Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain
Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. Following this logic Augustine states that, like Eve from Adam, the Church proceeds from the side of Christ toward a marital commitment to Christ that includes contractual and liturgical elements indicative to a marriage.
Moorman’s transition to Balthasar recognizes that Balthasar, like Augustine, sees the nuptial model as a helpful launching point for exploring the Church’s relationship to Christ. However, he goes further than Augustine in introducing the language of obedience as essential to the marriage between Christ and Church. “Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose.”
Like de Lubac, Balthasar sees the Church as the vessel through which the whole world will be redeemed. “There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.” The Church’s public faith and obedience to Christ is not only a witness of Christ, but is primarily that for which the world was created. “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.” Moorman suggests that here in the public nature of marriage, especially in the bride’s naked assent to the groom, we see the most explicit link between Augustine and Balthasar.
Moorman concludes with a reflection on Mary, the mother of Christ. She says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent…The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.”
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, not only for the interaction with Balthasar and de Lubac, but also for the opportunity to read more about Augustine’s ecclesiology. However, as my expertise lies more in former, I beg Cynthia’s and Mary’s forgiveness in limiting my comments to reflections on issues surrounding Balthasar’s use of the nuptial model. I’d like to offer just three critical reflections in conclusion, all of which stem from prelimenary concerns about what to me seems to be Balthasar’s deficient idea of marriage and, more generically, his use of typology.
First, it is dubious whether marriage includes all of the aspects that Balthasar imports into his nuptial ecclesiology under the concept of marriage. Most disconcerting to me is that his model of marriage presupposes mortifying obedience on the part of the wife. The Church as the Bride is called to total obedience, EVEN to the point of death: “Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.” I am not sure how the marriage metaphor leads to this kind of mortifying obedience. Likewise, the nuptial relationship shared by Christ and the Church leads to the Church’s adherence to her husband’s totalizing agenda, and thus to the virtual disappearance of her identity, to be replaced by her husband’s: “Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say ‘Church’ will be to say ‘obedience’.” Moreover, in losing her identify, the wife becomes the visible identity of the husband’s invisible kingdom: “My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.” While I don’t dispute that the Church is to have this kind of obedience, I have serious misgivings about whether the marriage relationship is an appropriate or beneficial metaphor for getting at this obedience. Roman marriage, as Moorman rightly acknowledges, is the reference point for Balthasar and Augustine. But is this Christian marriage?
Secondly, in borrowing from marriage to talk about ecclesiology, Balthasar risks a reciprocal interpretation or re-presentation of Christian marriage. Moorman points to the influence on Balthasar of De Lubac’s incorporation of the Augustinian cosmology – union with God as the fulfillment of the cosmos’ identity. But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working, although he is therein attempting to expand de Lubac’s (and Augustine’s) idea of cosmological fulfillment precisely through employing the marriage model: “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.” Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something superior about the concept of “husband.” Balthasar exposes Christian marriage to a reciprocal reinterpretation by employing the marriage model to explain the relationship of the Church to Christ, indeed the world’s fulfillment in and through the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church. Christian marriage, in light of nuptial ecclesiology, begins to look not like two people engaging in a life long commitment to one another of mutual love and submission, but rather of wives submitting to husbands in order to be fulfilled by their husbands (analogously?) as the Church submits to Christ and is thereby fulfilled. As the Church relinquishes her identity, wives too ought to lose their identity in order to manifest the their husbands’ identity, they ought to mortify themselves in obedience to their husbands. These conclusions are ramifications of what appear to be an unsystematic or unrestricted use of typology. How should one judge the direction and the extent to which the typology is to be employed?
Finally, bringing Marian doctrine to bear upon nuptial ecclesiology, Moorman says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent.” De Lubac and Balthasar are both fond of calling Mary the mother of the Church (see especially de Lubac’s commentary of Lumen Gentium in The Church: Paradox and Mystery). Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child – although it is clear that Balthasar would like to go further by equating constituency in the Church as participation in Mary’s yes. Moreover, I have concerns with how much being part of the church is repeating Mary’s yes versus imitating Christ. Nonetheless, the metaphors of Bride and Mother become distorted when Mary is both the Mother of the Church and the archetype of the Bride. How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride? I confess bewilderment as to what it means to embrace both metaphors simultaneously when each refers to something antithetical to the other. De Lubac doesn’t engage the two quite as systematically as Balthasar does. Neither offers a satisfactory solution. As long as the two function typologically the way that Balthasar employs them, it seems unlikely that there’s a middle ground to be had by balancing between the two as the two can neither be equivocal nor dialectically opposed. They are, rather, metaphors that seem to be best when left unmixed.
