| |
Love Must
Be Perceived | Hans Urs von Balthasar | An excerpt from Love Alone
Is Credible
Print-friendly
version
In Hans Urs von Balthasars masterwork, The
Glory of the Lord, the great theologian used the term "theological
aesthetic" to describe what he believed to the most accurate method
of interpreting the concept of divine love, as opposed
to approaches founded on historical or scientific grounds.
In Love
Alone Is Credible, von Balthasar delves deeper into this
exploration of what love means, what makes the divine love of God, and
how we must become lovers of God in the footsteps of saints like Francis
de Sales, John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux.
This excerpt from Love
Alone Is Credible is chapter 5, "Love
Must Be Perceived."
If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love
has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact
in, its being wholly other. The inner reality of love can be recognized
only by love. In order for a selfish beloved to understand the selfless
love of a lover (not only as something he can use, which happens to serve
better than other things, but rather as what it truly is), he must already
have some glimmer of love, some initial sense of what it is.
Similarly, a person who contemplates a great work
of art has to have a giftwhether inborn or acquired through trainingto
be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre
art or kitsch. This preparation of the subject, which raises him up to
the revealed object and tunes him to it, is for the individual person
the disposition we could call the threefold unity of faith, hope, and
love, a disposition that must already be present at least in an inchoative
way in the very first genuine encounter. And it can be thus present because
the love of God, which is of course grace, necessarily includes in itself
its own conditions of recognizability and therefore brings this possibility
with it and communicates it.
After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally
receives her child's smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart
of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge:
the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core
of the Thou. Knowledge (with its whole complex of intuition and concept)
comes into play, because the play of love has already begun beforehand,
initiated by the mother, the transcendent. God interprets himself to man
as love in the same way: he radiates love, which kindles the light of
love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man
to perceive this, the absolute Love: "For it is the God who said, 'Let
light shine out of darkness', who has shown in our hearts to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor
4:6).
In this face, the primal foundation of being smiles
at us as a mother and as a father. insofar as we are his creatures, the
seed of love lies dormant within us as the image of God (imago). But just
as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human
heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his
gracein the image of his Son.
Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular
time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and
archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of
the appearance of divine love to man. There has to be an encounter, in
which the unilateral movement of God's love toward man is understood as
such and that means also appropriately received and answered. If mans
response were not suited to the love offered, then it would not in fact
be revealed (for, this love cannot be revealed merely ontologically, but
must be revealed at the same time in a spiritual and conscious way).
But if God could not take this response for granted from the outset, by
including it within the unilateral movement of his grace toward man, then
the relationship would be bilateral from the first, which would imply
a reduction back into the anthropological schema. The Holy Scriptures,
taken in isolation, cannot provide the word of response, because the letter
kills when it is separated from the spirit, and the letter's inner spirit
is God's word and not man's answer. Rather, it can be only the living
response of love from a human spirit, as it is accomplished in man through
God's loving grace: the response of the "Bride", who in grace calls out,
"Come!" (Rev 22:17) and, "Let it be to me according to your word" (Lk
1:38), who "carries within the seed of God" and therefore "does not sin"
(i jn 3:9), but "kept all of these things, pondering them in her heart"
(Lk 2:19, 51), She, the pure one, is "placed, blameless and glorious"
(Eph 5:26-27; 2 Cor 11:2) before him, by the blood of God's love, as the
"handmaid" (Lk 1:38), as the "lowly servant" (Lk 1:48), and thus as the
paradigm of the loving faith that accepts all things (Lk 1:45; 1I:28)
and "looks to him in reverent modesty, submissive before him' (Eph 5:24,
33; Col 3:18).
Had the love that God poured out into the darkness of nonlove not itself
generated this womb (Mary was pre-redeemed by the grace of the Cross;
in other words, she is the first fruit of God's self-outpouring into the
night of vanity), then this love would never have penetrated the night
and it would never in fact have had the capacity to do so (as a serious
reading of Luther's justus-et-peccator theology illuminates in
this regard). To the contrary, an original and creaturely act of letting
this be done (fiat) has to correspond to this divine event, a bridal
fiat to the Bridegroom. But the bride must receive herself purely
from the Bridegroom ([kecharitoméne] Lk 1:28); she must
be "brought forward" and "prepared" by him and for him ([paristánai]
2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:27) [1] and therefore at
his exclusive disposal, offered up to him (as it is expressed in the word
[paristánai]; cf. the "presentation" in the temple, Lk 2:22
and Rom 6:13f; 12:1; Col 1:22, 28).
This originally justified relationship of love (because it does justice
to the reality) in itself threads together in a single knot all the conditions
for man's perception of divine love: (1) the Church as the spot less Bride
in her core, (2) Mary, the Mother-Bride, as the locus, at the heart of
the Church, where the fiat of the response and reception is real, (3)
the Bible, which as spirit (-witness) can be nothing other than the Word
of God bound together in an indissoluble unity with the response of faith.
A "critical" study of this Word as a human, historical
document will therefore necessarily run up against the reciprocal, nuptial
relationship of word and faith in the witness of the Scripture. The "hermeneutical
circle" justifies the formal correctness of the word even before the truth
of the content is proven. But it can, and must, be shown that,
in the relationship of this faith to this Word, the content
of the Word consists in faith, understood as the handmaid's fiat to the
mystery of the outpouring of divine love. But insofar as the Word of Scripture
belongs to the Bride-Church, since she gives articulation to the Word
that comes alive in her, then (4) the Bride and Mother, who is the archetype
of faith, must proclaim this Word, in a living way, to the individual
as the living Word of God; and the function of preaching (as a "holy and
serving office"), like the Church herself and even the Word of Scripture,
must be implanted by the revelation of God himself, as an answer to that
revelation, as it is illuminated by the relationship between the Church
and the Bible.
To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the
creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that
it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature
and its natural powers of love. But this occurs only in grace, that is,
by virtue of God's original gift of a loving response that is adequate
to God's loving Word. And therefore, the creature responds in connection
with, and "under the protective mantle" of, the fiat that the Bride-Mother,
Mary-Ecclesia, utters in an archetypal fashion, once and for all. [2]
It is not necessary to measure the full scope of the faith achieved in
human simplicity and in veiled consciousness in the chamber at Nazareth
and in the collegiurn of the apostles. For the unseen seed that was planted
here needed the dimensions of the spirit or intellect to germinate: dimensions
that, once again, stand out in a fundamental and archetypal way in the
Word of Scripture, but which first unfold in the contemplation of the
biblical tradition over the course of centuries"written on the tables
of our hearts" and henceforth "to be known and read by all men" (2 Cor
3:2-3), written "in persuasive demonstrations of spirit and power", spirit
as power and power as spirit (i Cor 2:4). That which the "Spirit" of God,
however, interprets in our hearts with "power" (and which the Church interprets
in "service to the Spirit" [2 Cor 3:8]) is nothing other than God's own
outpouring of love in Christ; indeed, the Spirit is the outpouring of
the Son of God, "the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:18), since the Lord
himself "is Spirit" (2 Cor 3:17).
When Christ is immediately thereafter designated the "Image of God" (2
Cor 4:4), then this expression ought not to be reduced to mythical terms,
since myth was definitively left behind with the dimension of the Incarnation
of the Word, which surpassed it. He is the "Image", which is not a merely
natural or symbolic expression, but a Word, a free self-communication,
and precisely therefore a Word that is always already (in the grace of
the Word) heard, understood, and taken in, otherwise, there would be no
revelation. There is no such thing as a "dialogical image", except that
which exists at the higher level of the Word, although it remains trueand
contrary to what Protestant and existential theology may claimthat
the Word preserves and elevates in itself all the value of the image at
the higher level of freedom. if the Word made man is originally a dialogical
Word (and not merely in a second moment), then it becomes clear that even
the level of the unilateral (ethical-religious) teaching of knowledge
has been surpassed.
It is not possible that Christ could have written
books ("about" something, whether about himself, about God, or about his
teaching); the book "about" him must concern the trans-action between
him and the man whom he has encountered, addressed, and redeemed in love.
This means that the level on which his Holy Spirit expresses himself (in
the letter), must necessarily itself be "in the spirit" (of the love of
revelation and the love of faith), in order to be "objective" at all.
To put it another way, the site from which love can be observed and generated
cannot itself lie outside of love (in the "pure logicity" of so-called
science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself liesnamely,
in the drama of love. No exegesis can dispense with this fundamental principle
to the extent that it wishes to do justice to its subject matter.
Endnotes:
[1] ThWNT, 5:835-40.
[2] Augustine offers a magnificent description of the archetypal prius,
of the perfect Yes in the Confessions (XII, 15; PL 32, 833): "Do
you deny that there is a sublime created realm cleaving with such pure
love to the true and truly eternal God that, though not coeternal with
him, it never detaches itself from him and slips away into the changes
and successiveness of time, but rests in utterly authentic contemplation
of him alone? . . . We do not find that time existed before this created
realm, for 'wisdom was created before everything' (Eccles. [Sir] 1:4).
Obviously this does not mean your wisdom, our God, father of the created
wisdom ... [but] that which is created, an intellectual nature which is
light from contemplation of the light. But just as there is a difference
between light which illuminates and that which is illuminated, so also
there is an equivalent difference between the wisdom which creates and
that which is created, as also between the justice which justifies and
the justice created by justification. . . . So there was a wisdom created
before all things which is a created thing, the rational and intellectual
mind of your pure city, our 'mother which is above and is free' (Gal 4:26)....
O House full of light and beauty! ... During my wandering may my longing
be for you! I ask him who made you that he will also make me his property
in you, since he also made me" (Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; reissued as an Oxford World's
Classics paperback 1998], 255-56).
Related IgnatiusInsight.com
Articles:
Author Page for
Hans Urs von Balthasar, with biography and listing of books published
by Ignatius Press
A Résumé
of My Thought | Hans Urs von Balthasar
Church
Authority and the Petrine Element | Hans Urs von Balthasar
The CrossFor
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 Balthasars Apologetics | by
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.
Visit
the Insight Scoop Blog and read the latest posts and comments by
IgnatiusInsight.com staff and readers about current events, controversies,
and news in the Church!
| | | |