Excerpt of "Church of the Ever Greater God"

CHURCH OF THE EVER G R E AT E R G O D The Ecclesiology of Erich Przywara

AARON PIDEL, S. J.

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2020 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction to Erich Przywara 1 chapter 1 Analogia Entis as Creaturely Metaphysics: Structure, Rhythm, Middle 000 chapter 2 Analogia Entis and the Problem of Religion 000 chapter 3 The Ignatian “Type” 000 chapter 4 Ecclesial Discretion 000 chapter 5 Apocalyptic Ressourcement and Nuptial Ecclesiology 000 chapter 6 Przywara’s Kirche in Gegensätzen Today 000 Notes

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Bibliography

Index

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Introduction to Erich Przywara

The present work on the ecclesiology of Erich Przywara, S.J. (1889– 1972), is a project of retrieval. Like all retrievals, it draws attention to a figure significant for both the past and the present. Of Przywara’s stature in the Zwischenkriegszeit in Germany there can be little doubt.

Some of the most influential theological and philosophical minds of Przywara’s generation regarded him with frank reverence and gratitude. His protégé Hans Urs von Balthasar describes his own programmatic work of ecclesial reform, Razing the Bastions, as an application of what he learned from him.1 Balthasar never ceased to address Przywara in correspondence as “dear master and friend”2 and went so far as to identify him as the “greatest spirit [Geist] he was ever permitted to meet.”3 Given the intellectual endowments of the source, this is indeed high praise.

But Balthasar was far from Przywara’s only admirer. Karl Rahner too acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Przywara, singling out his writings on the Ignatian charism.4 He predicted, moreover, a future rediscovery of the value of his thought: “Without being a Prophet, I feel compelled to say that we, the generation after him, as well as future generations, still have critical things to learn from him.”5 Even such a towering figure as Karl Barth showed Przywara a respect that 1

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transcended their important confessional differences. After his first meeting with Przywara in 1929, Barth wrote to a friend that he had just sparred with the intellectual “giant Goliath incarnate.”6 Less than three years later, he would famously refer to the idea for which Przywara is best known, the analogy of being, as the “invention of anti-Christ” and the definitive reason for not becoming Catholic.7 Hence, even though Barth ultimately remained unpersuaded that Przywara’s analogia entis did justice to the biblical vision of God and creation, he nevertheless considered it the most sophisticated and intellectually compelling alternative to his own vision.

In between such fervent admiration and vehement rejection, of course, there stand the testimonies of many other figures for whom Przywara was an important—albeit less decisive—influence. To name one example among many, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, née Edith Stein, would speak of the late 1920s and early 1930s as a time of “lively intellectual exchange” with Przywara.8 He introduced her to the thought of Aquinas and Newman, and she introduced him to the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Stein’s obvious appreciation for Przywara corroborates the overall impression of Przywara as a mind—and even a mentor—of the first rank.

Despite the impressive body of testimony to Przywara’s past stature, the evidence for his ongoing relevance may seem at first glance rather thin. He is seldom the subject of scholarly debate among Englishlanguage theologians. This is perhaps because when Przywara wrote about the Church he wrote comparatively little about the questions that have come to preoccupy ecclesiologists in the years following Vatican II. He shows little interest in the historical variations within the Church’s authority structures, for instance, and seldom descends to the brass tacks of pastoral policy or liturgical ars celebrandi. Notwithstanding Przywara’s understandable tendency to speak to the issues of his own day rather than to those of ours, it would be shortsighted, I think, to presume he has nothing to teach us.

Przywara’s thought has a timeless dimension as well. The key to Przywara’s ongoing contemporaneity, I argue, lies in the method by which he undertook the “task of differentiation and discernment” entrusted to him as a Jesuit intellectual.9 To my knowledge, he gives the

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fullest account of his strategy for intellectual discernment in In und Gegen (1955).

Acknowledging his indebtedness to the Jesuit philosopher and psychologist Josef Fröbes, Przywara describes his way of thinking as an ongoing rhythm between two moments: “in” and “against” (gegen).

“In” refers to the moment of intellectual sympathy: “‘to want to understand’ every author (however un-Christian or antireligious he may be) in pure objectivity (without pastoral or apologetic ulterior motives), ‘better than he understood himself.’” “Against” refers to the moment of “critical distance” (Auseinandersetzung) from this same author.

Przywara typically undertakes this second moment by profiling an author’s positions against a universal horizon, that is, against the “ultimate form” of reality that he calls the analogia entis.10 It is this methodical rhythm of immersion and distanciation that gives Przywara’s thought the oft-noted qualities of timeliness and timelessness. Reinhold Schneider dubbed him the “most modern theologian, both before and after the war.”11 The American philosopher James Collins likewise described Przywara’s work in philosophy of religion both as an indication of the role of Catholic thinkers in the general cultural movement and as a speculative achievement in its own right: “His works taken in chronological order represent the organic growth of the author’s position as it evolved naturally and gradually through successive contact with past and contemporary currents of thought. His theoretical development is indissociable from these other philosophical movements and is to be understood in light of a fruitful examination of them.”12 In Collins’s commentary especially, the “in” and “against” moments are both visible. Przywara plays a role within a “general cultural movement.” But his contact with “past and contemporary currents of thought” spurs a process of “organic growth” terminating in an original “speculative achievement.” Collins would concur, then, with the phenomenologist Peter Wust’s characterization of Przywara as “the man who watches over the times, and who keeps watch above the times.”13 These descriptions of Przywara as both in and above the currents of his times could apply mutatis mutandis to Przywara’s work as an ecclesiologist. On the one hand, Przywara’s thought unfolds “in” each

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ecclesiological current from the modernist crisis down to the preparatory phase of Vatican II. As Karl Neufeld would say of him, Przywara “was always witnessing to a situation.”14 In short, Przywara was, like Newman and Augustine, an “occasional” thinker. On the other hand, Przywara examines each newly formulated vision of Catholicism in light of its compatibility with the analogia entis, which he understands to be the most basic and comprehensive structure of creaturely existence. The conceptuality of the analogia entis gradually assumes new layers and complexity as Przywara encounters each new movement.

What we find at the end of this organic development, however, is not just a summary of positions, but Przywara’s own synthetic vision of the Church. Indeed, as I argue at length, Przywara’s analogy of being serves ultimately as the framework for an Ignatian ecclesiology.

This basic intuition that Przywara is in fact forging an ecclesiology both analogical and Ignatian structures this book at the level of each chapter and with respect to the sequence of chapters. Each chapter begins with a theological movement or event that furnishes the relevant interpretive background to a range of Przywara’s writings, then proceeds to show how Przywara brings his analogical sensibility—the analogia entis —to bear on the issue at hand. Finally, in order to show how Przywara both maintains and varies his theme, the exposition of each chapter (except the second) is ordered around three key dimensions of the analogy of being: “structure,” “rhythm,” and “middle.”

The sequence of chapters is both thematic and chronological. The first chapter treats chiefly Przywara’s writings on “creaturely metaphysics” up to and including his Analogia Entis (1932). Setting these writings against the backdrop of the condemnation of pantheism at Vatican I, I argue that the analogia entis represents a philosophical theology—that is, an account of the relationship of similarity-dissimilarity between Creator and creature—in the nonpartisan mode of an ecumenical council.

In other words, just as ecumenical councils formulate their decisions in such a way as to avoid identifying the whole Church with any individual theologian or speculative school, so Przywara formulates the Creator relationship of the analogia entis in such a way as to prescind from the speculative differences separating theological personalities such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. At the same time, just as ecumenical councils formulate their decisions con-

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cretely enough to exclude certain errors, so also the analogia entis articulates a creaturely metaphysics definite enough to exclude various shades of pantheism—especially the pantheism of German idealism.

Formally, therefore, all authentically Catholic theologies evince an irreducible “structure” of similarity and dissimilarity between Creator and creature, as well as a “rhythm” of energetic exchange between God and creation. For only such a creaturely structure and rhythm maintains the “middle,” that is, the essentially unbridgeable interval between Creator and creature. Pantheistic thought, however much it may avail itself of Christian language, can be recognized by its transgression of this deeper structure and rhythm of creaturely existence.

The second chapter advances the argument by showing how the analogia entis provides a Catholic account not only of metaphysics but also of religious experience, both natural and supernatural. While drawing on more or less the same range of writings as the first chapter, it profiles them against a different background and exposits them from a different angle. In this case the relevant historical context becomes the era of antimodernist magisterium, beginning with the rejection of “semirationalism” at Vatican I and culminating in Pius X’s criticism of “vital immanence,” that is, the identification of God with the apex of the human spirit. Przywara develops from the analogia entis a philosophy of religion that is specific enough, on the one hand, to respect the teachings of Vatican I and the antimodernist magisterium, yet broad enough, on the other, to include such nonscholastic thinkers as J. H. Newman and Max Scheler—often suspected at that time of religious “intuitionism.” Przywara mounts his case by arguing that one best understands the distinction between two widely acknowledged polarities—religionmetaphysics and nature-grace—according to the model of “relations of prevalence” (Prävalenzverhältnisse). In other words, religion and metaphysics both track the same phenomenon, namely, God as refracted through creation. Religion, however, responds in a predominantly (but not exclusively) practical way, whereas metaphysics responds in a predominantly (but not exclusively) speculative way. Since religion remains at least implicitly cognitive, appeal to religious experience counts as something more than irrational emotivism.

Natural religion and supernatural religion are likewise, at least in the actual economy of salvation, joined according to a relationship of

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prevalence. On the one hand, since God has chosen not to limit grace to the precincts of the Catholic Church, there can be in fact no religious practice entirely untouched by grace. On the other hand, since God has chosen to redeem humanity as humans, the Catholic Church will include the dispositions of even natural religion in a healed and elevated mode. The all-important consequence is that speculative thought and religious practice, though always distinct, nevertheless compenetrate so thoroughly that one can see intelligible connections between religious traditions and the metaphysical systems they generate. The Catholic religion, which represents for Przywara the maximal supernatural elevation of natural religious traditions, generates the metaphysics of the analogia entis.

The third chapter applies Przywara’s prevalence model of religious practice and speculative thought to one regional variant within the Catholic religion: Przywara’s own Jesuit order, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Set against the backdrop of post–World War I controversies regarding the place of mysticism (as opposed to asceticism) in Jesuit life, this chapter shows how in the 1930s Przywara uses the analogy of being both to explain the irreducible pluralism of religious “types” and to evoke the distinctiveness of the Ignatian type. As Przywara sees it, genuinely Catholic religious types are united in their basic respect for analogical balance but are distinguished by their relative emphases on one or another pole of the certain perennial tensions. Though all Catholic religious currents will respect creation’s similarity and dissimilarity to God, for instance, the Ignatian type accentuates dissimilarity, contemplating God preferentially under the aspect of Divine Majesty. This emphasis with respect to the vertical axis of the analogia entis gives rise to a series of horizontal, apostolic preferences: active service in imitation of the self-emptying Christ, personalized governance according to the model of discretio caritatis, and attunement to the directives of the hierarchical Church. These distinctive Jesuit emphases effectively balance other charisms and paths within the Church, making the Church a field of irreducible tensions whose pluriformity points beyond itself to the inexhaustible riches of God. Making the Church transparent to the majesty of God is for Przywara the perennially Ignatian ecclesiological project.

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The fourth and fifth chapters then work out in more detail Przywara’s Ignatian vision of the Church, distinguishing two stages of Przywara’s thought. The fourth chapter explores the principle of “ecclesial discretion” developed by Przywara in the early 1940s, showing how Przywara models the function of ecclesial authority on the function of an ideal Jesuit superior. Przywara argues that hierarchical authority, the Church of representative office, actually serves as the condition for the possibility of ordered pluralism, missionary outreach to the “uncovenanted,” and an enterprising laity. According to this model, the more the Church’s authority is seen to “descend” from God rather than to “ascend” from human ingenuity or majority consensus, the less various charisms and apostolates in the Church are seen to compete with each other. The Church “from above,” in other words, best accommodates pluralism—and even requires it. Przywara develops this Ignatian ecclesiology against the backdrop of the two models governing much of early twentieth-century ecclesiology: the so-called perfect-society ecclesiology descending from Vatican I and the so-called mystical-body ecclesiology popularized by the German Liturgical Movement. Przywara’s Jesuit ecclesiology of “discretion” aims to overcome the onesidedness of each position, reconciling their legitimate insights in a single, Ignatian and analogical model.

The fifth chapter observes something of a caesura in Przywara’s thought. In the closing years of World War II, the German Jesuit selfconsciously changes his approach to theology, undertaking what I call an apocalyptic ressourcement. Personal and national tragedy lead Przywara to conclude that God is permitting the collapse of the postTridentine “Western” Church in order to inaugurate a global and, indeed, cosmic Church. Aiming to cooperate with this divine initiative, Przywara adopts what he considers the more globally accessible medium of the nouvelle théologie: the primordial symbols of scripture, liturgy, and patristic preaching.

Ecclesiologically, the most significant consequence of this methodological shift is Przywara’s decision to recast his analogical vision of the Church in the biblical-symbolic categories of nuptiality and Marian typology. Despite this change in method and categories, I argue, Przywara continues to uphold the values that he formerly identified as distinctively

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Ignatian: reverence for the “ever greater God,” missionary outreach, and responsiveness to the unique pastoral needs of each age. Though the theme of the hierarchical Church is less prominent in Przywara’s writings from this period, the shift is best explained not as a repudiation of former positions but as a response to a new historical “occasion.”

With this later turn to a biblical and nuptial ecclesiology, we arrive at the end of Przywara’s original ecclesiological developments. After World War II, Przywara’s fragile mental health imposes on him a life of nearly eremitic seclusion, including separation from the normal community life of the Jesuit order. After many false starts, Przywara settles in the early 1950s at Murnau in the Bavarian countryside, where he resumes his intellectual vocation with the help of a caretaker named Sigrid Müller. During this period he also published many of the writings originally composed toward the end of World War II. The only major writing on the Church conceived after World War II, Kirche in Gegensätzen (1962), offers not so much new speculations as a prophetic synthesis of his ecclesiologies of discretion and nuptiality. Though written in anticipation of Vatican II, it nevertheless offers a nuanced answer to the question, often mooted in retrospect, What happened at Vatican II? With the view to sharpening the council’s discernment, Przywara outlines several perennial tensions in the Catholic Church whose competing values may vary in ascendancy from era to era. Przywara thus foresees in Vatican II not the birth of a new Church but the emergence of a new set of accents, or a new ecclesial “type.” Given the intellectual and spiritual currents clamoring for the council, however, Przywara suspects that the emergent ecclesial “type” will further suppress Ignatian emphases and, in turn, cloud the Church’s transparency to the Divine Majesty.

Przywara thus combines Joseph Ratzinger’s insistence on the basic continuity of the Church’s identity across Vatican II with John O’Malley’s sensitivity to the significance of change in ecclesial “style.” Intriguingly, though Przywara clearly offers his work as an instrument for ecclesial “discernment,” his reclusive circumstances lead him to name not Ignatius but St. Anthony of the Desert as his spiritual forebear.15 This later identification with the tradition of desert monasticism should not obscure, however, the fil conducteur that connects the whole course of Przywara’s reflections on the Church: the analogia entis in its

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distinctively Ignatian configuration. Przywara’s assessments of currents within the Church always represent an attempt to help the Church maintain her analogical equilibrium and thus her attitude of Marian humility. Because Przywara saw the ecclesial currents of his age as hostile to Ignatius’s values, his attempts to restore analogical balance to the Church often involved a vindication of the Jesuit way of proceeding. In this way, the analogy of being serves as a framework for articulating an Ignatian ecclesiology.

At the same time, Przywara’s analogical and Ignatian ecclesiology clearly has a broader, apologetic aim. The analogy of being, it will be remembered, designates the “middle” differentiating God and creation: only when we perceive the unbridgeable interval between Creator and creature do we come to serve the God of majesty rather than our own idolatrous projections. Essentially, Przywara’s religious apologetic boils down to a dilemma: either idolatrous pantheism or the analogia entis.

And because it is the Catholic Church who renders the analogia entis historically concrete, instantiating its structure and rhythm in her form of life, the dilemma is patient of a still more pointed formulation: either idolatrous pantheism or participation (whether explicitly or implicitly) in the Catholic Church. There is no third option.

Most provocative in Przywara’s either/or apologetic is its ability to advance a robust apologetic for the “absoluteness” of the Catholic Church without indulging in triumphalism. The Church remains “absolute” in the sense that she remains the only site positively willed by God for the gathering of all humanity in Christ. Yet God has established this site, Przywara would hasten to add, not as a repository of timeless formulas and rituals or as an uninterrupted parade of edifying saints and wise pastors, all of which might only serve to inflate the egos of the Church’s members. God has instead established the Church as a field of rippling tensions. One enters the Church, accordingly, to be stretched on the rack of her unmasterable polarities, to experience her permanence and her change, to wonder at her holiness in her Head and her sinfulness in her members. To persevere in such a “Church in antitheses,” in short, requires confronting and embracing one’s own relativity.

If the Catholic Church is thus the “Church of the ever greater God,” she is so because she is a school of ever more abject creatureliness.

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It is to this almost painful sensitivity to the majesty of God and to the Church’s role in conveying this majesty that Przywara’s admirers attribute his relevance for the present. In his “Laudatio auf Erich Przywara,” Karl Rahner, reflecting on the state of theology after Vatican II, predicts, “Future theology will still have much to learn from Przywara.

Precisely his later writings have not been widely received. The average theology of today too, which thinks—often being altogether too quickly persuaded—that it has dedicated itself to the spirit of the Council, could benefit today and tomorrow from letting itself be terrified by the dark fire of Przywara’s theology.”16 Balthasar too foresees that Przywara’s thought, after having served to stimulate the council, might now provide the key to its proper interpretation.

[Przywara] had long anticipated the opening of the Church to the world that came with the [Second Vatican] Council, but he also possessed the corrective that has not been applied in the way that the Council’s [teachings] have been inflected and broadly put into practice: namely, the elemental, downright Old Testament sense for the divinity of God, who is a consuming fire, a death-bringing sword, and a transporting love. Indeed, he alone possessed the language in which the word God could be heard without that touch of faint-heartedness that has led to the luke-warm chatter of the average theology of today. He lives like the mythical salamander in the fire: there, at the point where finite, creaturely being arises out of the infinite, where that indissoluble mystery holds sway that he baptized with the name analogia entis.17 Both Rahner and Balthasar, then, find in Przywara a stimulus to the Church of their own day and a corrective to the “average” theology of ours. Both identify Przywara’s thought as a remedy for the postconciliar obtuseness to the majesty of the “ever greater God.” But both ultimately omit to develop this line of thinking in detail, especially as it pertains to Przywara’s ecclesiology.

This book intends to develop precisely this line of thinking, showing how Przywara develops and deploys his analogia entis to help the Church become more fully what she can never altogether cease to be: the Church of the ever greater God.