Since others have already offered excellent summaries of Professor Kilby's book, I shall focus on its strengths and weaknesses. I shall begin with the good news. First, Kilby offers a very fine introduction to Balthasar's life, training, and the formative influences on his thought. Already in her introduction and first chapter, one gets a glimpse of Kilby's graceful writing style and her keen eye for what is central.
Next, I was struck by the sheer originality of Kilby's approach to Balthasar. I have read numerous secondary works, and they tend to follow one of two approaches. They either try to offer a systematic overview of Balthasar's theology in terms of the standard areas of theology, such as God, Christ, Trinity, and anthropology, or they try to get to the heart of Balthasar's work, either by approaching it through a central problem (e.g., Angelo Scola's anthropological approach) or by focusing on the center, with a view that the rest will “go without saying” (the approach of this author's own Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed Footnote 14). Kilby has ventured into new territory by looking at themes that recur frequently throughout Balthasar's corpus. This unique approach gives Kilby's book a freshness that is not always found in the secondary literature, while, at the same time, allowing her the “critical distance” that she needs to keep from getting sucked into the Balthasarian vortex.
Third, Kilby's style is not only generally graceful and lucid; it is also rigorous. She routinely summarizes Balthasar's approach, asks difficult questions of it, predicts how Balthasar might respond, and then offers her final indictment. The style is reminiscent of a Platonic dialogue or Thomas Aquinas’ Summa. It is enticing to watch Kilby's intellect at work; her ability to predict her “opponents’” objections is sometimes startling.
Finally, Kilby has done a great service for those of us who are generally favorable to Balthasar's project, for she has gathered into one well-written and thoughtful account nearly all of the objections that one is likely to find in a wide variety of thinkers, ranging from the resurgent neo-Scholastics to the postmodern feminists. In short, all of us benefit from the wide range of Kilby's education and her ability to represent accurately a wide variety of voices.
The bad news begins with Kilby's central thesis, which, it turns out, determines all of the particular criticisms contained in the individual chapters. That thesis goes something like this: Balthasar commends a dramatic theology that avoids both the pietistic subjectivism of lyrical theology and the distant, purely objective or neutralist approach of epic theology. Nevertheless, she maintains, Balthasar violates his own method inasmuch as he is constantly surveying various theological positions from an aloof position, only then to pronounce the final answer on the matter. If this criticism is true, then Balthasar fails not because he doesn't do theology to Kilby's liking, but because he doesn't do it to his own standards. Fortunately for Balthasar, the charge is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Indeed, the entire book hinges on this fundamental misunderstanding.
The mistake stems from the fact that Kilby has failed to recognize the significance of an extremely important, if cryptic, statement of Balthasar's, wherein he declares that his theology follows Goethe rather than Kant. This is important for numerous reasons, but let us begin with Kant. In his concise study of Continental philosophy, Simon Critchley makes the astute observation that analytic and Continental philosophy, which are seemingly the opposing choices in the contemporary scene, are in fact just different sides of the Kantian coin.Footnote 15 He explains this by saying that the analytic school is still doing philosophy in the key of Kant's first critique, while the Continental school is doing philosophy largely in the key of the second and third critiques.
This statement is relevant to Kilby's misunderstanding, because I think it also applies to the two allegedly opposing schools of theological thought in the United States: the Chicago and Yale schools. Without going into details, the seeming divide between these schools is premised on a fundamental agreement regarding the nature of knowledge—namely, that we cannot know the thing itself. They both, that is, accept the famous “turn to the subject.” Once that turn is accepted, one can either engage in critical theology by scientifically scrutinizing the sources of the Christian faith to expose the irresolvable tensions in both Scripture and tradition, or one can opt for a more pragmatic “cultural-linguistic” approach that defends the rights of various communities to believe on account of the fact that we can never step out of our own presuppositions successfully enough to say something that is simply true. In short, postcritical theology has more than a little of Lyotard's famous “incredulity towards metanarratives.”
The unfortunate fact for Kilby's thesis is that Balthasar refused to take a place at this Kantian table. His epistemology (sadly, there is no evidence in this book that Kilby has even read Theo-Logic) is simply not Kantian. It is, in fact, much closer to Aquinas’, and this can lead to confusion. Consider the following from Aquinas: “The substantial forms of things as they are in themselves are unknown to us, but they shine forth to us through their accidents” (ST I, q. 77, a. 1, ad. obj. 7). It would be interesting to read this quote to graduate students in philosophy to see how many would mistake it for Kant! But there is a crucial difference, and it is the bit about “they shine forth to us through their accidents.” In his excellent discussion of this passage Norris Clarke recommends that we substitute “operations” here for “accidents,” because it better fits the context and is more in keeping with the Scholastic notion that we know things through their activities (agere sequitur esse).Footnote 16
It would be almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this difference for Balthasar's project—thus the importance of the Goethe quote. Goethe also believed that the thing itself shines forth from the thing, and also, importantly, that it gives the thing its intelligibility, unity, luminosity, and, dare we say, its beauty. It is also crucial to realize that the approach of Aquinas drastically shifts our attitude toward the relationship between the whole and the part, and between truth and mystery. Because these two are central to Kilby's criticism, we should look at them.
In an astonishing passage, Kilby seems to have anticipated our concern: “Might there not be, it could be asked, underlying the criticisms I have been raising, something very like a modern anxiety towards wholeness, a refusal to countenance even its possibility? Is not my critique of Balthasar, in other words, in fact grist for the mill? Is this not just what one would expect from a thinker caught in the toils of modernity?” (149). But as soon as she moves into her answer to this objection, we see that she thinks that she can avoid being modern by being postmodern. She does not realize, that is, that Kant anticipated both, and that postmodernism is just a phase of modernism.
We see this in her contrasting interpretation of Balthasar's notion that the truth is symphonic. For Balthasar, this means not only that we need a wide variety of viewpoints to express the multiple aspects of truth (e.g., no single gospel or even a harmony of the four would adequately give witness to the mystery of Christ), but also that difference does not preclude unity. In other words, the bassoon in this particular symphony both does something unique and individual and takes its part in a larger whole, which it presupposes. In order to appreciate its role, I must have some glimpse both of its uniqueness and of the whole to which it belongs. Indeed, for Balthasar, I must have something like an intuition of the whole before I can even speak of the part, and this is just another way of saying that the thing itself shines forth in the distinct parts and actions of the actual thing in front of me, allowing me to know what it even is.
In Kilby's reading, however, only the first aspect of Balthasar's meaning is given its due. She uses a variety of examples to show that one can never grasp the whole of the symphony but only ever gets a part. For instance, if I am sitting too close to the drums, the other parts of the symphony might be obscured. Or perhaps my hearing is limited. Here is her conclusion: “Revelation, one might say, allows us to catch something of the music, and to trust that there is indeed a whole symphony, but it does not allow us to hear the whole” (151). I suspect that this last sentence will warm the cockles of most modern readers’ hearts because it sounds so “epistemically humble.” It makes an enormous difference, however, whether this humility is understood in a Kantian or Balthasarian (Thomistic, Goethean) manner. Kilby's hand is shown in part by her choice of the word “trust” in that sentence. What she knows, in good Kantian fashion, is what we cannot hear (or see); what she trusts, in good Kantian fashion, is that there is a whole that we cannot hear.
What she underestimates are the problems one gets into when one goes down this path. First, the thing in itself either reaches us or it does not. Kant simultaneously needs it to (to wake up the categories of the transcendental subject) but cannot really let it. But he cannot have it both ways, and Fichte will have to make him more consistent by outing him as an idealist. But even worse, when one misunderstands the relationship between the part and the whole, one will inevitably turn the part into the whole. Is it not interesting that Kant, the man who set about to show reason's limitations, turns around and writes a book called Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, a book that neither Aquinas nor Balthasar, for all of their alleged “intellectual hubris,” would ever write?
Let us return to Kilby's example of the person sitting too close to the drums. How would I know that this were the case if I didn't situate the drums against the backdrop of the whole symphony? Even more interestingly, why might I seek during my next visit to the symphony to get another seat? How would I know that I had missed anything? And if it is simply the case that one can only ever catch a glimpse anyhow, why would I want to get a better grasp of the whole?
But it gets worse. If the whole does not shine forth in such a way that it can be grasped (in keeping with the mode of the recipient, of course), would it be possible to distinguish good composers from mediocre composers? Composers from mere conductors? Conductors from oboe players? Professional oboe players from amateurs? How could Salieri know to be envious of Mozart? And how could Mozart dare to write the Jupiter Symphony without first consulting the music faculty at Salzburg?
Balthasar's comments, then, about the dramatic structure of truth, have absolutely nothing to do with Kantian apophaticism. They recall, instead, Hegel's quip that Kant is the kind of philosopher who wants to learn how to swim before getting into the water. One cannot do theology in its proper sense while one is obsessing about the conditions under which theology can be done. One must get in the water. But the one who has gotten into the water has not forfeited her ability to talk about swimming. Indeed, she will be more qualified both to say something about swimming and to appreciate its mystery.
To return to our previous metaphor, do we really want to say that Mozart's unique ability to see a whole symphony in the midst of all of those notes and instruments precluded his appreciation of the mystery of music? To preserve the mystery of music, do we really have to have a world without composers?
