The Hermeneutics of Kenosis, Part Three: On the Humility and Kenosis of God

Parts four and five of this series are also almost done. They will follow soon.

In many ways this essay on the hermeneutics of kenosis should have been written first in the series.  And that is because my previous posts on the topic simply assumed what they needed to first establish as at least theologically plausible.  And that is the theological assertion that kenosis is indeed an important and very central theological principle. Perhaps even the most central principle.  Furthermore, for this to be true it must also be true then that kenosis is something that we can ascribe in an analogous way to God himself.  But this assertion is disputed by certain kinds of strict Thomists (but by no means all Thomists) who claim that the humility God displays in the Incarnation cannot be imputed to the intra Divine life as such and they claim that this is based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.  In what follows therefore is a theological argument against this strict Thomistic view and in favor of the Balthasarian view that there is in God an “Urkenosis” that is the very condition of possibility for a creation of anything by God ad extra, and for the Incarnation.  

And after all of this, I will draw conclusions about the Church in a kenotic hermeneutic.  What I hope to show is that the cultural and ecclesial context of our times – a context characterized by unbelief and a concomitant “play acting” of spirituality and religion – can only be addressed from within a Church committed to a cruciform and kenotic way of living in a newly radicalized and creative form.  This will require several more parts to this series and will conclude with a discussion of how all of this relates to the concept of the development of doctrine over time and whether or not it is possible for the Church to reverse previous teachings and, if so, what criteria are to be used in that process.  I know a lot of people want me to lead with that first, but it cannot be the starting point.

The Hermeneutics of Kenosis: Part Three: On the Humility (Kenosis) of God

“Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. … Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?’”

(John 14:8-10)

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One of the hardest things for human beings to overcome is the deep and divisive dualism between matter and Spirit, God and the world, that dialectically plays them off one another and invariably pits them against each other in a competitive framework. This is an understandable dynamic, since absent a robust belief in the Incarnation of God in a human being, and that human being’s subsequent death and resurrection, the question of immortality presses in upon us with a percussive existential force that cannot be ignored.  Death, after all, is the ultimate fear – the fear of total annihilation – and all brave attempts in a stoic register to deny the reality of this fear are a form of performative play-acting that nobody believes.  Furthermore, we see all around us that the totality of the material world is characterized by decay and death, and by a general impermanence in a constant state of flux. The very contingency of all things therefore, and thus their finitude as such as well, comes to be synonymous with death.

Therefore, the principle of immortal permanence in some state of postmortem existence cannot in this dialectical view be located within the worldly realm of matter as such.  And the very essence of our finitude and contingency are viewed as a “decline” from a spiritual archetype precisely insofar as it is finite and contingent. And more importantly, the realm of divinity in these ancient systems of thought gradually morphs among the upper classes into a philosophical approach to “God” whose defining characteristic is a static immutability in an unnuanced and univocal sense as a “Ground” that does not in any way engage the finite world as a dramatic encounter of freedoms within the matrix of worldly time.

Thus does the ancient world endlessly and dialectically vacillate between a crass, anti-world dualism with various mythologies that explain the presence of our souls in the evil world of matter as an exile of some kind (Gnosticism, etc…), and a spiritual monism where the worldly world is viewed as an “emanation” of the divine substance as such.  And out of these two mutually related tendencies emerges two related but different approaches to the material world: 1) The material world as dialectical enemy of the spiritual divine; or 2) The world as an illusion of differentiation and individuation that masks an underlying monistic identity between God and world.  In the first option the world is overtly a principle of declension and even evil. In the second the world is a field of phenomenal appearances that, though not evil in themselves, nevertheless create within us a false consciousness of fragmentation which can only be gotten beyond by getting “behind” them.  

But with the epiphanic appearance of the Incarnate God in Christ a new dynamic emerges where the priority of Spirit is affirmed but now within a transformative matrix wherein matter as such is united with spirit and elevated to a new mode of existence via a transposition into the Divine life. More than a mere “vessel” for communicating spirit – a vessel which is then “discarded” at death – matter becomes a sacramental reality that mediates God to us rather than simply communicating some truths to us about him.  Combined with the Christian understanding of creation which affirms that all that God created was “good”, the Incarnation thus erases all vestiges of an oppositional dualism between matter and spirit, God and world, and time and eternity.

Indeed, even finite time itself is transposed into the dynamical event-like quality of the trinitarian processions.  Balthasar makes this point and prefers to speak of eternity as “supra temporality” rather than “atemporal.” By this he in no way means to imply that God is temporal in a univocal worldly sense and therefore passible and “changes over time”. Or that God is somehow, in a Hegelian fashion, part of the processes of worldly history.  Rather, the emphasis is on viewing finite time as something constitutive to creation that was part of what God deemed “good”, and therefore as something that finds an analogous predicate within the Divine life as such.  The emphasis is that there is something within the Divine life that is not an immutability of a pure apatheia of indifference but rather is the stasis of an infinite “movement” – a stillness and immutable stability that is the result of the infinite dynamic of the trinitarian circumincession. And that circumincession is itself the very essence of what we mean when we say that “God is love”, a love involves an intratrinitarian “Urkenosis”.  

(One can find a full exposition of Balthasar’s theology on this point in “Theo-Drama Volume II: The Dramatis Personae: Man and God”, pp. 266-270 ff. Ignatius Press English translation edition)

This is, of course, a view which does not sit well with strict Thomists. Indeed, they raise the objection against the Balthasarian view that the Divine immutability can be sustained even if we ascribe concepts of kenosis and humility to the intradivine trinitarian relations, that this is not possible. They claim that to say that God can have a kenotic humility renders God mutable and passible. They further claim, following Thomas, that it is not fitting for God to be humble since there is no person or entity "higher" than God and so to whom would God submit himself in a posture of humility? Therefore, they further claim that the divine kenosis mentioned by St. Paul in Philippians is simply an aspect of the economy of salvation that is not expressive of what God is like ad intra. In other words, it is appropriate to say that God was humble and that God "descended" (kenosis) into the "form of a slave", but this was merely a superficial aspect of the Incarnation and a product of the finitude of the human nature of Christ, but is not a revelation of what God is like in himself.

But this criticism is wholly inadequate and fails on several fronts. For example, such Thomists seem to base their analysis of such matters in purely philosophical considerations of what God, according to reason alone, “must” be like. And the philosophical analysis is narrowly focused and takes as its starting point certain presuppositions concerning the nature of impassibility and immutability without much consideration given to whether Revelation might give us insights that will give us new creative avenues of thinking on those topics. Indeed, the old standard Thomistic manuals, many of which were good in their own way, would often begin their discussion of the nature of God, not with the trinitarian nature of God as revealed in scripture, but with a tract on De Deo Uno, which is to say they began with a philosophical propaedeutic on the Divine nature with an emphasis on the Divine unity, and “simplicity”, before even considering the specifically Christian concept of God’s nature as a trinity of persons.  And when they proceeded finally to the trinitarian aspects of God these manuals then made every effort to locate this theology within the already established philosophical foundations which often had the effect of muting and blunting the deeper implications for our concept of God of the trinitarian revelation.

In one sense there is nothing wrong with such an approach if one is wedded to doing philosophy in a manner utterly sealed off from theology on all levels.  After all, grace builds on nature and faith therefore builds and completes reason.  The problem arises however when the philosophical foundations are taken as dogmatic and unreformable truths of reason that must never allow themselves to be “tainted” with the influences of Revelation. And this is a problem when that philosophy is then used to dictate to theology how it "must" proceed. But this is a questionable stance as even Thomistic thinkers as varied as LaGrange, Maritain, Pieper, Gilson, Clarke and Ulrich argue for a stronger cross fertilization between philosophy and theology where the insights of faith are not only “allowed” to influence reason, but are consciously invited in and entertained as catalytic concepts used to creatively deepen and expand a specifically philosophical analysis.  The thinking therefore of the strict Thomists is quite linear and flat-footed wherein reason (a very narrowly defined reason) is allowed to ground and influence theology, but never the other way around.  

This strict Thomistic approach therefore seems to allow for the philosophical tail to wag the Revelational dog while assiduously struggling to avoid the reverse. And this approach also directly threatens to sever the link between the actual economy of salvation (Revelation) and the life of God ad intra.  And if we deny on philosophical grounds that there cannot be anything in God analogous to humility and kenosis, then what is to stop us from denying that there is something in God analogous to love?

Furthermore, too often such restrictive and utterly unimaginative approaches evince a view of Revelation that lacks a necessary dramatic element as a personalistic encounter and dialogue between Divine and human freedom and emphasize instead a view of Revelation as the mere exposition of the truths needed for our salvation, but in very extrinsicist ways and grounded in a shockingly modern epistemology and a modern and “objectivist” concept of “truth”.  In contrast to this view Vatican II emphasized that Revelation does not merely tell us what we need to do in order to be saved or give us truths which only pertain, narrowly speaking, to what we need to know for our salvation. In other words, Vatican II rejects an approach to Revelation wherein it reads like a set of bullet points which, once noted and preserved, allow us to discard the original since it has now “done its job”.  Which is certainly a spectacle we can see with Catholics who rarely pay attention to Scripture, rarely engage in lectio Divina, rarely meditate on the Gospels in an Ignatian manner, but who can cite chapter and verse of various anathemas from Trent or the liturgical rubrics of the 14^th century Sarum Mass.

However, when Revelation is taken more broadly, which is precisely what Dei Verbum affirms, what we see is that Christ reveals to us these truths of our salvation precisely in and through revealing to us who God truly is.  That salvation from sin through the atoning sacrifice of the cross reveals to us not just the “how” of salvation, minimalistically conceived, but the “why” of salvation, now maximally conceived as the profligate gratuity of a God who is a love wherein wealth and poverty, glory and kenosis, humility and “sovereignty”,  eternally coincide as coextensive with one another.  That God’s kenosis is therefore a revelation ad extra of what he truly is ad intra. And as such Revelation represents a unique epistemic reality wherein the “information” it propagates is also, and perhaps first and foremost, a provocation to the mind via a perturbation of the soul. It relates to us knowledge of our salvation but in a manner that calls us to “come up higher”.  This is to transport us out of the realm of mere factoids and into the realm of Mystery since the Divine essence is ultimately “ungraspable” by us in any airtight rational sense; as St. Augustine affirmed, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus.” Indeed, the notion of Revelation as a collection of factoids is an utterly modernist and rationalistic conception utterly devoid of a true Catholic sense of Revelation as an epiphanic irruption into time and space of the deep mystery of He who says, “I Am who I Am” and who now further defines this as “I AM Father, Son, and Spirit”.

[**side note.  Please do not tell me that I am attacking a straw man here. The phenomenon of epistemically flat-footed approaches to Revelation that treat it as a set of catechism-like “bullet points of truth” is a view that has of late returned with a vengeance among certain so-called “traditionalists”.  In their writings it is as if the function of the magisterium is to take the poetic and lyrical mysteries presented in Scripture and to turn them into prosaic “teachings” in a manner that smacks of “correcting the ambiguities of scripture”.  But that is not the primary function of later post-scriptural doctrines. And eventually, what happens is that these kinds of Catholics stop reading scripture, stop engaging in lectio Divina, and focus almost exclusively on conciliar and papal teachings.  We used to call this “Denzinger theology” but I think to apply that term to the current crop of magisterial fundamentalists and positivists is an insult to Denzinger.**]

Therefore, the economy of salvation both unveils God for us but in so doing also veils God insofar as what is positively revealed is an infinite Mystery that is a mystery precisely through an excess of light rather than its absence.  And this “light” reveals to us a deep drama between infinite and finite freedom, which plays out in time and history – revealing the very substance of who we are and why we are – in a manner which really does reveal to us something about the Divine nature as well:  “He who sees me sees the Father”.  

For now I simply want to lay the foundations for why the Pauline concept of the kenosis of God in Christ – a concept he articulates in a creedal form in Philippians (2:6-11) --  is a truth that goes beyond the instrumentalization of the Divine action as a merely efficacious movement of grace for our salvation, and actually reveals to us that God, from all eternity is a trinity of relations, is kenotic. To show that kenosis is an essential attribute of who God is. This is an absolutely key point since a hermeneutics of kenosis would make no sense unless kenosis has as its theological condition of possibility a truth of the Divine nature rather than a merely contingent “artifact” of the salvational act.  Kenosis in the latter sense would be in large measure an epiphenomenal by-product of the positive “fact” of the Incarnation and not a central truth about God as such which can then be extrapolated into broader theological speculation about the trinitarian relations.  Thus, in this degraded form of Thomism the kenosis of God in Christ, spoken of by St. Paul, reveals to us nothing of significance really with regard to the Divine nature.  Instead, the Pauline assertion that Christ descended “into the form of a slave” is merely the poetic way of saying that the constraints placed upon God by the very medium of finitude into which he has entered were just the unavoidable byproduct of God’s decision to incarnate himself in a creature.

But this is a strange and almost “mechanical” understanding of the Incarnation as the mere “taking on of finitude as a necessary tool” for salvation given the antecedent fact that the creatures he seeks to save are finite material beings.  Why God chose to create finite beings in the first place is left unaddressed, and what such a creational choice for finitude as a fundamental good which expresses something of the Divine nature implies theologically is not taken up.  In the case of the Incarnation, therefore, in the Thomistic view “the medium is not the message”, and the humility of Christ’s human nature is a mere accident of the processes needed to save us from sin, and therefore the kenotic elements of the Incarnation tell us nothing about the inner life of God.  

This is a key point, I think. There is a connection between the denial that God can possess ad intra something analogous to kenosis and humility and a general squeamishness about finitude as such. And this issues forth into a clear predilection to see all of the implications of the Incarnation of God in a finite creature in purely apophatic categories, and to make sure that a great gulf is erected between the economy of salvation and the nature of God ad intra.  Furthermore, as Balthasar points out, no such apophaticism is invoked when the strict Thomists speak of God’s immutability and impassibility, as if those two concepts are completely perspicacious and transparent in their meaning when applied to the Infinite and eternal trinitarian God.  When it comes to those categories, they wax Aristotelian and speak as if we can assert such notions with a deep philosophical conviction that they are the only possible “rational” way of unpacking concepts like “change”. Indeed, I once read an essay by one such Thomist that confidently asserted that the Aristotelian concept of “change” was the only one possible with no further nuances needed!

There is in all of this therefore a striking harkening back to the ancient, pre-Christian view of matter, temporality, and finitude as recalcitrant media for communicating and mediating the divine.  Nobody is asserting on the Balthasarian end of things that there is no need to always keep in mind the greater dissimilitude between God and creation in any analogy between predicates of the Divine nature and the constitutive goods of creaturely being.  Nobody is asserting that God “changes” over time.  Therefore, the essential terrain of the dispute is playing out as a difference in the analysis of finitude to reveal, precisely as finitude and in and through finitude, something about the nature of God.  It is a dispute over whether we know God in spite of our finitude or precisely through our finitude.  

And I must press this point home by pointing out that latent within this denigration of finitude is a certain underwriting of the degradation of the same.  When one removes God so far from something as quintessentially human as the humility required by love, and assert that the Thomistic definition of humility has to be the only possible definition because of the authority of Thomas, then what becomes of ascribing such other human realities such as love, friendship, loyalty and all other qualities that speak from the realm of interpersonal interactions? Because in all cases God has no need of any of those interactions with any person other than the three Divine persons.  If God is not humble because there is no higher person to whom he, the Almighty, is humbling himself, then God also does not “really” love us but only himself, and so on.

Therefore, there is a creeping theological corrosion at play here the chief effect of which is the degradation of that which is most essentially human as something that finds no analogue within God.  And this has enormous implications that are not often enough thought through.

There is already within modernity a decided turn against idea that our choosing, our moral decisions, are anything more than the epiphenomenal flotsam and jetsam of our brain chemistry.  That our finitude is not to be viewed as completed in a movement into transcendence and imbedded morally and spiritually in the same but should be viewed instead as the meaningless struggle for survival with our utilitarian brains oriented toward inventing “morality” as a series of survival taboos for the sake of group perdurance in a hostile world.  Do not look to the God above, who is not there, but to your gut or your crotch or your veins.  

For how can it be that we miserable little trousered apes with brains geared toward utilitarian goals can bring about such cosmic consequences through our petty choices? How can it be that a pair of aboriginal humans (or a group of aboriginal humans if you prefer), by engaging in a single sin of rebellion against the law of God, can be the cause of God consigning us to the dereliction of a history littered with sufferings unimaginable?  

This was the fundamental point of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who leveled the accusation against Christ, as a formal “charge” requiring punishment, that he (Christ) had placed too heavy a burden on human freedom and freighted it with too much significance.  Furthermore, in doing so, the Inquisitor charged that Christ had inflicted the most hideous and dehumanizing sufferings upon humanity requiring the Church to step in to relieve people of this awful burden of freedom.  Therefore, the Inquisitor is determined to stop Jesus from returning since the modus vivendi that the Church has reached with the world is one wherein freedom is replaced with bread and circuses, raw authority, and the titillation of miracles scattered here and there.  Christ cannot be allowed to return the Church to His message of the eschatological weight of our glory.  

Is this not the entire ethos of modernity encapsulated in a story? The modern cult of bourgeois well-being reverses the spiritual order by making the pursuit of penultimate worldly realities into our only true ultimacy, and the pursuit of any kind of supernatural ultimacy is then viewed as a dangerous and anti-human assault on our right to choose trivialities as the end of our existence.  True freedom is not what is sought after since this impossible marriage of our wills with matter, as Balthasar puts it, is death to the realm of the Good as in any way normative, and therefore it is also death, ironically, to “desire” as such in its pure form, since we can only desire that which is inherently desirable, or good.  

Thus, we must invent goods that are ersatz and/or merely stipulative, which fade and lose their original attractiveness - - an attractiveness which only resided in the fact that they were simply “new” and “different” and therefore felt liberative but not in any way inherently desirable as an epiphany of a transcendent beauty and goodness.  Freedom, therefore, is not the true emphasis of modernity after all. Modernity prefers instead a vacuous open-ended, goalless, autonomy grounded in nothing beyond the passing affective moods of the choosing self.  As such, “choices” are a mere movement of directed neuronal impulses that signify nothing.

Some might say that I am making a giant leap here from the Thomistic denial that God can be humble and that there is in God an “Urkenosis” in the trinitarian relations, to the modern degradation of the significance of human freedom, reason, and love.  But I think there is a connection, at least on a metaphysical level if not directly causal, and that it is important.  Because there is a story to be told about how fundamentally modern and rationalist in a narrow sense so much of what passes for the Thomistic critique of Balthasar and those in the ressourcement camp actually is.  

In his marvelous new book, “Christ the Logos of Creation”, John Betz has a chapter entitled, “The Humility of God: On a Disputed Question in Trinitarian Theology”. *[A big shout out to Dr. Margaret Turek for drawing my attention to this book and this chapter]*   In this chapter Betz unpacks precisely the theological problematic I am addressing here.  He outlines the Thomistic critique of Balthasar with regard to the latter’s assertion that there can be something analogous within God to what we call “humility”.  Betz is worth quoting at length on this point and I cannot improve upon his brilliance in what follows:

"To be sure, there is none before whom God must be humble, and so, philosophically speaking, there is no need for it. But, of course, neither is there any philosophical necessity for love, and by the same logic one could say it is proper for creatures to love God but not for God to love creatures – they are, after all, less loveable than himself.  Indeed, from an Aristotelian standpoint, to love them would be beneath him.  But obviously revelation teaches us differently, raising the question of whether here too, but now with respect to the question of humility, the God of the philosophers stands in need of theological revision according to the principles of Thomism itself, to wit, that faith does not destroy but presupposes and perfects reason.

With all due respect to Thomas, there are therefore good reasons to find his treatment of divine humility – more precisely, his rejection of the notion – wanting, chiefly owing to the fact that it does not do justice to revelation.  For God’s willingly creating a world that would largely ignore and reject him and, in the person of the Son, willingly assume a human nature that would open him to wounds of insult, abuse, injury and even death, are plainly functions of divine humility. … After all, what is so striking about the gospel is not that a human being should humbly suffer the lot of human beings .. but that God, in the hypostasis of the Son, would so humble himself so suffer with us and on our behalf.  But if God has shown such humility toward us, how can we then say that such humility is merely a function of the economy and not a characteristic of God himself? How can we say that God is love and not see that love is necessarily humble?" (pp. 387-88)

And yet more from Betz worthy of long citation to conclude this section:

"Thus far however, the Thomists have not been persuaded. On the contrary, they see humility as a contingency of salvation and a quality that God would not otherwise possess.  But this in turn, raises a number of serious problems because it amounts to saying that God is only apparently humble and that in himself he is not.  And then, before you know it, we have severed the bond between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and revelation no longer means revelation.  But could this be? Must we not, rather, following Balthasar, posit something in the immanent Trinity, something like the humility we see in Christ, that is the transcendental condition for the possibility of so dramatic a revelation? Can we really say that Christ’s humility reveals nothing about his divinity – about God in himself? Could humility be so prized by the saints and so characteristic of the Mother of God, her virtue par excellence, as it were, if it were not reflective of the nature of her Son, the nature of God himself, who says, “Learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matt 11:29)? Is her glory, like that of her Son, not bound up precisely with her humility? Sure, it is.  But if it is, then, once again we have reason to find Thomas’s answer to this question wanting – not to mention other reasons we might have to be troubled by it.” (389)

To be sure, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom … and there can be no piety in the absence of reverence.  But neither can there be true piety where there is sheer terror, and a God without humility is nothing short of terrifying.  Worse, it suggests pride.  In their concern to defend divinity impassibility, the Thomists charge Balthasar with introducing suffering into the divine nature – though this suffering for Balthasar is nothing other than the voluntary suffering of love, which knows no bounds, descending even to hell, if need be, in order to seek and to save that which is lost.  But have the Thomists, inasmuch as they follow Thomas in this particular point, not done something worse? Have they not, by stripping God of humility, unwittingly stripped him of (the peculiar form of) his glory? For that matter, in refusing to admit humility, have they not unwittingly introduced pride into the divine nature, than which nothing more offensive to piety can be conceived? Certainly, one can err by forgetting that God is the omnipotent sovereign and subject to none; but one can also err by forgetting that God is love and that it is the nature of love to be humble." (Footnote 74, 389-90)

This might all seem like a lot of theological hair splitting, but it isn't. There is a critical truth at stake here. And it is the truth that the economic trinity reveals to us the immanent trinity. Along these lines, St. Paul said that his preaching was all about the crucified Christ. In other words, his preaching was about kenosis and the Divine humility, the ultimate expression of which is the Cross. Balthasar and others like him in the ressourcement school are therefore utterly correct to point to kenosis and cruciformity in the economy of salvation as showing us what God is actually like. And this has consequnces -- enormous consequences -- for how we approach ecclesial "structures" as well as how we judge the truth of doctrine. And it is to those questions to which we will proceed in a later part of this series.

Part four of this series will focus on what the significance of all of this is for the current life of the Church. This will involve a discussion of the dominant ethos of modern culture and how it influences the Church in her various "factions". It will be a wild ride of analysis so stay tuned ....

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Dorothy Day, pray for us