by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

On recent uses of the term “integralism”

In July of last year, Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa published an essay in La Civiltà Cattolica criticizing the cooperation of conservative Evangelicals and Catholics in American politics. Among conservative American Christians, Spadaro and Figueroa argue, religion ceases to be the force for reconciliation and peace that it ought to be, and becomes an instrument of division, forcing a sectarian agenda on society by main force. One of the many things that puzzled readers in the essay was the use of the term “integralism” as a Catholic analogue to Evangelical “fundamentalism.” Integralism is not a term that is used much in an American context. Integralism in the strict sense in which we use it at The Josias, has never played much of a role in American political life, which has always been committed to the Enlightenment ideal of religious liberty. Spadaro and Figueroa never explain very clearly what they mean by “integralism.” A blog-post from September by Keith Michael Estrada, however, points us to an author who does give a very detailed account of integralism that in some ways fits the usage of Spadaro and Figueroa: Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Balthasar uses “integralism” in both a narrow sense and a broad sense. The narrow sense refers to the anti-modernist “party” in the period immediately after modernism’s condemnation by St Pius X, which made an organized effort to implement the condemnation and stamp out modernism in the Church, led by the likes of Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val and Msgr. Umberto Benigni. The broad sense refers to groups at any time that he sees as having a similar approach to Catholic life, even if they do not share the specific goals of integralists in the narrow sense. Balthasar is relentlessly critical of integralism in all its forms. As it happens, my own use of the term “integralism” was initially derived from Balthasar via David Schindler. I started using the term after reading Schindler’s Heart of the World, Center of the Church, in which he makes use of Balthasar’s work on integralism. And so I think that it is worthwhile considering Balthasar’s critique carefully. In the present essay, I will first give a summary of Balthasar’s account of integralism. I will then try to show that part of his critique is a justified warning that integralists should heed. A second part of his critique is based on an unhelpfully broad extension of the term “integralism,” and can therefore be set aside. A third part of his critique rejects things that are really good about integralism. The third part is based on imprecisions in Balthasar’s account of grace, which I will manifest by contrasting some of the consequences of Balthasar’s position with those of the Church’s Doctor of Grace: St. Augustine.

Balthasar’s account of integralism

In 1963, when the Second Vatican Council had just opened, and the old controversy between modernism and integralism was about to be transformed, Balthasar published a highly polemical essay entitled “Integralismus”.[1] A quarter of a century later, he published a revised version, entitled “Integralismus heute,”[2] [“Integralism Today”], in which he argues that while the Council seemed to have ended integralism, integralist tendencies had re-appeared in new forms in the post-conciliar Church. These two versions of the Integralismus essay are Balthasar’s fullest treatment of the subject. Following Maurice Blondel, Balthasar tries to show modernism and integralism as two equally reductive approaches to Catholic life. On the one hand are the modernists, who reduce the faith to a subjective sentiment or intimation of the spirit, destroying the objective character of revelation, and reducing Christianity to one among many ways of expressing the religious sense. On the other hand are the integralists, whom he sees as reducing revelation to a system of explicit propositions to be imposed from without. Between these two errors, the nouvelle théologie steers the true course, incorporating the legitimate concerns of both modernists and integralists in a higher unity. The attack on integralism is thus connected to some of the central concerns of Balthasar’s theology: the nature of revelation, and the relation of nature and grace.

The nouvelle théologie holds that historical reality will never have the integral completeness that can only be found in God Himself. In this world, so the story goes, everything is always fragmentary, and the whole can only be dimly intimated. Moreover, grace and nature are inextricably mixed. So that the task of Catholics is to enter into the dynamic movement of culture, and in solidarity with the people of their time, discern the movement of grace in the present. “There are paths of God’s grace that move from below upwards, paths that lead men of good will even outside the visible Church into the Divine love.”[3] Balthasar does not speak of “initiating processes rather than occupying spaces,” as is fashionable nowadays, but it would have expressed his meaning quite well. The problem with integralism is that it claims an integrity to the visible Church that is not actually possible. The root of this presumption Balthasar sees as being a faulty account of revelation, an erroneous theological epistemology:

The integralists hold that reality can be captured in abstract, static, and immutable concepts, so that one has only to act with a view to a correct conceptualization to act rightly… For [the integralists,] revelation is primarily a system of doctrinal concepts that by definition cannot be found anywhere in the human world, and can therefore only be handed down from above by a hierarchical Church authority to a purely passive laity. According to Blondel, this rationalistic extrinsicist approach leads to the corruption of the Christian message into a ‘law of fear and coercion’ rather than the soul-liberating law of love that it ought to be… The logic of integralism is relentless: the clear conceptual distinction between an enclosed realm of nature and equally closed-off realm of the supernatural, which rules from on high, demands from the representatives of the latter that ‘they identify themselves with the truth of the revelation, or rather that they identify the truth of revelation with themselves, so that they finally come to a human theocracy, which they are always denying, but always practicing.’ Since the temporal arm is no longer available for this rule, they substitute for it with an intra-ecclesial reign of might; the whole Church is said to be in ‘a state of siege,’ and since the ideal subject is the blindly obedient one, all who refuse complete submission are to be driven out of the Church.[4]

Balthasar recounts the story of the integralist party under the pontificate of St. Pius X, and castigates its leaders Rafael Merry del Val and Msgr. Umberto Benigni for their systematic and secretive persecution of the modernists. He admits that the modernists were heretics, but he objects to the secret-police style methods used against them. This brings him to an extension of the term “integralist” to any movement that he sees as similar to the anti-modernism of Merry del Val and Benigni:

Integralism reigns wherever revelation is conceived of primarily as a system of true propositions given to believers from above, and where therefore form becomes more important than content, and power more important than the cross.[5]

In the 1963 essay, Balthasar then goes on to criticize various groups in the Church that he saw as integralist: the eccentric Catholic-Nietzschean poet Ludwig Derleth, author of such bizarre works as The Frankish Koran; the atheist French politician Charles Maurras and his Catholic admirers; the groups around La Cité Catholique and Chabeuil; and especially St. Josemaria Escriva’s movement Opus Dei, which Balthasar attacks with particular venom.

In the 1988 essay Balthasar argues that while the old integralist party came to an end at Vatican II, there are still groups within the Church that can helpfully be described as integralist. He identifies three main forms: (1) an integralism of power, (2) an integralism of Tradition, and (3) an integralism of reason.

1) The integralists of “power” are those who “wish to achieve supposedly Christian results via the detour of worldly power.”[6] He doesn’t name names here, but it is clear that he is thinking particularly of the Opus Dei, and other organizations that try to recruit rich and influential members so that wealth and influence can be used to further their agenda. This seems to be the sense of integralism that Spadaro and Figueroa had in mind.

2) The integralists of tradition are those such as the Society of St. Pius X, whom he sees as claiming an integral grasp of tradition, and rejecting all developments past an arbitrarily chosen point as non-traditional. The problem, he argues is that they see tradition as something static rather than something dynamic; something found in the letter rather than the spirit.

3) The integralists of reason are (oddly enough) a certain sort of modernist who think that Christianity can be comprehended by reason and included in a higher syncretic synthesis. The inclusion of modernists as a form of integralists shows how unhelpful Balthasar’s broadening of the meaning of integralism is.

What integralists can learn from Balthasar

One point of Balthasar’s critique that I think can serve as a helpful warning to integralists is that an emphasis on the role of temporal power can lead to a temptation to lose solidarity with the weak and downtrodden, and to make common cause with powers that are not really on the side of justice. We see this preeminently in the Catholics who made common cause with Maurras and the Action Fraçaise. There was a kind of impatience in many of Maurras’s Catholic supporters. “The more than thousand-year league between spiritual and worldly power was in their memories and in their blood.”[7] And this led many French Catholics to make common cause with profoundly un-Catholic political forces. Alan Fimister points to a passage from Maritain’s Maurrasian stage that manifests this impatience:

The formula [of the Action Française] seems to me at once very weak – because the essential order, that of man toward God, and the demands of the supernatural order are not given first place… – and yet it is the only practicable formula, because it unites all men of good will and orients them – at least this is what I hope – in the direction of God.[8]

What Maritain at that point saw as “the only practicable formula” was really a trap. Maritain would later come to recognize this, but in over-correcting, he was to abandon integralism all together.

Balthasar is also quite right to point to the obscuring of the Christian witness that takes place when Christians are seen to be in solidarity not with the poor and the oppressed but with the rich and powerful. Here integralists can learn from what I have called (perhaps infelicitously) “Augustinian radicalism.”[9]

Where Balthasar misses the mark

Certainly, Balthasar, in bringing up the Maurrasians, pointed to a danger to which Catholic integralists have been prone. But he is wrong to see any necessary connection to the principles of integralism. Indeed, the best examples of the integralist tradition have always had a healthy contempt for worldly power. The notion that temporal power must be subordinated to spiritual power is indeed based on a truly Augustinian recognition that in this fallen world political power is usually unjust.[10] Balthasar admits that post-Revolutionary integralism owes much to the traditions of the Gregorian Reform of the High Middle Ages.[11] And, of course, the Gregorian Reform was animated by a healthy mistrust of worldly power and the injustices that it habitually perpetrates. Recall the following passage of St. Gregory VII’s famous letter to Hermann of Metz:

Who does not know that kings and leaders are sprung from those who— ignorant of God— by pride, plunder, perfidy, murders— in a word by almost every crime, the devil, who is the prince of this world, urging them on as it were— have striven with blind Cupidity and intolerable presumption to dominate over their equals; namely, over men? […] We refer to kings and emperors who, too much swollen by worldly glory, rule not for God but for themselves. But, since it belongs to our office to distribute exhortation to each person according to the rank or dignity which he adorns, we take care, God impelling us, to provide weapons of humility just for emperors and kings and other princes, that they may be able to subdue the risings of the sea and the waves of pride.[12]

One can see this tradition very clearly in the greatest of integralists in the strict sense. Cardinal Merry del Val, in fact, objected to Pope Benedict XV’s softening of the integralist tradition precisely because he saw it as being too accommodating to worldly powers. When Benedict XV re-established and extended the policy of ralliement, Merry del Val wrote of:

…too much politics, worldly diplomacy and intrigue that are hardly in keeping with the lofty ideals of our mission, nor profitable to the best interests of God and his Church. Here, alas, we come up against it at every step, all day and every day… We are drifting . . . Surely at a time when the world has lost its bearings and is anxiously seeking that which we alone are able to provide, we should not drift ourselves, or appear to juggle with principles, but hold up the lesson of light as God gave it to us and refrain from the tactics of human politics.[13]

Merry del Val was a true integralist, and living proof of the goodness of integralism. His implacable opposition to the modernists was founded on an accurate estimate of how dangerous they were. And his “intransigent” insistence on Catholic principles in relation to states was the opposite of an un-Christian “worldliness.” He had a lofty understanding of the supernatural mission of the Church, and a healthy mistrust of this world which, to the extent that it has not been liberated by Baptism, is under the dominion of the devil. But this lofty understanding of the Church didn’t make him proud, as we can see from his Litany of Humility. And his insistence that all things, including political life, have to be freed from the dominion of the prince of this world, and made subject to Christ is not an un-Christian “Constantinianism;” it is simply orthodox Catholicism.

Balthasar’s extension of the term integralist from the likes of Merry del Val to any Catholic movement that he thinks has similar weaknesses stretches the term so much as to make it useless. If integralism can be applied to the likes of St. Josemaria Escriva, whose explicit doctrine was so non-integralist,[14] and even to neo-Hegelian modernists, then it is a term that has no meaning.

Balthasarian ‘optimism’ vs. Augustinian ‘pessimism’

At the heart of Balthasar’s critique of integralism is his own theology of nature, grace, and revelation. But is Balthasar right to look for a third way between modernism and integralism? In abandoning integralism, does he steer his ship too close to modernism? Certainly, Balthasar always vehemently rejected modernism in the strict sense. He did not reduce Christianity to one among many manifestations of religious experience. On the contrary, he put great emphasis on the historical singularity of the drama of salvation— the eternal Word became flesh as a particular human being, and His death on the cross is the objective revelation of God. And he was even quite sharp in his critique of Rahner’s theory of “anonymous Christians,” which he rightly saw as emptying the cross of its power, by seeing the Incarnation as merely making explicit what is already implicit in human striving for the good.[15] And yet, Balthasar thought that he could give an account of the particularity of the Incarnation that would make it every bit as universal as Rahner would have wanted; the maximum universality in and through the maximum particularity. My claim is that Balthasar was not wholly successful in this attempt. The very wide scope that he gives to “implicit” faith in Christ ends up undermining the scandalous particularity of the cross that he wants to preserve— so that his own theology falls under his critique of Rahner. One can see this by contrasting Balthasar’s “optimism” both about the salvation of those who do not explicitly believe in Christ, and about “worldly” reality more generally, with the “pessimism” of St. Augustine on the same matters.

The theology of grace developed by Henri de Lubac and eloquently defended and amplified by Balthasar was meant to be a recovery of the true, pre-modern Catholic understanding of grace— not only of St. Thomas’s teaching, but also, and especially of St. Augustine’s, the Church’s “Doctor of Grace.” St. Augustine’s “You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” was seen as the “unsurpassable summary” of the teaching that “human beings were created for communion with God in Jesus Christ, and that consequently there is a natural desire for the vision of God.”[16] By “the vision of God” the supernatural Beatific Vision is meant, by which human beings are elevated beyond their nature, and become sharers in the divine nature, adopted sons of God. The objection that has always been made against the idea that human natures could have a natural desire for the supernatural good of divinization, is that such a natural desire would destroy the gratuity of grace. No natural desire can be in vain, and it would be unjust if God were to give His creatures a natural desire for an end without giving them the means to attain it. In other words, God gift of supernatural grace to man would be an act of justice, of fairness and not of completely gratuitous mercy. De Lubac and Balthasar, of course, strenuously deny that their account destroys the gratuity of grace. Is their denial convincing?

I will not attempt to retrace the debate here.[17] Instead I want to compare the results that Balthasar draws from his theology of grace to those that Augustine draws from his. My contention is that the so-called “pessimism” of the Augustinian conclusions derives precisely from his consistent insistence on the gratuity of grace, whereas as the apparently “optimistic” conclusions drawn by Balthasar shows that despite his protestations, his account of the natural desire for the supernatural does compromise that gratuity.

Balthasar explicitly rejected Augustine’s teaching that most persons go to hell. Hell, Balthasar argues, is a real possibility, but Augustine’s claim that there are persons in whom that possibility has become real is unwarranted:

the transformation of this ‘real possibility’ into ‘objective certainty’ occurred with the great Church Father Augustine, whose opinion (whether traceable back to his ten years of Manichaeism may be left open here) has cast an enormous shadow over the history of Western Theology[.][18]

Now, Augustine has many arguments from Scripture to back up his teaching. But let us look only at how the “Doctor of Grace” uses the gratuity of grace to show the reason why the greater number of persons is damned. It is worth quoting Augustine at length:

But eternal punishment seems hard and unjust to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting that highest and purest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression. The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning Him; and he who destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil. Hence the whole mass of the human race is condemned; for he who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished with all his posterity who were in him as in a root, so that no one is exempt from this just and due punishment, unless delivered by mercy and undeserved grace; and the human race is so apportioned that in some is displayed the efficacy of merciful grace, in the rest the efficacy of just retribution. For both could not be displayed in all; for if all had remained under the punishment of just condemnation, there would have been seen in no one the mercy of redeeming grace. And, on the other hand, if all had been transferred from darkness to light, the severity of retribution would have been manifested in none. But many more are left under punishment than are delivered from it, in order that it may thus be shown what was due to all. And had it been inflicted on all, no one could justly have found fault with the justice of Him who takes vengeance; whereas, in the deliverance of so many from that just award, there is cause to render the most cordial thanks to the gratuitous bounty of Him who delivers.[19]

All men deserve eternal death. That a remnant of them is snatched from their richly deserved fate, and elevated to an unspeakable happiness— to participation in the very life of God— thus appears as the totally gratuitous and unmerited mercy that it is. “So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy… He has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills.” (Romans 9:16,18)

Balthasar responds to such texts that one has to keep reading Romans until one gets to the following verse: “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.” (Romans 11:32)[20] God’s mercy, Balthasar holds, wants to extend to all. Augustine would read the “all” in that verse to mean both Jews and gentiles, which seems the obvious reading in context. But for Balthasar, Augustine is limiting the universality of God’s mercy and love. In the Theo-Logic Balthasar attacks The City of God precisely for being not universal enough:

it must be regretted that the possibility of any such universality [of the City of God] is vitiated by [Augustine’s] a priori system of predestination. However earnestly he may urge the citizens of the City of God to put a Christian shape on the secular state, and however positive a description he can sometimes give of a Christian emperor, his system of predestination compels him—given the divergent orientations of the two civitates (namely, caritas and cupiditas)—to conclude that these two orientations are bound for opposite ultimate destinies. As a result, the civitas terrena must constitute at least a shadowy anticipation of the civitas diaboli. […] It is true that Augustine is aware of individual pagans—but only from the time before Christ—who, on account of their attitude, are to be reckoned as belonging to the City of God, but they remain exceptions; Augustine is very far from allowing the City of God to have the same extension as the objective scope of Christ’s saving act.[21]

In Razing the Bastions Balthasar makes the same point, and accuses Augustine of something very like what he elsewhere describes as integralism:

According to Augustine, there is hope of salvation for every man as long as he lives, that is to say, as long as he can repent of sin and, if he is outside the Catholic Church, can convert to her. This interpretation […] was from the outset wholly in accord with the vision of a visibly demarcated civitas Dei on earth: a supernatural realm of light over against which stands another region, equally clearly demarcated—one that could not be illuminated in all eternity.[22]

These “clearly demarcated” regions sound an awful lot like the “clear conceptual distinctions” of the integralists. This in itself should make us question whether the nouvelle théologie was really a recovery of Augustinian teaching on the natural desire for God, and whether “integralism” was based on an early modern surrender of the full depths of that teaching. If integralism is based on a reductive non-Augustinian account of grace and revelation, why then does Augustine himself draw the same conclusions as the integralists?

Strangely, Balthasar accuses Augustine, and the entire medieval Church that followed in his wake of a kind of individualism or egotism:

The medieval Christian’s naive, because wholly unreflective, egotism of salvation cannot be reproached; it would have to be censured today, however, now that the bastions have fallen and the element of solidarity makes its appearance for the first time in the awareness of a humanity united. […] It was possible to be a wonderfully awake Christian like Dante and yet pass through the hell of his fellow Christians with a hardened heart and unmoved, contemplating the tortures of this most impressive of all concentration camps, studying them, committing them to memory, letting life-stories and tragedies be related to him and each time shaking the dust from his feet at the end, passing on, leaving behind what could not be changed and leaving it to itself. What a Christian of that era could justify, cannot be accepted today; otherwise, he would reveal himself to be an utter un-Christian. For in the meantime something new has been displayed among us.[23]

This is a strange accusation to make. Is not Dante the least individualistic or egotistic of all thinkers? Nor is it true that he is unmoved by the fate of the damned. Indeed, at the beginning of the poem, Dante often faints with compassion and horror at the ruin of the damned. But what he comes to see through his journey is that justice of eternal punishment is founded in the same Divine Love that causes the unmerited glory of the saints. Dante, like Augustine before him, sees how sin has set up a rival city to the city of God. Christ’s saving work is indeed universal in the sense of being offered as the way of salvation to all, but only those who are actually united to Christ through divine faith are actually saved. It is not enough to be united to Christ in the solidarity of the human nature that He shares; one must believe in Him, and renounce His enemies.

The task of the Church is therefore not merely to enter into solidarity with the dynamic movement of the peoples of the world, and discern the movement of grace among them. It is rather to rescue them from the earthly city, subjecting them explicitly to Christ. The fallen world is under the dominion of the devil. The devil has been conquered by the passion of Christ. But the dominion of the devil is removed bit by bit through the sacramental system of the Church. Hence Baptism, even of little infants, is preceded by exorcisms. Even the blessings of inanimate objects traditionally includes exorcisms that remove those objects from the dominion of Satan, before handing them over to Christ.[24]

There are indeed “paths of God’s grace that move from below upwards,”[25] but such paths are preparations leading men to the visible Church.[26] Balthasar is right that revelation is more than “a system of true propositions given to believers from above,”[27] but it must include such propositions. As as St. Pius X put it, “faith is a genuine assent of the intellect to truth received by hearing from an external source.”[28] To understand this truth is not to lack in solidarity with those parts of humanity that have not yet been liberated from the earthly city. On the contrary, it is this knowledge that enflamed the hearts of the great missionaries of the Church in the attempt to save the nations of the world. (Think, for example, of St. Francis Xavier.)

At one point, Balthasar raises an objection against his own position. “Is not such an ideal construction in itself an ideology, indeed the expression of a hidden defeatism on the level of reality[?]” he asks.[29] That is, is not this “armchair universalism” a response to a discouraging suspicion that most of the world is not going to hear the Christian message and repent? He argues of course that he is not. But I remain unconvinced.

And it seems to me that this very question of integralism manifests the problem. Ultimately, Balthasar’s theology of grace blurs the distinction between the City of God and the earthly city. In Balthasar’s followers, this blurring of the distinction has led either to the acceptance of secular liberalism[30] or to a Christian anarchism that denies the legitimacy of political power completely.[31] Neither position is reconcilable with the Tradition of the Church.

[1] In: Wort und Wahrheit 18 (1963), pp. 737-744.

[2] In: Diakonia 19 (1988), pp. 221-229.

[3] “Integralismus,” p. 738; “Integralismus heute,” p. 222; translations from these two essays are by me throughout.

[4] “Integralismus,” p. 738; “Integralismus heute,” p. 222-223; Balthasar’s quotations are from: Maurice Blondel, La Semaine Sociale de Bordeaux et le Monophorisme (1910).

[5] “Integralismus,” p. 739.

[6] “Integralismus heute,” p. 225.

[7] “Integralismus,” p. 737.

[8] Maritain, Letter to Delatte in: Alan Fimister, Robert Schuman: Neo Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 108.

[9] See my paper “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” The Josias, https://thejosias.com/2016/03/03/integralism-and-gelasian-dyarchy.

[10] See my paper “The City of God: An Introduction,” The Josias, https://thejosias.com/2017/08/28/the-city-of-god-an-introduction.

[11] “Integralismus heute,” p. 228.

[12] Pope St. Gregory VII, Letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz, March 15, 1081, in The Josias Library: https://thejosias.com/library/pope-st-gregory-vii-letter-to-hermann-of-metz.

[13] Letter to Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, November, 192, cited in: John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914-1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999), p. 158.

[14] See: Martin Rhonheimer, “The Message of St. Josemaría: Particularly Relevant Ideas for Today’s Society,” Lecture, Corporate Communication Professional Development Seminar, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, March 2, 2007: “…love for freedom and a spirit of non-discrimination, important characteristics of what St. Josemaría called ‘lay mentality,’ and the importance of this message for the activity of Catholics in a society marked by secularity and pluralism to open a path that is precisely non-fundamentalist and non-integralist for the evangelizing task of the Church and the realization of her mission to penetrate this world with the truth and spirit of Christ.” (Emphasis added.)

[15] See: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, trans. Richard Beckley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).

[16] Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., “Henri de Lubac on Nature and Grace: A Note on Some Recent Contributions to the Debate,” in: Communio [English ed.] 35.4 (2008), pp. 535-564, at p. 539.

[17] I have written a little on this debate before. (See especially my blogpost: “Integralism,” Sancrucensis: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/integralism/). I intend to write more on the question in future. Particularly, I intend to address the case for de Lubac’s position made by David Braine [“The Debate Between Henri de Lubac and His Critics,” in: Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 6.3 (2008), pp. 543–590]. I consider Braine’s the best defense of the position, but I think that it ultimately fails, because it rests on a crucial misunderstanding of the distinction between antecedent and consequent will.

[18] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 165.

[19] Civ. Dei XXI,12.

[20] See: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in this Age, trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), Kindle ed., loc. 554.

[21] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, Vol. 3: The Spirit of Truth, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005) pp. 277-279.

[22] Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, loc. 487-491.

[23] Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, loc. 545-547, 650-654.

[24] Thomas Pink made this point with great force in a lecture at the 2017 Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum in Gardone Riviera.

[25] “Integralismus,” p. 738; “Integralismus heute,” p. 222.

[26] Cf. Thomas Cordatus, “More thoughts on implicit and explicit faith,” Laodicea, https://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/more-thought-on-implicit-and-explicit-faith/ .

[27] See my blogpost “Unwritten Tradition,” Sancrucensis, https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/unwritten-tradition.

[28] The Oath Against Modernism.

[29] Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, loc. 569-570.

[30] For an example of this error in a follower of Balthasar see: Francesca Aran Murphy, “Is Liberalism a Heresy?” in: First Things, June 2016.

[31] See: “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy.”

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