The Dialectical God - Part One

We must resist attributing evil to God and exonerating humanity

The Good God Who Does Not Punish

A pressing question today is that of divine goodness. People ask: Given that evil is the deprivation of due good, while God, infinite goodness, only desires good, and considering that punitive evil seems to be the deprivation of due good—meaning that punishment is an evil of suffering—how can it be possible that God would want to punish someone, that is, to deprive someone of due good? Can the deprivation of a good, in the name of punitive justice, become a good, a just thing?

This is the question many people ask today, and it is the one we aim to address in this article, which focuses on the perspective of Von Balthasar. His view seems to be the outcome of a long history of human thought that can be traced back to ancient Greek sophistry and Plotinus, on the one hand, and to kabbalistic speculation centered on the explanation of the story of creation and original sin, mediated by Hegelian idealism, which influenced Von Balthasar’s thinking. We will explore these points throughout the article.

However, let us state from the outset that the thesis suggesting that God approves everything we do assumes not a God who is a judge and legislator, to whom we must answer for our actions, but a God who is merely a notary, noting our decisions. This implies transferring from God to man the power to decide what is good and evil. Therefore, this thesis is convenient for those who are intolerant of divine law and want to conceive of a "merciful" God who allows them to do whatever they want or "forgives" everything they want.

But two serious difficulties arise from this, which the forgiveness advocates cannot overcome, instead entangling themselves in blasphemy and violence. In blasphemy, because by considering themselves arbiters of good and evil and thus innocent, they conclude that the merciful God is simultaneously a cruel God who sends earthquakes and famines and an evil God who forbids man from doing his will.

The advocates of goodness—those who desire to be seen as kind-hearted, tolerant, and morally superior (Ed.)—place the cause of sin in God rather than in man, making man innocent and suffering innocently, while portraying God as the source of evil. Why? Because for the advocate of goodness, being the legislator and since sin is disobedience to the law, it is not they who sin, but God, who opposes their will. On the other hand, if sin is willing the harm of another, God, by opposing man’s will, sins against him.

Moreover, although claiming to be Christian, the advocate of goodness considers suffering to be an inexplicable, unjustifiable, unusable absurdity, an absolute evil that must be rejected entirely, not taken from the hands of a good God, because, before suffering, God is impotent and suffers, making suffering an enemy of God and man, invincible and eternal. The advocate of goodness ignores the biblical explanation of the origin of suffering and the salvific sense and value that Christ gives it.

Additionally, the advocates of goodness are driven to violence against others because, denying a God who gives everyone the same moral law but believing that everyone has the right to impose their will on others, results in a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all) and a reign of oppression and violence. Just like Nietzsche, evangelical exhortations to mercy become laughable or at least cannot have a theological justification, because the nature of God is to be both the principle of good and evil, of goodness and malice. God is not analeptic (as ChatGPT explains, 'analepsis not only serves as a literary and rhetorical device but also offers a rich ground for philosophical exploration of time, identity, memory, and narrative construction. It underscores the interconnectedness of past and present in shaping our understanding of reality and self' [Ed.]), but dialectical.

To resolve these antinomies, it is necessary to start with the correct concept of good and evil and to say that good can exist without evil because there is a substantial and subsistent good, which is God Himself, who is infinite goodness free from any evil of fault, God is just, and therefore, He inflicts punitive evil. Evil, however, is an accidental and contingent fact, that presupposes a good subject and can be removed.

Thus, we must say that evil certainly exists in general, but it belongs to the order of non-being, which does not mean that evil is nothing, quite the opposite: its effects are very real and evident; however, it is conceived as if it were being, it is a being of reason; it is simply the deprivation of due good.

We must also distinguish between two types of evil: one is the act of depriving someone of a due good, which is the evil of action, hence the evil of fault, sin; and the other type is the act of moderately depriving a wrongdoer of an undeserved good, which can be just and obligatory by a human or divine judge. This results in human civil or ecclesiastical penalties or divine punishment, temporary (in this life or purgatory) or eternal (hell).

The evil of punishment refers to the suffering of a subject deprived of the good generally or principally due to them. This is the evil of grief, pain, and hardship. Here, however, we must make a further distinction: the evil of punishment can result either from violating a subject's rights or from the just or unjust penalty imposed on a subject, respectively, either for justice or through violence.

Again, we must distinguish between just and unjust punishment depending on whether the judge respects justice. Human judges can err, but the divine judge does not.

According to Scripture, experience, and sound reason, sin results in the evil of punishment. This consequence can be natural—for example, gluttony damages health—or it can be due to the judge. This penalty may be lacking due to the neglect of human justice. Still, divine justice inevitably arrives sooner or later if the sinner does not repent in time—as seen, for example, with the rich man in the parable.

A frequent error in modern overly indulgent pastoral behavior ( excessive leniency, sentimentalism, or soft-heartedness, at the expense of truth (Ed.)) is the confusion between the evil of punishment and the evil of fault, and sin. There is an attempt to make sin disappear and replace it with suffering. Thus, wickedness is replaced by fragility. People no longer speak of guilt or sin but of mistakes or errors. Every crime is excused for psychological reasons. No one is guilty. The psychiatrist has replaced the priest and the judge. There is no longer unwillingness but only incapability, and failure. Hence the principle: Nemo ad impossibilia tenetur” (no one is bound to the impossible).

Yet, guilt is often invented where none exists or cannot be proven, such as in the case of an earthquake, climatic disorder, flood, train accident, or bridge collapse. Immediate search for culprits and endless trials with substantial profits for lawyers ensue.

All Saved, All Damned: Von Balthasar's Eschatology

This confusion between sin and suffering originates in Kabbalah, passes through Luther (justus et peccator) and Böhme, reaches Hegel, and unfortunately, as we shall see, extends to Von Balthasar. In this theory, Christ saves us not only by suffering but also by sinning; that is, He takes upon Himself not only the punishment for sin but also the guilt of sin.

Ignacio Andereggen, an Argentine theologian from the Gregorian University, and a scholar of Von Balthasar reports that for Von Balthasar, "Christ, when He descended into hell, had no more hope, because—according to Balthasar—Christ truly descended into hell, which is the only hell he considers, namely the hell of the damned"[1]. "For Balthasar, even the Son of God is in hell and all those who share in the condition of the Son of God"[2].

Von Balthasar states:

"The Son bears sinners within Himself along with the desperate impenetrability of their sins to the light of divine love. Therefore, He experiences within Himself, not their sin, but the despair of their position against God, the graceless no of divine grace against this opposition. The Son, who has entirely abandoned Himself, trusting in the Father (to the point of identification with the brothers in their perdition), must now be abandoned by the Father. He, who has allowed Himself to be completely given by the Father, must now feel that all this was 'in vain.'

Nothing ultimately resolves or settles between light and darkness; every calculation between the 'in vain' of sin and its hatred and ('in vain') the grace that gives itself away for no reason, shatters. At the end of the night (infinitely experienced), the light bursts forth in its original creative force, at the end of the absolute uselessness of forgiveness. But the night experienced as infinite was, itself, already the absolute light (which, where it meets no obstacles in the air, becomes invisible, says John of the Cross), and it does not give and forgive because something was rendered in return, but because every possible rendering was impossible. The assumption of the world's darkness into the intra-trinitarian light signifies a miracle of transfiguration, the sinful night's distance is overcome and embraced by the voluntary distance of the obedient divine yes. The wrath of God against the denial of divine love strikes a divine love, that of the Son, who exposes Himself to this wrath, disarms it, and renders it literally objectless. But in this abstract and comprehensive formulation, unresolved problems remain hidden"[3] .

According to Ignacio Andereggen [4], Von Balthasar's views can be likened to musical dissonance.

"Great music is always dramatic. It continually creates tensions and resolves them at a higher level," echoing Hegel's thoughts in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. However, dissonance is not cacophony; it supposedly originates in God and is integral to His nature, revealing a Protestant influence in Balthasar’s thinking. Balthasar suggests, "The ultimate test of rupture is the cross," where God hides Himself in opposition, as Luther posited. In the cross, there is only suffering in the permanent identity of obedience. There is no rebellion of Job; God accuses Himself of contradiction; there is no model of intra-ecclesial contestation”[5].

Balthasar's soteriology posits that hell and paradise are indissolubly united in Christ, who, in the kenosis of the cross, denied and emptied Himself to return to Himself by negating His self-negation in the resurrection, reflecting Hegel's dialectical Christology.

This is an eschatological extreme of the simul justus et peccator: the Christian is simultaneously in grace and mortal sin, forgiven and unrepentant, all good and all evil, all guilty and all innocent, all mercied and all damned. "Death and hell are transformative birth, rebirth. The fire of damnation ascends to heaven as the fire of praise.[6]"

In this way, it is not suffering that frees us from sin, it is not death that frees us from death, but it is sin itself that frees us from sin. Thus, sin itself liberates from sin, making evil necessary for the existence of good. Paradise exists because there is hell. God is good precisely because He is also bad. As Hegel would say, the positive exists because there is the negative.

One might ask about the merciful God who saves all. Indeed, He saves all, but in what sense? Does He remove sin from everyone? Not at all, because, as Luther understood, all are righteous and sinners, righteous precisely because of being sinners. Therefore, all are in paradise because all are in hell. This is Von Balthasar's thesis: in one sense, hell is empty because all are in paradise, but in another sense, all are in hell because sin, although a means of salvation, remains in hell.

Thus, all, in Christ, innocent and sinner, are at once blessed and damned. This is the real Von Balthasar, the full version of his thought, courageously revealed by Andereggen, not the softened and saccharine image circulated by the do-gooders of the kind-hearted man who excuses everyone, sending them all to paradise with a comfortable life, without sacrifices, and sparing them from hell.

Between Plotinus's Overly Benevolence and the Kabbalah's Malevolent God

It should be added that Von Balthasar was misled by Plotinus's conception of evil, which reappears in Origen, Leibniz [7], and Spinoza. According to them, evil is not the absence of due good but simply non-being, mere negation.

This means that the finiteness or limitation of a finite being is already a form of evil for him. Still, it is an inescapable natural evil unless the finite becomes infinite, as in pantheistic visions. Omnis determinatio est negatio, as Spinoza says, is the finitude of the Infinite.

Thus, the exit or emanation of beings from the One—according to Plotinus—is the formation of multiplicity, which, moving in a circular motion (stasis-exit-return), after reaching the opposite point of the circle, returns to the One. By the mere act of departing from the One, beings sin because in leaving the One, they become finite. They are saved only by returning to the One.

However, upon reuniting with the One, multiplicity vanishes into the One, and with it, evil disappears, as it is tied to multiplicity. Everything is reconstituted in the initial unity. Origen, recklessly fascinated by Plotinus, adopts this pantheistic-emanationist vision, whereas, in the Christian view, God creates a world in which He allows the existence of sin. Therefore, at the end of the world, He does not make evil disappear but subjects it by creating hell, inhabited by those who have rejected Him.

So, if in Plotinus, God corresponds to the One, and evil arises from the finiteness of multiple beings, making evil disappear when beings return to the One, for the Kabbalah, evil is not merely the limitation of being but a true deprivation of being, as in Aristotle. While Aristotle attributes evil solely to human will, the Kabbalah, acknowledging that man is created by God, traces the origin of evil back to God Himself, specifically to the so-called 'left hand.[8]' Hence the eternity of evil and the eternal punishments of the wicked, in addition to the existence of evil spiritual creatures, the demons, as in Scripture.

Evil of Guilt and Evil of Punishment

It should be added that there is a difference between the purposes of human punishments and divine punishments. The corrective and compensatory or rebalancing purpose lies in the principle that it is right for someone who has voluntarily gone a certain extent beyond the limits allowed by law to be coercively brought back by the authority to the same extent within the limits allowed by law. It is about restoring or reconstituting the broken order [9].

Divine punishments, besides these purposes, are also purificatory (purgatory), redemptive (present life), and afflictive (hell). Indeed, those who have deserved this punishment endure it forever and cannot serve to correct the sinner because they are forever fixed in their decision to reject God.

With these distinctions in mind to clarify the issue, let's now start by asking: Does God want evil? Can He want evil? Can He act wrongly? Unjustly? Can He desire sin? Suffering?

How can there be a just punishment, a deserved punishment? If evil is the absence of due good, can there possibly be a deserved and just absence of due good? How does that which is not due become due? Is it both due and not due? Where does the distinction between doing good and doing evil end? Doing good is certainly a duty. But can it be a duty to harm someone? To take away or prevent from them a due good? Isn't that injustice? How can there be a just punishment? Can there be a deserved evil?

If I cannot deprive someone of the good that rightfully belongs to them, by what right, in the name of punishment, do I take away the good that belongs to them? Is punishing not harming someone? And if sinning is harming, then isn't punishing a sin? Isn't it cruelty? So, can God, in punishing, sin? And if so, where does divine goodness fit in? Mercy is lifting from misery and relieving suffering from the sufferer. But with punishment, which inflicts pain and misery, what happens to mercy? And if God is merciful, how can He punish with hell? This is Von Balthasar's problem, which is the problem of many of us.

But let's immediately say that this is only an apparent impossibility and contradiction. This is why Christ does not deceive us and does not deceive Himself when He tells us that there are damned souls in hell. As we will see, this does not imply any contradiction in God, nor any injustice or lack of mercy, but rather illuminates both. Let's see how things unfold.

We must clarify what it means to do evil to someone. If a judge or an authorized person enforces rights, they can commit unjust or just harm. Unjust harm is violence, abuse, or the sin of injustice. Just harm is rightful punishment, a good due to the wrongdoer for their benefit, to prompt repentance. A judge who punishes the wrongdoer does not deprive them of a deserved good but of a good that, due to their crime, they no longer deserve, at least for the duration of the penalty.

Just as human justice rightfully deprives a wrongdoer temporarily of a certain good due to their crime, making them unworthy of that good, divine justice similarly and analogously deprives forever of divine good those who have decided to reject God forever. In this sense, one can say that God wills the evil of penalty. This consideration justifies the existence of the damned in hell.

This rejection by the obstinate and unrepentant sinner of divine good grants God the right to inflict eternal punishment. God then eternally distances from Himself those who have not chosen Him as their supreme eternal good. This is the infernal punishment.

We must now, with regret, highlight a well-known issue: an astute operation conducted by some theologians. Under the pretext of advancing ecumenism or exalting divine mercy and emphasizing God's will to save everyone, they try to persuade Catholics to adopt the Lutheran-Böhmian-Hegelian conception of God. This view, unfortunately, present in a great theologian like Von Balthasar, is presented as truly biblical, opposing the Aristotelian-Thomist view. The latter, according to these theologians, is tainted by the dualistic and abstract metaphysics of Greek scholasticism, which they claim has been surpassed by the new narrative and existential theology promoted by the Second Vatican Council [10].

Father Giovanni Cavalcoli

Fontanellato, February 22, 2024

Source:

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

References:

[1] Inferno vuoto? Un confronto con l’infernologia di Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in Inferno e  dintorni. È possibile un’eterna dannazione? , edited by Serafino Lanzetta, Cantagalli Editions, Florence 2010.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Theodramatics, vol. IV, Jaca Book Publisher, Milan 1982, pp. 325-326.

[4] The block quote is Anderggen's words; simple brackets are Von Balthasar's words.

[5] Hell Empty? Cit., ibid.

[6] Quoted from my book L’inferno esiste. La verità negata, Fede&Cultura Editions, Verona 2010, p. 57.

[7] Cf. Charles Journet, Il male, Borla Editions, Turin 1963, pp. 133-139.

[8] Gershom Scholem, La cabala, Mediterranee Editions, Rome 1992, pp. 128-129.

[9] See J. Maritain, Nove lezioni sulle nozioni prime della filosofia morale, Vita e Pensiero, Milan 1979, lesson IX - The notion of sanction, pp. 231-248.

[10] See my book L’inferno esiste. La verità negata, Fede&Cultura Editions, Verona 2010, chap. VII - Von Balthasar, pp. 54-70.