The Beauty of Christian Vocation

Some Thoughts on Priesthood and Revelation

This week, Fr. Justin and I are away for the bi-annual Archdiocesan Priest Convocation. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d offer some thoughts on beauty, priesthood, and revelation. In the essay that follows, we’re working within the world of Hans Urs von Balthasar . . . a surprise to no one, I’m sure. For anyone who took the Catholic 301 course in September, I hope you find the following thoughts a helpful articulation of much of what we spent four weeks studying. And if this is your first encounter with the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, please consider going back to listen to September’s podcast recordings.

The Sacrifices of Abel and Melchizedech 6th cent. mosaic

I.

What is the life of a priest supposed to look like?

The vision of the Christian life that Hans Urs von Balthasar develops in his theological project bears directly on the office of the priesthood. The use of the term “vision” is deliberate: the most singular feature of von Balthasar’s theology is his effort to integrate a theory of aesthetics into a proper understanding of the Christian life. What emerges from these efforts is a vision of the moral life that can also be described as beautiful. The Christian life—insofar as it is grounded in the reality of the love of the Father revealed through the Son and in the unity of the Holy Spirit—is rooted in a relationship with God that binds together the disparate parts of a person’s life into a unity; a unity marked by balance and harmony.

We can say more. The Christian life is also a reality that can be observed, seen, beheld: the Christian life reveals to the world that it is the love of God that serves as the principle of unity that holds the many parts of a human life together. As a moral reality, the Christian life is anchored in the love of God; but as an aesthetic reality, the Christian life reveals the love of God to the world through an aesthetic manifestation of God’s glory. For von Balthasar, genuine beauty is a movement of expression from an interior, concealed principle to an exterior, revealed reality. The more deeply concealed the interior principle that is revealed, the more beautiful is the object that is seen or beheld. The life of Christ—on this model of the aesthetic—is profoundly beautiful because Christ is the fullest revelation of a concealed and hidden God. And the most beautiful moment of the life of Christ—on this model of the aesthetic—is the Cross. There on the Cross is the love of an unseen God most perfectly revealed to the world.

This blend of the aesthetic and moral dimensions of the Christian life take on a special significance in the office of the priesthood. As a moral reality, von Balthasar says that the office of the priesthood reaches the fullness of its potential to the extent to which its members allow the model of Christ’s Incarnate life to function as the principle of unity that gives shape to their lives. As an aesthetic reality, von Balthasar maintains that the office of the priesthood reaches the fullness of its potential to the extent to which Christ—and not the person of the priest himself—is manifested in and through the life of the priest. The life of a priest, in other words, is something that might be called both genuinely good and genuinely beautiful: through the priesthood a man is capable of uniting himself to Christ in a way that reveals Christ’s love to greater world.

One way to make better sense of these moral and aesthetic dimensions of the priestly office is through an examination of the relation between the evangelical counsels and the office of the priesthood. Von Balthasar believes that the distinction between the life of the counsels and the life of the priesthood shows us that there are two movements through which a person might commit himself to God. The first movement—that of the evangelical counsels—is marked by an upward ascent by which a person commits themselves to vows which unite someone all the more deeply to the love of God. The second movement — that of the office of the priesthood — is marked by a downward act of self-abnegation through which a man allows Christ to work through his life as an offered sacrifice.

In both cases, it is God who functions as the principle of unity in the life of the Christian, and the term that von Balthasar uses to describe a principle of unity is “form”: a form is the principle of unity that binds together the disparate elements of a person’s life in a way that is capable of outward observation; a form reveals itself through a person who lives a certain kind of life. The language of “form” can help us to understand the priesthood. For von Balthasar, there are three kinds of form that distinguish the Christian life: anthropological form, evangelical form, and missionary form. What follows is an attempt to summarize von Balthasar’s understanding of form in the Christian life so that we can better understand the priesthood. The language of form will help us to make sense of how the evangelical counsels and the office of the priesthood belong to one another. And understood in concert—as three ways of making sense of a single Christian life—these three forms reveal the beauty and the goodness of the office of the priesthood.

II.

Important to any understanding of von Balthasar’s theological project is his commitment to a particular metaphysical vision of the relation between God and the world. As a young Jesuit in Pullach, Germany in the 1930s, von Balthasar became a student of the Polish metaphysician Erich Przywara, S.J.¹ In the 1930s, Przywara was engaged in a project to resurrect a proper understanding of the importance and of the doctrine of analogy in Roman Catholic theology. Although it is impossible to present an adequate synopsis of Przywara’s project in this essay, the thrust of his theological conviction can be summarized as follows: because God exists and the world exists, and because God has an essence and everything in the world has an essence (essence: a way of being), a good Roman Catholic metaphysics builds on the truth that the world bears a certain likeness to God. The world and God have something in common. But the relation between God and the world is no more than a likeness. For God, essence is existence; the essence of God is to exist; God exists by way of necessity. But the world and its essences do not need to exist; the world is contingent. Unlike God, the unity between essence and existence in the world is not perfect—it is a unity-in-tension. What this means is that despite the genuine likeness that obtains between God and the world, it is more accurate to claim that there is an ever greater distance between God and the world. Przywara draws from the theology of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council to present an image of the Christian life best characterized as a dynamic movement and rhythm: it is precisely when a Christian recognizes the great distance that exists between him- or herself and God that he or she draws nearest to God. The doctrine of analogy for Przywara becomes something of a paradox: the Christian is never nearer to God—God is never more immanent to the life of a Christian—than when the utter transcendence of God is grasped by the believer. The Christian life, thinks Przywara, is uniquely marked by this rhythm between immanence and transcendence; the Christian life, thinks Przywara, is best characterized as a striving toward God that requires a respect of the distance that exists between creature and Creator. 

Von Balthasar was greatly influenced by the thinking of his Jesuit teacher, a fact that reveals itself in the development of the first kind of form that von Balthasar identifies as central to the Christian life: anthropological form. As von Balthasar conceives of human nature, an accurate anthropology follows from good metaphysics. Von Balthasar explains that man’s first state—the original point of departure for understanding human nature—is to be at a twofold remove—at a remove from God and from nothingness. The human person is a contingent being; the human person does not exist by virtue of any necessity whatsoever, but only by the grace of God. And yet, because the human person does exist, he or she enjoys a certain likeness to the divine nature. Von Balthasar employs the language of archetype and image to draw out the distinctions that he believes important: the human being is an image of the divine archetype, and this is a fact that must be taken seriously. But at the same time, the Christian is forewarned that it is impossible to assume that any kind of identity exists between the human being as an image of God and the divine archetype upon which the human being is fashioned and created as an image. As von Balthasar understands the relationship between human beings and their Creator, the grace by which the human being is called into existence depends entirely upon the fact that human beings need not exist at all: the grace of likeness that obtains between human beings and their Creator depends upon a genuine distance between the two.

What follows from von Balthasar’s metaphysical and anthropological commitments is a vision of the Christian life that demands of the Christian a metaphysical appreciation for the nature of reality at its foundation. The Christian is called to love, says von Balthasar, but that love:

must have the inner form of dependence and submission: it must be identical with the glorification of the Eternal Archetype by means of reverential service . . . it means emphasizing the distance between creature and Creator so that, from the perspective of this distance, the unmistakable and unique character of the archetype will become ever more apparent.² 

From the distance that exists between creature and Creator, the distinctive form of Christian love emerges: Christian love is characterized by servile obedience. That obedience—Christian love understood as service—is first owed to God. When the Christian gives himself over to God in the service of love, he or she enters into the unique rhythm and striving that is the mark of the Christian life. Von Balthasar remarks that the Christian life consists of the effort to develop the self into an ever greater likeness of the Archetype to which the self is but an image. But the Christian is only able to engage in such a project through a recognition of the distance that obtains between creature and Creator; a distance that demands a life of humble service on the part of the person who desires to conform themselves ever more closely to God. 

Von Balthasar’s metaphysical commitments lead to the identification of the first type of form that marks the Christian life: anthropological form. The very nature of the human person is to exist at a distance from God and yet to be made in the image of God. An image that might develop into a greater likeness through a love that is characterized by service and obedience.

III.

The obedience that characterizes the anthropological form of the Christian life ought not to be understood as one of divine command. Von Balthasar does not mean to imply that the life of Christian obedience consists of a “simple submission to an external authority.”³ Rather, the life of Christian obedience that characterizes anthropological form is an invitation to a way of life to which the Christian must freely consent. Paradoxically, the Christian must choose in freedom the life of obedience and service. And when the love of God serves as the principle of unity which binds together the disparate elements of a person’s life into a whole, the service and obedience that defines that love is freely given. The reason that the Christian life of service can be conceived as something wholly consonant with human freedom follows from the fact that the reality of Christian service cannot be separated from the divine economy of salvation. The obedience that a Christian gives to God is a response to an invitation: the invitation of a God who has entered into history and offered to humanity the opportunity to share a common life together.

The common life to which the faithful are invited to share is marked by the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As von Balthasar explains, the life of the counsels “is not a function; it is an imitation of Christ in the form of life proper to the vows.”⁴ The Christian who embraces the life of the counsels embraces the life of Christ himself; to live the counsels is to live as Christ lived. What follows from this invitation to share in the Incarnate life of Christ is not only a means of avoiding the tension that might exist between obedience and freedom, but also a form of life that gives shape to the way in which a Christian engages the world. The life of the evangelical counsels—evangelical form—builds upon anthropological form. Whereas anthropological form demands that a Christian give his life over in service and obedience to God, evangelical form assumes more explicitly the form of an answer one is privileged to make to God; to the invitation to share in a common life. If anthropological form disposes a person to serve God, then evangelical form is one possible answer to the call of God to those who would sell what they have and follow him.

But the singular brilliance of von Balthasar is to avoid too strict of a limitation upon whom is called by Christ to live the evangelical counsels. As Joseph Ratzinger explains:

There is, in the end, [for von Balthasar] only a single Christian form, which as such is beyond the distinction of laity and clergy. Every Christian is summoned to ‘eschatological existence,’ and Christianity as a whole is ordered to the new aeon. Balthasar rightly calls attention to the reason that the state of the counsels is not an eighth sacrament: it is the entrance into the being of the Church as such, which is the fundamental sacrament prior to all the individual sacraments.⁵

As von Balthasar understands the life of the counsels, these might exist in the life of a Christian in either an explicit or implicit form. As an explicit form, a Christian receives the call of Christ to enter into religious life and professes the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As an implicit form, a Christian embraces poverty, chastity, and obedience as interior structures of the will which give form and shape to the whole of their lives; through an implicit living of the counsels, a Christian shares in the common life of the Incarnate Christ. Ratzinger agrees with von Balthasar on the important fact that the life of the counsels—whether manifest in an implicit or explicit form—serve as a gateway to the other sacraments of the Church. 

This understanding of the life of the counsels develops from von Balthasar’s reading of the New Testament: the first way of life to which believers are called is that of the counsels.⁶ Only after Christ has invited those who believe in him to share in his life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, does he make distinctions between various other states of the Christian life. And this is as true of Christ and his priesthood as it is for any believer who considers himself called to the priestly office. Von Balthasar explains that, “poverty, chastity, and obedience are the inner modalities of the Son’s perfect love, which becomes, through them, a sacrificial offering,” and so, “these modalities cannot fail to signify the establishment of his priesthood.”⁷ Christ’s priesthood is one marked by sacrifice and self-offering, and so to the extent that Christ is a priest, his priesthood follows naturally from the life of the counsels through which he first gives himself over in service to his Father. In the life of Christ, the distinct ministries that will come to characterize the Christian life—priesthood, marriage, an explicit professing of the counsels—are all subsequent to a prior interior embrace of the life of the counsels. This reality is as true of the Incarnate Christ as it is for any of those whom he calls to share in his common life. 

There is a logic to the relation between the priesthood and the counsels: those called to the office of the priesthood are also called to live out the evangelical form of life. Von Balthasar describes the life of the counsels as the “fundamental basis of all priestly spirituality.”⁸ Importantly, von Balthasar believes that sequence matters: the priestly office must flow naturally from a prior embrace of the life of the counsels, those counsels which then give life to and animate the office through which a man most concretely follows the model of the life of Christ. “The counsels are not only one state of life, they are in some sense the inner meaning of the whole Christian life made explicit . . . each state of life, and indeed the entire moral life, must ultimately look to them to see its ‘inner form’ even while each retains its integrity as such.”⁹ And so, a clean division cannot be made between the life of the counsels and the office of the priesthood. Such a division would require a division be made between parts or aspects of the life of Christ. A man who is called to be a priest is called not to embrace some part of the life of Christ, but rather to embrace the fullness of the life which was lived by the Incarnate Christ himself. 

IV.

Two kinds of form—let’s call them two principles of unity—have so far been drawn out from the theological project of Hans Urs von Balthasar: anthropological form and evangelical form. Through an embrace of anthropological form, the Christian gives him- or herself over in service and obedience to the love of God. Anthropological form prepares a person to hear the call of God to a particular state of life. Whether that particular call leads a Christian to an explicit professing of the evangelical counsels, or to marriage, or to the priesthood, it is nonetheless required that all Christians embrace evangelical form as an interior modality; all Christians are called to share in this aspect of the common life of Christ. For the priest, this is especially true: just as Christ’s priesthood followed naturally from the sacrifice that was his living of the counsels, so the priesthood of any man who assumes the office must follow from an interior and implicit living out of the counsels. 

And so a final type of form, essential for understanding of von Balthasar’s theology of the priesthood, moves to the foreground of the moral life: missionary form. Von Balthasar describes missionary form as an “individual’s personal state of life — the unique state that determines his existence, that has been assigned to him by God, and that gives his life its true content, its raison d’etre. This state is determined by the grace of personal mission.”¹⁰ Though all Christians are called to give themselves over in service and obedience to God, and though all Christians are called to embrace the life of the counsels in some analogous way, it is at the level of missionary form that the relationship between a Christian and God becomes particular and personal. Here the concept of vocation enters into the theological lexicon of von Balthasar.

But it is also here that the concept of form of life in the theology of von Balthasar assumes its aesthetic dimension. It is at the level of missionary form that a particular Christian way of life most directly and concretely reveals the love of God as the principle of unity that gives shape to the whole of a person’s life. This is especially the case with the priesthood, which is a “function and an office,” in which, “the official, and, therefore, impersonal mark of the minister must always be present . . . so that the personality of Christ may shine through with greater clarity.”¹¹ The special character of the priestly office is that it entails the elimination of personality for the sake of better serving as an instrument—as a functionary—through which Christ might work in the world. Whereas the explicit profession of the life of the counsels binds a person’s personality to vows which lead the person whole and entire toward a higher state of perfection, consecration to the priesthood entails the diminution of personality as a further means of making oneself into an ever greater sacrificial offering. In the “self-surrender” of the priesthood, “the priest ‘loses his soul’—his subjectivity—in the act of obedience that is an essential part of every special election and mission.”¹²

We need to get clear on Von Balthasar’s use of the term “personality.” He does not mean that a priest is called to live as some kind of a Christ-serving automaton, devoid of personality traits, passions, thoughts, and the rest of what constitutes a robust human life. In other places, von Balthasar writes beautifully on the interplay of divine and human freedom—the moment in which two wills become united and a wholly original Christian life becomes a distinct brush mark upon a divine tapestry. And a wholly original Christian life is not possible for a Christ-serving automaton. So, what does von Balthasar mean? Only that a priest is called to identify most strongly with the office of the priesthood: his personality traits, passions, thoughts, and the rest of what constitutes a robust human life must flow through the office itself. The most important truth about a priest is that he is a priest, and to the extent that a priest embraces his office, the whole of his life becomes expressive of Christ. The personality of Christ is revealed through the life of a priest.

The distinction between the life of the counsels and the office of the priesthood thus becomes all the more clear: whereas the life of the counsels requires an active, subjective engagement on the part of the person who professes them, the office of the priesthood assumes a more objective measure. God is at work in the priest regardless of the man’s subjective participation. For both the life of the counsels and the office of the priesthood, a genuine tension exists between the mission to which the person is called and the identity which conforms to that mission to a greater or lesser extent. But with the office of the priesthood missionary form endures regardless of the subjective commitment of the man consecrated.

What von Balthasar accomplishes with this theological project is the construction of a vision of the Christian life that is established upon firm metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic grounds. His system describes a special theology of the priesthood because—to the extent that a Christian life is beautiful through its revelation of God in its words and actions—the office of the priesthood is revelatory in its very nature. The priest is called to reveal Christ to the world not through any particular features of his own personality, but rather through the abnegation of his personality for the sake of becoming a better instrument through which Christ might work. But this does not entail that a priest—by virtue of his missionary form of life—is no longer called to live by the norms of anthropological and evangelical form. The priest must remain resolute in his commitment to a life of service to God, a kind of service that takes on a special form in the life of the counsels. The priest who wishes to most successfully reveal Christ to the world will remember the grace of God when he considers his metaphysical origins, and he will remember Christ’s poverty, chastity, and obedience when he considers the truth of the Gospel. Only a priest who commits himself to the fullness of the Christian form of life—anthropological, evangelical, and missionary—will render himself a proper instrument for the revelation of Christ’s mission to the world.

1. Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 2005), pg. 17.

2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 68.

3. Christopher Steck, The Ethical Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2001), p. 64.

4. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 269.

5. Joseph Ratzinger, “Christian Universalism: One Two Collections of Papers by Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Communio: International Catholic Review, vol. 22 (Fall, 1995), p. 551.

6. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Priestly Spirituality (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), p. 26.

7. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 252.

8. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Priestly Spirituality, p. 27.

9. David S. Crawford, “Love, Action, and Vows as ‘Inner Form’ of the Moral Life,” in Communio: International Catholic Review, vol. 32 (Summer, 2005), p. 295.

10. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 72.

11. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 268.

12. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, p. 268.