ton patera ho hyios: ibid., p. 343):
For this reason, when Jesus arrived at the economy in accordance with which he
was to be raised above the world and, once recognized, to be glorified by the glory
of those who would go on to glorify him, he spoke these words: “Now the Son of
man has been glorified”; and since “no man knoweth the Father, save the Son who
reveals him” and the Son was about to reveal the Father through an economy, for
this reason “God as well was glorified in him.” (Ibid.)
The economy of passion and the economy of revelation coincide in glory, and
the latter (or, rather, glorification) defines the set of Trinitarian relations. The
trinity is a doxology.
8.7. Modern theologians distinguish, as we have seen, between “economic
trinity” (or trinity of revelation) and “immanent trinity” (or trinity of substance).
The former defines God in his praxis of salvation through which he reveals himself
to men. The immanent trinity instead refers to God as he is in himself. We redis-
cover here, in the opposition between two trinities, the fracture between ontology
and praxis, theology and economy that we have seen constitutively marking the
formation of economic theology (see §3.4 above). To the immanent trinity there
correspond ontology and theology; to the economic there correspond praxis and
oikonomia. Our investigation has tried to reconstruct the way in which these orig-
inal polarities have, at different levels, developed into the polarities of transcen-
dent order and immanent order, Kingdom and Government, general providence
and special providence, which define the operation of the machine of the divine
government of the world. The economic trinity (Government) presupposes the
immanent trinity (the Kingdom), which justifies and founds it.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that immanent trinity and economic trin-
ity, distinguished at the very beginning, are then perpetually reunited and artic-
ulated together by the theologians and that it is precisely this articulation that
is at stake in theology. The “economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice
versa” (Moltmann, p. 160): this is the principle that must guide all attempts to
think their relation. The work of sacrifice and salvation, which is in question in
economic theology, cannot be erased in the immanent trinity.
If the central foundation of our knowledge of the Trinity is the cross, on which
the Father delivered up the Son for us through the Spirit, then it is impossible
to conceive of any Trinity of substance in the transcendent primal ground of this
event, in which cross and self-giving are not present. (Ibid.)
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That is, there are not two different trinities, but a single trinity that is, at once,
a single divine story of salvation and a single economy. And yet, this identity
should not be understood as “the dissolution of the one in the other” (ibid.). Ac-
cording to the complex mechanism that, as we have seen, marks the relations be-
tween theology and economy from the beginning—and, then, the functioning
of the governmental machine—the two trinities, though intimately articulated,
remain distinct. What is in question is rather the reciprocity of their relations.
What this thesis is actually trying to bring out is the interaction between the
substance and the revelation, the “inwardness” and the “outwardness” of the
triune God [ . . . ] From the foundation of the world, the opera trinitatis ad extra
correspond to the passiones trinitatis ad intra. (Ibid.)
Glory is the place where theology attempts to think the difficult conciliation
between immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia, being and praxis, God in himself and God for us. For this reason, the doxology, despite
its apparent ceremonial fixity, is the most dialectical part of theology, in which
what can only be thought of as separate must attain unity.
Real theology, which means the knowledge of God, finds expression in thanks,
praise and adoration. And it is what finds expression in doxology that is the real
theology. There is no experience of salvation without the expression of that ex-
perience in thanks, praise and joy. An experience which does not find expression
in this way is not a liberating experience [ . . . ] So God is not loved, worshipped
and perceived merely because of the salvation that has been experienced, but for
his own sake. That is to say, praise goes beyond thanksgiving. God is recognized,
not only in his goodly works but in his goodness itself. And adoration, finally,
goes beyond both thanksgiving and praise. (Ibid., pp. 152–153)
In glory, economic trinity and immanent trinity, God’s praxis of salvation and
his being are conjoined and move through each other. From here stems the in-
dissoluble knot that binds together doxological elements in the strict sense and
the Eucharistic mimesis that one finds in liturgy. Praise and adoration directed
toward the immanent trinity presuppose the economy of salvation, just as in
John, the Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father. The economy
glorifies being, as being glorifies the economy. And only in the mirror of glory do the two trinities appear to reflect into one another; only in its splendor do being
and economy, Kingdom and Government appear to coincide for an instant.
Hence the Council of Nicaea, in order to avoid all risk of separating the Son
from the Father, the economy from the substance, felt the need to insert into
the symbol of faith the formula phōs ek phōtos, “light of light.” For this reason,
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Augustine, while seeking obsessively to eliminate all risk of subordination by the
trinity, takes up an image of light and glory (Augustine, On the Trinity, Book 4,
Chapter 20, §27).
א Given that glory is the place in which the movement of the Trinitarian economy
has to reveal itself in full, it is also the place in which the risk of noncoincidence between being and praxis and of a possible asymmetry in the relation between the three divine
persons is at its highest. It comes as no surprise then that it is precisely in the excursus on glory that Origen seems to adopt a subordinationalist position that could make him
appear as a precursor to Arius. Having commented upon the reciprocal glorification of
Father and Son in John, he prudently puts forward the idea of a self-glorification of the
Father that is independent of the one that he receives from the Son:
I wonder whether God can be glorified in a way that is independent of his being
glorified by the Son, since he has the advantage of being glorified in himself;
through the contemplation of himself he rejoices in his own knowledge and
vision with an indescribable satisfaction and joy that are greater than that of the
Son, since he finds his joy and satisfaction in himself—as far as it is possible to
express such ideas with respect to God. Indeed, I use these terms that cannot
really be applied to God, because I lack the unspeakable words. (Origen, Commentaire, pp. 337–339) That subordinationalism is rejected from the beginning as an intolerable heresy is not
so much and not only because it implies a superiority of the Father over the Son
(in
the Gospels, Jesus frequently attributes to the Father just such a superiority), but also
and above all because it endangers the functioning of the Trinitarian apparatus, which
is founded upon a perfect interpersonal circulation of glory between immanent trinity
and economic trinity.
It is still with reference to the passage in John that Augustine, in On the Trinity, warns against every attempt to introduce an asymmetry into glory so as to found upon it the
superiority of one person over another.
But here also let them wake up if they can, who have thought this, too, to be
testimony on their side, to show that the Father is greater than the Son, because
the Son hath said, “Father, glorify me.” Why, the Holy Spirit also glorifies Him.
Pray, is the Spirit, too, greater than He? [ . . . ] Whence it may be perceived that
all things that the Father hath are not only of the Son, but also of the Holy Spirit,
because the Holy Spirit is able to glorify the Son, whom the Father glorifies. But
if he who glorifies is greater than he whom he glorifies, let them allow that those
are equal who mutually glorify each other [ invicem]. (Augustine, On the Trinity, Book 2, Chapter 4, §6, pp. 47–48)
The economy of glory can only function if it is perfectly symmetrical and reciprocal. All economy must become glory, and all glory become economy.
THE KINGDOM AND THE GLORY
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8.8. Theology never manages truly to get to the bottom of the fracture
between immanent trinity and economic trinity, between theologia and oikonomia. This is demonstrated in the very glory that was supposed to celebrate their reconciliation. It is marked by a fundamental dissymmetry in which only
the economic trinity is completed at the end of days, but not the immanent
trinity. After the Last Judgment, when the economy of salvation is complete
and “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), the economic trinity will be
reabsorbed by the immanent trinity and “what remains is the eternal praise of
the triune God in his glory” (Moltmann, p. 161). The paradisiacal liturgy ends
up in doxology; it knows no mass but only the hymn of praise. In this asym-
metry of glory, the “anarchic”—and, at the same time, generated—character
of the Son reemerges, putting in question the laboriously achieved result of the
long and acrimonious dispute with Arianism. The economy is anarchical and,
as such, has no foundation in God’s being; and yet, the Father has generated
the Son before the eternal times. This is the “mystery of the economy,” whose
darkness glory is not able completely to dispel in its light. To the original
paradox of a generated anarchy, at the end of days, there corresponds that of
an economic—and yet finite—anarchy. (The attempt to think, at one and the
same time, an infinite being and its finite history—and hence, the figure of
being that survives its economy—forms precisely the theological inheritance
of modern philosophy, which achieves its most extreme form in the last works
of Heidegger.)
Of course, the operation of glory—or at least its pretension—is to express
the pleromatic figure of the trinity, in which economic trinity and immanent
trinity are once and for all securely articulated together. But it can only fulfill
this task by continuously dividing what it must conjoin and each time recon-
joining what must remain separated. For this reason, just as in the profane
sphere glory was an attribute, not of Government but of the Kingdom, not
of the ministers but of the sovereign, so the doxology refers ultimately to the
being of God, not to his economy. And yet, just as we have seen that the King-
dom is nothing but that which remains if one removes Government, and the
Government that which remains if the Kingdom removes itself, in such a way
that the governmental machine always consists in the articulation of these two
polarities, equally, one could say that the theo-doxological machine results from
the correlation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, in which each
of these two aspects glorifies the other and stems from the other. Government
glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government. But the center
of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates
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from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the
central vacuity of the machine.
8.9. The aporias implicit in every theology of glory are evident in the work of
the Protestant theologian who lies at the origin of Balthasar’s attempt to aesthet-
icize doxology. In a decisive passage of his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth inserts a brief treatise on glory, which the Catholic theologian takes up and expands upon
in his masterpiece. Even though the stylistic form of the work of the two theolo-
gians is very different, their aim is substantially the same. Barth is perfectly well
aware that glory refers to “His freedom, majesty and sovereignty” (Barth, p. 641).
For him it defines “His competence to make use of His omnipotence [ . . . ]
and to exercise His lordship [ Herrschaft]” (ibid.). Abruptly shifting his analysis of glory into the “immediately proximate” (ibid.) sphere of beauty, he uses this
concept as a supplement ( Hilfsbegriff: ibid, p. 653) to confront what appears to
him a “blind spot” (ibid., p. 650) in the theological conception of glory. That is
to say, it is a case of nothing less than the neutralization of the idea that the glory
and sovereignty of God are reducible to the brutum factum of his omnipotence
and his force.
Or can we say positively of the method of God’s glory, of His self-glorification,
only that it has the whole omnipotence of God behind it, that it persuades [ überzeugt] and convinces [ überführt, literally, “it guides us from above”] by ruling, mastering [ herrscht] and subduing [ überwältigt] with the utterly superior force
[ . . . ]? [ . . . ] When the Bible uses the term “glory” to describe the revelation
and knowledge of God, does it not mean something other and more than the
assertion of a brute fact? [ . . . ] We have seen that when we speak of God’s glory
we do emphatically mean God’s “force.” Yet the idea of “glory” contains some-
thing which is not covered by that of “force.” For the idea of “kingdom” which
precedes the other two concepts in the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer seems to
say something of wider range than can be described by “force” alone. Light too,
has force and is force, but it is not this that makes it light. Has not and is not
God more than is covered by the idea of force when He has and is light and is
glorious? (Ibid.)
We find here, as we find at the hidden root of all aestheticisms, the need to
cover and dignify what is in itself pure force and domination. Beauty names pre-
cisely the “supplementary element” that enables one to think glory beyond the
factum of sovereignty, to “depoliticize” the lexis of Herrlichkeit (that Barth, not by chance, had up to this point expressed with the technical terms of political
sovereignty and government: herrschen, führen, walten), transferring it into the
sphere of aesthetics.
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565
If we can say that God
is beautiful, to say this is to say how He enlightens and
convinces and persuades us. It is to describe not merely the naked fact of His
revelation or its power [ Gewalt] but the shape and form in which it is a fact and
is power. (Ibid.)
Barth is perfectly aware of the impropriety and inadequacy of the term “beauty,”
which inevitably refers one to the profane sphere “of pleasure, desire, and enjoy-
ment” (ibid., p. 651); and yet the risk of aestheticism (“drohende Ästhetizismus”:
ibid., p. 652) is precisely the price to be paid if one is to detach the theory of glory
from the sphere of Gewalt, of power. That beauty should become the designation,
at once improper and absolutely inevitable, of glory, means that the problem of
the relation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, between ontology
and oikonomia will have to be related to the aesthetic sphere as well. God’s glory and freedom are not an “abstract freedom or sovereignty” (ibid., p. 659). The
being of God is not “self-enclosed and pure divine being” (ibid.); what makes him
divine and real is his being nothing other than the being of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit. “His being [ . . . ] is not form in itself but the concrete form of
the triune being of God” (ibid.). The trinity of God is, in this sense, “the secret of
His beauty” (ibid., p. 661). The decisive moment of the transferral of the biblical
kabhod into the neutral sphere of aesthetics, which only a few years later Balthasar will consider to have been fully achieved, takes place here.
8.10. There is also another reason behind the aestheticization of glory. It
allows one to confront the problem that, in the history of theology, is—at one
and the same time—ever present and always eluded by new means. We are
speaking of that glory that the theologians define as subiectiva, seu formalis (or, external); that is, the glorification that men (and with them the angels) owe to
God. Inasmuch as it constitutes the doxological nucleus of liturgy, it enjoys a
lustrous prestige and self-evidence; however, despite the specifications and argu-
ments of the theologians, it certainly cannot be said that its rationale is equally
clearly illuminated.
As long as there has been glory there has been glorification; and this not only
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