Introduction to Adrienne von Speyr's "The Book of All Saints"

Introduction to Adrienne von Speyr's The
Book of All Saints | Hans Urs von Balthasar




This work came into being over the course of several years, as new portraits
were constantly added on occasion or at my own request. In the beginning,
Adrienne was shown individual saints during times when she was not at all
thinking of these particular people. For the most part, they were shown in
their general disposition and, then, often in prayer that was particularly


characteristic of them. Adrienne was each time able to reproduce their
disposition when we recorded the dictation, and the words they spoke in prayer
were given to her again during the dictation. Once the dictation was over, she
would most often completely forget what she had seen and heard, as always was
the case when Adrienne had "settled" something in obedience and put
herself at the disposal of a new task.



In the first period, she was also often given the vision of a saint during the
night while she was at prayer, and she would report to me the next day that she
had seen this or that saint, asking whether she could tell me about him or her.
Frequently, she would be shown the essence of the person she saw without
knowing exactly what the person's name was. Once she said, "Today I have
seen Gregory." "Which one?" I asked. She confessed that she did
not know there was more than one; she had no idea which person it was with whom
she had interacted. I asked her then to begin, and after just a few sentences
it became clear to me that it could have been none other than Gregory
Nazianzen, as the section in this book will confirm. Later came Gregory the
Great and Gregory of Nyssa to join him.



Another time she said to me, "Today I received Catherine", and to my
question, "Which Catherine?" she could only say, "Not the one
from Siena; I know her." With the description, I guessed that it must have
been Catherine of Genoa, whose life I myself had never read; a subsequent
comparison with her biography and especially a comparison of the prayer with
the account of the visions Adrienne had received gave me the certainty that it
could have been no one else.



Later, the choice of the saints that were to be described was increasingly left
to me. At first, I would jot down names for myself on a scrap of paper, and it
might happen that, when I placed the paper before Adrienne, she would
immediately say, "I can do this one." Another name she might take
with her into her nightly prayer and then describe him to me on the following
day. Later, I was able to request from her whatever saint or special
personality I wished: a brief prayer would transpose her to the
"place" of vision, she would close her eyes, look for a moment in the
Spirit on what was shown her with intensity and inner excitement, and then the
description would begin, slowly at first, in very clearly stamped words, and
then more quickly, without the slightest hesitation, making new judgments with
every sentence. Those who were still alive, and whose fate still lay in their
free decision, were not shown, or (as, for example, with Therese Neumann) only
in very brief glimpses. The definitive text on the little "Resl",
[13] as well as on John XXIII, were written only after their deaths.


Adrienne had either no knowledge or just a glimmer of an idea about the
majority of the personalities whose names I presented to her. Quite often the
outcome of her description took me completely by surprise; I had expected
something altogether different. I also presented her with names that were for
me nothing more than names; I got some of them from a list of people who had
received the stigmata, [14] above all, in order to see what sort of piety or
attitude in each case lay behind the phenomenon; a few names were taken from
the book by P. Herbert Thurston, [15] behind whose purely psychological and
physiological descriptions the properly religious and Christian destinies and
decisions remained hopelessly hidden and unrecognizable.



What might the truth be, one wants to ask, about a Maria Castreca or the
enigmatic Maria de la Visitación? In most cases, I did not verify the answers
with documents that may finally have come to my attention; but the things that
were shown, which were always extremely precise and bore a unique personal
quality, already arranged the individual and disconnected traits into an
internally plausible portrait.



It is important for the reader to bear in mind that the only thing intended to
be shown here is the particular person's prayer and attitude toward prayer in
relation to God. This attitude can in some cases be considerably different from
the person's other achievements in the world and also for the Church (as, for
example, the surprising and indeed shocking portrait drawn of Thomas Aquinas
shows). The degree of integration between inner life and external work can vary
quite significantly in the different saints, as we see, for example, in the
description of Gregory of Nyssa.








Particularly in the earlier periods of this work, Adrienne possessed an
altogether extraordinary need for purity and transparency. Each time, she would
ask, almost with anxiety, whether she was in fact "clean enough",
whether I was able to see perfectly through her soul. She preferred to go to
confession every time before she undertook this work, desirous as she was to be
in every case in a perfect state of confession. In this regard, she dictated to
me the following sentences:

As long as a person lives in this world, he always clings in some sense to the
things that belong to him. In confession, by contrast, a person must set the
things that belong to him free; he must let the world go; he must bring forth
everything and hand it over to the Church. He must become like a child. Then a
person can allow everything God wishes to pass through him. Everything the
Spirit says. But in confession a person gathers together all his sins, 'as God
sees them'. He becomes dispossessed of his own judgment over himself in order
to leave judgment to God alone. Only when a person leaves judgment to God alone
can he, when he is shown a saint, say how it is that the Holy Spirit sees him.
The Holy Spirit's judgment often turns out to be different from what the saint
himself expects. For this reason, it can happen that something is shown of
which the saint and those around him were scarcely aware; the Spirit
underscores certain things that he takes to be important in the saint's soul,
whether they be positive or negative.

The state of confession, in which Adrienne sought to remain, means: pure
openness and readiness, the whole of the soul being nothing more than a
photographic plate, able to take up and reproduce anything that is given to it,
just as it is given. If this purity were not there, according to Adrienne, it
would not be possible to see "how much of what was given belonged to the
saint himself and how much belonged to me. In fact, it would disproportionately
increase precisely what I had kept of my own, hidden in myself, in the
transmission of what came from the other, and would thus make the objectivity
of the portrait impossible."



The more absolute the obedience demanded was (and here it was truly demanded in
an absolute sense), the greater would be the guilt if someone wanted to keep
something hidden. It is clear, however, that such an "experiment"
could be performed only with a soul that had been completely purified. The
complete self-effacement that was demanded has of course nothing in common with
Buddhism and Zen; it is a pure work of Christian love; it is the highest
possible approximation to the Church's attitude as the Bride of Christ, in
whose bosom and spirit all the saints and those who pray find their shelter. It
is the attitude of the soul that has been known, since Origen's time, as the
anima ecclesiastica, the ecclesial soul,
[16] it is the perfection of the Ignatian sentire cum Ecclesia.



Adrienne takes the prayers of the saints and other believers into her soul
through a perfect reenactment of them. That is why she occasionally shows some
awkwardness when she has to reproduce an imperfect prayer: she herself would
have preferred to pray a different way. Or, if the prayer contains traces of
vanity (as, for example, in Gregory Nazianzen), she feels afterward somewhat
stained. On the other hand, she feels personally enriched by all the things in
the prayers that are good. She receives all of this with her own "organ of
prayer". If she herself had not prayed so much, she would not have been
able to transmit any prayers, and if she did not herself have some experience
of everything that appears in all these prayers, she would also not have been
able to reproduce them. Nevertheless, she was not permitted to be anything but
an instrument in the moment of transmission. Moreover, she was not able to
carry through these transmissions in the presence of anyone but her confessor,
because the whole was a work of obedience. [17]



If, on Adrienne's part, it is a work of obedience, then on the side of the
saints it was a work of humility. Of a heavenly humility that does not shy from
displaying itself before the earthly Church in an unshielded attitude of
confession. If Péguy considers public confession to be an indispensable
principle of the earthly Church," how much more validity it holds for the
heavenly Church, where nothing private exists anymore! The examples will show
that nothing happens outside of love and discretion, for the sake of mere
curiosity, and that everything that is shown is an aid in some sense to
Christianity on earth.



The various series came to be at different times. In the first series, one
finds sections included that occurred at a later date. The series dealing with
the threefold attitude and the series with the recited prayers came into
existence within the space of a relatively brief period of time. When Adrienne
had finished her description, I was given the freedom to ask questions in order
to fill in some blanks. These questions, or the answers to them, can be recognized
in the text because they are preceded by a line space. It is significant that
Adrienne, who was doubtless in a form of ecstasy, nevertheless heard the voice
of her confessor by virtue of her obedience, understood his questions, and was
able to answer them in view of what she saw.



The choice of the saints' portraits remains of course arbitrary; there could
have been many more such portraits to be had. Regarding the wording of the
dictation, very little has been changed; nothing at all has been changed in
terms of the meaning, though the sentence structure was here and there
tightened; French words (Adrienne's native language was French, and she was not
always able to find immediately the fitting word in German) were often left
untranslated. A bit more variety was brought to her somewhat poor vocabulary
through the occasional use of synonyms.



In judging these portraits, the reader ought to focus his attention on the
center of the things said rather than getting caught up in the margins or in
trivial matters. Certain details might be expressed in a one-sided manner,
perhaps even badly characterized. But no one is going to deny that Michelangelo
is able to draw well just because in one of his drawings there happens to be a
"stray" line. In reading, one reads the Spirit in the illuminated
background, not in the letter. No one who reads the following pages can fail to
see the power of the things said, whose intellectual differentiation and
characterization presuppose a wholly uncommon natural intelligence and a just
as uncommon supernatural discernment of spirits. It should be clear, however,
that this work is given to the modern, prayer-weary Church in order to awaken in
her an astonishment over the riches of the "world of prayer" and a new
joy in praying.



The second part of the Book of All Saints will fill out things in this first volume
in a variety of ways.



Hans Urs von Balthasar



ENDNOTES:



[13] ["Resl" is a diminutive for
"Theresa".—TRANS.]



[14] Franz L. Schleyer, Die Stigmatisation mit den Blutmalen (Hannover, 1948). Almost nothing about the interior
life of those discussed comes to light in this doctor's descriptions.



[15] Die körperlichen Begleiterscheinungen der Mystik (Lucerne, 1956).



[16] [Balthasar's translation of the Latin as verkirchlichte Seele would be literally rendered into English as
"ecclesialized soul".—TRANS.]



[17] The one attempt I made to request something of this sort in the presence
of a third person (a young Jesuit priest, who was a friend of ours, was
present) was such a torture to Adrienne that I immediately perceived the
falseness of the endeavor and never repeated it.



[18] "Publier le privê, c'est le principe même, c'est la mêthode
ecclêsiastique même. Le vieux principe de la confession publique court sous
toute la chrétienté. Le chrétien dans la paroisse, dans la chrétienté, est
toujours le premier chrétien, le fidèle antique toujours prêt, toujours soumis
a la confession publique, a la commune et comme mutuelle confession" (Un
Nouveau Théologien, Oeuvres en prose, vol.
2 [Pléiade], 875). [To make public what is private is the very principle, the
very method of the Church. The old principle of public confession flows under
the whole of Christianity. The Christian in the parish, in Christianity, is
always the first Christian, always the ancient believer, who is always ready,
always subject to public confession, to a common and, as it were, mutual
confession.]






Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:





• Author Page for Adrienne von Speyr |
Ignatius Insight


• Creation | Adrienne von Speyr.
From The Boundless God


• Death, Where Is Thy Sting? | Adrienne von Speyr.
From The Mystery of Death


• The Confession
of the Saints | Adrienne von Speyr. Chapter 11 of Confession


• Perceiving God's
Will | Adrienne von Speyr. An excerpt from Light and Images



• Author Page for
Hans Urs von Balthasar | Ignatius Insight

• A Résumé
of My Thought | Hans Urs von Balthasar


• Jesus Is Catholic | Hans Urs von Balthasar | An
excerpt from In The Fullness of Faith


• Love Must Be Perceived | Hans Urs von Balthasar | An
excerpt from Love Alone Is Credible


• Church
Authority and the Petrine Element | Hans Urs von Balthasar


• The Cross–For
Us | Hans Urs von Balthasar


• A Theology
of Anxiety? | Hans Urs von Balthasar | The Introduction to The
Christian and Anxiety


• "Conceived
by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary" | Hans Urs von
Balthasar | An excerpt from Credo: Meditations on the Apostles' Creed


• Love Alone
is Believable: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Apologetics | Fr. John R. Cihak








Hans
Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) was a Swiss theologian, considered to
one of the most important Catholic intellectuals and writers of the twentieth
century. Incredibly prolific and diverse, he wrote over one hundred books
and hundreds of articles. Read more
about his life and work in the Author's Pages section of IgnatiusInsight.com.