Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar are the two most significant figures of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology. They were, roughly speaking, contemporaries. Both joined the Jesuits, and at one time they were collaborators, but they followed different paths, working in different contexts (Rahner had a much more traditional life as a Jesuit and an academic theologian than did Balthasar), and, as we shall see, doing theology in rather different ways. It has become customary to see Rahner and Balthasar as representing two roads down which Roman Catholic theology can go. Each had periods in the ascendancy and periods when they were, one might say, in the doghouse, and it is probably still too soon to say which will be taken as the more important thinker in the long run.

An interesting question to ask is whether Rahner and Balthasar oughtto be construed as fundamentally opposed – whether the two roads goin genuinely different directions – or whether instead they can be seen asdeveloping complementary kinds of theology. The answer, it seems, dependsvery much on whom one asks: Balthasar scholars usually, but not necessarilyalways, think there is a clear and important opposition; Rahner scholars aremore likely than not to opt for complementarity.

ART AS RELATIVE SINGULARITY

Hans Urs von Balthasar liked to claim from time to time that he was really a Germanist rather than a theologian. As peculiar as that claim might sound to those who know him from his great theological trilogy, his patristic monographs, or even his work in the 1980s on the Vatican's International Theological Commission, his assertion certainly holds true of his professional training before he entered the Society of Jesus in 1929, when he was awarded a doctorate in Germanistik at the University of Zurich. But it is not as if his entrance in the Jesuit Order then meant he had abandoned literary studies for 'pure' theology. Indeed, it will be the burden of this chapter to show that his later work as a theologian is thoroughly intertwined with his earlier work in literary appreciation, criticism, and theory. Some might even argue that Balthasar's theology is so enmeshed with his literary sensibility that it undermines, confuses, or even vitiates that theology. The astute scholar, however, will find that the richness of Balthasar's theology is due, at least in part, to his literary training and sensibility, and that, conversely, his theology only lends weight and substance to his literary-critical insights, making those insights genuinely interdisciplinary, and in that way all the more original.

The first thing to grasp about artistic innovation and renewal is that it needn’t come from an avant-garde, which usually groups together artists who are just a bit more self-conscious about ‘progress’, and more theoretically aware of the nature of art (or at least of that which they don’t like). Nearly all the artists whose works still survive in the canon, however that may be institutionally or politically constituted, have made innovations, and even those who work within what is sometimes termed a ‘consensus practice’ will have been experimenting, more or less, with the boundaries of that consensus.

Indeed that is what a serious paradigm allows you to do. I am using ‘paradigm’ here in a loose sense, to mean the framework of ideas which help to define what is normal or usual in a practice. It was ‘normal’ for Georg Grosz to be taught the paradigms for realist biblical and historical narrative painting at his art school, as it was for musicians at the beginning of the century to understand and reproduce sonata form, with, as Hepokoski puts it, its ‘melodic simplicity, squarely period phrasing, frequent cadences and balanced resolutions, symmetrical recapitulations’, repetitions and so on. Such textbook paradigms have a certain summarizing cultural authority, and this tends to be a property of those works which are part of the traditional canon, whether imitated in the life class or the counterpoint class. They are what comes before innovation, the traditional practice that confronts the individual talent.

At least among professional theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar tends to perplex more than he manages to inspire. To be sure, he can inspire. For example, the journal he founded, Communio, now appears in twelve languages (including Arabic). But subscribers never exceed the number - itself already quite small - usual for most other professional theological journals. More to the point, few Catholic departments of theology in Europe or North America consider it essential to have a Balthasarian expert on their respective faculties (a similar attitude towards liberation theology, transcendental Thomism, or feminist theology, by comparison, would seem vaguely revanchist).

To some extent, however, this situation has begun to change. In fact, this volume in the Cambridge Companion series testifies to what seems to be an incipient sea change in attitudes towards this unusually productive, subtle, and complex theologian. For that reason, the editors wish to stress that this collection of essays by a wide array of scholars wishes not so much to inspire as to address the perplexity that seems to be an inherent part of everyone’s reaction to Balthasar’s thought. We make no claim to have resolved the perplexity that so many readers feel upon encountering his theology for the first (or even umpteenth) time.

The variety of compositional styles, the multiplicity of the functions of music, the verdict that Schoenberg’s music was destined for the happy few who could understand it (and that Richard Strauss’s was destined for the happy few who could afford it), the lamented lack of a relationship to society and ‘the people’, the lack of genre consciousness in the works of many composers in the 1920s, their flirting with the vernacular or the apparent banality of their music – all these perceptions led inevitably to a quest for greater seriousness in music and a new sense of social commitment. The new seriousness was meant to supersede the arbitrariness of musical styles and reinstate composition as a coherent manifestation of high cultural values or as a timeless emanation of the art of music. It was, in short, to replace the alleged social irresponsibility of the 1920s.

The scandals provoked by Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s music before the First World War had been a symptom of the dispersion of a hitherto more or less consistent stylistic language. Together with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s non-tonal works had been the first compositions which seemed to jettison the musical tradition of the nineteenth century. In hindsight, a work like Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, mirroring in ‘its ahistorical anachronisms’ the ‘disunities of modern life’, equally served to undermine a sense of coherent compositional development. The emergence of a plethora of disparate musical styles and techniques meant that there was no longer a perceived tradition: any composer could be progressive and regressive at the same time, and in this way compositional options presented themselves less in the form of a linear development than of a maze in which tradition seemed to play no part.

INTRODUCTION

When Hans Urs von Balthasar set out in 1947 to write what would later become in 1985 the first volume of the Theologik, he was already convinced that Jesus Christ was the heart of the world. Historically, the Jesuit order (Society of Jesus), to which he belonged at the time, had often been linked with devotion to Jesus' Sacred Heart. But long before the Second Vatican Council this devotion had come under attack for its lachrymose sentimentality. So in Heart of the World (first published in German in 1945), Balthasar had tried to give more tough-minded consideration than was usual to that spiritual theme. Moreover, he realized that one could not flesh out the claim that Jesus Christ was the midpoint of being without a thoroughgoing investigation into the relations of christology with ontology, the study of being, the exploration of reality in its fundamental pith, shape, direction.

Normally speaking, an ‘ontological christology’ is simply an investigationof the reality of Christ as one personal being inhabiting two natures,divine and human, and accepting their union in himself. It is a christologythat takes with full metaphysical seriousness the affirmation of the Councilof Chalcedon about Christ’s two-in-one make-up, and tries to do it philosophicaljustice.

No previous convulsion had so profound an impact upon the musical life of Europe at large as did the Second World War. In as much as they could, combatant nations clung to a vestige of the familiar and well-loved. Despite the emigration to the United States of a dismayingly large percentage of those who commanded a measure of cultural authority, opera houses and concert halls struggled to assert ‘business as usual’ in the face of daunting circumstance, and awaited better times. In consequence, the late 1940s and early 1950s were devoted to the restoration not just of the fabric of Europe’s devastated cities, but of long-established cultural institutions. As was to be expected, the music-loving middle classes returned with gratitude to their cultivation of an authoritative classical repertoire.

But for the generation of young European musicians who had passed their formative years amongst the constrictions of the later 1930s and early 1940s, the imperative was now to make their own the more radical currents of pre-war culture to which they had been denied access. The situation was particularly acute in Germany – subject since 1933 to stringent regulation of the culturally permissible by Goebbels’s Reichsmusikkammer. Although Italian fascist cultural policy, as directed during the immediate pre-war years by the minister of culture, Giuseppe Bottai, had proved somewhat more encouraging of a carefully regulated innovation, its younger generation felt itself similarly cut off. The élan of French cultural life of the 1920s and 30s (strongly neoclassical and pro-Stravinsky) had been brought sharply to heel under German occupation, leaving Olivier Messiaen as a solitary beacon for younger composers with an interest in the modernist tradition.

(Re)constructing African music

In the interconnected global ethnoscape of the late-twentieth century, the aesthetics of ‘art’ and popular music alike increasingly bore the mark of hybridity and cultural crossover. It is a world in which once-secure musical boundaries became highly porous; in which transnational cultural exchanges produced an array of richly intersecting multicultural musical forms; indeed, a world in which ‘polystylism’ was itself considered a representative hallmark of a post-modern condition that challenged the very concepts of cultural authenticity and artistic originality. Collaborative avant-garde projects, like that between Philip Glass and the West African griot Foday Musa Suso, resulted in music that smoothly overlays discrete musical styles, in this case Glass’s distinctively minimalist additive rhythms (already indebted to Indian classical music) with the cyclic patterning of the kora. Elsewhere, European composers with minimalist leanings, like György Ligeti, extended the dense textures created by Central African polyphonic techniques by drawing out acoustically produced ‘inherent rhythms’ in the context of Western musical instruments. Relatedly, American postmodernists, like Mikel Rouse, wrote operas (such as Failing Kansas (1995) and Dennis Cleveland (1996)) that sound like creative transcriptions of the African rhythmic processes found in A. M. Jones’s Studies in African Music.

Precursors

Jazz has proved to be one of the most significant forms of music to arise in the twentieth century. Aesthetic considerations aside, it has been the source for the two most important forms of popular music in the West, and to a considerable extent elsewhere: the big dance band, which dominated popular music from about 1925 to 1945, and what is loosely called rock, in its various manifestations. Without jazz neither of these forms could have existed. As for ‘classic’ jazz, this term arose in the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century as a catch-all to subsume a variety of forms of music that existed before the arrival of ‘modern’ jazz in about 1945. The word ‘classic’ is a loaded one, chosen for its overtones of prestigious classical music, and reflecting the pressure during this period to assimilate jazz within the academic canon of great music; in this chapter, however, it is employed simply as a convenient term to cover pre-modern jazz, including Dixieland, swing and their variants, all of which share harmonic and rhythmic systems that are significantly different from those of modern jazz.

Jazz arose in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century out of a unique set of circumstances: the presence of a concentrated population of blacks and racially mixed ‘Creoles’ in the New Orleans area; rapidly developing systems of mechanical entertainment, including the player piano, sound recording, and radio; a craze for social dancing; and a dramatic shift in American attitudes occurring in about 1910–25.

In earlier periods in the history of music the past was either forgotten or else was present as a living, unconsciously handed-down tradition that was not specially thought about. It was only the increasing historical awareness in the eighteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth, that enabled composers for the first time to forge links with the styles and practices of works that had been forgotten, while at the same time creating contemporary music with a historical subtext. Not by chance, these developments in composition coincided with the upsurge of historical awareness in concert life.

The formation and widening of a repertory that includes earlier works in their due place is a process that has continued to the present; the first half of the twentieth century saw at the same time the evolution of new forms of engagement by composers with the past. The present study is concerned solely with such historical references. It does not embrace other forms of engagement that introduced folksong into modern music as a reflection of popular culture; even if the tunes that are evoked, quoted, and put to new uses have ancient origins, it is not in such instances a matter of music from the past, but rather of music that is felt to be still alive today. My first concern is with developing general characteristics of neoclassicism, particularly in connection with Stravinsky. Next I shall investigate the relationship to neoclassicism of those works whose titles end with the suffix ‘-ana’ or ‘-iana’ (a form of ‘rewriting’ primarily represented in Italy).

REASON, REVELATION, AND THE LIBERAL PROJECT

It must be admitted that 'revelation' as a theological topic is not without ambiguity. The very definition of revelation is in dispute, with critics pointing to its rather vague delineation as a separate topic of theological discourse well into the medieval period. Rather than getting bogged down in these sorts of questions, however, perhaps the best place to begin a treatment of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of revelation would be with his most basic assertion: in revelation we have a sovereign divine action pro nobis that makes God known to his creatures in a manner that they can apprehend (LA, 7-8). It is God who speaks in revelation and it is humanity who listens and responds. Even if it must be admitted that divine revelation makes use of worldly forms and words, these structures are 'taken up' into an essentially divine act and given a new context within a divinely constructed 'form' (Gestalt). For Balthasar, revelation is not a species of a much broader genus that can be loosely called 'religious manifestations' or 'divine epiphanies'. In Christ we have an utterly unique event without parallel that judges all human expectations rather than being judged and tamed by them. There are definite affinities with Barth here in Balthasar's insistence that revelation carries within itself its own theological warrant, its own self-authenticating, 'engracing' logic. Balthasar does not deny that there is a role for analogy, philosophy, and 'natural theology'. However, the issue is whether anthropology and/or cosmology will be allowed to govern christology, rather than the reverse. And on that issue he is consistently, even rigorously clear: Balthasar will reject any systematic approach that attempts to locate the significance of revelation within an overarching ideological scheme of some kind, especially when the attempt is made reductively to 'explain' revelation as an outcropping or even as an epiphenomenon of various anthropological capacities or cosmological processes.

The red thread of eschatology - thought and doctrine about ultimates - runs through Hans Urs von Balthasar's work from start to finish. He first took up this theme with his humanistic dissertation written at the University of Zurich on 'the history of the eschatological problem in modern German literature' (1930), a large study that was eventually incorporated into an even larger enterprise, a three-volume work on 'the apocalypse of the German soul' (1937-39). And in what may have been his last academic engagement before his death, Balthasar in April 1988 gave a lecture at the University of Trier on apokatastasis (the technical Greek term referring to 'the restoration of all things at the end of time'). But more than the sheer pervasiveness of the topic, his own version of eschatology has also been probably the most innovative - and therefore most controversial - theme in his theology. That was the case at least from the time when he published Mysterium Paschale in 1969, and he continued to radicalize his position in the last two decades of his life in the explicitly eschatological sections of the Theo-Drama and the Theo-Logic.

ESCHATOLOGY AS REVELATION

The thesis of Balthasar’s earliest work, both the dissertation and itslater three-volume expansion, was that the ways in which a people envisionsthe End ‘reveal’ its ‘soul’.

The story usually goes something like this:

Once upon a time, in the early 1950s, black rhythm and blues and white country music were married in the southern United States and gave birth to rock and roll, a blast of youthful energy that disrupted the stultifying blandness of a self-satisfied and conservative affluent post-war society. Parents were horrified, but the kids were more open-minded and rebellious than previous generations, and the course of musical events was completely and irrevocably changed. After a few short years of revolution, many of the major players were sidelined for various reasons (most of which are open to a reading of conspiracy by the US government afraid of the growing power of teenagers and African-American culture), and music entered a dead zone between 1958 and 1963, during which nothing of any interest or import happened. This all changed with the rise of the Beatles, the British blues boom, and the flowering of real revolution – political, sexual, racial, artistic – which was heralded by the arrival of the rock god in his many guises and reached its pinnacle in the hedonistic festival culture of the late 1960s. Afterwards came decadence and decline, only to be shaken up by a new revolution in which the Bicentennial of American Independence and the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II in England were disrupted by the arrival of punk. The Goths were at the walls.

But that’s a story for another night.

Like most myths and legends, this fairy story tells us more about the culture that tells it than it does about the historical events on which it is based. It is the classic Western tale of rise and fall, whether of the individual or the civilization. How much of the truth of those historical events survives? Are any of these truths recoverable at this late date? These may seem foolish questions about something that happened within living memory,but that is indeed largely where it exists – in the living memory of people who experienced the events along highly personal pathways, in oral histories, in the words of journalists and critics who very often had their own agendas.

INTRODUCTION: MOTIVATIONS AND SOURCES

If Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics treats Christian theology under the rubric of contemplation (which entails 'seeing the form' of God's self-disclosure), then his theodramatics deals with action, both God's and ours. For Balthasar, this transition from contemplation to action in the context of his trilogy has an inherent necessity. But the 'logic' here is not the logic of formal argumentation, rather the logic of Christian existence, as perceived by Balthasar in its most basic patterns.

Motivations

As others have shown in this volume, Balthasar is aiming to write adeeply scholarly theology yet at the same time one fully in touch with livedChristian life – an aim unusual in the modern period. Whilst theology shareswith other branches of learning a demand for academic discipline and thefull use of the powers of the mind, Balthasar is clear that the subject matterof theology remains, first and last, the God who calls human beings into amore than merely intellectual relationship with him; the God who shapespeople for his work; a personal God; the living God of the Bible and of faith.

INTRODUCTION

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 'the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics in our time' (GL5, 656).

Obviously, this tocsin represents a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, conception of metaphysics, one thoroughly incompatible with any of the standard conceptions of metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy. For Balthasar, metaphysics and Christian theology are distinct activities, each with its own sources and rules; but neither, he believes, can be properly conducted in ignorance of the other. Christian theologians cannot develop an account of biblical revelation which would pretend to be completely unconnected with pre-Christian and non-Christian traditions of metaphysical thinking. On the other hand, the experience of wonder which is central, in his view, in all philosophical traditions, is now almost completely invisible to philosophers who are not themselves practising Christians. In virtue of the biblically grounded awe at the divine glory which is made available to Christians, liturgically and in ascetical practice, it becomes possible to retrieve the 'experience of being' which, historically, philosophers from the beginning have sought to articulate, and with which any serious philosopher today should wish to engage.

In short, the true guardians of the experience of being are those philosopherswho have the faith to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The cultural event that most conspicuously marked the turn of the millennium in Britain was the opening of London’s Tate Modern, the refurbished power station that is now, spatially, the world’s largest museum of modern art. The building itself is significant since it marks a transformation from an industrial utility to a cultural space; together with its contents, it signifies a commitment to modern art at the end of the twentieth century. It is even able to include a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated urinal – an object designed to test institutional limits. So reconstructed, museums no longer instil a dominant view of culture, nor do they display artists as overbearing bastions of authorial rectitude: they are more likely to present contrasting outlooks and leave spectators to find ways of accommodating them. Like the exhibits in the Tate, modernist musical artefacts cannot survive without support, yet their institutions can evolve and need not be governed by the curatorial attitudes normally associated with museum culture. Institutions, like music, are embodiments of human ideas and are therefore potentially mobile and subject to interpretation.

Institutions and performers

The most remarkable institution of twentieth-century music must surely be IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Adjacent to the Centre Georges Pompidou in central Paris, IRCAM is devoted to the technical and creative advancement of music. Remarkably, it derives from the vision of one man, Pierre Boulez, whose stature as a musician enabled him to secure funding from the French government for the development of a music research institute.

The remarks of Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964) quoted above appeared in a Sonderheft of the Musikblätter des Anbruch, the in-house organ of Universal Edition, widely known for its publications of new music. Devoted entirely to jazz, the issue included articles by critics and composers including Gruenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Percy Grainger, representing Germany and the United States (through Gruenberg’s German–American residence and training), as well as France and Britain. While the authors did not agree on the extent of jazz’s influence on their compositions or the works of others, they all acknowledged a fascination with and desire to utilize this kind of popular music as a transnational aspect of 1920s musical modernity.

In identifying jazz ‘as a point of departure’ for the composition of new music, Gruenberg drew upon long-standing views of popular culture and its music as accessible, irresistible, and personified as female. Coming into its own in the 1920s, jazz was thus not unlike another social phenomenon of the time, the New Woman. Both were perceived as youthful, urban, and free from past conventions of propriety and morality. While more women did enter the public workplace during the 1920s, and often in ways that utilized modern technology, the new woman of the modern city was in many respects an overdrawn fiction. Similarly jazz and its seductive temptations were also potent fantasies of modernism, fantasies that originated in the dichotomies of mind and body, classical and popular, cultural insiders and outsiders.