Modern Theology - 2020 - Shea - Internal Difficulties in The Theology of Karl Rahner

Modern Theology 37:3 July 2021 DOI:10.1111/moth.
12652
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
INTERNAL DIFFICULTIES IN THE

THEOLOGY OF KARL RAHNER
HENRY SHEA
Abstract
Criticism of the theology of Karl Rahner is most often made from bases external to his thought. When the
ever greater ascendancy of transcendentality in Rahner’s thought is juxtaposed with areas of his theology
concretely differentiated by symbol and history, however, internal difficulties arise that jeopardize the
coherence and integrality of his work. Following an analysis of the predominant role of transcendentality
in Rahner, three particular areas of such internal difficulty are considered: (1) the irreconcilability of the
reciprocally constitutive dynamics of the Realsymbol with the fundamentally unidirectional operation of
transcendental grace, (2) the disjunction entailed in the experience of grace as conscious yet unreflexive
knowledge (Erkenntnis), and (3) the incommensurability of an historically developmental self-communication
(Selbstmitteilung) of the economic Trinity with an a priori, always already self-communication (Selbstmitteilung)
of God in grace. By rendering transcendentality ever surpassing in its reach, Rahner ultimately exposes other
corners of his theology to the point of provoking internal disjunction that his transcendental overextension
leaves him unable to resolve.
Introduction
“Naturally I know there is perhaps very much in my theology that does not clearly and
unambiguously fit together,” Karl Rahner remarked in a lecture given on the occasion
of his eightieth birthday shortly before his death. Such potential disjuncture may be
attributed to the “original pluralism of the sources of our knowledge,” Rahner contin-
ued, and a theologian can only “request from both supporters and opponents that they
approach his theology with gracious goodwill,” prioritizing its “starting points, funda-
mental tendencies, and placement of questions (Ansätze, Grundtendenzen,
Fragestellungen)” more than its “‘results,’ which, after all, can never really be
Henry Shea
Campion Hall, Oxford University, Brewer Street, Oxford, OX1 1QS, UK
Email: henry.shea@theology.ox.ac.uk
© 2020 The Authors. Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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638 Henry Shea
conclusive.”1 While the following query is advanced neither in support of nor in oppo-
sition to Rahner’s thought, it is certainly hoped that it will honor his request for gra-
cious goodwill. One of the challenges for any reader of his theology, nonetheless, is that
some of its fundamental tendencies are positioned in a tension whose ultimate har-
mony is not readily evident. In recent years several commentators, most notably Karen
Kilby, have drawn attention to textual developments and potential discrepancies in
Rahner’s corpus,2 even as others have underscored oscillating dialectics that recur in
his thought.3 While both approaches provide frames of reference for the following anal-
ysis, it focuses distinctly on the extent to which diverse areas of Rahner’s theology in-
ternally cohere, arguing that a careful comparison of his vision of transcendentality
with other salient elements of his thought exposes difficulties that issue not in tensive
harmony so much as internal disjuncture. After considering the development of tran-
scendentality in Rahner’s writings, this is related accordingly to three alternate topoi in
his theology: (1) the Realsymbol, (2) the conscious experience of grace, and (3) the histor-
ical self-communication of the economic Trinity.
Expanding Transcendentality: The Broadening Scope of the Always Already

Rahner’s vision of transcendentality has several layers, each of which requires careful
parsing. His first major monograph, Geist in Welt (1939), situates the knower within
three simultaneous and mutually conditioning starting points such that (i) the appre-
hension of a finite, sensible object coincides with the (ii) pre-apprehension (Vorgriff) of
infinite esse and the (iii) dawning of self-consciousness, or self-presence, in the subject.
The first point firmly anchors Rahner’s epistemology in sense, such that all human
knowledge arises only by the conversio ad phantasma initiated in apprehension and com-
pleted in judgment. Transcendentality, by contrast, pertains to the latter two elements.
1
Natürlich weiß ich, daß in meiner Theologie vielleicht sehr vieles gar nicht eindeutig und klar zusammenpaßt, was
in ihr gesagt wird, weil ein Mensch bei dem ursprünglichen Pluralismus der Quellen seines Wissens gar nicht in der
Lage ist, eine adäquate und allseitige Reflexion auf die Kohärenz seiner Sätze durchzuführen. Ein Theologe kann daher
seine Freunde und die Gegner seiner Theologie nur bitten, seiner Theologie mit gnädigem Wohlwollen zu begegnen,
Ansätze, Grundtendenzen, Fragestellungen wichtiger zu nehmen als die ‘Ergebnisse,’ die ja schließlich nie wirklich
endgültig sein können. Karl Rahner, “Erfahrungen eines Katholischen Theologen” (1984), in Karl Rahner
Sämtliche Werke, 32 vols., (Freiburg: Herder, 1995-2018), 25: 54; “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, eds. Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 297-310, here 306. All citations of Rahner’s works in German are from the Karl Rahner
Sämtliche Werke, henceforth abbreviated as SW. The initial date of publication for each German title is given in
parentheses. Each citation references the German edition first followed by its standard English translation.
While the English translations were consulted, unless noted otherwise, all translations are mine. The original
German text is also commonly provided as a point of reference.
2
See Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004); for less disjunctive ac-
counts that still attend to significant shifts in Rahner’s thought, see David Coffey, “The Whole Rahner on the
Supernatural Existential,” Theological Studies 65 (2004): 95- 118; Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Method in
Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, 65-82.
3
See Patrick Burke, Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2002). In considering the oscillating dialectic between transcendentality and the sensible
world in Rahner’s thought, Burke argues that Rahner’s account of abstraction destabilizes and relativizes the
concept, endangering both the creedal features of faith and the internal balance of his system. For a sympa-
thetic critique of Burke that affirms several of his insights while defending Rahner’s recrafting of the passive
intellect, see the review of Stephen Fields in The Thomist 69, no. 4 (2005): 628-32. Burke’s reading is reflective
of his dissertation director, John M. McDermott, as evinced by several articles of the latter: “Karl Rahner on
Two Infinities: God and Matter,” International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1988): 439-57; “Dialectical Analogy:
The Oscillating Center of Rahner’s Thought,” Gregorianum 75 (1994): 675-703; “The Analogy of Knowing in
Karl Rahner,” International Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1996): 201-16.
Internal Difficulties in the Theology of Karl Rahner 639
Although Rahner derives the transcendental from Kant, whose conception he appropri-
ates insofar as transcendentality is the realm of subjectivity and the a priori conditions
for the possibility of experience, it becomes a play on multiple meanings by its concomi-
tant reference to that which transcends the whole range of finite being. Following
Maréchal, Rahner posits that the apprehension of every finite object transpires, as a con-
dition of its possibility, before an infinite backdrop, or excessus, that, operating like a lu-
minous silhouette, establishes the human subject in an implicit position of absolute
openness to being in general. In expositing the Vorgriff Rahner alternates between sev-
eral motifs: it is the light by which everything else is seen, the always receding horizon
that can never be directly examined, and the limitless whither whose desirability incites
a dynamism in the subject impelling her beyond all finitude toward infinite esse—and
thus, however implicitly, God.4 While this excessus, which coincides with the prescind-
ing of the universal from the particular in the process of abstraction, is infinite in scope,
Rahner specifies that its content is “empty (leeren),” disclosing only a “negative (not
privative) limitlessness (Ungegrenzenheit)” and enshrouding infinite being per se in a ten-
ebra ignorantiae.5 Because its dynamism is always complemented by the coincident
movement outward toward the historical, sensorial world, the alternation between these
dynamics, according to Geist in Welt, positions the human being as an “oscillating mid-
point (schwebende Mitte) between the world and God,”6 a “duality (Doppelheit)” that
gives rise to what Rahner identifies as the constitutive, “tensive oscillation (Schwebe)” of
human knowing.7 Every human knower may thereby discover in categorical objects
what analogously symbolizes the überkategoriale Sein pre-apprehended in transcenden-
tality and, by a process of comparison (comparatio) and negation (remotio) “as inner mo-
ments within the excessus itself,”8 reflexively elaborate and thematize the original ground
of its experience and knowledge.9 This thematizing, nonetheless, never “objectively rep-
resents (gegenständlich vorgestellt)” its ground, which manifests itself as an Objekt tran-
scending every categorical Gegenstand, a horizonal excessus that infinitely surpasses
4
While Rahner’s reading of the Vorgriff into q. 84, a. 7 of the Summa theologiae was original, his presenta-
tion of its contents is derived from a variety of intellectual sources, most notably Aquinas, Kant, Maréchal,
and Heidegger. With the exception of Maréchal, each of these sources is engaged with such creativity, how-
ever, that Rahner’s ultimate indebtedness to them is rendered somewhat ambiguous. Though the terms
Vorgriff and Horizont derive from Heidegger, for instance, Rahner’s argument that every subject is thereby
provisioned with a glimpse of infinite being—indeed of God—is decidedly his own. In like measure, ever
since Martin Honecker failed Geist in Welt as a doctoral dissertation at Freiburg due to its unconventional
rendering of Aquinas, the pedigree of the Vorgriff has been rife with controversy. The recurring point of con-
tention is the extent to which Rahner aptly retrieved the Vorgriff from Aquinas himself—as in the affirmation
of the De Veritate that omnia cognoscentia cognoscunt implicite Deum in quolibet cognito (q. 22, a. 2)—or began
from a more uniquely modern point of departure.
5
Rahner, Geist in Welt (1939), SW 2: 293, 295-96; Spirit in the World (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 398, 401.
6
So ist der Mensch die schwebende Mitte zwischen der Welt und Gott, zwischen Zeit und Ewigkeit, und diese
Grenzlinie ist der Ort seiner Bestimmung und seines Schicksals: quasi quidam horizon et confinium corporeorum et
incorporeorum (S.C.G. II 68). Rahner, Geist in Welt, 300; Spirit in the World, 407.
7
So enthüllt sich schon in der Problemformel der conversio ad phantasma die Schwebe des Ausgangspunktes men-
schlicher Metaphysik in seiner einen Doppelheit: beim Hier und Jetzt der Welt und beim Sein im Ganzen. Rahner, Geist
in Welt, 59; Spirit in the World, 64. Rahner consistently identified this unified duality of human knowing as its
tensive foundation and likewise the source of theological analogy: Und jenes ursprünglichere Verhältnis ist eben
das, was wir Analogie nennen—schwebend zwischen einem kategorialen Ausgangspunkt und der Unbegreiflichkeit des
heiligen Geheimnisses: Gott. Grundkurs des Glaubens (1976), SW 26: 74 passim; Foundations of Christian Faith (New
York: Crossroad, 1978), 73 passim.
8
Rahner, Geist in Welt, 294; Spirit in the World, 399.
9
Metaphysik ist also nur die reflexe Auslegung des eigenen Grundes jeder menschlichen Erkenntnis, der immer
schon als solcher in ihr von vornherein mitgesetzt ist. Rahner, Geist in Welt, 288; Spirit in the World, 390.
640 Henry Shea
what is thought through the judgment (urteilend denken).10 Its potential for analogous
thematization, nonetheless, establishes the basis for what Rahner expounded in a sec-
ond monograph, Hörer des Wortes (1941), in which the movement toward the phantasm
constitutes the knower in historical “anticipation”—“on the lookout”—“for a real reve-
lation” in the world of sense of that illimitable being implicitly pre-apprehended and
ineluctably desired.11 As enfleshed spirits, we only know “being as a whole” by “turning
toward an historical appearance in the world,” explains Rahner, and therefore humanity
must listen “for the historical revelation of God which may come in the human word,”
i.e. for “the free personal self-manifestation of a divine Thou.”12
Rahner never wrote another philosophical monograph. But in the many theological
works that followed these early texts, transcendentality was gradually expanded to in-
tegrate the supernatural. It thereby moved even further beyond the confines of a Kantian
conception, incorporating not only the Vorgriff but a series of theological dynamisms,
most notably, “the supernatural existential (Übernatürliche Existential)” and “transcen-
dental revelation (tranzendentale Offenbarung).” Rahner first formally launched the su-
pernatural existential as a concept in 1950 in an article for Orientierung.13 In the context
of the debate over nature and grace initiated by Surnaturel, the supernatural existential,
Rahner proposed, could simultaneously obviate the pitfalls of extrinsicism while pre-
serving the specific gratuity of grace—while its always already givenness renders the
supernatural intrinsic to the ordinary human condition, its entelechy rises above the
natural order as specifically gratuitous. Even so, Rahner had already been conceptually
hovering over the supernatural existential for some time, as evinced by an article from
1942, “Priesterliche Existenz,” in which the concept was exhibited in embryonic form.14
The upshot of this, as Philip Endean and others have aptly illustrated, is that the exis-
tential does not so much derive from the nature-grace debate as it is of an originally
christological inspiration.15 Time and again Rahner reiterated that the supernatural ex-
istential provides a theoretical framework for envisioning how the salvation revealed
for all humanity in Christ may indeed be received by every human being. By the exis-
tential Rahner interwove historical, theological content into transcendentality, as its ab-
stracted consideration of the existential conditions of the subject is reciprocally informed
by a theological point of departure in what has been disclosed of the universal salvific
will of God in Christ, which Rahner commonly abbreviated by reference to 1 Timothy
10
Rahner, Geist in Welt, 294; Spirit in the World, 399.
11
. . . die Erwartung und das Ausschauen des Menschen nach einer wirklichen Offenbarung Gottes dort. Rahner,
Hörer des Wortes (1941), SW 4: 276; Hearer of the Word (New York: Continuum, 1994), 156.
12
Rahner, Hörer des Wortes, 141-42; Hearer of the Word, 152.
13
The original article, published as “Eine Antwort” in Orientierung 14 (1950): 141-45, was slightly revised
and republished by Rahner as “Über das Verhältnis von Natur und Gnade,” in Schriften zur Theologie 1
(Einsieldeln: Benziger, 1954), 323-45, all of which has been collated in SW 5.1: 66-83. The standard English
translation is from Rahner’s Theological Investigations, 23 vols. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961-
1992), hereafter cited as TI. “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” TI 1: 297-317.
14
While Rahner does not deploy the concept as a formal term, he uses the same terminology adjectivally
to speak of an “innermost supernatural existential realm of the human being (innerst übernaturliche existentiale
Bereich des Menschen).” Rahner, “Priesterliche Existenz,” SW 20: 207; “Priestly Existence,” TI 3, 252.
15
Philip Endean, “Rahner, Christology and Grace,” Heythrop Journal 37 (1996): 287-97. Others had also
proposed similar concepts, as Rahner later recognized in the case of Edmond Brisbois, who employed a scho-
lastic rather than Heideggerian nomenclature. See Nikolaus Schwerdtfeger, Gnade und Welt: Zum Grundgefüge
von Karl Rahners Theorie der ‘anonymen Christen’ (Freiburg: Herder, 1982), 161-78; Edmond Brisbois, “Le Désir
de voir Dieu et la métaphysique du vouloir selon saint Thomas,” Nouvelle revue théologique 63 (1936): 978-89,
1089-113.
2:4. If the revealed will of God to save humanity is embraced in faith, Rahner the theo-
logian is ever reasoning, this same God will always already be actively communicating
Godself in the inner recesses of every human life, whatever contrary indications not-
withstanding. This interior grace is nonetheless derived from and oriented towards the
historical mystery of Christ, establishing the two in a relationship of interdependence
and mutual priority. In reflecting on the implications of the salvific will of God, Rahner
continued to develop the supernatural existential as a concept even after its 1950 debut.
By careful analysis, David Coffey has shown how Rahner spoke more reservedly in his
initial article,16 referring to the supernatural existential as a “longing for” and “ordina-
tion to God’s love (das Verlangen und die Hinordnung auf die Liebe Gottes),” an “existential
for supernatural grace (Existential für die übernaturliche Gnade),” and an “unexacted real
receptivity (ungeschuldete reale Empfänglichkeit)” exceeding “what is left over as remain-
der (was als Rest bleibt),” i.e. nature.17 But in several subsequent articles and throughout
his later theological career,18 Rahner expanded its scope beyond a mere “ordination” to
include the gift of Godself such that by the supernatural existential “every human being
really and radically” is the “event of the supernatural self-communication of God,” al-
ways already present “at least in the mode of an offer” (mindestens im Modus des
Angebotes).”19 By free “acceptance or rejection,” this existential offer becomes existentiell,
for the gratuity of its grace never imposes itself upon the subject but is freely accepted
or rejected, establishing within transcendental experience the basis of each person’s
fundamental option. By its free reception, this divine self-communication, as the “inner-
most deification of the world,”20 thus fundamentally realizes all the salutary and di-
vinizing effects of grace, from justification and the exercise of faith, hope, and love21 to
the received indwelling of the Spirit, adopted sonship, and participation in divine life.22
All this could not transpire in a salvific way, however, without a certain revelation,
for God cannot be believed in without the hearing of his word, even if implicitly. Thus
we find Rahner, from the early 1960s onward and in some contrast to the “lookout”
position articulated in Hörer des Wortes, carving out a space for revelation in the tran-
scendental sphere. Even as this interior and universally disclosive “self-revelation”
(Selbstoffenbarung) of God is distinguished from “verbal and propositional revelation
(satzhaften Wortoffenbarung) as such,” transcendental revelation entails a “permanent
16
David Coffey, “The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential,” 95-118.
17
Rahner, “Über das Verhältnis von Natur und Gnade,” 79; “Concerning the Relationship between Nature
and Grace,” 313.
18
Distinct stages of this development may be traced in: Rahner, “Fragen der Kontroverstheologie über die
Rechtfertigung” (1957), SW 5.1: 141-47; “Questions of Controversial Theology on Justification,” TI 4: 199-205.
“Natur und Gnade” (1960), SW 5.1: 125ff.; “Nature and Grace,” TI 4: 180ff. Grundkurs des Glaubens, 116ff.;
Foundations of Christian Faith, 116ff.
19
Die These, daß der Mensch als Subjekt das Ereignis der Selbstmitteilung Gottes sei, ist unbeschadet dessen, daß
sie von einer freien ungeschuldeten Gnade, von einem Wunder der freien Liebe Gottes zur geistigen Kreatur spricht, ein
Satz, der schlechthin alle Menschen meint, der ein Existential jedes Menschen aussagt. Ein solches Existential wird
nicht dadurch geschuldet und in diesem Sinne ‘natürlich,’ daß es allen Menschen als Existential ihres konkreten Daseins
gegeben und ihrer Freiheit, ihrem Selbstverständnis und ihrer Erfahrung vorgegeben ist. Rahner, Grundkurs des
Glaubens, SW 26: 127; Foundations of Christian Faith, 127.
20
… dieser innersten, der Freiheit angebotenen Vergöttlichung der Welt. Rahner, “Über die Heilsbedeutung der
nichtchristlichen Religionen” (1978), SW, 22.2, 348; “On the Importance of the Non-Christian Religions for
Salvation,” TI 18, 292.
21
Rahner, “Rechtfertigung und Weltgestaltung in katholischer Sicht” (1978), SW 28: 515-27; “Justification
and World Development from a Catholic Viewpoint,” TI 18, 259-73.
22
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 117-22; Foundations of Christian Faith, 117-22.
642 Henry Shea
modification of our transcendental consciousness (dauernd bewirkte gnadenhafte

Modifikation unseres transzendentalen Bewußtseins),” constituted and effected by the al-
ways already divine self-communication.23 In this way Rahner transcendentalized not
only the distinction between nature and grace but between reason and revelation such
that all these may be, in a fundamental sense, realized together in the depths of the
subject. As the transcendental horizon serves as a backdrop to consciousness, so does
the Selbstmitteilung Gottes result in an “original luminosity (ursprünglichen Gelichtetheit)”
that is, “in an authentic sense, already revelation (im eigentliche Sinne schon Offenbarung).”24
Rahner never so expands transcendental activity that he denies the necessity of its me-
diation by a categorical object and thus retains the three coincident starting points of
Geist in Welt. In spite of the requisite simultaneity of sensible categoriality, however, the
actualization of grace and revelation as a transcendental unity is increasingly presented
by Rahner as relatively indifferent to the determinate content of its mediation. This ten-
dency reaches a certain definitiveness in his compendious Grundkurs des Glaubens
(1976), where Rahner concludes that because transcendentality “is mediated through all
the categorical material” of “a posteriori experience,” its “supernaturally elevated” mo-
dality “is also mediated to itself through any and every (jedwede) categorical reality in
which and through the subject comes to itself.”25
While the supernatural existential and transcendental revelation were both of un-
doubtable christological inspiration, there are, of course, several further reasons why
Rahner would advance such claims in an increasingly secular and self-consciously plu-
ralist milieu. By existentially front-loading the operation of grace as a ubiquitous a pri-
ori, Rahner’s theology renders the everyday and the world as a whole already saturated
with the gift of Godself, however implicitly, thereby provisioning universally common
ground that is not only natural but properly graced. A world of grace is not only a place
for mutual tolerance and reasoned discourse but for recognizing the effects of the al-
ways already given God in every other, provisioning a basis on which to reflexively
realize a grace diversely expressed yet mutually given and to render more thematic
through Christ the deep spiritual bonds shared even now. Two underlying tendencies
in the theoretical foundations of this Rahnerian vision, however, require further consid-
eration. In an early review of Geist in Welt in 1939, Hans Urs von Balthasar suggested
that there was an inner Tendenz in Rahner’s thought for the transcendental, in which
alone infinite, transcategorical (überkategoriale) being is given, methodically to
23
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 148; Foundations of Christian Faith, 149. Cf. “Weltgeschichte und
Heilsgeschichte” (1962), SW 10: 594-97; “History of the World and Salvation History,” TI 5: 102-6. “Atheismus
und Implizites Christentum” (1967), SW 22.2: 902-3; “Atheism and Implicit Christianity,” TI 9: 162-64. In his
controverted second edition of Hörer des Wortes (München: Kösel, 1963), Johann Baptist Metz attempted to
smooth over these differences in Rahner’s thought by way of emendations and footnotes. More recently,
Karen Kilby, by contrast, has stressed the overarching incongruities in the textual record (see Kilby, Karl
Rahner, 49-69; 142). Even if there is a way of systematically eliding these two phases in Rahner’s theology, the
crux of Kilby’s exegesis still pertains. In terms of what Rahner placed on the written page, there is a basic
discrepancy in the way revelation is framed in the early as opposed to later works: whereas the former por-
tray revelation as sought singularly in history, the latter distinguish this historical, categorical form from a
more fundamental, transcendental disclosure.
24
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 148; Foundations of Christian Faith, 149.
25
Wenn nämlich wirklich die Transzendentalität des Menschen durch alles kategoriale Material seiner aposterior-
ischen Erfahrung zu sich selbst vermittelt wird, dann ist eben die einzig richtige Auffasung, daß auch die übernaturlich
erhobene Tranzendentalität—vorausgesetzt, daß ein freies Subjekt in seiner Transzendentalität handelt—zu sich vermit-
telt wird durch jedwede kategoriale Wirklichkeit, an der und durch die hindurch das Subjekt zu sich selbst kommt.
absorb—literally, to “suck in” (einzusaugen)—concrete objective differentiation into it-

self.26 Whereas Geist in Welt presented the knower in a tensive dialectic (Schwebe) be-
tween concrete objects known through the conversio ad phantasma and the interior
horizon within which such knowledge transpires, there is a kind of inexorable tendency
in Rahner for the infinite excessus within to eclipse its finite counterpart without. This
eclipsing emanates from what made Rahner’s employment of the theology of analogy
so revolutionary: by positioning infinite esse as a horizon that breaks within, Rahner
transposed the locus of reference by which creation is rendered analogous to God to the
transcendental realm. The infinite esse within, as a result, is always already ever greater
than the confined categorical world. Whereas the conversio ad phantasma, as that by
which the negative emptiness of this esse is gradually filled in, should serve to forestall
such an eclipsing within Rahner’s system, he did little to develop its contravening, in-
filling dynamic even as the scope of transcendentality was further expanded. A striking
parallel pertains, moreover, between the eclipsing infinity of the horizon and the self-
communication of God that freely enters via its aperture. Though this latter transcen-
dental self-communication is always categorically mediated, it itself is immediate, and
the immediate aspect of this “mediated immediacy (vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit)”27 re-
mains not only fundamental but surpassing. This immediacy comprises the core of a
document that the mature Rahner described as a kind of last will and testament and
“résumé” of his theology,28 his Rede des Ignatius von Loyola an einen Jesuiten von Heute, in
which Rahner, assuming the voice of Ignatius, recurrently declares that he experienced
Godself.29 Ich habe Gott erfahren,30 avows his Ignatius, and this God gave himself in “a
grace that came so close it could not be confused with anything else”—namenlos, bildlos,
unmittelbar.31 The implication is that what Ignatius expressed is nothing else than what
God communicates transcendentally to every human being. In the same way that
Aristotle presented the foundations of logic, Rahner elsewhere proposed, Ignatius artic-
ulated the basic grammar of spiritual experience: while people had always both rea-
soned logically and experienced grace, “it was only through Aristotle and Ignatius that
26
Balthasar acknowledges that Geist in Welt, given its design as a study of Aquinas, could never have been
expected to develop a full-blown “metaphysics of the object.” But he cautions all the same: Immerhin lag ihr die
Tendenz nicht fern, diese letztere [Objektsmetaphysik] infolge der schlechthin bevorzugten Tranzendenzstruktur des
Subjekts (in dem allein das überkategoriale Sein zur Gegebenheit kam) gleichsam methodisch in sich einzusaugen (378).
Balthasar, “Rezensionen: Karl Rahner, Geist in Welt, und Johannes Lotz, Sein und Wert,” Zeitschrift für
Katholische Theologie 63 (1939): 371-79.
27
See Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 84-90, 116-32; Foundations of Christian Faith, 83-89, 116-29.
28
When asked by a young woman what he would leave to youth as a last will and testament (Vermächtnis
ins Stammbuch), Rahner responded: Es ist schwer, in Kürze darauf zu antworten. Meine ‘Rede des heiligen Ignatius
an einen Jesuiten von heute’ könnte man als eine Art Testament ansehen. Beim späteren Lesen ist mir das bewußt ge-
worden. Es ist aber weniger ein Vermächtnis für die Jugend. Eher handelt es sich um ein Resümee meiner Theologie
überhaupt und dessen, was ich zu leben versucht habe. “Ermutigung zum Christsein” (1983), SW 28: 471;
“Contemporary Christian Life,” in Faith in a Wintry Season, eds. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (New
York: Crossroad, 1990), 104.
29
In an early collection of prayers, Rahner made similar claims about himself: Dank deiner Barmherzigkeit,
du unendlicher Gott, daß ich von dir nicht bloß weiß mit Begriffen und Worten, sondern dich erfahren, erlebt, und erlit-
ten habe. Denn die erste und letzte Erfahrung meines Lebens bist du. Ja wirklich du selber, nicht dein Begriff, nicht dein
Name, den wir dir gegeben. Rahner, Worte ins Schweigen (1938), SW 7: 15; Encounters with Silence (London: Burns
& Oates, 1978), 30.
30
Rahner, Rede des Ignatius von Loyola an einen Jesuiten von Heute, SW 25: 301; “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to
a Modern Jesuit,” in Ignatius of Loyola, ed. Paul Imhof (London: Collins, 1979), 11.
31
Rahner, Rede des Ignatius von Loyola, 299-301ff.; “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks,” 11-13ff.
644 Henry Shea
these logics came into explicit awareness.”32 But the dynamics of this “logic” of grace
transpire only in transcendentality, which, as the realm in which the infinite dawns and
gives itself in utter immediacy, tends to render, once more, the concrete content of its
mediation into a matter of relative indifference. If the horizon and self-communication
of that which is ever greater is already immediately there, it will always eclipse and
surpass what follows.
In his Rede des Ignatius, Rahner nonetheless qualified that it would be “foolish (töricht)”
to say that everything is “equally pervious (gleichmäßig durchlässig)” to God.33 When
Rahner systematically accounted for categorical differentiation, he did so principally on
two levels: in terms of (i) ethics and identity and (ii) salvation history. With respect to
ethical action, the categorical expression of transcendentality finds its exemplar in the
love of neighbor, for “every act of charity toward our neighbor is indeed formally, even
if perhaps only implicitly”—via the self-communicating God who transcendentally
forms the a priori supernatural formal object of every such act—also “love of God” and
therefore salvific.34 But even as Rahner considers the love of neighbor to be “a fortiori” a
salutary act, the ethical parameters of his soteriology are not limited to this. “At least in
the normal case,” Rahner notes, the categorical mediation of transcendental grace in-
volves the assumption of one’s “historical and concrete world task (Weltaufgabe).”35 But
more minimally still, “every radically free moral act (jeder radikal freie sittliche Akt)” may
become “a saving act through grace.”36 A justifying grace may be mediated through
simple self-acceptance: for a person already accepts transcendental “revelation when-
ever he really accepts himself completely, for it already speaks in him.”37 Concomitantly,
in the realm of religious identity, transcendental grace can be mediated categorically
even by “theoretical verbal atheism” and a fortiori by non-Christian religions.38 For “the
thematic religious act as such is and remains secondary (sekundär) in comparison with”
the transcendental acceptance of grace mediated through the free moral act.39 Even if it
is ideally embodied in an explicitly Christian and manifest love of neighbor, the borders
of the categorical mediation of salvific grace are thus much broader than this and enjoy
a certain encompassing relativity.
With respect to categorical symbols of transcendental grace, Rahner considers Jesus
Christ to be the absolute climax of salvation history. Rahner’s reflections on the redemp-
tive significance of the cross are apposite: the cross of Christ is specified as the signum
32
“This is not to deny,” Rahner qualified, “that the science of the saints developed by Ignatius had fore-
runners in the doctrine of ‘the discernment of spirits’ and so forth. Nor do I deny that what Ignatius raised to
the level of a science was afterwards understood only poorly and little developed.” “Comments by Karl
Rahner on Questions Raised by Avery Dulles” (1969), trans. James M. Quigley, SW, 25: 245.
33
Rahner, Rede des Ignatius von Loyola, 306; “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks,” 17.
34
Rahner, “Über die Einheit von Nächsten-und Gottesliebe” (1965), SW 12: 81; “Reflections on the Unity
of the Love of Neighbor and Love of God,” TI 6: 237.
35
Rahner, “Rechtfertigung und Weltgestaltung,” 522-24; “Justification and World Development,” 266-71.
36
Rahner, “Über die Einheit von Nächsten-und Gottesliebe,” 86-87; “Reflections on the Unity of the Love
of Neighbor and Love of God,” 243.
37
Er nimmt aber diese Offenbarung auch schon an, wenn er sich selbst wirklich ganz annimmt, denn sie spricht
schon in ihm. Rahner, “Die Anonymen Christen” (1965), SW 22.2: 287; “Anonymous Christians,” TI 6: 394.
38
Rahner, “Über die Heilsbedeutung der nichtchristlichen Religionen,” 345-51; “On the Importance of the
Non-Christian Religions for Salvation,” 288-95. “Kirche und Atheismus” (1981), SW 30: 254-64; “The Church
and Atheism,” TI 21: 137-50.
39
Rahner, “Über die Einheit von Nächsten-und Gottesliebe,” 89; “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of
Neighbor and Love of God,” 246.
efficax of the “redeeming love” that God has eternally willed and always already com-
municates, even as this love is mediated and made unsurpassably definitive in history
by Christ’s death. While the fundamental ground of its grace remains God’s eternal
salvific will, the categorical event of Christ’s paschal mystery renders this grace histor-
ically “tangible (greifbar),” “irreversible (irreversibel),” and eschatologically “victorious
(siegreich).”40 Rahner draws an analogy between an interior act of freedom and its con-
crete accomplishment: the “material fact” of a deed “reveals” the “original decision”
that gave rise to it while rendering the decision “irreversible” and “in this sense” be-
coming “its cause by its objectification.”41 But even when Christ is considered an objec-
tifying cause and symbolic explication, however mediately efficacious, of what is
always already given, transcendentality still appears to outstrip its categorical expres-
sion. In a striking passage in Grundkurs des Glaubens, Rahner cautions against any ap-
proach that would involve “a christological narrowing (christologischen Engführung).”
Alluding to the myriad “sources of experience and knowledge (Erfahrungs- und
Erkenntnisquellen),” the “plurality of which we must explore and negotiate (auszufalten
und zu vermitteln),” Rahner avers that theology “cannot begin with Jesus Christ as the
absolute and final datum (als dem schlechthin letzten Datum).” For “there is a knowledge
of God,” he concludes, “which is not adequately mediated (vermittelt) through the en-
counter with Jesus Christ.”42 While Rahner specifies elsewhere that the humanity of
Christ is what God himself is when God becomes non-divine, as the “grammar” of
God’s self-expression that reaches its climactic apex in the cross and resurrection, its
particular categoriality is still ever surpassed—transcended—by the infinite horizon
and immediate self-communication of God within.
A similar nomenclature of explicitation and irreversible objectification may be found
in Rahner’s writings on the sacraments. At the end of Grundkurs des Glaubens Rahner in-
dicates that “in the sacraments the official, explicit, and ecclesial history of the salvation
of the human being becomes manifest,” even as this grace is already received implicitly
wherever human freedom engages in a “merely existentiell salvific act of a human being
in God’s grace.”43 The reception of the “express revelation of the word in Christ,” which
reaches its own apex in eucharistic celebration, is “only the explicitation (Ausdrücklichkeit)
of what we always already are by grace (immer schon aus Gnade) and experience at least
unthematically in the limitlessness of our transcendence.”44 Even as Rahner describes the
“exhibitive character (exhibitiven Charakter)” of a sacrament as an event “which effects
what it signifies (bewirkt, was es anzeigt),” he provides the critical qualification that a sac-
rament is effective “not inasmuch as it would call forth a will of God to give grace which
would not exist without it, but inasmuch as through it precisely this will of God to
give grace manifests itself in history and so also renders itself historically
40
Rahner, “Das Christliche Verständnis der Erlösung” (1981), SW 30: 354-56; “The Christian Understanding
of Redemption,” TI 21: 250-51.
41
So ähnlich wie bei der menschlichen Freiheit, die unter Umständen gerade durch ein materielles Faktum, das von
ihr als ursprünglicher verscheiden ist, doch ihre eigene ursprüngliche Entscheidung mit dieser Objektivation sowohl
offenbart, sie auch erst irreversibel macht und in diesem Sinn doch auch von dieser Objektivation verursacht ist, so ist
es auch beim Kreuzesgeschehen. Rahner, “Das Christliche Verständnis der Erlösung,” 355; “The Christian
Understanding of Redemption,” 251.
42
43
Sondern sie unterscheiden sich wie amtliche, ausdrückliche, kirchlich in Erscheinung tretende Heilsgeschichte des
Menschen in den Sakramenten und bloß existenzielles Heilstun des Menschen in der Gnade Gottes. Rahner, Grundkurs
des Glaubens, 404; Foundations of Christian Faith, 429-30.
44
Rahner, “Die Anonymen Christen,” 287; “Anonymous Christians,” 394.
646 Henry Shea
irreversible.”45 In this vein Rahner proves markedly consistent, and the distinguishing
features of the categorical mediation of grace, in the Christ-event as in the sacraments,
remain twofold: explicitation and irreversibility. The assertion of explicitation, however
simplistic and near tautologous, reflects a scholastic tradition that reaches back to
Aquinas, even as the claim to irreversibility represents the confidence Rahner places in
the grace of Christ, once manifest, to prevail.
Rahner’s expansive theology of transcendentality, however, also reframes the distinc-
tion between implicit and explicit given that the infinite, immediate divine self-
communication, always already implicitly initiated within, tends to eclipse its explicit
development in the concrete progression of salvation history. In his mature essay “Zur
Theologie der Gottesdienstes” (1979), Rahner is especially overt about the extent to
which this accentuated always alreadyness contrasts with a previous, often predominant
theological tradition. As opposed to a model in which grace operates through “an inter-
vention of God” entering history “from outside” at “a definitive point” in time,46 Rahner
proffers another model, which he clearly favors, in which “the profane world is always
already encompassed and pervaded (immer schon umfaßt und durchdrungen) with the
grace of divine self-communication.” By contrast with the first model, which according
to Rahner “savors, for people today, of something miraculous and mythological,”47 the
worship of the second model “is not something which otherwise does not happen or
permanently happen elsewhere in the world,” as if thereby foreign to human experience,
but “something that happens always and everywhere in the world” and is “explicitly
celebrated, declared, and accepted” in the sacramental48—such was Rahner’s Wende,
whether Copernican or otherwise.49 It is not, therefore, as if an aperture for grace was
opened distinctly in and through the Incarnation but that what this mystery realized and
manifested was always already operative with an encompassing reach—not only in
grace and revelation but even sacramentally and liturgically. “The liturgy of the Church,”
Rahner further states, is but “the symbolic representation of the liturgy of the world,”
and the celebration of the Eucharist makes explicit and irreversible the same grace that,
as grounded in transcendentality, redounds upon the ordinary human condition and the
world as a whole.50 The abiding question for such a Wende, however, is whether its inner
45
Dieses sakramentale Zeichen der Gnade ist ein wirksames Zeichen, nicht insofern es den ohne es nicht bestehenden
Gnadenwillen Gottes hervorrufen würde, sondern insofern durch es eben dieser Gnadenwillen Gottes sich selbst zur
geschichtlichen Erscheinung bringt und so sich selber auch geshichtlich irreversibel macht. Rahner, “Was ist ein
Sakrament?” (1971), SW 18: 484; “What is a Sacrament?,” TI 14: 144.
46
Es vermeidet nämlich die Vorstellung, heilshaftes Gnadengeschehen müsse notwendig als punktförmig von außen
kommendes Eingreifen Gottes gedacht werden. Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Gottesdienstes” (1979), SW 29: 394;
“On the Theology of Worship,” TI 19: 145.
47
. . . eine Vorstellung, die nun einmal für den Menschen von heute irgendwie einen mirakulösen und mytholo-
gischen Beigeschmack hat. Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Gottesdienstes,” 394; “On the Theology of Worship,” 145.
48
Es geschieht darum in solchem Gottesdienst nicht etwas, was sonst in der Welt nicht geschieht oder bleibend
geschehen ist, sondern es wird ausdrücklich gefeiert, ausgesagt und angenommen, was in der Welt immer und überall
geschieht. Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Gottesdienstes,” 396; “On the Theology of Worship,” 147.
49
Rahner first asserted that his theology of a world always already saturated by grace marked a Copernican
turn (Wende) in a 1970 article on the sacraments, “Überlegungen zum Personalen Vollzug des Sakramentalen
Geschehens,” SW 18: 458-59; “Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event,” TI
14: 161-62. He partially retracted the claim as an exaggeration in “Zur Theologie des Gottesdienstes” (1979),
398; “On the Theology of Worship,” 149, on the basis that the new paradigm is not mutually exclusive of the
previous model, both of which must be affirmed to some extent. Even then, Rahner still characterizes the
difference between them as diametric.
50
Die Liturgie der Kirche ist die zeichenhafte Darstellung der Liturgie der Welt. Rahner, “Zur Theologie der
Gottesdienstes,” 395; “On the Theology of Worship,” 146.
pull is compatible with those areas of Rahner’s thought more distinguished by concrete
differentiation—or whether it finally leaves them compromised and exposed.
The Contravention of Transcendentality in Realsymbolism

In contrast to the relative indifference to categorical content with which his later writings
present transcendental activity, Rahner’s earlier writings on symbolism attribute to sacra-
mentality a much more differentiated capacity for mediation. In recent years several pro-
ponents of Rahner’s thought have in fact thus presented his work on symbolism as a kind
of counterbalance to his theology of transcendentality. James Voiss has argued that
Rahner’s theory of the Realsymbol affords his theology an aesthetic depth to which
Balthasar’s criticism does not do justice, and Peter Joseph Fritz has appealed to the con-
versio ad phantasma and its movement toward the sensible world in Geist in Welt and Hörer
des Wortes as the foundation for a Rahnerian theological aesthetic.51 While these areas of
Rahner’s oeuvre are indeed formed by an aesthetic dynamic, the recurring question will
be whether their content is internally consistent and commensurate with Rahner’s theol-
ogy of transcendentality, particularly its cast of the movement from implicit to explicit.
Earlier in his career Rahner’s symbolic theology was heralded as a central feature of
his thought and as among his most important contributions to the field of theology.52 In
the epilogue to a two-volume Festschrift produced on the occasion of Rahner’s sixtieth
birthday in 1964, his brother Hugo opined that Rahner’s essay, “Zur Theologie des
Symbols” (1959), contained the heart of his theological thought and its fundamental
point of departure.53 Rahner had written in that same essay that “no theology can be
completed (durchführen läßt), without also being a theology of the symbol,” just as “the
whole of theology is incomprehensible if it is not essentially a theology of symbols.”54
51
James Voiss, “Rahner, Von Balthasar, and the Question of Theological Aesthetics,” in Finding God in All
Things, eds. Mark Bosco and David Stagaman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 167-81; Peter
Joseph Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014),
especially 5-77, 130-45, 261-66. Whereas Voiss engages in a tentative search in Rahner for theologically aes-
thetic elements that could reconcile him with Balthasar and counterbalance his transcendental and abstractive
features, Fritz’s initial argument was considerably more ambitious and somewhat anomalous, arguing that
Rahner’s theology is “aesthetic,” in the very broad sense of openness to “the manifestation of being,” “all the
way down” (11- 13). In a subsequent volume, Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner’s Fundamental Option and
Theological Aesthetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), Fritz has somewhat qual-
ified his initial claims, acknowledging, for instance, that his first definition of aesthetics was too “thinly con-
ceived” (12), even as he basically maintains and elaborates his aesthetic reading. For critical discussion of the
first volume, see Richard Viladesau, Review of Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, Modern Theology 32 no. 1
(January 2015): 125-27; “Review Symposium: Four Perspectives on Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics,”
Philosophy & Theology 29, no. 2 (2017): 485-506.
52
For comprehensive analysis of the Realsymbol and its philosophical and theological antecedents, see
Stephen Fields, Being as Symbol: On the Origins and Development of Karl Rahner’s Metaphysics (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2000); also see C. Annice Callahan, “Karl Rahner’s Theology of Symbol: Basis
for his Theology of the Church and the Sacraments,” Irish Theological Quarterly 49 no. 3 (1982): 195-205; James
J. Buckley, “On Being a Symbol: An Appraisal of Karl Rahner,” Theological Studies 40 no. 3 (1979): 453-73.
53
Noch ein gemeinsames theologisches Anliegen, das unmittelbar in die Problematik von ‘Gott in Welt’ hineingreift,
sind unsere Bemühungen um die patristische sowohl als die theologische Ausdeutung der Andacht zum Herzen unseres
Herrn, und was ich zur Geschichtstheologie dieser Andacht geschrieben habe, wird von Dir spekulativ unterbaut in der
Abhandlung, die ich persönlich für den Inbegriff Deiner theologischen Grundrichtung halte, ‘Zur Theologie des
Symbols.’ Hugo Rahner, “Eucharisticon fraternitatis,” in Gott in Welt: Festgabe Für Karl Rahner, Band II, ed.
Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg: Herder, 1964), 897.
54
The German durchführen connotes not only completion but also performance and enactment: daß sich
eine Theologie nicht durchführen läßt, ohne daß sie auch eine Theologie des Symbols . . . Tatsächlich kann die ganze
Theologie, ohne nicht auch wesentlich eine Symboltheologie ze sein, sich gar nicht begreifen. Rahner, “Zur Theologie
des Symbols” (1959), SW 18: 435; “The Theology of the Symbol,” TI 4: 235.
648 Henry Shea
In a synthetic study to which Rahner wrote a foreword of approbation, Logos-Symbol in

the Christology of Karl Rahner, Joseph Wong illustrated how foundational elements of
Rahner’s symbolic theology were first laid in the premises of Geist in Welt and Hörer des
Wortes.55 As indicated above, in these early works the knower is disposed to recognize
through abstraction and judgment the symbolic meanings of formal, sensible objects
even as the subject moves dynamically beyond the appearance of the symbol toward
the more, or excessus, of the symbolized. The finite world is an analogous symbol of the
infinite. God, as the absolute esse of the excessus, is thus the “ultimate symbolizer or
ground of symbol, and as such is present sacramentally in the finite symbol.”56 “Everything
is a parable—figura—of the God who is at once always revealed and concealed in the
parable.”57 But though all creation is sacramental, not everything is equally apt for sym-
bolizing: certain words and symbols are more disclosive than others. Channeling Rilke,
Rahner vouches that the privileged role of the poet is to employ “primordial words”
(Urworte) that evoke the divine mystery rather than control, rendering a thing “translu-
cent (durchscheinend) to the infinity of all reality.”58 Certain primordial symbols
(Ursymbolen), such as the heart, act in a similarly privileged way.59 Even as every subject
as a symbol-interpreter is thereby capable of approaching the infinite esse whose hori-
zon dawns within them through the differentiated analogous symbolism of the finite
world, Rahner designates the distinct historical possibility of an “absolute symbolic
revelation” of the infinite as dependent on the free decision of this infinite being.60
In “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” Rahner moved beyond this hermeneutic of symbols
toward a comprehensive theological ontology in which all realities actualize themselves
through symbolic mediation. “Every being is of itself necessarily symbolic,” Rahner
posited, “because it ‘expresses’ itself in order to find its own essence.”61 This is the prin-
ciple of the Realsymbol, whose plurality-in-unity is thereby rendered into a kind of theo-
logical transcendental by which being is constituted in a trinitarian way. Rahner speaks
of an “inner agreement (innere Übereinkunft)” between expressing and expressed, reality
and symbol, to capture how this plurality-in-unity is joined by a distinctly intrinsic for-
mal causality more than the extrinsic aspects of efficient causation.62 Through a dy-
namic of emanation and return, all being is actualized in a reditio completa in seipsum, a
communication of “itself to itself” in a self-diffusive outpouring in which its emanating
55
Joseph Wong, Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner (Rome: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1984).
56
Joseph Wong, Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner, 94.
57
Alles ist ein Gleichnis—figura—des im Gleichnis immer enthüllten und immer verborgenen Gottes. Rahner,
“Die Wahrheit bei Thomas von Aquin,” SW 2: 316; “Thomas Aquinas on Truth,” TI 13: 13. This text of Rahner
was first delivered as a lecture in 1938 and pertains to the same period as his philosophical monographs. It
was published later in Portuguese in the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (1951) and in German in the tenth vol-
ume of Schriften zur Theologie (1972).
58
Rahner, “Priester und Dichter” (1955), SW 12: 422; “Priest and Poet,” TI 3: 295.
59
Rahner, “‘Siehe dieses Herz!’ Prolegomena zu einer Theologie der Herz-Jesu-Verehrung” (1953), SW 13:
488-95; “Behold this Heart! Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” TI 3: 321-30. “Zur
Theologie des Symbols,” 451-57; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 245-52.
60
Rahner, Hörer des Wortes, 252-56, 270-72; Hearer of the Word, 140-42, 152-53.
61
Das Seinde ist von sich selbst her notwendig symbolisch, weil es sich notwendig ‘ausdrückt,’ um sein eigenes
Wesen zu finden. Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 426; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 224.
62
Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 426-35; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 224-34; cf. Stephen Fields,
“The Metaphysics of Symbol in Thomism: Aeterni Patris to Rahner,” International Philosophical Quarterly 37 no.
3 (1997): 277-90.
self-expression and subsequent return to itself in self-possession constitute its essence.63

Even as this dynamic courses through all creation, its ground and primal analogate is
the God who revealed Godself in Christ. As the begetting emanation of the Son and
processing return through the Spirit in unity and love constitute the essence of God in
relation, the whole of reality, by implication, is an analogical reflection of the Trinity and
a participation in its triune dynamism (circumincessio). Rahner proffers a series of illus-
trations: ousia expresses itself in eidos or morphe to compose a concept; the concept incar-
nates itself in an expressive word; the soul realizes itself through the body as form in
matter, and a substance expresses itself through its powers and accidents.64 So, too, with
the symbolism of the sacraments: “as God’s work of grace on the human being is ac-
complished (incarnates itself), it enters the spatio-temporal historicity of the human
being as sacrament, and as it does so, it becomes effective (wirksam) for the human being,
it constitutes itself (setzt sie sich selbst).”65 Rahner believed he thereby overcame the neo-
scholastic quarrel concerning “physical” or “moral” sacramental causality: as grace is
actualized through a reciprocal conditioning in which “the sacrament is precisely
‘cause’ (Ursache) of grace, insofar as it is its ‘sign’ (Zeichen),” grace is also “the cause of
the sign, which effects (erwirkt) the sign and so first (erst) makes itself present (anwe-
send).”66 The adverb erst is worthy of note in this case: bearing the connotation of both
“first” and “only,” it implies that grace becomes present only in and through its sign.
All of this serves as a prolegomenon to the problem at hand. The original epistemol-
ogy on which Rahner’s symbolic theology is based implied that a transcendental exces-
sus is not sufficient for an absolute symbolic revelation of the infinite and thereby
constitutes the human person on the “lookout” for such in history, whereas his later
writings constitute this person as already equipped, gratuitously, with the fundamental
elements of both grace and revelation, however implicitly. Even though the absolute
categorical revelation made in Jesus Christ enacts and enables a definitive thematiza-
tion of the always already divine self-communication,67 according to Grundkurs des
Glaubens any categorical sign may in fact serve as an effective medium for the funda-
mental option for grace. According to Rahner’s ontology of the symbol, however, the
actualization of grace should prove formally commensurate, and even constituted in a
relationship of mutual conditioning, with its intrinsic symbolic expression in every con-
crete case. For the dynamics of realsymbolism are not based so much in an extrinsic ef-
ficient causality as in the internality of formal “agreement” (Übereinkunft), rendering the
convenientia of symbol and symbolized integral to the realization of both as a unity.
Rahner’s symbolic theology was originally formulated to explain how the Sacred Heart
serves as an intrinsic expression of the love of God. The logic of his realsymbolism,
nonetheless, would essentially preclude the equivalent efficacy of a symbol whose ex-
pression was fundamentally contrary to love. If the kenotic love of God became incar-
nate in a violent gesture, it simply would not actualize itself to the same degree—and
perhaps even fundamentally fail to do so. A self-effacing savior-king could hardly enter
Jerusalem in martial array but, following Zechariah, must ride the foal of a beast of
63
Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 423-51; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 221-45.
64
Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 423-55; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 224-49.
65
Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 447-48; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 242.
66
Daß das Sakrament gerade ‘Ursache’ der Gnade ist, insofern es ihr ‘Zeichen’ ist, und daß eben diese Gnade (als
von Gott herkommend gesehene) Ursache des Zeichens ist, die dieses erwirkt und so sich selbst erst anwesend macht.
Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” 448; “The Theology of the Symbol,” 242.
67
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 151-71; Foundations of Christian Faith, 153-75.
650 Henry Shea
burden to have his heart pierced upon a cross. The mediating content of these symbols
is not indifferent to the actualization of what they express—in the historical revelation
of God as well as in the subject who receives this revelation and participates in its mys-
tery by grace.
In fact it seems near impossible to square the reciprocal dynamics of Rahner’s real-
symbolic ontology with the assertion that the Selbstmitteilung Gottes may fundamentally
be mediated by “any and every (jedwede) categorical reality in which and through which
the subject becomes present to itself.”68 When Rahner intimates that contemporary
atheism is as capable of mediating transcendental grace as the lived embrace of Christian
faith, his claim runs aground on the basic tenets of his realsymbolism. It is true that
Rahner’s theology of the reciprocal causation between symbol and symbolized may be
found even in his later writings, particularly in those more narrowly focused on chris-
tology and the sacraments, and it is likewise true that Rahner routinely affirms in these
writings the basic principle of Trent that sacraments effect what they signify and confer
grace ex opere operato.69 But against the backdrop of his broader theology these affirma-
tions appear more like conventional tropes whose implications are in any case never
worked through systematically in a way that would fundamentally shape his theology
of grace. For in all of Rahner’s central texts on grace and anthropology the relation be-
tween the categorical and the transcendental is not framed such that the categorical
must intrinsically reflect the transcendental option for grace in order to more fully real-
ize the interior reception of divine self-communication, as if on a spectrum, nor as if the
fullness of a transcendental option for grace is causally dependent in concrete context
upon a correlatively full symbolic mediation. As grounded in a surpassing and imme-
diate transcendental whose fundamental grace is ubiquitous, the texts simply do not
project such a vision. At times Rahner even appears to preclude such a possibility,
drawing strict dichotomies between transcendental and categorical exercises of free-
dom: “in the act of a thematic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God,” he writes, “this ‘yes’ is not affirmed
immediately (unmittelbar) to the God of original transcendental experience (ursprüngli-
chen transzendentalen Erfahrung), but only to the God of thematic, categorical reflection,
to a God in concepts, maybe even only to a God in idols (im Götzen), but not immedi-
ately and exclusively to the God of transcendental presence.”70 Such partitioning only
reinforces the indifference of transcendental affirmation to its categorical counterpart.
Mutually constitutive conditioning, by contrast, requires a fluid bidirectionality be-
tween the transcendental and categorical as implied by Rahner’s own realsymbolic on-
tology. One may alternatively conceive of reciprocal pathways which, like trinitarian
processions, realize the reality of grace according to a mutual causality such that prog-
ress is conditioned upon the formal commensuration of both transcendental act and
symbolic mediation. While this would reflect Rahner’s realsymbolism, it would also
issue in a very different theology of grace from that which he came to espouse. There is
a theological aesthetic in the writings of Rahner, but its inner dynamic does not so much
counterbalance his theology of transcendentality as contravene it.
68
69
See “Der Eine Jesus Christus und die Universalität des Heils” (1975), SW 22.1b: 895-99; “The One Christ
and the Universality of Salvation,” TI 16: 212-16. “Glaube und Sakrament” (1981), SW 30: 576-78; “Faith and
Sacrament,” TI 23: 186-88. “Taufe und Tauferneuerung” (1980), SW 29: 405-13; “Baptism and the Renewal of
Baptism,” TI 23: 196-204. “Zur Situation des Bußsakramentes,” SW 29: 414-27; “The Status of the Sacrament of
Reconciliation,” TI 23: 205-18.
70
Divided Subjectivities: The Experience of Grace as Conscious, Unreflexive Knowledge

A related tension obtains between Rahner’s portrayal of grace as entering into con-
sciousness and his insistence that such grace may remain unreflexive and unthematic.
Each of these claims serves as a premise for central contentions in Rahner’s theology:
whereas the former enables him to render grace intrinsic to ordinary human experience,
the latter grounds his argument for the universality of its reach. Even when God remains
thematically unknown, the received divine self-communication must be more than
“merely ontic (bloß entitativ),” at least for those capable of experiencing it as such. For
however unassuming the circumstances it is ordinarily conscious engagement with this
communication that enables the affirmative responses of faith, hope, and love, even if
only in an implicit way.71 There is much to be said on behalf of Rahner’s insights. Michael
Purcell has drawn compelling correlations between Rahner’s theology of grace in the
everyday and Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of the saturated phenomenon: the ordinariness
of creation and our everyday lives within it always bear an excessus that surpasses our
capacity to reflexively engage it, at once opening space for “the advent” of the divine
other, “graciously prevenient,” and engendering “a surplus of intuition that confounds
intention.”72 Such a phenomenology of excessive grace will be readily recognizable to
anyone who has even dabbled in spiritual reflection: what is given in a moment may be
received over time and only reflectively appreciated much later. “We had the experience
but missed the meaning,” writes T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, “And approach to the
meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”73 Any gift
that involves Godself will always bear unlimited potential to be further received, as its
reception is ever surpassed by what is given. Each grace, in turn, is never merely a
memory but akin to a bottomless well from which we may always draw water anew.
But even when the excess of what is consciously intuited and only inchoately in-
tended is not adequately thematizable, we are still able to identify and affirm its given-
ness. The abiding question is what to make of situations in which there is no indication
of this, or it is emphatically denied, and here the difficulty in reconciling the two claims
of Rahner with which we began most recurs. The vexing implication of the dual claim
that grace is consciously yet unreflexively received is that it portrays large swaths of
people so graced as routinely, even constantly, missing the meaning of what they are
consciously and most deeply experiencing, as if their capacity for reflexive expression
was permanently repressed or inhibited. From this angle many of the unthematically
graced can appear not so much “anonymous” as schizophrenic. This is not to overlook
the creative genius that characterizes Rahner’s hermeneutic, which tends to turn what
he termed “depth psychology (Tiefenpsychologie)” on its head, eschewing reductive
readings of the human person and religious experience for an alternate theological re-
ductio in mysterium of a pervading grace; the deepest repressions, Rahner implies, are
made by those who reflexively deny the meaning of transcendence and love even as
deeper experiences of such persist at the unthematized core of their being.74 Though the
71
Rahner, “Die Anonymen Christen” 291; “Anonymous Christians,” 398.
72
Michael Purcell, “Glimpsing Grace Phenomenologically: Prevenience and Posteriority,” Irish Theological
Quarterly 73 (2003): 76, 81, 86.
73
T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” in Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London:
Faber and Faber, 1978), 168.
74
Rahner, “Der Eine Jesus Christus und die Universalität des Heils,” 902; “The One Christ and the
Universality of Salvation,” 219-20. “Im Dialog mit Atheisten” (1983), SW 23: 783-84; “In Dialogue with
Atheists,” in Faith in a Wintry Season, 126-27.
652 Henry Shea
ground for such a hermeneutic is laid principally in Rahner’s theology of transcenden-

tality, its origins may be traced to Rahner’s earliest writings, such as in the spiritual
anthropology he draws from Bonaventure, in which an abyssal apex affectus resides
deeper than a person’s intellect and will as the seat of unitive love,75 and in Rahner’s
first published collection of prayers, where he speaks of “knowing (Erkennen)” as touch-
ing “only the surface of things” and failing “to penetrate my heart, to the depths of my
being in which I am really I.”76
When this experience is transposed into universal claims, however, the difficulties
resurface. There is a certain presumptiveness to any type of claim about repression in
others, as objectors to Rahner’s controverted label of the “anonymous Christian” com-
monly noted. It could even appear as if Rahner was claiming to have reached a panoptic
position from which he as theological psychoanalyst was better positioned to explain
the experiences of others than they were able to reflexively interpret them themselves.
This would be a caricature, however. Rahner makes no claim to possess inside insight
into the particular contours of any one person’s experience but merely avers, princi-
pally on the basis of what is revealed in Christ, that God is always already giving
Godself and every human person must therefore be engaged with this mystery, ineluc-
tably and without exceptions. It is worth recalling that in Rahner’s phenomenologies of
everyday grace he tends to conceive of such grace as accepted in and through the expe-
rience of something else and, in this sense, indirect: grace transpires in the following of
conscience at personal cost, in practical love for a neighbor in need, or in persevering
hope in the face of death.77 In these everyday circumstances grace is not usually recog-
nized as such “with an unambiguous reflexive certainty (eindeutigen reflexen Sicherheit).”78
But this phenomenological and categorical indirectness subsists in further tension with
Rahner’s description of transcendental grace as intimately immediate: ich habe Gott er-
fahren.79 To some extent such tension is resolved by Rahner’s indication that mystics
and Christians achieve greater clarity in grace than is ordinarily the case, but even in the
ordinary case, grace is still God’s immediate self-communication—implicit, perhaps,
but not fundamentally indirect in itself. The broader question that hangs in the back-
ground of these difficulties, therefore, is whether Rahner’s basic distinctions are plausi-
ble, or whether his wires cross: can “transcendental knowledge of God (transzendentale
Gotteserkenntnis)”80 be had in both ways—as conscious yet not reflexive, immediately
75
Even at this early phase Rahner frames Bonaventure’s apex affectus as the locus of an “immediate” expe-
rience of God: die ecstasis ist die dunkle, sic im apex affectus allein vollziehende Erfahrung unmittelbarer
Liebesvereinigung mit Gott. “Der Begriff der Ecstasis bei Bonaventura” (1934), SW 1: 155-63, here 159.
76
. . . das Erkennnen nur die Oberfläche der Dinge eben anrührt, daß sie nicht eindringt in mein Herz, in jene Tiefen
meines Wesens, in denen ich wirklich ich bin. Rahner, Worte ins Schweigen, SW 7: 15; Encounters with Silence, 29.
77
See Rahner, “Alltagliche Dinge,” SW 23: 475-87; “Everyday Things,” (London: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 1-
41. “Erfahrung des Geistes” (1977), SW 29: 38-57; “The Spirit in the Church,” (New York: Crossroad, 1979),
3-31.
78
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 130; Foundations of Christian Faith, 130-31.
79
Rahner, “Rede des Ignatius von Loyola,” 301; “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks,” 11.
80
Wir zielen also auf jene konkrete, ursprüngliche, in geschichtlicher Verfaßtheit transzendentale Gotteserkenntnis,
die im Modus des Ja order des Nein unweigerlich im Grunde des Daseins noch im alltäglichsten Leben des Menschen
geschieht. Sie ist natürliche und gnadenhafte, erkenntnishafte und offenbarungs-glaubenshafte Erkenntnis in einem, so
daß die Unterscheidung ihrer Elemente ein nachträgliches Geschäft der Philosphie und Theologie, nicht aber eigentlich
ein Ereignis reflexer Art für diese ursprüngliche Erkenntnis selber ist. Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 60;
Foundations of Christian Faith, 57. The structures of human transcendentality and the divine self-communication
blend together for Rahner in ordinary conscious experience to the point of being indistinguishable.
experienced yet not reflexively identified, known yet not thematically expressed? Such
a theology walks along a tightrope that at times looks more like a knife edge. Its lines in
Rahner’s texts press further: can “knowledge,” at once natural and graced, unthemati-
cally transpire “behind the back of the knower (hinter dem Rücken des Erkennenden ab-
spielt)?”81 Would that not rather pertain to the subconscious, a realm of undoubtable
significance yet not subject to “self-present” knowledge? To what extent does an expe-
rience still recognizably transpire even when it is reflexively rejected and denied? At the
very least, it would seem that a simple schematic of the implicit and the explicit is not
adequate to capturing the ambiguous complexity of such movements. Rahner’s alter-
nate expressions for the movement from the implicit to the explicit, i.e. unthematic and
thematic, anonymous and reflexive, tend to be used in the same way and offer no evi-
dent advantage in resolving the conundra in question. All these categories appear espe-
cially inadequate, moreover, insofar as they would pose as binaries, and at times Rahner
tends to convey them as such, as in his characterization of our transcendental “yes” to
God as fundamentally independent of “thematic, categorical reflection.”82 A more
broadly spectral schematic, in contrast, that would admit of multiple directionalities
and thereby take into account the ways in which “categorical” differentiation shapes
the experience of grace would be significantly more commensurate with the human
condition as Rahner himself portrays it in Geist in Welt, that is, as abiding in an oscillat-
ing Schwebe between the transcendental and conversio ad phantasma. No aspect of the
world is more wildly diverse than its endless variety of concrete forms, all of which are
known only through the phantasm. While a given grace may be submerged in the core
of a person’s being, does not its evocation and elicitation in and through the concrete
phantasmic aspects of experience enable grace to develop in a reflexively conceptual
and verbal process such that all these elements may become causally and constitutively
integral to its gradual realization in the recipient?
Such considerations bear closely upon the broader question of the relation of original
experience to the concreteness of context, one of the key loci of which is language. Given
that categorical revelation for Rahner provides the media by which to render transcen-
dental grace explicit, he often relies on the language of Scripture to describe what grace
is like. In his 1960 article “Natur und Gnade,” for instance, while making the case that
grace enters into experience, Rahner defers to the lexicon of the New Testament: the
grace of the Spirit is “‘life,’ ‘unction,’ ‘consolation,’ and ‘light.’” Very quickly thereafter,
however, he systematically extends the same grace described in scriptural terms to the
conscious experience of everyone in their transcendentality: for each person always
lives in the presence of the triune God, Rahner writes, even when an individual “does
not ‘know’ (‘weiß’) it and does not believe it, that is, cannot make it an individual object
of his knowledge (Wissens) through an inward looking reflection.”83 But the questions
nag. Was the same “life,” “light,” and “unction” of which the early Church spoke expe-
rienced as such prior to the mystery of Pentecost, the preaching of the kerygma, and the
waters of baptism, or did these linguistic-historical events not become constitutive ele-
ments and even conditions of the grace experienced by those who participated in them?
The same sort of New Testament passages to which Rahner referred when contending
81
82
83
Der Mensch lebt bewußt, auch wenn er es nicht ‘weiß’ und es nicht glaubt, d.h. nicht zu einem Einzelgegenstand
vor dem dreifaltigen Gott des ewigen Lebens. Rahner “Natur und Gnade,” 124-26; “Nature and Grace,” 178-81.
654 Henry Shea
for grace’s entry into consciousness tend to cast the light and consolation experienced
by early Christians as new—with little to no advertence to their only having been reflex-
ively such.84 Apart from Rahner’s suggestive, general phenomenologies of ordinary
grace, he scarcely attempts to present any historical evidence of grace extrinsic to the
verifying witness of the New Testament. Given the line Rahner has drawn between the
conscious and reflexive, the internal consistency of his case does not necessarily require
it. If the same fundamental grace is constitutive of an unthematized experience that
only surfaces reflexively through categorical revelation, there should in fact be little
thematic evidence of such before the New Testament period. But while the New
Testament patently affirms the universal salvific will of God disclosed in Christ and
thus provisions ground for Rahner’s inference that grace is universally given, the same
scriptural witness arguably gives rather less reason to affirm its transcendental equiva-
lence. The critical question that remains for the New Testament as for any Rahnerian
phenomenology of grace is to what extent contextual aspects of the experience shape its
reception such that distinct linguistic content may become constitutive of its greater
realization. Given that the Logos is primordially integral to the realsymbolic actuality of
the triune God, it would logically follow that the concrete hearing and reflexive recog-
nition of this same Logos would operate in a similarly constitutive way in the reception
of its self-communication.
Here the internal tensions in Rahner’s theology closely intersect with external criti-
cism so as to reinforce the difficulty. For decades George Lindbeck criticized what he
termed Rahner’s “experiential-expressivist” model for neglecting the widely held so-
ciological and anthropological view that religions are “comprehensive interpretive
schemes” that “structure human experience” through “doctrines, cosmic stories or
myths, and ethical directives . . . related to the rituals [they] practice.” The relation be-
tween religion and experience, Lindbeck countered, should be viewed not as strictly
“unilateral but dialectical.”85 The faith that is heard, he contended in an early theologi-
cal essay, not only expresses and articulates “existential depths” but produces and
forms them—as someone “becomes human by being taught a language, so he begins to
be a new creature through hearing, learning and internalizing the language which
speaks of Christ.”86 If language signifies not merely by ostension but within a matrix of
meaning, to learn Christ in the mode of a disciple will involve not merely concrete en-
counter with his mystery but the disclosure of its meaning by its hermeneutical key, i.e.
within a kerygmatic matrix. This process entails not only language, however, but the
broader dialectical relationship between Christian narrative and practice (cf. Acts 2:42),
or as Wittgenstein described it, the way in which “the speaking of language is part of an
activity, or of a form of life (Lebensform).”87 A dialectical conception of interior experi-
ence and concrete forms of life would indicate that to hear the preaching of the kerygma,
experience the waters of baptism, and participate in the eucharistic liturgy and its cor-
respondent Lebensform is to enter more deeply into the divine self-communication in its
recurring newness such that these experiences become causally internal and
84
Consider, for instance, Acts 2:1-42, 10:44-48, 19:1-7; Romans 3:9, 3:20-21, 5:11, 10:13-14; Galatians 3:23-28,
4:4-9; Ephesians 2:11-13; Colossians 1:3-8; 1 Thessalonians 1:5-9; Titus 3:4-7.
85
George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 18-19.
86
George Lindbeck, “Fides ex Auditu and the Salvation of Non-Christians,” The Gospel and the Ambiguity of
the Church, ed. Vilmos Vajta (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1974), 116, 120.
87
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2009), §23, 15-15e.
constitutive of a fuller reception of grace. Such causality would be principally formal

but also integrally material, efficient, and final. In fairness Rahner does present anony-
mous grace as dynamically oriented toward explicitation, just as he insists upon the
“incarnational and social structure of grace and of Christianity” to the point of affirm-
ing both that Christian faith generally proffers a “greater chance of salvation (größere
Heilschance)”88 to those who practice it and that upon its authentic, concrete proclama-
tion it becomes the “only valid religion” and necessary for salvation.89 This latter affir-
mation is qualified, however, by what Rahner suggests is the common inadequacy of
the preaching of the gospel and his broad insistence that other historical forms, even
contemporary atheism, give categorical expression to saving faith, albeit less ade-
quately. In the final calculus, nonetheless, what most deeply militates against any differ-
entiation of grace according to its mediation for Rahner is the central thrust of his
theology of transcendentality, which implies that the same fundamental grace may al-
ways be immediately received irrespective not only of linguistic and historical context
but of a concretely chosen form of life.90 Not only does the significance of symbol, lan-
guage, and praxis thereby tend to diminish, but even the explicitly accessible life of the
mind—i.e., its reflexivity—gives way to the radical preeminence of the transcendental
depths in which God gives himself in a way that ever exceeds every categorical
explicitation.
Several Rahnerian commentators have acknowledged that “Rahner’s own formula-
tions need to be extended in such a way that they include reference to language, tradi-
tion, and history,”91 but as Rowan Williams long ago observed, “the question remains
of whether, if this historical mediation is taken with complete seriousness, the whole
transcendentalist apparatus will not need radical revision, such as Rahner has not in
fact chosen to undertake.”92 Philip Endean and others have striven to present such “ex-
tensions” as developing naturally out of Rahner’s theology by vouching that categori-
cal mediations are internally constitutive features of the experience of grace.93 But
textual loci in Rahner’s own writings are few and far between in which he identifiably
conceives of grace as dialectically and reciprocally constituted by the concrete linguis-
tic, historical, and sacramental aspects of its context such that its transcendentality is
not merely expressed as explicit in a fundamentally unidirectional fashion, and the few
88
Rahner, “Das Christentum und die nichtchristlichen Religionen” (1961), SW 10: 571; “Christianity and
the Non-Christian Religions,” TI 5: 132.
89
Wo immer der Mensch konkret in der echten Dringlichkeit und Schwere seiner konkreten Existenz vom
Christentum betroffen wird, stellt sich nach dem Selbstverständnis des Christentums dieses als die einzig noch gültige
Religion dieses Menschen dar, die für ihn von heilsmittelhafter, nicht nur gebothafter Notwendigkeit ist. Rahner, “Das
Christentum und die nichtchristlichen Religionen,” 561; “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” 120.
90
In a later essay, “Die Kunst im Horizont von Theologie und Frömmigkeit” (1982), Rahner reflects upon
the capacity of art to express and evoke transcendental or subjective experience even as he decisively invokes
the priority of the latter for theology: Die ganze christliche Theologie muß, richtig verstanden, ‘subjektiv’ sein. Sie
kann nicht von Gegenständigen reden, die jenseits der geistig-personalen freien Wirklichkeit des Menschen liegen . . .
Man könnte also sagen: Theologie fängt erst dort an, wo sie wirklich subjektiv wird . . . Christliche Theologie muß sub-
jektiv sein, insofern sie von Glaube, Hoffnung und Liebe reden muß, von unserem personalen Verhältnis zu Gott. SW
29: 141; “Art Against the Horizon of Theology and Piety,” TI 23: 165.
91
Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 203,
152-53ff.
92
Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner,” in The Analogy of Beauty, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1986), 11-34, here 30.
93
Cf. Thomas Kelly, Theology at the Void (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 119-49;
Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary (London: SCM Press, 1988), 219-53; Philip Endean, “Has Rahnerian Theology
a Future?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, 281-96.
656 Henry Shea
allusions that may be found in his sacramental theology, for instance, are never systemat-
ically worked through.94 To propose in contradistinction to Rahner that grace is differen-
tiated by contexts will not, of course, imply complete disjunction between them: even as
the origins of a Christian form of life may be distinctly traceable to the concrete event of
Christ, this form may still be related to what precedes or alternates with it by analogy.
Rahner’s Realsymbol in many respects presents precisely what such a contextually com-
mensurated, analogous understanding of grace would entail, particularly in its reciprocal
conditioning of grace and sign, reality and symbol. But the bifurcated subjects of his the-
ology of transcendentality are placed in a different position in which the work of grace
“behind the back” of its knower may operate with relative indifference to what the knower
reflexively conceives and chooses to live, and Rahner’s affirmation of such performative
self-contradiction subsists in further tension with his concomitant insistence upon the suf-
fusion of consciousness by grace—as if what one consciously and most deeply knows and
affirms transpires only as if behind one’s back. The implication that such knowledge is
fundamentally equivalent to what transpires in and through the categorical realm of
Lebensformen places an even more severe strain upon this epistemological twisting and
imperils the internal coherence of his theology. If transcendentality is constituted in a dia-
lectical Schwebe with its conversio ad phantasma, as Rahner first conceived their relation in
Geist in Welt, should not the categorical input of language and Lebensformen prove integral
to our reception of the divine self-communication? By increasingly submerging this recep-
tion in unreflexive depths, however, Rahner renders his framework incapable of incorpo-
rating the differentiatedness of such categorical content, as the fundamental unilaterality
of its transcendental grace and the unidirectionality of its movement toward explicitation
jar not only with the Realsymbol but with the oscillating Schwebe in which Rahner first
framed the relation of transcendentality to the conversio ad phantasma.
The Disjunctive Crossroads of an Historical and Transcendental Selbstmitteilung

Rahner’s trinitarian writings are best known for the controverted yet influential thesis
that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and vice versa (umgekehrt).”95 To eluci-
date the parallels between the immanent and economic processions, Rahner employed
a familiar term that already stood at the center of his theology of grace—Selbstmitteilung.
In delineating the trinitarian aspects of the divine self-communication, Rahner draws
distinctions between “three different manners of givenness (drei verschiednen
Gegebenheitsweisen)” by the Father, Son, and Spirit.96 While the incarnation of the Logos
in Jesus Christ is the way in which “the one God communicates himself to the world
(sich selbst der Welt mitteilt),” this “self-communication (Selbstmitteilung)” properly per-
tains to the manner of givenness of the Son, and its “peculiarity (Eigentümlichkeit)” is
thereby “determined by the peculiarity of the second person.”97 Such peculiarity de-
rives from Rahner’s contention that the parallelism between the immanent and
94
See footnote 69 above.
95
Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott als Transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte” (1967), SW 22.1b, 535;
On the Trinity (New York: Herder, 1970), 20.
96
Rahner speaks of “three distinct manners of subsisting (drei distinkten Subsistenzweisen)” in the imma-
nent Trinity, whereas he refers to “three different manners of givenness (drei verschiednen Gegebensheitsweisen)”
in the economic Trinity. “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 616-20; On the Trinity, 109-15.
97
Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 541ff.; On the Trinity, 27ff..
economic entails that only the second person of the Trinity, as the immanent self-
expression of the Father, could properly communicate God to the world in the
Incarnation—a position that also flows directly from Rahner’s theology of the symbol.98
To parse this peculiarity further Rahner employs and adapts another term from his lexi-
cology of grace: quasi-formality. If the self-communication of God involves a quasi-
formal causality, and the divine form is triune, it follows that its self-communication
will be quasi-formal in a tripersonal way, as each person distinctively appropriates its
own proper relation to created reality.99 As the expression of God the Father pertains to
the Son properly speaking, so does the reception of this expression in unity and love
pertain properly to the sanctifying action of the Spirit.100 Each of these divine actions
involves a distinctly historical movement. Insofar as it is trinitarian, therefore, the eco-
nomic self-communication of God, according to Rahner, is realized only through the
diachronic movement in which the Son and Spirit are sent as incarnate and indwelling,
respectively. A little later in the same texts on the Trinity, however, Rahner frames this
progressively historical economic self-communication as transcendental, rendering it a
universally accessible, interior reality. But given that one usage is a priori and the other
is diachronic, is this a valid transposition? May the same term, Selbstmitteilung Gottes, be
legitimately carried across the transcendental and historical divide of Rahner’s theol-
ogy of the economy of salvation, as if its alternately a priori and diachronic elements
were systematically interchangeable?
In keeping with his broader theology, Rahner argues that such a self-communication
in history is but the categorical explicitation of what is always already given transcen-
dentally as the quasi-formal self-communication of God, Father, Son, and Spirit, in the
existential depths of the human person. But his conflation of the two meanings of
Selbstmitteilung belies a fundamental difficulty. His trinitarian theology entails that the
economic Selbstmitteilung Gottes is fully realized in history only through the incarnation
of the Word even as its reception is completed only through the pentecostal sending of
the Spirit. Rahner in fact envisions this concrete historicality as so indispensable that, in
answering the objection that an historical self-communication would remain inaccessi-
ble to angels as “immaterial, corporeal, personal” subjects, he does not point to an an-
gelic transcendentality but argues on the basis of the unity of spirit and matter that
angels must have access in their own way to the same “self-communication of God
which moves toward the one world of spirit and matter” and finds its “highpoint
(Höhepunkt)” and “irreversible finality” in Jesus Christ, for “a really Christian angelol-
ogy must be aligned from the outset with the fact of the God-man.”101 But does this
“highpoint” of the economic Selbstmitteilung Gottes correspond with a “highpoint” of
98
Rahner makes this explicit: Menschliche Natur ist mit anderen Worten nicht die von außen angenommene
Larve (das πρόσωπον), die Livrée, in der versteckt der Logos in der Welt gestikuliert, sondern vom Ursprung her das
konstitutive Realsymbol des Logos selbst. “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 549; On the Trinity, 33.
99
Nicht-appropriierte Beziehungen einer einzelnen Person sind möglich, wenn es sich nicht um eine effiziente
Ursächlichkeit, sondern um eine quasi-formale Selbstmitteilung Gottes handelt, die ein je eigenes Verhähltnis jeder
göttlichen Person zu der jeweiligen geschöpflichen Wirklichkeit impliziert. Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 594; On
the Trinity, 77.
100
Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 600-1ff.; On the Trinity, 86-87ff..
101
. . . dass die Gnade der Engel auch Gnade Christi, also Moment an jener Selbstmitteilung Gottes ist, die sich auf
die eine Welt aus Geist und Materie (als der notwendigen Andersheit des endlichen Geistes) hinbewegt und—die
Freiheit der Selbstmitteilung vorausgesetzt—notwendig in der Inkarnation (so und nicht anders) ihren Höhepunkt und
ihre irreversible Endgültigkeit findet . . . Eine wirklich christliche Angelologie hat sich von vornherein an der Tatsache
des Gott-Menschen auszurichten. Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 603; On the Trinity, 90.
658 Henry Shea
the Selbstmitteilung Gottes in its transcendental reception? While the latter is certainly
made explicit by embracing the concrete expressiveness of the former, there is little in-
dication in Rahner that the reception of the transcendental self-communication of God
is internally affected by the historical progression of this self-communication such that
its economic “highpoint” would render its actuality distinct from what was always al-
ready experienced. Even as one is an existential and the other is progressively realized,
the incongruity between them is never systematically worked through but rather con-
cealed by the simple transposition of the term Selbstmitteilung.
In the same treatise on the Trinity, Rahner devotes a paragraph to the relation between
history and transcendence so as to affirm their “unifying duality” (einigenden
Gezweitheit).102 But the difficulty for his theology remains: however much history and
transcendentality are affirmed as reciprocal in the overarching relation between the in-
carnate Christ and interior grace, as mutually prior elements of the divine will to save,
there is no systematic adequation of their operation that would commensurate their ac-
tivity in the diverse concrete contexts of the divine self- communication. Whereas
Rahner’s trinitarian theology, like his theology of the symbol, points to the mutual con-
ditioning of the “modalities” of history and transcendence according to particular con-
text, his transcendental theology, once more, frames its interior self-communication as
relatively independent of the content of its historical mediation. To proffer an image,
transcendental grace may implicitly realize itself like a root vegetable without leaves,
fully ingrown in the ground, and, until its explicit harvest, remain entirely undiscovered
from above. But what is brought into the light of day is fundamentally the same as what
was submerged in the earth. When Rahner leans more upon the term “history of revela-
tion” (Offenbarungsgeschichte) as a categorical contrast to the Selbstmitteilung Gottes, as in
Grundkurs des Glaubens, the dichotomy between transcendentality and history is at least
more consistently framed. Until its climax in Christ, Rahner indicates, the categorical
history of revelation is saturated with partiality and religious disarray such that what is
transcendentally experienced is subjected to a variety of “erroneous, sinful or merely
human interpretations.”103 Yet even then the same transcendental experience abides
throughout: a tuberous root may be totally submerged in weeds, yet in actuality it is al-
ready a sweet potato. Rahner’s asymmetric portrayal of the relation between subjective
Gnade and historical Offenbarung is rendered even more problematic, however, when the
two are conflated in a common Selbstmitteilung Gottes that comprises at once an always
already existential and a three-fold givenness that gradually unfolds in time. At this ter-
minological crossroads history and transcendentality merge only in disjunction, as the a
priori status of the divine self-communication is contravened by claims to its historical
maturation such that its “highpoint” would be reached only in a visibly incarnate, real-
symbolic actualization—as if what was first but a seed finally blossomed as it emerged
and unfolded above ground.
Here internal difficulties once more dovetail with external criticism. None is more
famous than that of Rahner’s former student, Johann Baptist Metz, who declared that in
his theology of transcendentality Rahner made claim to have won the race without ac-
tually having run it, as in Grimm’s tale of “The Hare and the Hedgehog.”104 By always
102
Rahner, “Der Dreifaltige Gott,” 604; On the Trinity, 92.
103
104
Johann Baptist Metz, Glaube in Geschichte und Gesellschaft (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1978), 140-48;
Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley (New
York: Crossroad, 1980), 158-66.
already enveloping the subject in transcendental grace, Rahner immunized it from the
exigencies—at once dangerous and demanding—of historical and social life. Even as
this theology unburdens its adherents, its closure to what interrupts and even threatens
also renders them impervious to the authority of those who suffer and the urgent call to
a converted solidarity with the victimized. Metz’s familiar criticisms recall that the re-
ception of grace in Scripture as in Christian tradition involves historically situated
conversion—Πεπλήρωται ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ἤγγικεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ; μετανοεῖτε (Mark
1:15). This incarnate call to metanoia not only issues from without but induces an inher-
ently diachronic movement that cannot be rendered redundant by an a priori. The call of
those who suffer and the call of the incarnate Christ, insofar as they are different, are
heard only in and through history. Following Metz, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, also a
former student of Rahner, identified his transcendental theology as tautologous insofar
as it “overlooks” the degree to which spiritual desire is shaped by the “historical and
hermeneutical dimensions of human experience.”105 Rahner’s tendency to avoid pre-
senting concrete data for his claims about transcendentality and grace finds a helpful
contrast in figures such as de Lubac and Balthasar, whose theology is markedly more
calibrated to historical differentiation. In Le mystére du surnaturel, for instance, de Lubac
challenges his readers to identify pre-Christian expressions of a hope, or even longing,
for the unitive vision of a personal divinity, and he recurrently emphasizes how the
Gospel, in the newness of kerygmatic preaching and sacramental life, activates a hidden
aptitude for God and transforms those who participate in it.106 Balthasar, in turn, por-
trays “the journey of grace (der Fahrt der Gnade)”107 as reciprocally commensurated with
a concrete historical movement that culminates in the appearance, expression, and sur-
render of the incarnate Word, in whose Gestalt grace finds its full form.108 By the same
token, the progress of grace becomes an impetus for the concrete maturation of nature,
the entelechy of which is fully actualized only when, Balthasar observes in expositing
Irenaeus, “the fullness of grace coincided with the fullness of time.”109 Whereas Rahner
also acknowledges that Christ received a unique and unsurpassable fullness of grace,110
he does not evidently conceive of the concrete relation of persons to this prime analo-
gate as determinative of the conditions of their reception of the divine self-
communication. In Balthasar, by contrast, the historical conditions for the graced
105
Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Theology: Transcendental or Hermeneutical?” Horizons 16 (1989): 329-41.
106
Henri de Lubac, Le mystére du surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1965), 155-77; The Mystery of the Supernatural
(New York: Crossroad, 1998), 119-39. Cf. De Lubac, La foi chrétienne (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1969), 255-83;
The Christian Faith (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986), 261-89. Petite catéchèse sur ‘nature’ et ‘grâce’ (Paris:
Fayard, 1980), 41-71; A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1984), 55-99.
107
Wenn Gott das Vehikel geschichtlichen Fortschreitens (samt dessen ganzer Fragwürdigkeit) benützt, um zu sei-
nem ganz andern und gar nicht fragwürdigen Ziel zu gelangen, dann wird dieses ’Fahrzeug’ (um den indischen
Ausdruck zu gebrauchen), als ganzes dadurch gezeichnet bleiben, daß der Herr der Geschichte sich seiner bedient hat,
und zwar auf der Fahrt der Gnade. Balthasar, Theologie der Geschichte (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 2004 [orig. 1959]),
101; A Theology of History (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), 137.
108
Gnade aber ist kein vager Impuls von außen oder von oben; sie hat in der Geschichte eine ganz besondere Gestalt.
Sie gewinnt diese Gestalt schon inchoativ im Alten Bund und vollendet sich im Neuer Bund. Balthasar, In Gottes
Einsatz leben (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1972), 18; Engagement with God (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2008),
12.
109
Ja der Sohn wartet selber auf seine Stunde, die der Vater allein kennt, um nichts zu verfrühen, sondern die Fülle
der Gnade mit der Fülle der Zeit zusammenfallen zu lassen. Herrlichkeit II/1 (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1962), 81; The
Glory of the Lord II (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1984), 81.
110
Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, 171ff.; Foundations of Christian Faith, 174-75ff.
660 Henry Shea
actualization of human potential shift according to their concrete relation to the incar-
nate Christ such that—broader recapitulative dynamics notwithstanding—“an analogy
of anthropology” is drawn in close correspondence with an analogy of history and
time.111
Yet the accounts of de Lubac and Balthasar also imply that the activity of grace is
disparate and uneven, and this seems difficult to reconcile with a genuinely universal
divine will to save. While chosenness is part of the biblical record, so is the universality
of the ultimate election disclosed in the paschal mystery. Even if such accounts are com-
plemented by a robust affirmation of the universal salvific will of God, as de Lubac and
Balthasar both made, in concrete context the grace thereby given is not equally accessi-
ble to all. By making the principle of grace as immer schon his point of departure, Rahner
provided a way of explaining the ubiquitous efficacy of an unrestrictedly universal di-
vine will to save without recourse to vicarious representations that bypass existential
decision, post- mortem exercises of freedom, or eschatological postponements. Its
grounding in transcendentality also insulates somewhat the work of grace from the
exposure and vicissitudes of human life. On this account Rahner’s theology remains a
vital and salient frame of reference for any systematic account of grace that embraces
salvific universality. But in affording ever greater ascendency to the transcendental,
which ineluctably eclipses categoriality and remains always truly decisive, Rahner
compromised even other areas of his own theology insofar as it is differentiated by the
concrete content of symbol and history. Rahner famously defined grace as the
Selbstmitteilung Gottes. Apt as this phrase may be, it is not innocent of his broader
imbalance—and in fact reflects a pattern that recurs in the difficulties at hand. For grace
is not merely a one-sided a priori communication but an exchange that entails, in the
likewise apt formulation of Aquinas, “participation in the divine goodness.”112 Even as
the triune God is always already communicating Godself, human participation in this
mystery cannot be otherwise than diachronic, and to compress it into a hidden a priori
can only be a distortion. While Rahner evidently endeavored to arrange his framework
to forestall such a collapse, the internal difficulties underscored here illustrate why its
foundations do not adequately ground the tension required to do so. This inadequacy
surfaces most acutely through analysis of those elements in Rahner’s work that are not
prone to being transcendentally compressed, such as the Realsymbol, the reflexive recep-
tion of grace, and the historical givenness of the economic Trinity, each of which re-
quires that the symbolic, phantasmic, linguistic, and historical dimensions of experience
be constitutive—in a differentiated and reciprocal manner—of our participation in the
divine self-communication. But such a reciprocally constitutive role for the concrete is
simply never transposed into Rahner’s theology of transcendentality. Insofar as his
work would pose as a consistent system, in consequence, its contents do not conclu-
sively cohere—and not merely its “results” but even its fundamental tendencies. This
lack of internal coherence in Rahner is of more than exegetical interest, as it illustrates
111
Die Gesamtheit der Menschenzeit ist also ein innerlich analoges Phänomen, das im ganzen durch die Zeit Christi,
in der sie gipfelt, sich erklärt. Balthasar, Theologie der Geschichte, 33; A Theology of History, 43. For an elaboration
of the historical phases of this theologische ‘Analogie der Anthropologie,’ see Theodramatik II/1 (Einsiedeln:
Johannes, 1976), here 392; Theo-Drama II (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), here 428.
112
. . . ipsa participatio divinae bonitatis quae est gratia. ST I-II, q. 110, a. 2, ad 2; cf. I-II, q. 109, a. 1. Thomas also
defines grace more directly by the formula of 2 Peter 1:4 as a certain participation in the divine nature: donum
autem gratiae excedit omnem facultatem naturae creatae, cum nihil aliud sit quam quaedam participatio divinae naturae.
ST I-II, q. 112, a. 1.
more broadly what happens when a theologian tilts the scales of the ineluctable para-
dox that obtains between the universal givenness of grace and the differentiation in its
concrete realization, or what Rahner referred to as the tension between history and
transcendentality. In expanding the latter, Rahner ultimately exposes other corners of
his theology to the point of provoking internal disjunction that his transcendental over-
extension leaves him unable to resolve.

Modern Theology - 2020 - Shea - Internal Difficulties in The Theology of Karl Rahner

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Modern Theology 37:3 July 2021 DOI:10.1111/moth.

INTERNAL DIFFICULTIES IN THE

Expanding Transcendentality: The Broadening Scope of the Always Already

modification of our transcendental consciousness (dauernd bewirkte gnadenhafte

absorb—literally, to “suck in” (einzusaugen)—concrete objective differentiation into it-

The Contravention of Transcendentality in Realsymbolism

In a synthetic study to which Rahner wrote a foreword of approbation, Logos-Symbol in

self-expression and subsequent return to itself in self-possession constitute its essence.63

Divided Subjectivities: The Experience of Grace as Conscious, Unreflexive Knowledge

ground for such a hermeneutic is laid principally in Rahner’s theology of transcenden-

constitutive of a fuller reception of grace. Such causality would be principally formal

The Disjunctive Crossroads of an Historical and Transcendental Selbstmitteilung

You might also like

Modern Theology - 2020 - Shea - Internal Difficulties in The Theology of Karl Rahner

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Original Title

Copyright

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Modern Theology - 2020 - Shea - Internal Difficulties in The Theology of Karl Rahner

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Copyright:

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Modern Theology 37:3 July 2021 DOI:10.1111/moth.

INTERNAL DIFFICULTIES IN THE

Expanding Transcendentality: The Broadening Scope of the Always Already

modification of our transcendental consciousness (dauernd bewirkte gnadenhafte

absorb—­literally, to “suck in” (einzusaugen)—­concrete objective differentiation into it-

The Contravention of Transcendentality in Realsymbolism

In a synthetic study to which Rahner wrote a foreword of approbation, Logos-­Symbol in

self-­expression and subsequent return to itself in self-­possession constitute its essence.63

Divided Subjectivities: The Experience of Grace as Conscious, Unreflexive Knowledge

ground for such a hermeneutic is laid principally in Rahner’s theology of transcenden-

constitutive of a fuller reception of grace. Such causality would be principally formal

The Disjunctive Crossroads of an Historical and Transcendental Selbstmitteilung

You might also like

absorb—literally, to “suck in” (einzusaugen)—concrete objective differentiation into it-

In a synthetic study to which Rahner wrote a foreword of approbation, Logos-Symbol in

self-expression and subsequent return to itself in self-possession constitute its essence.63