The Dialectical God - Part Four

We Must Halt the Ongoing Operation That Aims to Corrupt the Divine and Justify Humanity

A Voluntarist Conception of God

This conception of God, which cannot exist without determining itself as the world, is connected with the voluntaristic conception of God, according to which God is conceived as a self-realizing will. This concept belongs to Schelling, for whom God exists not because He cannot not exist, but because He willed to exist. God exists not by the necessity of His essence, but as the effect of His will, the pure act of His freedom. Being is the same as being willing. Similarly, for Luther, a follower of Ockham's voluntarism, God is good and just simply because He wills it.

Good actions and sin are not such because they are unreasonable and based on false good, but simply because God wills them so. If He had willed it, He could have established that adultery, theft, murder, or lying were good actions. This is why proponents of moral relativism (or hypermerciful absolutists) and gender ideology say that sodomy is not against nature and not a sin, because God wills differently for those who practice it.

(Translator's Note: The repeatedly used Italian term “buonisti” or “volontaristi” has been rendered as “hypermerciful absolutists” in this translation to reflect their theological focus on exaggerated mercy. Another possible term, “grace-extremists,” could also be used, depending on context.)

For voluntarists and proponents of moral relativism, divine will does not refer to a law of nature established by God as an immutable and universal rule of conduct. It does not concern an intelligible and justifiable good, even if it is God Himself, but rather concerns His own will.

For them, God does not will something because it is good, a good that we can also know. Rather, goodness is good only insofar as it is something that God wills. He determines what is good and evil, rewards and punishes not according to a criterion known to us, based on a truth and falsehood verifiable by us, but according to His pure arbitrariness, based on His inscrutable will.

Accordingly, they argue that God not only refrains from revealing why He predestines one thing and not another—something beyond our comprehension—but also does not inform each of us of the reasons for His judgment. As a result, we cannot verify His loyalty and faithfulness to agreements or fully understand the justice of His judgment. This leaves us unable to know why He rewards one action and punishes another. Instead, we will know this at the Last Judgment, thus eternally praising His justice and mercy.

On the other hand, voluntarists assert that we are also ignorant of this, so in case of disappointment with expectations, we are not permitted to protest. In this way, they suggest that we can expect bitter surprises from Him that show Him as erratic, inconsistent, unreliable, and unfaithful. Yet these are blasphemies that demonstrate the impiety of voluntarist theology, which, under the pretext of faith and mystery, offends reason and portrays God as a monster.

According to them, we cannot verify the reasonableness of implementing divine justice in individual cases because we do not know the criterion. If He sends us to hell, we do not understand why. However, if He does so, He is just, even if it does not appear so to us. Yet this is false because God is a faithful God who keeps His agreements, as narrated in the Gospel parables that speak of the master who pays workers according to the agreed-upon wage or assigns the sinner a just punishment.

In this regard, it is important to note the confusion that Hegel creates between logical opposition and real opposition (emphasis by the editor). Why does Hegel not accept the concept of pure being, pure truth, pure good, or pure life, and instead always pair these values with their opposites or counterpoints? Why does he need to negate what he affirms? Because he confuses these values in reality with these values as conceptualized.

While good can exist independently of evil in reality, good and evil are interdependent concepts in thought. Hence, confusing logic with reality leads to the simultaneous affirmation of absolute good (as a real entity) and the notion that no good exists without evil (as a conceptual pair).

Even Saint Thomas notes that the science of opposites is the same: medical science knows health and pathology, normality and abnormality, and moral science knows virtues and vices. In the reality of things, however, there can exist a being free from non-being, a truth untainted by falsehood, a good unblemished by evil, and an immortal life.

The Agnostic Outcome of Kant's Transcendental Dialectic

Kant's critique of reason may appear completely unrelated to theological issues if God is or is not the principle of evil. In a very simplistic manner typical of Enlightenment rationalism, Kant limits himself to noting that every human is a sinner, thus attributing the origin of sin solely to humans [1].

However, since humans are endowed with reason and free will, by putting into practice the dictates of reason with their goodwill, they can triumph over evil within themselves. That's all there is to it.

On the other hand, according to Kant, the transcendental dialectic causes speculative reason to deceive itself into attempting to prove a posteriori or through causality the existence of God, because reason, starting from sensory experience, fails to transcend phenomena to elevate itself to the supersensible and the world of spirit. Despite this, Kant by no means denied the existence and dignity of spirit and personhood, as evidenced by his interest in spiritual values: self-awareness, reason, intellect, truth, the ideal, thought, science, will, freedom, moral law, virtue, and philosophy.

What is surprising and puzzling is how Kant could have his moral certainties without the support of speculative reason, to the extent that one wonders whether Kant's moral certainties, presented in the form of absolute obligatoriness, universality, unconditionality, and necessity—thus eternal and immutable, devoid of any external or transcendent reason—are truly well-founded and objective certainties or rather the effect of inflexible subjective voluntarism.

On the other hand, Kant's God, postulated by practical reason, is not a real and personal God, creator of humanity, a God who speaks to humanity in Christ revealing the mystery of His being and His salvific will over humanity and giving the means of grace, but rather an entity of reason, the supreme idea of reason, which unifies the entire system of rational ideas, certainly a supreme and spiritual entity, but one that does not transcend reason and therefore is not at all the creative cause as befits the true God.

In this way, in Kant, reason takes the place of God as the rationale for human existence and the regulator of human action. Hence the complete disinterest and even disdain, typical of Masonic Enlightenment, for the contents of the Christian faith (Translator’s bold), considered childish mythology, ridiculous stories, and at most symbols of the truth of reason and philosophy.

But if speculative reason, in its attempt to prove the existence of God, becomes, for Kant, ensnared in an irresolvable dialectic, how can one fail to recognize in the God of dialectic a sophistical, Kabbalistic, or Boehmian God of yes and no? Of good and evil? And what is this God if not the God of Kabbalah? However, this God can also be derived from Greek sophistry and skepticism, which Kant likely had in mind.

Thus, the Kabbalist Hegel also takes Kant into account. Hegelian dialectic is a sublimation and sacralization of the transcendental dialectic Kant speaks of concerning the problem of the existence of God. Hegel transforms dialectic into science, indeed placing dialectic in God Himself, whereas Kant continued to understand dialectic in its Aristotelian sense as the opposition of contrary opinions without the possibility of deciding between yes and no.

In Kantian eschatology, there is still an allowance for a separation between the just and the unjust in the afterlife. Instead, Hegel, by his pantheism of God all in all or the One-All God, the God-world, author of both good and evil, extends to all humanity and to God Himself the condition of just and sinner which Luther reserved only for believers as he conceived them. Balthasarian vision of paradise and hell within God finds its initial impulse here.

Thus, Hegel acknowledges the existence of the transcendental dialectic spoken of by Kant. However, for him, there is no need for the knowledge of pure affirmation as opposed to negation, which must overcome the oscillation between yes and no typical of dialectical reasoning. For Hegel, knowledge itself, indeed absolute science, divine science itself is dialectical, because for Hegel, yes does not exclude no, but includes it. There is no excluded third for him; even the third is included.

Truth for Hegel does not lie in affirming yes and excluding no but in the conjunction of yes with no. However, as is known, this is precisely what Christ prohibits, calling it "serving two masters". Instead, Hegel makes it the principle of science and even places it in God Himself. Therefore, according to Hegel, following the Kabbalistic principle, which then corresponds exactly to sophistry and Protagorean skepticism already refuted by Aristotle, in God there is being and nothingness, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

Therefore, for Hegel, God exists and does not exist, is conceivable and inconceivable, is good and bad, does good and does evil, is truthful and deceitful, is faithful and unfaithful, rejoices and suffers, is omnipotent and impotent, and so on. This constitutes Hegel's conception of the true Absolute, which he believes was intuitively grasped by Boehme. This is the "Hegelian totality," later referred to by Bontadini as the "Whole," drawing from Parmenides, though it's clear that Hegel's concept entails a pantheistic and nihilistic totality.

For Hegel, God is not merely self-affirmation but also self-negation and overcoming opposition to Himself. Hegel's conception of God arises from Kant's transcendental dialectic, where Kant leaves undecided whether God exists or not, as reason, facing the question of God's existence, remains trapped in a dialectic of uncertainty from which it cannot escape.

Because for Hegel, both affirmation (yes) and negation (no) are divine, God remains fundamentally the opposition between yes and no. The self-reaffirmation after self-negation or alienation does not eliminate the polarity of no, because it too is divine: it is God against God. Therefore, God's immutability must include theism and atheism, completing in pantheism an identity of God with the world.

Even Great Theologians Can Fall into Serious Errors

What happened to Von Balthasar? How did such a great theologian, sensitive to the values of holiness, charity, truth, justice, beauty, grace, glory, and mysticism, allow himself to be deceived by such serious errors in eschatology? According to Andereggen, it was due to insufficient critical vigilance towards imagination and emotion. His theodramatic aestheticism played a nasty trick on him.

Thus it happened that for him, inheriting through Hegel the murky and convoluted mysticism of Boehme, where glimpses of heavenly light blend with the horrors of anguish, everyone is forgiven and everyone is damned, everyone simultaneously enjoys the joys of paradise and suffers the pains of hell, because God Himself, in whom there is both good and evil, wills both good and evil, sin and justice, life and death, mercy and punishment.

According to Cecchetti, who follows Von Balthasar in this, the Logos of God is the cause with His will not only of every form of goodness, joy, and beauty in the universe, but also of every evil, pain, and ugliness: "The Logos-Son of God comprehends not only the beauties of the cosmic order, but also the ugliness of wickedness, pain, and death..."

Cecchetti's expressions grossly offend the infinite goodness of God. Indeed, it is utterly false that God desires wickedness. If He ordered the animal and plant nature in such a way that it involves the killing of the weak by the strong or natural selection, this in no way detracts from divine goodness if goodness means willing the order of nature. Nor does it detract from divine goodness that God punished humanity descended from Adam by subjecting it to the upheavals and calamities of nature.

It in no way detracts from divine goodness that He punishes eternally those who die in a state of mortal sin. God would be cruel if He took pleasure in these evils and desired them as such, just for the sake of causing suffering. But this is unthinkable and blasphemous even to consider.

If it is true that mercy alleviates and removes suffering, when God inflicts punishment or suffering, He does not act contrary to mercy, but exercises justice, so that if He did not induce those penal evils, He would sin against justice, which would be blasphemous even to think.

It is clear that good and evil exclude each other. However, it must be borne in mind that the evil of punishment, that is, just punishment, is a good, and it is only sin that can never prove to be a good. And for this reason, if God can operate or permit the evil of punishment, He absolutely cannot will sin or guilt.

Therefore, it is a very serious error to attribute wickedness or evil to God. The Church has also defined the thesis of predestination to hell, invented by Godescalco in the 9th century, as a horrible blasphemy[2], and it surprises and saddens greatly that Luther dared to resurrect it.

He considered himself predestined to paradise and Catholics predestined to hell. Subsequently, in the 19th century, the Lutheran Schleiermacher thought mercifully to extend predestination to paradise to all humanity and founded the flourishing current of goodism, to which Von Balthasar also adhered, albeit with a clarification that he was not strictly a proponent, as rumored, of the "empty" hell, but of its existence not outside of God, but in God, blessed and suffering, the principle of good and evil, in the line of Boehme and Hegel. Therefore, all at once are blessed and damned, righteous and sinners.

(Translator's Note: Schleiermacher’s goodism reflects a 19th-century Lutheran approach that emphasizes universal predestination to paradise, rooted in a humanistic and sentimental view of God’s mercy. This contrasts with the Catholic truth, which views goodism as overly sentimental and insufficiently grounded in the demands of divine justice, truth, and the transformative power of grace.)

Cecchetti adds: "The cruel ruthlessness of natural selection is part of God's creativity, but it does not reveal God's nature." It makes no sense to speak of ruthlessness, which is a moral category, regarding the behavior of living beings lower than humans, even though this behavior entails the killing or deficiency of the weaker. It is nonsensical to label a lion that kills a gazelle as "cruel," as if it were committing a moral fault since it is merely obeying the laws of its nature, which were placed in it by the same Creator. Therefore, it also makes no sense to deny that the lion's behavior reveals the nature of the Creator.

On the contrary, the nature of a work reveals the nature of the author who produced it. The behavior of a lion that attacks kills, and devours a gazelle is governed by very specific neurological, physiological, psychological, physical, and behavioral laws of the lion itself, laws that reveal the wisdom of the divine mind that conceived them and the divine power that created them and puts them into practice.

Hans Urs von Balthasar states in Theology of Holy Saturday:

"There is a Calvary up there, from which everything derives." He had just written that "the sacrifice of Christ began before he came into the world and his cross was that of the 'Lamb slain from the foundation of the world'" [3].

This thesis of von Balthasar is false. It is absurd to think that death can corrupt the divine nature, which is eternal life by essence. One can speak at most of the death of God in the event of the cross by the communication of idioms, referring to the sacrifice of the cross. But to speak of the death of God as God ("in heaven") and of the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" is pure absurdity and nonsense.

Cecchetti continues:

"Perhaps only mysticism can enter into the 'depth' of a cosmic redemption if, as Balthasar also noted: 'God alone goes to the very bottom of the abandonment of God, God brings about the deprivation of God, God lets God sink into dereliction.'"

Another nonsensical statement. What sense does it make for God to abandon Himself? How can God bring about His deprivation? The deprivation of God is sin: Is God the instigator of sin? Is God pushing to go against God? What is this God that splits and lets His duplicate sink into dereliction?

The Problem of Salvation: A Serious Matter, Not One of Dialectics

Now, let's be frank: aren't we fed up with these deliriums that abound today, starting from Kabbalah to Boehme and Hegel? This is an abuse of the communication of idioms. Here we are not dealing with mysticism but with blasphemous rantings that have nothing to do with true mysticism. They rather demonstrate an uncontrolled imagination, dominated by an unrestrained use of poetic creativity, leading pseudo-poetic theology to surprise the reader with disturbing and absurd images.

What may be tolerated in poetry becomes inadmissible when claimed as theology. In theology, it is not about creating or inventing original and surprising images, but about knowing and making known things not thought up or invented by us, but objective realities necessary for the good and salvation of humanity. Theology is a science, just as medical science is.

The doctor should not invent anything but simply understand the patient's condition, make a proper diagnosis, and offer appropriate treatment. A theologian who seeks to surprise and be original will never be a physician of souls, but an exhibitionist seeking spectacle, often resorting to fireworks, which can become dangerous if taken seriously due to their strangeness or enormity—perhaps charming as poetic expressions but as damaging as spiritual remedies.

What benefits, indeed, do von Balthasar's discourses offer to spiritual life? What does he hope to achieve with these affronts to the Mystery of God, with this mystification of His holy Name? What religious piety, what insight into God, what prompts of charity do these repugnant expressions evoke? What wisdom is gained from such absurdities?

Where does Scripture speak in this manner? Where do the Fathers and Saints? Where in the Magisterium? Where among Catholic mystics do we find these expressions? What kind of theology is this? It must be said that von Balthasar, in his immense production, also has excellent things. Let us focus on these, and let us close an eye with a sense of compassion for the quips of a great theologian of the last century—a master of spirituality, a man of faith, a soul of a poet, an admirer of the Saints, a reformer of the Church, and a precursor of the Second Vatican Council.

Thus, we must say that there is not only beauty but also horror; not only quod visum placet (what pleases the sight) but also quod visui repugnat (what is repulsive to the sight). There is not only glory but also ignominy. There is not only order, harmony, proportion, the well-formed, moderate, the balanced, but also disorder, disharmony, disproportion, deformity, excess, and imbalance. And these two things cannot coexist. Christ came to bring peace but also to bring a sword. What is separate must be separated, and what is united must be united. To unite the separate and separate the united is not the work of God but of the devil.

Let us leave earthquakes and catastrophes outside divinity. Storms are on the surface of the ocean, not at the bottom. Even if the Trinity is in trouble, who will get us out of trouble? If the Trinity is not at peace, who will give us peace? If even in God we do not find peace, where will we find it? In the pleasure of making war?

Let us not transform the Trinity into the tragedy of three ne'er-do-wells like us. Let us not expose it to ridicule. Let us maintain the sense of the sacred. Let us maintain the seriousness of holy things. Let us respect the suffering. Let us not mock them. If even the doctor is sick, who will heal the sick?

There is not only the beauty of paradise but also the horror of hell, the beauty of the angel, and the ugliness of the demon, as millennia of iconographic art from all religions teach us, though even in hell, the wisdom and mercy of God are present. Just as there is no evil without good, so even horrible things retain a glimmer of beauty.

The Mission of the Theologian

Von Balthasar is certainly a man of faith, with profound intelligence, broad vision, rich spirituality, highly cultured, and with a prodigious literary output. He follows a perfect and persevering method of work, with a generous heart, enthusiasm for Christ, a lover of the Church and the Pope, an exceptional writer, a refined aesthete, and a soul of both poet and mystic.

However, he has an approach to theology not based on knowledge but on feeling, not on analectic but on dialectics, not on the univocal but on the equivocal, not on coherence but on surprise—qualities that enrich works of art but damage the interest and respect for truth in theology. The pulchrum perfects the verum but cannot contradict it.

(Translator's Note: The term 'analectic' refers to a method of reasoning rooted in Aristotelian thought, which emphasizes objective, systematic analysis, aiming for clarity and precision. In contrast to dialectical reasoning, which seeks synthesis through the interaction of opposing ideas, the analectic method remains focused on logical coherence, univocity, and a scientific, non-sentimental approach to theological concepts.)

The glory of which St. John speaks is not the paradoxical sparkle of poetic inspiration but the diamond-like, luminous, and mysterious truth of the Logos. This is the fundamental flaw in Von Balthasar's theology.

The duty of the theologian is not to create but to investigate; not to invent but to discover; not to surprise but to illuminate; not rhetoric but reasoning; not paradox but coherence; not obscurity but clarification; not suggestion but explanation; not self-display but service; not to distress but to console; not to fascinate but to empower; not to seek admiration but to lead to admiration. (bold added by the translator)

If anything, creativity and inventiveness should be employed in language or expression to make the contents being transmitted or taught attractive and understandable, but not in the contents themselves, which are what they are and cannot be changed or created by us without thereby causing harm to those who listen.

No one denies that the theologian can use images, symbols, comparisons, allegories, similitudes, analogies, parables, myths, stories, metaphors, synecdoche, and oxymorons. But all of this must serve to elevate thought and affection from the sensible to the intelligible, from the concrete to the abstract, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the material to the spiritual, from the visible to the invisible, from earth to heaven, from the natural to the supernatural, from man to God.

The theologian must indeed evoke taste but must evoke taste for what he has shown. He must indeed inspire enthusiasm, but for what he has demonstrated to be true. He must indeed inspire love, but for what he has demonstrated to be good. He must not rely on sympathy but on reason. He must be credible more than admirable. He must shake, certainly, but shake the conscience more than emotions.

The theologian can also be a mystic, a poet, or a writer, but if he stops being a theologian, he has already failed in his duty. Instead, he should strive to become holy; otherwise, he risks not being a good theologian.

His tool is not fantasy but intellect. His method is not to impress but to reason; not to seduce but to lead; his aim is not to stir emotions but to enlighten.

He must not confuse faith with experience. He must not confuse reason with sentiment, knowledge with poetry, or mythology with theology. His duty is not the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, but to reveal the beauty of truth and goodness.

Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP

Fontanellato, February 22, 2024

Source:

https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/il-dio-dialettico-occorre-bloccare_50.html

Notes

[1] La religione entro i limiti della sola ragione (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone), Laterza Publishers, Bari 1985.

[2] At the Council of Quierzy in 853 (Denz. 621).

[3] Quoted by Andereggen in Inferno e dintorni, op. cit.