DOI:10.1111/nbfr.

12049

Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian

Perspective
Aidan Nichols OP

For an overview of what the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von

Balthasar has to say on this theme, which in the pontificate
of John Paul II re-surfaced in liturgical, theological and popular
consciousness,1 I propose to divide up my material into a trio of
segments. I shall give them titles that aim to illuminate Balthasar’s
thought. Thus I shall be looking at: firstly, ‘the pre-redemption’; sec-
ondly, ‘the co-redemption strictly so called’; and then thirdly, ‘the
trans-redemption’. I preface my account of Balthasar’s thinking on
these three topics with a few general remarks about his Mariology,
and close with some final reflections.

Balthasar’s Mariology in general

What is the formal character – the methodology, so to speak – of

Balthasar’s Mariology? Rather than laying down a law that reflection
on our blessed Lady must have this or that departure point (com-
monly, in modern Catholic practice, this will be either Christology
or ecclesiology), Balthasar prefers to draw attention to the fact that
Marian theology cannot dispense with a dramatic story of the Virgin
and Mother. It is, he points out, a requirement of (any) woman’s on-
tology, her very being, that she requires a span of time – a narrative
space – in which to develop from ‘receptive bride’ to the mother
who both bears and nurtures a child. This will not fail to be so
in this special case where ‘creation reaches its epitome in Mary’s

1
I have in mind the liturgical impetus given by the promulgation of the 1986 Collectio
Missarum de beata Virgine Maria, the renewed vigour of theological theories of Marian
mediation dependent on an ‘ecclesio-typical’ Mariology (see for instance L. Eggemann,
Die ‘ekklesiologische Wende’ in der Mariologie des II. Vatikanums und ‘Konziliare Per-
spektiven’ als neue Horizonte für das Verständnis der Mittlerschaft Marias [Altenberge,
1993]), and the popular movement associated with the name of the American lay theolo-
gian Mark Miravalle which lobbies for a new dogma linking co-redemption via Marian
‘advocacy’ to the Virgin’s mediation of graces.


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250 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

bridal motherhood’.2 Somewhat startlingly, Balthasar declares that

narrative – in the sense of giving attention to the sequence of indi-
vidual historical events – is more important in Mary’s case than in
that of Jesus. The Saviour’s consciousness of his mission developed
in a ‘straight line’ – the way his human mind drew on his divine mind
for the purposes of his mission was rectilinear – whereas Mary’s role
was ever changing in accordance with the needs of her Son whose
helpmate she is.3 From the mysteries of the Infancy, through the
public ministry to Calvary and the Cenacle, her journey follows a
zigzag path. Hence the emergence of the apocryphal lives of Mary
of the patristic period or the mediaeval Vitae, and their more chas-
tened modern equivalents.4 The need to construct a coherent story
line cannot be avoided even in Mariological studies which examine
the materials systematically, in the light of some major principle in
theological doctrine, or, again, do so historically, via the chief epochs
of the Church’s Marian ponderings. And this will be a dramatic story,
not only because of the tergiversations just mentioned but also, and
supremely, because its context is the ‘theo-drama’: the combined di-
vine and human acting whereby, in Balthasar’s thought, saving good
(the acme of all goodness) is brought within the reach of man.5 So
far-ranging are the implications of Mary’s role as ‘dramatic person’
that, for one student of Balthasar’s Mariology, it generates nothing
less than an all-pervasive ‘Marian principle’ in his thinking.6 Were
we to suppose, however, that the formal principle could, by abstrac-
tion, be separated off from Mary herself in all the concreteness of
her figure we should quite falsify the tenor of his texts.
Balthasar insists – rather puzzlingly at first sight – that while
the veneration of Mary in the Church grew exponentially, Marian
doctrine has always remained the same. He is quoting with approval
Blessed John Henry Newman, who wrote:

2
H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, I. Seeing the
Form (Et Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1985), p. 109.
3
H. U. von Balthasar, Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, III. Dramatis Per-
sonae: Persons in Christ (Et San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), p. 294–5.
4
By the latter, Balthasar had in mind here such works as P. Gächter, Maria im Erden-
leben. Neutestamentliche Marienstudien (Innsbrück: Tyrolia, 1954); F. M. Willam, Maria,
Mutter und Gefährtin des Erlösers (Freiburg: Herder, 1959).
5
I offer a hopefully accessible entry to Balthasar’s theo-dramatic theory in A. Nichols,
O. P., A Key to Balthasar. Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness and Truth (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 2011), pp. 49–88, and a full commentary on the volumes of
his Theo-dramatik in idem., No Bloodless Myth. A Guide through Balthasar’s Dramatics
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 2000).
6
Hilda Steinhauer, who has written the fullest account of Balthasar’s Mariological
reflections overall: Maria als dramatischer Person bei Hans Urs von Balthasar. Zum
marianischen Prinzip seines Denkens (Innsbrück: Tyrolia, 2001).


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 251

I fully grant that devotion towards the blessed Virgin has increased
among Catholics with the progress of centuries; I do not allow that the
doctrine concerning her has undergone a growth, for I believe that it
has been in substance one and the same from the beginning.7
And like Newman, engaged in courteous polemic with Pusey, he
finds already in the pre-Nicene age not only an awareness that Mary
guarantees the true humanity of the Word but also a mysterious
identification of Mary and Church: the two great themes, these, of
all Catholic Mariology.8
It soon turns out, however, that what Balthasar means by the con-
tinuous identity of Marian doctrine is the undisturbed abiding, in the
heart of the Church, of the core-affirmations of that doctrine. He
would not deny – indeed, he asserts – that certain further implica-
tions required time for their unfolding. Thus, the need to reconcile
the absolute primacy of the divine saving initiative with the recog-
nition of the creature’s deepest being as responsiveness to the Word,
produced a long-lasting debate in Catholic theology between ‘Ma-
culists’ and ‘Immaculists’, closing only in 1854 with Pius IX’s ex
cathedra pronouncernent on the Conception of the Mother of God.
And again, the difficulty of inter-relating appropriately the oper-
ation of the Redeemer and the co-operation of the Woman whose
consent to the Word must be consent to all its resonances, all the
consequences of the Incarnation, generated that disputable (but not
disreputable!) family of concepts which deal with Mary’s assistance
to Christ’s mediation. Recalling how a sea of titles for the Mother at
the Cross rises (with, say, Co-redemptrix) and falls (with, perhaps,
Auxiliatrix), Balthasar speaks in this same marine metaphor of
the ebb and flow, through history, of Mariology’s tides; a flood of lofty
attributes, titles and venerations is almost necessarily followed by an
ebb that restores the level; but the ebb-tide can also seep away, leading
to a forgetfulness that is unworthy of theology.9
Balthasar evidently believed himself to have lived in an era when
Mariology was at low tide. He wrote, with, evidently, some bitterness
of feeling, Man schämt sich einer Christenheit, die sich heute ihrer

7
J. H. Newman, Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, II (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), p. 26, cited in H. U. von Balthasar,. Theo-Drama.
Theological Dramatic Theory, III, op cit., p. 296.
8
J. H. Newman, Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, II, op. cit.,
p. 58, on the vision of the ‘Woman clothed with the Sun’ in Apocalypse 12: ‘doubtless
the Woman represents the Church; this, I grant, is the real or direct sense, but what is the
sense of the symbol under which that real sense is conveyed? Who are the Woman and
the Child: I answer, they are not personifications but Persons. This is true of the Child,
therefore it is true of the Woman.’
9
Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, III, op. cit., p. 297. I draw here on
material used earlier in A. Nichols, O. P., No Bloodless Myth, op. cit., 2000), pp. 112–113.


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252 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

Mutter schämt: ‘One is ashamed for a Christianity which today is

ashamed of its own Mother’.10 This statement, made by Balthasar
a few years into the post-Conciliar crisis (it appeared in an essay
in the magazine of his old alma mater, the Benedictine school at
Engelberg, which lies between Lucerne and Interlaken) announces a
theme which will be heard increasingly in his later theology. It is the
theme of Mary, the Mother of God.
Let us now, then, move away from the question of how, in formal
terms, Balthasar viewed Mariology – a dramatic story prompting
fresh doctrinal articulation on the basis of abiding core-affirmations –
and move on instead to the substance, the theological meat, of his
teaching.
While by no means entirely absent from his earlier writing, Marian
themes came to exercise him more and more as a result of the
demands on him of his dirigée the mystic Adrienne von Speyr who
needed his theological help in order to express her own intuitive
inspirations in the fuller form which a priest with a profoundly rooted
and wide-ranging ecclesial culture could provide. It will probably
never be possible to ascertain with certainty what he gave Adrienne
von Speyr and what she gave him. But we can at least say that
a surprising number of the leit-motifs of his mature Mariology are
already audible by way of overture in her 1948 study Magd des
Herren, ‘The Handmaid of the Lord’.11 The notion that opens Magd
des Herren, ‘consent’, Zustimmung, will prove to be the key concept
in Balthasar’s own Marian thinking, and his Mariology reflects her
conviction that reflection on the story of our Lady should commence,
continue and end here. She writes:
This single, all-encompassing act accompanies her at every moment of
her existence, illuminates every turning point of her life, bestows upon
every situation its own particular meaning and in all situations gives
Mary herself the grace of renewed understanding.12

It can hardly be coincidence that, in Balthasar’s presentation of the

story of the Theotokos, what is emphasised is Mary’s undivided –
single-minded and single-hearted – assent to the unique mission of
her Son.13 At the Annunciation she gave her consent to the Incarna-
tion of the Logos in her womb; on Calvary she assented to the Sacri-
fice her Son offered for the sins of the world; and with Christ’s rising
in glory this fiat or act of saying Yes is transformed into unending

10
H. U. von Balthasar, ‘Marienverehrung heute’, Titlisgrüsse 55. 1 (1968), pp. 2–6.
11
A. von Speyr, Handmaid of the Lord (Et London: Harvill Press, 1956).
12
Ibid., p. 7.
13
Balthasar’s commitment to this work was long lasting as is demonstrated by the
second edition which appeared from his publishing house, Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln, in
1969.


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 253

jubilation.14 In Balthasarian Mariology, the theme of consent is like

the thread of Ariadne which enabled the Attic hero Theseus to find
his way out of the Labyrinth – in our case out of the tortuous ways
of speculation onto the broad sunlit uplands not of Crete, as in the
Greek legend, but of divine truth.

The ‘pre-redemption’

What, then, does Balthasar have to say about what I propose to

call the ‘pre-redemption’, the pre-Calvary contribution of Mary to
her Son’s saving work? In a study of the historic development of
Marian titles, René Laurentin showed that the term ‘co-redemptrix’
came to displace an older word of prayer and praise – ‘redemptrix’ –
which, along with other soteriologically maximalist titles such as
‘life’, ‘salvation’, ‘hope’ had functioned hitherto as a way of speaking
about Mary’s role in the Incarnation.15 Had that word survived into
the early modern period, it would of course have been especially
shocking (indeed, deliciously so) to Protestants.
But once theological attention passed from Mary’s part in the
Flesh-taking of the Word to her place on Calvary, and so her part in
the Word Incarnate’s Sacrifice, it was felt inappropriate – confusing
and incongruous – to call Mary ‘redeemer’ in this new setting. In due
course, then, the language of ‘co-redemption’ took the now vacated
place. Yet despite this linguistic history (and I am assuming that
Laurentin’s researches are fundamentally sound), much early modern
and modern discussion of Mary’s co-redemption continued to focus,
in fact, on her cooperation in the Incarnation, for, after all, the latter
establishes the pre-conditions for her collaboration at the Cross. This
is where use of the phrase ‘the pre-redemption’ comes into its own.
True, along with many of the Church Fathers, one might regard the
Incarnation as not only the putting in place of the ultimate condition
of the Redemption – the moment when the Mediator, the One capable
of joining the sundered ‘terms’ of God on the one hand, and sinful
humanity on the other, is constituted in his own being – but also as
the actual beginning of the Redemption properly so called.16 On such
a view, the Incarnation is itself redemptive, and all that the victorious
Cross does is to sweep away the obstacle of sin which prevents
the deployment of the Incarnation’s energies. It is not possible to

14
J. Saward, The Mysteries of March. Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Incarnation and
Easter (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 61–81.
15
R. Laurentin, Le titre de Co-rédemptrice. Etude historique (Rome: Editions Mari-
anum; Paris: Nouvelles Editions latines, 1951).
16
J.-P. Jossua, O. P., Le salut, Incarnation ou mystère pascal? Chez les Pères de
L’Eglise de saint Irénée à saint Léon le Grand (Paris: Cerf, 1968).


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254 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

grasp Balthasar’s theology, however, unless one regards the coming

to be of the redemptive Mediator as simply the virtual inauguration
of salvation which itself comes about in its definitive reality and
full efficacy only with the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s Death and
Resurrection. And this, I take it, is the better view – if perhaps a
rather ‘Greek’ one for the Byzantine Liturgy, unlike the Latin (or
the Syrian or the Armenian come to that), gives more weight to the
Easter cycle than it does to that of the Nativity.17
For Balthasar, our Lady’s pre-redemptive role should be sought not
only in her contribution to the Lord’s infancy (though pre-eminently
there) but also, and in continuity with this, via her place in the public
ministry of Jesus. As I have stressed, his account of these things –
like his comments on what I term the ‘co-redemption strictly so
called’ and the ‘trans-redemption’ (my phrase for the reception of
redemption through Mary) – turns at all points on the concept of
consent. How, then, does he see our Lady’s pre-redemptive role?
There are, to his mind, three considerations which point up the
importance of Mary’s free consent to the Incarnation. First, in taking
flesh in a human mother’s womb God must not violate his creature,
for this would transgress the most basic Creator-creature relation-
ship. So in the Annunciation he turns to Mary, appealing to her will,
waiting (though not for long!) for her reply. Secondly, this particular
Mother had to be capable of introducing her Child as man into the
fullness of Israel’s religion, which was the already existing divine
revelation to mankind and so would form the indispensable presup-
position and background for Jesus’s mission. Thirdly, the Incarnation
of the Word requires what Balthasar calls ‘a flesh that welcomes him
perfectly’.18 In other words, the matrix into which the Logos entered
when he stepped into the created, material realm had to be perfectly
disposed to union with himself. Mary’s consent, which establishes
the co-redemption in the broader sense of that word by inaugurating
what I am calling its ‘pre-redemptive’ phase, is itself conditioned
(like the subsequent co-redemptive act at the Cross whence what I
am terming the ‘trans-redemption’ issues) by the mystery of her Im-
maculate Conception. For it is the peculiar grace of the latter that it
makes Mary utterly open both to God and to men. In Theo-Drama
Balthasar writes:

17
G. Rémy, ‘Le Christ Médiateur dans l’oeuvre de S. Thomas d’Aquin’, Revue
Thomiste XCIII. ii (1993), pp. 183–233, and here at p. 230. A ‘Greek view’: see R.
Taft, S. J., ‘L’apport des liturgies d’Orient à l’intelligence du culte chrétien’, in p. de
Clerck (ed.), La Liturgie, lieu théologique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1999), pp. 97–122, and here
at pp. 108–109.
18
H. U. von Balthasar [with Adrienne von Speyr], Au coeur du Mystère rédempteur
(Paris: Editions C. D. F., 1980), p. 55.


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 255

As a Mother, she has to mediate – in the requisite purity – everything

human that her Child needs; as her Son’s companion and bride, she
must be able to share his sufferings in a way appropriate to her, and
what most fits her for this task is her utter purity, which means that
she is profoundly exposed and vulnerable.19

As this passage suggests, Mary’s consent is not only virginal and

maternal. It is also, and Balthasar will emphasise this, ‘bridal’. When
we speak of her virginal consent we should be minded to think
of her relation with Israel (she is the perfect ‘virgin daughter of
Zion’). When we speak of her maternal consent we should be minded
to think of her relation with Christ (for reasons that hardly need
explaining). When we speak of her bridal consent, we should be
minded to think of her relation with the whole of humanity, and
indeed the cosmos.
How so? The hypostatic union is a marriage between divine nature
and human, for which Mary is not simply a venue. The marriage
of divinity and humanity in the single person of the Word incarnate
does not take its matrimonial character exclusively from the side
of God, for Mary had to give a bridal consent on the behalf of all
creation. To Balthasar’s mind, it is because Mary is a woman that she
can represent the human creation vis-à-vis God. A male human being
would have been unable to fulfil this role. The reason is: creaturehood
has an archetypally feminine quality. Because the creature is not made
in the image of the Father but in the image of the Word, humanity is
more primordially receptive than it is creative – just as in the eternal
Trinity the Son is primarily receptivity, sheer reception of the Father’s
life, and only on that basis can he be creative, whether metaphorically
so when with the Father he spirates the Spirit or literally so when
the world is made through him. So humankind is likewise creative
on the basis of being receptive, and of its two genders, male and
female, it is the female which the better represents the substance of
human creaturehood in this respect.
Though physiologically speaking, the active female contribution to
generation is as important as that of the male, nevertheless at the
level of the human totalities involved it is the woman who receives
and the man who gives. Nothing ‘gender studies’ has to say can
suppress that fact. But neither should this be taken, in the theological
inference Balthasar draws from it, as a ground for belittling creation
in its womanly aspect. If, in the Incarnation, the part of man is taken
by God as giver, this does not render the human recipient of the
divine gift passive. As Balthasar puts it, commenting on Mary’s fiat:

19
Idem., Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, III., op. cit., p. 323.


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256 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

Let us say rather that this assent is the highest and most fruitful of
human activities, or in terms St Paul might have used, faith is required
more fundamentally than works.20

When he turns from the Annunciation, the beginning of the pre-

redemptive phase of the co-redemption, to the remainder of that
phase, namely, to Mary’s place in the public life of the Saviour prior
to his Passion, Balthasar stresses the infinite flexibility her continuing
consent to the Incarnation and its redemptive unfolding entails. She
does not insist on understanding in advance everything there is to
know about her mysterious Son. In the popular format of an essay
in the collection Maria heute Balthasar comments accordingly:

Just as Jesus little anticipated the fate that lay in store for him but let
it be revealed to him from day to day by his Father, so too would his
mother have anticipated little of what was to come: part of her faith
(the fulfilment of the faith of Abraham) was always to accept God’s
dispositions.21

Mary is called to enter after Jesus the night of the senses – the rupture
of physical contact with her Son, and also the night of the spirit –
the breakdown of understanding of him. Here we see Balthasar’s
indebtedness to the Carmelite school. These phrases (‘night of the
senses’, ‘night of the spirit’) are taken from the ascetical and mystical
theology of St John of the Cross.
The most original aspect of Balthasar’s theology of Marian consent
during the public ministry is his interpretation, precisely by means
of these Sanjuanist phrases, of the ‘distancings’ between Jesus and
Mary. This rubric covers such moments as the losing of the Child
in the Jerusalem temple; the rebuke at the marriage-feast of Cana,
and the declaration that the true mother is whoever does the will of
the heavenly Father. Traditional Protestant exegesis has viewed these
episodes or sayings with some satisfaction, as indicative of a low
Mariology on the evangelists’ part. Catholic exegesis has sought, not
always persuasively, to vindicate them from that charge.
Like typically Protestant exegesis, Balthasar interprets these mo-
ments as definite turnings away of the Son from the mother. But,
unlike such exegesis, he regards these self-removals of Jesus from
Mary as invitations by the Son to the Mother whereby he calls her to
enter with him into the experience of abandonment which will come
to its climax at the Cross. There, at least in Balthasar’s theology of
Calvary, the abandonment of Christ revealed in paradoxical fashion
the perfect loving union of Abandoner and Abandoned. They are the

20
Idem., Au coeur du Mystère rédempteur, op. cit., p. 58.
21
Idem., Mary for Today (Et Middlegreen: St Paul’s Publications, 1987), p. 16.


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 257

consubstantial Father and Son who, through the homoousion of the

Spirit, are ever one in the Holy Trinity.
Here too, in the Marian dimension of his other-relatedness, Jesus
is engaged by seemingly negative actions in the most superlatively
positive activity. He is transforming his mother’s faith from simply
being the faith of Israel, albeit the faith of Israel in uniquely fulfilled
form, into being a ‘cruciform faith’, a faith of the kind that will
typify the Church. Precisely by turning away from her he teaches her
the demands of his mission and what is going to be her share in the
mission of that Church she will personally embody.
He shows her the way her fiat will have to persevere through
darkness and incomprehension. And this lays the foundation for
the Mother’s future collaboration with the Son, her role in ‘the co-
redemption strictly so called’, just as that co-redemptive role further
establishes, through her, the basis for the Church’s co-operation in
redemption: what I am calling in its Marian foundation the ‘trans-
redemption’.

The co-redemption strictly so called

At the Cross the movement of Mary’s continuing consent reaches its

climax in her receptive yet supremely creative standing by. In his
theological dramatics Balthasar writes:
It is only in this way that the New Eve is the helper of the New Adam.
. . . He makes room for his Mother’s part, so different and so painful,
which is simply to let his suffering happen and to accept all the pain
that must happen to her too.22
Now the notion that, at the Cross, what Mary was doing was a
unique form of consenting is by no means special to Balthasar. It
is found, indeed, in no less exalted a source than the concluding
Marian chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution of the
Second Vatican Council on the Church. There we read of the consen-
sus, ‘consent’, quem in Annuntiatione fideliter praebuit, quemque sub
Cruce incunctanter sustinuit, ‘which she gave in faith at the Annun-
ciation and sustained unwaveringly beneath the Cross’.23 And again,
on the moment of the Atonement, from the same chapter, but this
time more fully, we hear:
Thus the Blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and
loyally persevered in her union with her Son unto the cross. There she
stood, in keeping with the divine plan, suffering grievously with her

22
H. U. von Balthasar, Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, IV. The Action
(Et San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), p. 395.
23
Lumen Gentium, 62.


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258 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

only-begotten Son. There she united herself with a maternal heart to

his sacrifice, and lovingly consented to the immolation of this Victim
which she herself had brought forth.24

The question is, then, not whether she consented, but what sort of
consent was this and how may its implications be gauged.
I now lay out the elements of Balthasar’s answer to this question
(or questions).

1. Though there is no need to present Mary as consenting to the

Atonement on humanity’s behalf – for that is done by Jesus
himself, nevertheless, to the extent that Mary’s consent at the
Annunciation was a pre-condition of the Incarnation it cannot at
the Cross simply be engulfed by the human ‘Yes’ of her Son.
A distinctive value is retained for her act of consent in what is
done at the Tree. It is not incorporated without remainder in the
New Adam’s self-offering to the Father.
2. In thus renewing her fiat, Mary does so from a position not
only of proximity to the Crucified but also of distance from him.
At the Cross, Mary is both close and distant. This is fitting,
for, so Balthasar explains, despite her unique proximity in spirit
to her Saviour-Son, she is – precisely as the Immaculate – in
complete solidarity with sinners, endlessly at their disposal.25
Only a human nature and personhood thus transformed by grace
can be so utterly open to others. It is in this optic that we must
contemplate her standing at the Cross’s foot. The uniqueness of
her witness to the Offering lies in her simultaneous identification
both with the Offerer and with those for whom the Sacrifice is
offered. On Calvary, the Son is thus accompanied by a uniquely
well-placed consenting witness to God’s atoning action. And this
means – pace opponents of all notions of Marian co-redemption
whatsoever – that the revelation of the Trinity on the Cross cannot
be expounded on the basis of the Crucified alone.
3. This witness, the Mother of the Lord, is, moreover, an icon of
the fruitful receptivity by which the Son, in the spiritual darkness
of the Passion, lovingly obeys the Father in the Holy Spirit. It is
because of her ‘poverty’, the ‘humiliation’ of which the Magni-
ficat speaks – her standing behind sinners and with them – that
she is able to receive the measureless outpouring of the Son on
the Cross in his Sacrifice of praise and petition to the Father, and
receive it in such a way that she becomes the Bride of the Lamb

24
Ibid., 58, with allusions to John 19: 25 and 26–27.
25
H. U. von Balthasar, Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, IV. The Action, op.
cit., p. 356.


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 259

and the Womb of the Church – a ‘nuptial relationship that begins

in the utter forsakenness and darkness they both experience’.26

Here we move from the realm of the ‘objective redemption’ – how the
all-sufficient redemptive act was put in place – to that of ‘subjective
redemption’, which concerns the manner in which the effects of the
redeeming act are transmitted to beneficiaries.
Mary consents to be the witness par excellence of the atoning Act,
and in the way in which she does so she becomes the fruitful recipient
of all its effects. ‘The way in which she does so’: this, for Balthasar,
is crucial. We can trumpet Mary’s share in the victorious Passion
of Christ only if we keep in mind that she lived out that sharing
in the spirit of the Beatitudes. The triumphant vindication whereof
she spoke in her Magnificat continued to be conditioned by the utter
‘lowliness’ she ascribed to herself in that canticle (Luke 1: 48).
Balthasar adds provocatively that at the Cross her ‘Yes’ was to her
own helplessness. Consigned to the care of John, she found herself
dispatched to apparent uselessness in the work of salvation. The
qualifier ‘apparent’ here brings me to the last stage in my exposition
of Balthasar’s thinking, to what I call the ‘trans-redemption’.

The trans-redemption

The apparent uselessness, the seeming sterility, of Mary’s state of be-

ing at the Cross in fact concealed its opposite. In actuality, she was in
process of becoming the ‘womb’ in which the dying incarnate Word
was placing the ‘seed’ of the Church. All the spiritual fruitfulness
that will characterise the community of the Messiah, the total trans-
formative power vouchsafed the Church for the purposes of human
redemption, began at that moment in and through Mary’s witnessing
consent to the saving Sacrifice and it did so thanks to the uniquely
receptive quality of her response. In Balthasar’s words, the Word
‘finally and definitively becomes flesh in the Virgin-Mother, Mary-
Ecclesia’.27 This will give him the starting-point for his theology of
the Church of the Word incarnate:
Because Mary is bodily the Mother of the Lord, the Bride-Church must
be bodily and visible, and her visible sacraments and institutions must
be an occasion for the spiritual experience of Christ and of God.28

26
Ibid., p. 358.
27
Ibid., p. 361.
28
Idem., The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, I. Seeing the Form, op. cit.,
p. 364. See more widely on this theme, B. Leahy, The Marian Profile in the Ecclesiology
of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996).


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260 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

On his view, it is vital that in our Lady the Church herself con-
sented to the Redemption, and continues to consent in, with, and
through, Mary’s never retracted ‘Yes’ to the death of her Son, such
that redemption not only once upon a time but ever afterwards passes
through or across (‘trans’) Mary. As Balthasar sees things, the God-
man did not want the Church to participate in his atoning Sacrifice
simply after the event, when it was all over. He wanted the Church
to be contemporary with the event, so that from the very beginning
the Sacrifice of Calvary was inseparably that of Head and members.
Even in the utter dereliction of Calvary he did not wish to act without
the accompaniment of the Church. And this Mary provided.29
Through the supreme renewal of her virginal, maternal and bridal
consent, as offered in the poverty and darkness of the place by the
Cross, Mary was enabled by the Holy Trinity to give birth to the
Church – and to go on doing so continually throughout the ages.
She allowed herself to lose everything personally her own – including
her Son – so that all that is hers may be ‘expropriated’, given over
to the members of the Church.30 As Balthasar puts it in his exegesis
of the mysteries of the Rosary:
Mary-the-Church keeps no grace for herself; she receives grace in
order to transmit it. This is what a mother does. We are the children
of Mary’s fruitfulness, and her fruitfulness has been given her that she
might receive and fulfil the fruitfulness of her Spouse.31

Some concluding remarks

It should be obvious by now that Balthasar’s teaching was hardly

couched in the rigorous Neo-Scholastic idiom characteristic of the
theology of Marian co-redemption at the high point of its produc-
tivity in the 1940s and 50s.32 Much of the time, his is a theology
which moves forward by the exploration of images, or by plotting
the dramatic relations which seem to connect the various figures of
the divine ‘play’ of salvation. While not without argumentative el-
ements, its main service consists in setting forth certain intuitions
which theologians of a more conceptual stamp may cast into more
rigorous form. One might think here of the analogy of a scientific
theory. For such a theory imaginative construction is the more basic

29
Idem., Au coeur du Mystère rédempteur, op. cit., p. 54.
30
Idem., The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, I. Seeing the Form, op. cit.,
p. 341.
31
Idem., The Threefold Garland (Et San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988 [1982]), p. 137.
32
A good idea of these may be had by scanning the ‘Bulletins mariales’ furnished by
Père Jean-Hervé Nicolas, O. P., in the pages of the Revue thomiste in the years surrounding
the dogmatisation of Mary’s Assumption.


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 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective 261

and important step, even though a new hypothesis about the physical
world cannot be taken with full seriousness until the procedures of
verification proper to the scientific community have been applied.
A doctrine of co-redemption concerned to integrate Balthasar’s
intuitions – something which should only be ventured if they can
be said already to serve as instruments for expressing the faith-
consciousness of the Church, the Great Paradosis of revelation –
would want to do justice not only to what I have been terming the
co-redemption strictly so called, the events on Golgotha, but also to
what I have called the pre-redemption and trans-redemption.
To include our Lady’s role in the Incarnation (‘pre-redemption’)
has the advantage of keeping within the scope of the wider concept
of co-redemption that original Annunciation consent which is the
focus of the most ancient theologies of this subject. To extend the
purview of the doctrine to the communication of redemption through
Mary as embodiment of the Church (‘trans-redemption’) would have
the further merit of incorporating within the doctrine the idea of
Marian mediation of the grace of Christ. Yet the centre of the doctrine
should surely be the Happening on the Hill (‘the redemption strictly
so-called’).
I must now make a confession, My account so far has concealed
the fact that Balthasar did not actually favour the use of the word
‘co-redemptrix’, even though, as I have sought to show, he upheld in
original (some might think idiosyncratic) form the substance of the
doctrine. His anxieties about the diffusion of the term in a popular
context are widely shared, not least because of the changing fortunes
of that all-important prefix ‘co’, at least in English. Its meaning
is shifting from the original sense of accompaniment to the very
different modern connotation of equality. That is not to say that no
acceptable periphrasis can be found. ‘The Redemptive Collaboratrix’
is a bit of a mouthful but hardly more so than the name a lady in
a grotto once confided to Bernadette Soubirous: ‘The Immaculate
Conception’.
Personally, for what it is worth, I have come to look more
favourably on the proposal of a dogmatic definition. The princi-
pal doctrinal – as distinct from pastoral – virtue of such a definition
would lie in its enabling the Marian proclamation of the Church to
address not only the beginning of definitive salvation (as is done in
the dogmas of the Conception, Motherhood and Virginity), and not
only definitive salvation’s outcome (as is done in the dogma of the
Assumption), but the key moment of definitive salvation itself, the
Paschal Mystery.
The Orthodox urge that there should be no proclamation about
Mary, since her place is in the secret heart of the mystery of the
Church, not in the Gospel kerygma heralded to the world. This point
of view would have bewildered the Fathers of Ephesus. They thought


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262 Marian Co-redemption: A Balthasarian Perspective

it best to speak about who God is in Jesus Christ by way of discourse

about Mary whom they proclaimed to be the Bearer-of-God. This
Ephesian strategy can be extended. If our intellectual eye is too
weak to take in the overall dimensions of the salvation wrought on
the Cross and its triumphant display in the remaining acts of the
Paschal Mystery – and surely it is too weak, since these are the
events whereby the Incarnate One re-made the world – we can at
least speak of how they registered in the human response of Mary,
and speak too of their fruitful consequences in the Woman whom
the Man who sits at the Father’s right has crowned. In some not
only beautiful but penetrating words, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn
of Vienna wrote:
Why is it that theology finds the centre of its heart in the heart of
a woman who is Jesus’ mother? Mary is the guarantor of Christian
realism; in her it becomes manifest that God’s word was not only
spoken but heard; that God has not only called but man has answered;
that salvation was not only presented but also received. Christ’s is
God’s word, Mary is the answer; in Christ, God has come down from
heaven, in Mary the earth has become fruitful. Mary is the seal of per-
fect creatureliness; in her is illustrated in advance what God intended
for creation.33 .

Aidan Nichols OP
Buckingham Road
Cambridge,
CB3 0DD
United Kingdom
E-mail: jcan2@cam.ac.uk

33
Words spoken at the 1986 Fatima Symposium on the Alliance of the Hearts of
Jesus and Mary, cited in M. I. Miravalle (ed.), Contemporary Insights on a Fifth Marian
Dogma. Mary Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, Advocate. Theological Foundations III (Goleta,
CA, Queenship Publishing, 2000), p. 6.


C 2013 The Dominican Council