The Fool and Hans Urs von Balthasar
A Story About Ambiguity
It was a mistake, says Hans Urs von Balthasar, to think of saints as heroes. Those kinds of stories (Balthasar means Western heroic epics) were, in some sense, the kind available to the early church and to the medieval church, at least in terms of Hellenistic story conventions and, later, Germanic ones. But using these conventions to describe saints produces a problem for Christians and for the Christian notion of sanctity. “The heart of sanctity,” Balthasar says, “[which is] abandonment in transcendence to the open will of God, cannot be put into epic or dramatic form; only the indirect, accidental effects—miracles, heroic achievements, strange behavior—offered narrative material capable of gripping a reader.” Thus the saint becomes a hero: exciting and strange and even intimidating, fearsome in their loveliness. Their sanctity is confirmed, not by its interior core in a human heart given over to God, but by amazing external signs.
It is no one’s fault to want a good story. It is not bad to find exciting stories exciting, nor to want a story to hold our attention by being available, somehow, to give ourselves to it. Exciting deeds and events might be cheating on that account, but they are a good cheat. Being excited is exciting.
But Balthasar points out a tension between hero stories in particular and the secret work of God. Miracles and heroic acts are very exciting, but they are not the content of sanctification. They are a sign of sanctity. And not even the main sign. Sanctification is a humbler, more invisible reality, whose primary fruit is the willingness to do the good and actually doing it. But no one wants great scenes of saints bringing some food to a neighbor’s house, or talking with a stranger they never meet again. No one wants a movie where the first hour is the saint on the phone in complete silence, sitting with a distressed friend breathing on the other line.
This literary tension indicates a much larger ambiguity, which is the general difficulty of discerning “where” God is in human events and in human beings. In Christianity, after all, God is everywhere, and for God all things are possible (Mt 19:26). And we know, in faith, that God is up to something good. Indeed, the whole world and everything in it is an existent reality through which God brings about the possible. Georges Bernanos’s Satan in Under the Sun of Satan snarls that even he is an instrument of the divine will. And if even Satan is on the table to serve God despite hating God, truly everything is on the table.
Christianity roots itself in a basic wonder that the world exists at all. Because the sheer fact of existence is an object of reflection, the Christian horizon tilts toward a certain maximality. But it is a very open maximality rather than a completely determined one. Anything that exists is to be valued, and more, valued through amazement. Sandro Botticelli’s Saint Francis of Assisi stands before creation with open arms, and creation dwarfs the saint on the canvas.
Our cosmic point of view makes Christianity complicated as much as it makes Christianity interesting. The complication-interest is that everything is theophany. Everything, everything. Nothing does not count. “Lord, if you are not here, where shall I seek you, being absent?” writes Saint Anselm. “But if you are everywhere, why do I not see you present? Truly you dwell in unapproachable light. But where is unapproachable light, or how shall I come to it? Or who shall lead me to that light and into it, that I may see you in it? Again, by what marks, under what form, shall I seek you?”
Hero-Catholics
Balthasar mentions, only very briefly, that this problem of describing Christianity through hero-narratives continues into our day. It is worth pausing to consider that notion. What is our version of the hero-story?
Sometimes we treat divine revelation as the answers at the back of the book, or Catholicism itself as a version of knowing everything. It is an understandable impulse. Catholics today have to decide about being Catholic in a way they once did not need to. Cultural mediation has broken down its presumptive supports for the rise to Catholic adulthood, the Catholic Church “feels” uncertain in one way or another, and the newspaper is rife with Catholic embarrassments of small and enormous kinds. In response, we want to secure Catholicism somehow. Protect it. “Many Christians today,” Balthasar says, “feel lonely in the Church. In fact, it would not be too much to say: they feel isolated from the Church.” And so we go about securing ourselves against our loneliness and isolation.
There are many ways to do such a thing. Sometimes, it is as simple as Latin. (I love Latin.) It feels, somehow, more Catholic to pray in Latin. Other times, it takes the shape of some larger grip on authentic Catholicism over-against false Catholicism. Real morality, real doctrine, real action; best, most-real popes or cardinals or priests (like they’re mascots and not churchmen).
Catholics love beautiful things. We are proud of them, too. In fact, we are proud of most of the things we have made and kept. I never tire of telling my students, who feel very accosted to be in class with me, a theologian, “Did you know that the Catholic Church invented universities? That a Catholic priest was the first to theorize the Big Bang?” The Catholic universe of things-made and things-achieved is enormous enough that one could build a whole fort with them and have enough left over for several more forts. Which is nice. And which is a temptation, when one is warring to protect one’s identity.
Notice how the arrangement of signs threatens to topple the actually important things about Latin or doctrines or universities. Notice how it becomes a hero story: exalt the external, the strong, the amazing, the strange. But the really important thing, the reason for the whole thing, is the secret work of God. God is making our whole world holy, including us. Holiness is willingness to do the good and actually doing it; it is the world groaning for God. Catholics love symbols and signs and art; but what good are they without an interior reality, a presence and a meaning, that most of all makes them what they are? Our temptation is to let external signs do all the work of being real and convincing Catholics instead of doing it ourselves.
We want Catholicism to be strong. We want to gather the world together for the common good. We need people to vote for the right things, to believe the right things, to get to heaven. We need to make sure. We want getting there to be glorious.
But sometimes being strong conceals being scared. Trying to be different or wonderful or interesting conceals the question that God is to us. And the worst thing that strength does, however unwittingly, is believe that God cannot use our weakness. It acts as if there is an end to the “everything” that God can use for his purposes. It confesses, secretly, that God only loves a heroic Catholicism and only loves the good, real, best Catholics.
We become too strong to ever know the divine mercy that humbles all the glories and the miseries of our lives, because we have to be busy making sure that everything is wonderful enough for an advertisement. We can never be embarrassed or bad at anything or failed or confused—our art must be glorious; we must be compelling and interesting and erudite; we have to tell impossible stories about the long chain of our triumphs across all history—and without meaning to, we prevent ourselves the joy of being sorry, of learning something all over again, of discovering that we never really learned it at all.
“Lord,” Saint Anselm writes, “I acknowledge and I thank you that you have created me in this your image, in order that I may be mindful of you, may conceive of you, and love you; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing, that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except you renew it, and create it anew.”
Telling the Story Differently
If not hero-stories, then Balthasar wonders what kinds of stories would describe a Christian world that includes the saints. This is a serious question. “Literature,” Balthasar says, “is meant to reveal what the living man of flesh and blood is and the standard by which he is measured.” And so Balthasar asks himself about Christian literature, but also about the Christian measure of living people.
Of course the measure is Christ. But the more interesting question, at least for Balthasar, is how that measure appears in living flesh and blood. The saints are the concrete appearance of the Christ-measure in their own living of their lives. But the Christ-measure gets a bit confused and concealed in the actual writing of saintly literature when that literature needs them to be exciting and interesting. The saints themselves leave open what to do with the Christ-measure when the Catholic is a bad one. “The saints fly so high,” Balthasar admits, “that they discourage sinners.”
But beyond saintly legends and vitae there is real history. There is what saints are up to in history. For Balthasar, what saints are up to is fundamentally a collision between worldly power and holy vulnerability. “Dramatic situations exposing the rift between earth and heaven,” says Balthasar, “a rift which in a Christian context deepens still further the rift between ethos and power (Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse, Aristotle and Alexander, Seneca and Nero).” In other words, Balthasar is interested in the crisis that is Thomas à Becket’s brains spattered across the cathedral floor. “But,” he continues, “a rift is still not a figure.” A collision is still not a symbol of living flesh and blood. And Balthasar wants to discover a living Christ-measure for living people—a living literature for a living people. We have to include sinners.
Balthasar has reminded us of Christianity’s apocalyptic side, which reads history as a dramatic struggle between earth and heaven. It would be a simple thing to resolve the tension and kill much of the struggle by putting Christians on the side of heaven. However, Balthasar has also reminded us of Christianity’s sinful and bloody side. When he turns to saints in history, Balthasar sees saints poorly treated, not just by pagan powers, but by Christian ones. Thomas à Becket’s blood cries out from the cathedral floor, spilled there at the behest of a Christian king. “There exists in the Church,” says Balthasar, “no holiness that is excused from proving itself by means of opposition from the forces of inertia in the Church.”
Even in the old hagiographic legends, saints endure the spite of other Christians. Saint Benedict has to be twice rescued from murder at the hands of his own monks for asking them to be good. It turns out the legends say something true: that Christians are not very good at Christianity, and still less are Christians good to those who are good. Old stories endure repetition in history: Saint John of the Cross is imprisoned by his brethren in a broom closet. For asking them to be good. So it is no wonder that Balthasar finds hero stories insufficient to the task of expressing this, the actual and far stranger reality of being Christians in our own history.
We wobble between signs and their meaning. It is hard to know, in a world that promises none of us an absence of suffering, whether one’s struggles are worth anything. It is hard to know what God is up to in our own ambiguity, which stares back at us in the mirror. If we are not heroes, then what are we? What stories should we tell about to help us know ourselves a little better?
Stories are not real. “Fiction, by definition,” says Toni Morrison, “is distinct from fact.” But stories can tell us something true. Morrison continues: “The crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.” Balthasar searches for something like this. He wants stories that can, as stories, tell the truth. He wants a literary “measure” suitable for our real flesh and blood that, he says, “has an affinity with us.”
An Affinity For Fools
Balthasar chooses stories about fools. That is his measure, at least in this particular argument: Eschenbach’s Parzival, Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and more. It is a perfectly bizarre decision, at least for a theologian so deeply associated with “the beautiful” and with “theological aesthetics.”
But I am describing a moment in those theological aesthetics, which are perhaps different aesthetics than those we imagine for Balthasar on his behalf. Perhaps we give Balthasar’s notion of beauty too much dignity. Or impart to it our own feelings for beauty’s precious, ethereal reality. By contrast, Balthasar’s aesthetic includes stories with rude, scandalous humor (as Parzival, Simplicissimus, Don Quixote all do), bawdy and sacrilegious works written by literal criminals (François Villon), stories whose protagonists are different kinds of fools: Parzival, whose ignorance and constraint lose him the Grail; Simplicius, the clever but uneducated rogue; Don Quixote, the fool gone mad on stories like Parzival’s.
Simplicissimus is an outrageous book. It was written after the horror of the Thirty Years War by one of the soldiers who survived it. The war, its horrific costs (millions dead), its ridiculous parade of changing loyalties, its roaming bands of soldiers causing wanton destruction, all serve as the book’s setting. Medieval romances were still being written at the time. But, Balthasar says, “Grimmelshausen laughs in the face of this dusty old dream-world and does not even need his foolish hero to play the part of that world’s judge and gravedigger.” Simplicius himself, the ostensible hero, begins the story knowing nothing at all. He knows neither his own name nor what wolves look like, which is unfortunate for a shepherd trying to guard sheep from wolves. “So complete was my ignorance,” he says, “I was unaware of knowing nothing.” He does not even have words for the violent horrors that befall his obscure family home when soldiers descend on it and drive Simplicius into the woods for a life of absurdist adventure.
“There is,” Balthasar argues, “a gleam of unconscious, unintended sanctity about the real fool. He is the unprotected man, essentially transcendent, open to what is above him. . . . And yet the fool is not the saint.” In all of Balthasar’s chosen fool-stories, the fools are never permitted complete comfort with their own foolishness. Even Simplicius, despite being an essentially cunning character who learns quickly, has to suffer not only indignities at the hands of others, but also the strange results of his own cunning. At one point in the story, he is stuck in a town under siege, pretending that he really thinks that he has been miraculously transformed into a baby cow. “That was when I first took a look inside myself,” Simplicius explains, “trying to work out the right course for me to follow. I determined there and then to be the most complete fool I could be and to bear patiently whatever fate should throw at me in future.” Some of Balthasar’s fools are devious, others could never lie, but none of them are stupid. Most importantly, they are “shielded by the angel wings of folly” only as genuine folly.
Against the calculations of the powerful and the scheming of the devil, Balthasar sets down the puzzling figure of the fool. The fool is too simple to be studied with as one studies with a master. And the fool is far too exposed to the vicissitudes of human history for them to master any situation they may find themselves in. “He is the unprotected man.” But if there is sorrow in the fool, still there is not tragedy. Balthasar often thinks of tragedy as human eros coming up against its limit. Tragedy is another important literary measure of flesh and blood in Balthasar’s thought. But the fool is not tragic.
The fool is simultaneously pure limitation summarized in a single person and the expression of a bewildering inability to account for limits at all. And for Balthasar, the fool points at something. Something like trying to survive the contradictions of human life, and doing so cleverly yet badly. But there is something more, too. Balthasar can only name it under the rubric of Christian humor, which he calls a “light.” This light, whether it laughs or not, approaches “a bit of dogmatics neglected by Catholic theologians.” Christian humor “knows about the mysterious relationship between engraced wisdom and sinful folly and about the abyss, at once open and closed.”
There is something serious in the fool, too. There is something serious about human unseriousness and failure, about our self-contradiction and inattention and too-clever ruination, about our pathetic acts that visit one another with lonely meaninglessness. So of course Balthasar wants to discover the cross even here. “The games of the fools from Parzival to Don Quixote and Simplicius were a merry prelude to the seriousness of [Dostoyevsky’s] The Idiot,” explains Balthasar. In Dostoyevsky’s story, Balthasar is at last able to fully render the fool in terms of God’s capacity to bring supernatural meaning to everything. Everything, everything. “The point where human existence was proclaiming its senselessness and idiocy, has been taken up by the gentle divine Idiot on the cross. He silently contains everything in himself and imprints on everything his form, the form of the divine mercy, for which it is a matter of sublime indifference whether its glory is manifested invisibly in earthly beauty or in ugliness.”
A Story For Us
Balthasar has many literary interests, of course. But in an age like ours, when Christians are trying so very hard, for entirely understandable reasons, to emphasize the goodness and wonder of their cultural works, Balthasar’s turn to the fool is all the more interesting. These fool-stories are also written by Christians. But they say something that hero stories cannot. With the fool, Balthasar’s aesthetics explicitly embraces both beauty and ugliness. And as a Christian literary measure in particular, Balthasar’s fool widens the horizon of narrative art to include the sinner, who must, after all, somehow be contained in Christianity as its very reason for existing.
There are many things to like about this odd interlude in Glory of the Lord about fools, which no one cares about except to pull odd quotes from or to skip over for the sake of Hegel. Balthasar’s survey of foolish characters confronts the ambiguity and confusion of trying to navigate normal human life. It emphasizes, without despairing, how poorly that goes for us. It hopes in the persistence of God’s work in the poverty of our own; it hopes in God by embracing our real poverty in the wide light of laughter. In the figure of the fool, Balthasar questions whether all the finery of human power and wealth are what Catholics need in order to need God thoroughly and honestly. Finally, the fool asks us whether we are fools ourselves, and, like Simplicius, simply too ignorant to know it.
Balthasar’s fool is difficult to assimilate into the normal rhythms of Christian self-mythologizing. The fool is not the martyr who is proud of his suffering. The fool cannot console himself with false humility, which protects the ego by calling one’s suffering noble. We are very creative with our follies when we can stand to know about them, and we can stand them when we can still place them in a narrative that is still fundamentally for heroes.
But Balthasar’s fool is genuinely foolish. His fool is an actual failure of some kind. His fool approaches a massive feeling that resembles, on some level, shame. Something a little helpless, but not so helpless it can be shrugged off. The fool walks into an overwhelming situation that can only be laughed at to be survived. In that sense, the fool is a human sacrament of the things about us that we do not know how to metabolize.
For Balthasar, the fool has something important to say to Catholics. About us. About our art. Something left over from the more lovely-wonderful signs in our history and our being. Something overlooked by the eyes of power. Something powerfully Christian all the same, clothed in broken armor, ignorance, and folly.
In the fool, Balthasar offers to Catholics an image that allows us to confront things about ourselves we are normally loath to see. A literature that helps us to hope that God is it at work in the things about us that are not fit for polite company, for exciting narratives, for strength. Balthasar’s fool trusts that God will be there, in the next frightful leap, in the next tumble into the river on the run from one’s own deeds, in the next tilt at windmills. It might not work out as one hopes. But God will be there. God is not just in the hero stories. This is the truth that a fool, at least, really knows. For Balthasar’s fool sees “what every modern homme révolté fails to see: the realization which dawns on you only when you are at confession that the person who does not trust in God is ‘out of his senses.’”