Where is Hans?

That is a great question. I have no idea.

Somewhere between the influenza and the blissfully warm sunshine days, my copy of Love Alone is Credible was either assumed into heaven or lost in the shuffle. Darnnit. And I was just getting to the exciting part!

So, while my plan was to comment on "Love's Failures" today, that is not at the moment the divine will for me. Instead, here is a little article from Ignatius Press about the book; it also includes a brief biography of darling Hans. This passage sums his project up nicely:

"Balthasar argues that the encounter with beauty in the world is analogous to the encounter with the Triune God. What happens in the "aesthetic encounter"? He sees that beauty is an indissolvable union of two things: species and lumen. Beauty consists of a specific, tangible form (species) accessible to human senses with a splendor emanating from the form (lumen). Beauty has a particular form, is concretely situated in the coordinates of time and space, and thus has proportion so that it can be perceived. The splendor is the attractive charm of the Beautiful, the gravitational pull, the tractor beam pulling the beholder into it. When confronted with the Beautiful, one encounters "the real presence of the depths, of the whole reality, and . . . a real pointing beyond itself to those depths."

If people's eyes glaze over when you walk them through a logical argument for truth, then perhaps the appeal to beauty will be an effective apologetic.

And for more on the Community of St. John (the secular branch of which was founded by von Balthasar), go here.

Speaking of the divine will, Fr. Ciszek's He Leadeth Me is devastatingly challenging. I read it five years ago, but was more interested in the storyline than in the spiritual lessons. Well, this time around I'm simply astonished.