resolved; in Balthasar’s own work, it is deliberately never resolved. Through dramatic crossways like these—fragment and whole, universal and particular, etc.—Balthasar moves to appropriate other thought-forms; ever and always, the integrity of the particular persists as the form of our perception of the whole.

Cultural Pluralism

Balthasar is determined to gather a wealth of fragments by which to understand theology and its task. If we attend to the manner that he gathers his fragments, his methodical intent or theological “style,” we immediately notice two things: he is profoundly aware of his limitations—his own fragmentariness—and he is highly critical of a European tradition that imagines itself as self-enclosed. In the very beginning of Glory of the Lord, Balthasar writes, “The overall scope of the present work naturally remains all too Mediterranean. The inclusion of other cultures, especially that of Asia, would have been important and fruitful. . . . May those qualified come to complete the present fragment.” 9 He explicitly acknowledges the limits of his education, calls his work a fragment, and asks others to supply where he lacks. Balthasar has not written a comprehensive theology, and he does not claim that he has. He presents us instead with a method, much as he might resist that word.

When Balthasar approaches the cultures he knows well, from his youthful dissertation to his later works, he continually rearranges those resources in order to critically open them not only to theology, but also to the world. In Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, the revision of his dissertation, Balthasar not only accuses German culture of becoming “the apotheosis of death” by restricting itself to pure immanence and control, but he also uses non-German sources to counter that culture.10 Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky appear in order to put the question to the titanisms of German Idealism and existentialism. From there, Balthasar works outward, rapidly appropriating—the realm of aesthetics alone—English literature (most of all in G. M. Hopkins), French literature (Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, etc.), and more. He spirals outward from what is near to what is far, using what is familiar to extend himself into what is not. This extension went beyond Europe, moving tentatively but consistently into Japanese thought and art in particular. He shows increasing awareness of Eastern artistic forms, with particular attention to the Japanese encounter with German Idealism, as a mid-career example;11, and by the time of Theo-Logic II (1984), he employs the thought of Keji Nishitani, a Japanese scholar, among others, and has clearly done more research on Eastern thought, allowing him to finally, seriously differentiate its shape from that of Hegel.12

It is untrue, then, to say that Balthasar “disregards non-European others,” (71) or to say that a criterion for inclusion in his canon of resources is “a certain kind of status within the Euro-Mediterranean and North Atlantic ‘West.’” (90) Nor is it appropriate to collapse his work on Russian literature and religious philosophers into a broadly Eastern European or Western framework, thereby domesticating Balthasar’s interests, as Russian culture is far too hybridic to safely fall under such a description, and it is unclear whether Russians would ascribe it to themselves. (This collapse occurs especially on Thinking Prayer, 90.) It would be far truer to accuse Balthasar scholarship—especially in the English world—of being content with Balthasar’s own limitations, and by omission fails to imitate the determined self-expansion of Balthasar himself.

Because Balthasar is serious about the fragmentary nature of our knowledge, especially as it is expressed in culture, he works to leave his European background open to other cultures and he works to extend his knowledge beyond it. He remains a European man of letters, but his efforts to acknowledge and address his own limits are one helpful way to cope with one’s own lack. By no means is his the only way to do so.

Aletheia

This brings us to Balthasar’s use of and opposition to Heidegger, and we have prepared for it in two ways: (1) by acquiring a background in Balthasar’s fundamental (metaphysical and theological) outlook, (2) by examining how this background plays itself out in his use of cultural resources. Both are directed against Heidegger, and Prevot gamely attends to many of the ways Balthasar sets himself in opposition to Heidegger. At the same time, Prevot is concerned that Balthasar capitulates too much to Heidegger, emerging as only partially post-metaphysical and only partially able to relinquish modern “technological” (in Heidegger’s sense) efforts at domination. (101, 109) I will surface Baltahsar’s use of Heidegger in one exemplary way in order to question the truth of this claim.

Balthasar begins Theo-Logic I (originally Wahrheit, 1947) with truth, and not with aletheia. The enterprise of human thinking begins always with truth. 13 Against the possibility that truth is an arbitrary assignation of meaning, Balthasar also contends that “the thinking subject is always one that exists and recognizes that it does.” 14 So, at the very least, the thinking subject knows the truth of being in the experienced facticity of his or her own existence. Both of these preliminary gestures, toward truth and toward the subject, take place before Balthasar formally introduces Heidegger’s aletheia. Both are performed with deliberate attention to Thomas Aquinas and to Maurice Blondel. Beginning with truth itself mimics the structure of Thomas’s De veritate, and moving from there into the experience of the thinking subject follows Blondel’s L’Action. Both men help provide the ground for and the protective measure against Heidegger. Only then does Balthasar explain that truth is “the unveiledness, uncoverdness, disclosedness, and unconcealment of being.”15

“Truth in the full sense,” Balthasar writes, “is actualized only in the act of judging the truth—as the manifestness of being now possessed as such in a consciousness.” 16 That truth is a judgment is drawn directly from Thomas, who speaks not only of “adequation” to the thing, but also firmly locates truth as that which an intellect knows. This judgment is aletheia, is an unveiling, and it is an unveiling within a consciousness. Heidegger’s aletheia appears not only within Thomas, but by directing his reflection into the realm of consciousness, Balthasar more nearly appropriates Blondel.

It is not merely that being manifests itself. It is that contingent being is true self-evidently in the knowing subject because being is also known by an infinite subject. For Balthasar, truth has to be understood in the context of a theocentric Thomism. Alongside this, truth is accompanied by the complexity of a conscious subject who is already acting in the world, and in acting that person implicitly affirms the supernatural (that is, the transcendent). So for Balthasar, aletheia has to be understood within the dramatic boundaries of historical action, which occurs within and before God. This is Blondel’s insight. By grounding aletheia in an account of authentic transcendence, Balthasar wrests truth from the temptation to Promethian dominance. All contingent truth, including that of the knower, is unveiled under the double mysteries of the finite and the infinite. There is not even a bridge between finitude and infinity; there is only the delicate rhythm of analogy, which moves through all of being (Przywara). Attempts to dominate truth fail because the truth is not independent of knowing subjects, and because contingent knowing subjects do not know truth apart from God. In other words, the truth is poor, and “knowledge is, in the very act of its origination, service.”17

In the first few movements of Theo-Logic I alone, then, we see an appropriation of Heidegger that at the same time questions the grounds from which Heidegger speaks, and Balthasar does so by giving new foundational perspectives to the original Heideggerian idea. At its minimum, Balthasar’s use of aletheia puts to question how indebted to Heidegger that idea ends up being for Balthasar. In a more maximal interpretation, it opens the door to seeing every Heideggerian idea in Balthasar under a new light. Certainly it is the case that truth and knowledge, for Balthasar, are not about domination.

Recapitulation

To briefly recapitulate our themes: created being must bow before the Creator it anticipates but does not know, even as its own deference is already an image of the Word. Yet this image is but a dim anticipation of Christological prayer. Within this context of an ever-echoed dialogue of analogies, the “monstrous thing,” the Ungestalt and un-word, appears in all the defiance of what it does and does not resemble.

It is perhaps the case that Prevot associates any allegiance to metaphysics as a problematic capitulation to control over knowledge and a concealment of suffering. Thus our need to move beyond metaphysics. While I would question such a narrative, which certainly Prevot is too nuanced to adopt naively, the more important point is that for Balthasar, in any case, the word “metaphysics” does not function in this way.

Conclusion

What I have worked to do here is provide an alternate reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar, one that brings him nearer to Andrew Prevot’s ultimate concerns. Rather than positioning Balthasar in opposition to liberation, it is more faithful to his thought to see ways his thought grounds possibilities of liberation, however deeply or thinly he understood the liberation theology of his time. Still, the fact that Balthasar did not spend himself in specific questions of liberation, does not replace the need for this, which makes Prevot’s efforts here fundamental to the continued development of theology. Balthasar is, in my view, less Heideggerian and less culturally imperial than Prevot imagines. He is, too, more open to lingering questions of suffering. I would argue that these realities are undergirded throughout by Balthasar’s metaphysics, and in that respect I do not see Balthasar as post-metaphysical at all, much as he can be used in such efforts. Yet here I suspect that we do not mean the same thing by “metaphysical,” and so for now the disagreement is at least partially insoluble.

I want to reiterate that I have taken the time to offer a lengthy critique because I think Prevot’s interests are important, and because his reflections in Thinking Prayer are helpful. However many our disagreements or confusions, I will insist on that. And I thank you for your patient reading.