Juan Sara. Secular Institutes According to Hans Urs ... - Communio

328 Juan M. Sara
someone who is able to experience it, to bear it, to suffer its
deadly opposition and melt its rigidity through pain. 46
5. The secular institutes and historical mission
We must now touch briefly on a final aspect: secular institutes
and the Christian task in history. Both God and the world express their
being in a historical event, in history understood as the apocalypsis—the
unveiling—of their mutual love. The theater of the world is the place
of the mutual self-revelation, self-donation, and self-declaration of God
and the world. It is also the expressive field in which the secular
institutes fulfill their native form.
The secular institutes, we have seen, are a qualified existential
locus for the mutual glorification, “dramatization,” and confession of
God and the world. They bring about an epiphany of God and the
creation thanks to their very consecration, by their enactment of
their own being as an obedience of love. This obedience, the center
and apex that includes the other evangelical counsels, enfolds and
fosters their action in the world. Indeed, their defining task is
“worldly profession as the expression of consecrated obedience,
Christianization of the worldly domain thanks to the full form of the
consecrated state.” 47 Incarnated in the temporal sphere, this
obedience is the concrete expression, at the level of the beautiful, the
good, and the true, of God and the world.
In order to understand something of this central point, we
will consider Balthasar’s Tragedy Under Grace, a book-length study of
German Catholic historian and man of letters Reinhold Schneider.
The book represents Balthasar’s dialogue with Schneider concerning
the task of Christianity today, which is to say, the way in which it
must collaborate in the assumption (tollere) of the human tragedy into
the drama of God himself. Significantly, Tragedy Under Grace bears the
following dedication: “Written for and dedicated to the Secular
Institutes.” 48
46 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Does Jesus Know Us?—Do We Know Him? (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 35.
47 Balthasar, Gottbereites Leben, 105.
48 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the
Experience of the West (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 5.