Balthasar's Apocalypse is the title of a new post by Larry Chapp. He is among the few whose posts I read as they come out. This one is a bit beyond me, but while I had it up in a tab so I could read a bit more at a time, I kept glimpsing the title and thinking that it sounds like a novel. Partly because to me, Balthazar is one of the Three Kings, reputedly the one who brought myrrh, a prefigurement of death and entombment
The whole title is "Balthasar's Apocalypse and the Crisis of our Time: The Law of Proportionate Polarization".
The name Balthasar in the post refers not to the one who follows the star to Bethlehem but to Hans Urs von Balthasar, a notable German theologian, and Apocalypse in his sense refers not to zombies or the terminators but to " the unveiling of what was previously either unknown or partially occluded". Revelations, the last book of the Bible, was formerly known to Catholics as Apocalypse and the terms are somewhat synonymous.
Here's a bit about what "proportionate polarization" means in this context.... I'm going to excerpt bits from the essay basically just as a way to interact with it.
First, Christ's coming brought polarization to sharp focus:
the more God enters clearly and definitively into time and history the more it provokes a counter response from the “principles of fallen life” (30) which are animated by the libido dominandi. This is why it is only with the advent of Christ that the provocation, and therefore the conflict, comes into its starkest focus.
Newman wrote in one of his Tracts that revelation does not dispel mystery. It highlights it, in the sense that knowing something, anything, makes you aware of what you do not know. Once this was thought of as a good thing, to reach beyond -- but in modern times, rationality seems to include a desperate implicit demand that everything must be clear to the human mind, and anything that breaks that contract needs to be ignored, despised, rejected or denied. I suppose it's not an accident that these words all surround the incarnation and passion of Christ.
I tried to find a site that would explain the term libido dominandi. It comes from Augustine's City of God when he is talking about pride in specifically political circumstances, a "desire for power" or "will to dominate". It's been picked up many times by political philosophers and cultural commentators and for this reason it was hard to find a resource that didn't have a "take" on what the term meant, and that take might be different from what Augustine, or Larry Chapp, or Balthasar intends in using the phrase
So the point is that the more God reveals Himself (most fully in His Son), the more the forces of evil will declare themselves as well. Consider the snake in the garden for a prototype, then Jesus's encounter with the devil in the desert; the whole Gospel, indeed.
Second, this polarization is integral to Christology in relation to us (perhaps this is redundant -- I am not sure if the role of "Christ" is in itself extricable from our need for a Messiah, a Savior)
And the ripping open of that veil exposed polarities that were not only made clear by the advent of Christ but were in fact created by Christ’s provocation as such, and increased according to the aforementioned law of proportionate polarization. The “Last Things” of time and history are not merely “made clear” by Christ but are in fact christological categories as such. Heaven, Hell, and purgatory are all “located” in the Sacred Heart of Christ (all three implicated in the event of the Cross) and are eschatological markers for differing Theo-dramatic responses to the Christ provocation.
Jesus prophesied that following Him would bring division, a "sword". This is mysterious, but seems to relate to what Dr Chapp is bringing out here. St Paul talked about how the Law revealed our unrighteousness -- we couldn't keep the Law, it exposed our inability to do so. You can read the Old Testament as a series of polarizations or more narratively, as interventions on God's part to expose evil, teach us to recognize it, and free us from it.
Third, this apocalypse or "unveiling" is once again coming into sharp focus in our historical time period. There may have been decades and locations when there seemed to be a truce, a stasis or even complementariness between the forces of the world and the Church. But not now.
Returning then to our beginning where we invoked Balthasar’s law of proportionate polarization, we can see that the theology of history developed in the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation has come into stark relief in modernity. The rejection of the crucified Lamb as the primary metric for the truth of our existence is now fully exposed as the rejection of the binding nature of truth as such.
Dr Chapp points out the pastoral and evangelical implications of this. Christianity can't count on any kind of approval or even tolerance of our evangelical witness. Not anymore. Probably many peoples in the world have a continuous ground level awareness of the polarity, but it seemed the Western world may have become a bit numb to it in the last couple of centuries, in spite of things like Revolutions and World Wars.
What this points to is the essentially apocalyptic nature of the choice we face in the sense of apocalyptic as a final unveiling of that which has remained hidden or latent. And it is an unveiling which only now reveals to us, in the stark polarization of modernity, that a complacent stasis where the Church attempts to tread water and maintain the status quo through a “don’t rock the boat” approach to pastoral energy, is doomed to failure
Fifth -- a bit more on our current time frame in regard to the Church's position. The skeptical indifference to quirky religious belief, the elite tolerance of faith as a cultural and moral stabilizer, is no longer with us.
The phenomenologist Max Scheler also saw this clearly and noted that at one time religious indifference was not a huge threat to the Church but that it now is. He states:
“It was skeptic indifference and unbelief that enabled the Churches to live such an easy life before the war and to be so content with ‘maintaining’ their position. But the time will come when unbelief’s sterile negation and the apparent tolerance of religion by lazy indifference will have come to an end. Then religion will once again be recognized and attacked from all sides for what it is – the highest concern of man.” (On the Eternal in Man, 121)
And with regard to evangelization today as needing to confront the apocalyptic choice of a clear “yes” or “no” to Christ under the law of proportionate polarization, he states:
“… one must also be prepared to find that this catalytic conviction also penetrates one’s own ranks, and that the mere policy of ‘holding fast’ … brings on the destruction of the very things one wished to preserve."
You can see the trajectory. Apocalypse means unveiling or revelation, but the term has come to mean something like world-scale catastrophe or the end times. We may or may not be in the immediate end times -- though it seems you could argue that the end times came into play right around Pentecost and have been manifesting in different ways ever since. However, we are in an unstable, dramatic time and it does seem to be worldwide -- I can't offhand think of any place on earth you could define as a haven. Here in rural Oklahoma, and before that in mile-high California mountains, my family was in some of the calmer little side eddies of life but never to the point where we could be unaware of the "progressive polarization" -- the Lamb vs the Beast. I don't think anyone is unaware of it these days. No one's faith is a simple easy enhancement of normal bourgeois prosperity anymore. If there is anyone who still thinks so, I am fairly sure their children don't.
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