Love, power, and Hans.

I've been thinking a lot lately about love and how to communicate love. One of the biggest catalysts has been the debate over same-sex marriage in New York: I think the debate points to some disagreements so fundamental that we, as a society, have lost the ability to even have this debate. And so, there is no debate: There is, in the end, only power.

But power is not credible. Power is not satisfying, I believe, even to the one who holds it. Love alone is credible, and as a civilization I believe we have lost who love is: the true, the good, and the beautiful.

And, hey! I've read books about love... So here, with a few revisions is a re-post of my analysis of the third chapter of Hans Urs von Balthasar's Love Alone is Credible.

Hans presents two approaches to speaking of the love of God.

Eros. First, we can begin to think in terms of personalism: One person cannot presume to master intellectually another person's gift of love. I can't break down my husband's love empirically or even explain it in terms of his "humanity"--the minute I do, I lose him.

Beauty. The second approach to love is through beauty. "In the experiences of extraordinary beauty--whether in nature or in art--we are able to grasp a phenomenon in its distinctiveness that otherwise remains veiled. We encounter something we could not have invented, but which is nevertheless deeply compelling. It satisfies us in a way we could not have satisfied ourselves.

These two approaches are, of course, just "signs." Von Balthasar emphasizes that, unlike a piece of art, God's love is not something "produced," nor does it exist in order to "fill my need." But both eros and beauty come together and are transcended by God's revelation of his love.

Divine love replaces human love as "agape"; divine beauty is "glory." Von Balthasar insists that both terms are needed for us to perceive that majesty of divine love: because it is beauty, it possesses an authority. When this authority shows itself, it demands our obedience; we long to be obedient when we see it, because it is at once so glorious and so intimate.

He has a beautiful little meditation on authority in the middle of the chapter--addressing the authority of the ecclesial office (bishops), the Scriptures, and the "living proclamation of the Word." All three, he says, are "merely word." They do not take on flesh until God himself takes on flesh: "The sole authority is the Son, who interprets the Father in the Holy Spirit as divine Love."

The authorities we obey here on earth have authority in obedience to Christ's mission. They--the Church--"prepare man to perceive the manifestation of God's love and to give it its due." This is a lovely way to think about Church authority and all the "rules" and doctrines; they have authority insofar as they exist to prepare us to see God face-to-face.

Von Balthasar leaves us with a warning: We must interpret Christian revelation "either wholly in terms of the self-glorification of absolute love or else we simply fail to understand it."

Receiving the beauty of love--the glorious majesty of God--requires the eyes of faith, eyes that neither presume too much nor shrug with false simplicity.

Revvin' up!

In a fit of therapeutic shopping online (most of which happens at Amazon.com with "one-click"), I hit the button and ordered a new Hans Urs von Balthasar. This one is simply Prayer and boasts such chapter headings as "The Necessity of contemplation," "Mediation by the Church," "Totality," "Flesh and Spirit," and "The Cross and Resurrection."

From the Preface:

"Contemplation's ladder, reaching up to heaven, begins with the word of scripture, and whatever rung we are on, we are never beyond this hearing of the word. In contemplation, just as we can never leave the Lord's humanity behind us, neither can we get 'beyond' the word in its human form. It is in the humanity that we find God, in the world of sense that we find the Spirit."

Be still, my heart!

And be prepared for continuing raptures in this space. Now... to just get rid of the latest head cold.

The "education of man."

I've been dipping into Hans Urs von Balthasar over and over again this Advent. Love Alone is Credible is surely, as I've exuded before on this page, one of the best spiritual readings for the penitential seasons.

This week, it's been "Love as Form," which sounds awfully technical but is in fact not. Rather, as he nears the end of his little work, von Balthasar seems to be moving away from the philosophical and theological categories and analyses and into Scriptural and mystical themes (informed always, of course, by the truths of the faith). In this chapter in particular, he embarks on a long meditation on the form, or character, of Christ's own love: "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving one another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you forgive. And above all these put on love..." (Col 3:12-14)

This passage particularly strikes home in Advent, as he moves into a brief discussion of the Old Testament and the preparation for Jesus's coming: "This love is first of all the goal of the entire Old Testament education of man, which sought to conform man inwardly to God... [The Jewish people] thus knew only that [they] must continue to transcend toward some goal, but without having any vision of the final form itself."

Who could have guessed that this "final form" of love would be God taking on human nature in order to sacrifice that nature on behalf of all the world?

As we keep adding those ornaments to our Jesse Tree and reading the words of Isaiah and the prophets, we must give thanks that we have seen that "final form" of love. That little infant, born to die, is the absolute, final, and only necessary Word.

Giving order to the complexities and distress of our lives, our families, our nations.

Giving peace the world cannot give.

The form of love, for which the world was long prepared and for which our prophets longed.

Love Must Be Perceived (Part V)

Hans Part V

"If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize... The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love."

This chapter (V) is full of hope--a much-needed dosage after the "Failures of Love" reminded us of how frigid and finite our little post-lapsarian hearts are. Our selfish beings still retain some "glimmer," says von Balthasar, of what selfless love is.

As a mother, I love his first chosen analogy: "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 the child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty sense-impressions gather meaningfully around the Thou." Love precedes and is the necessary condition for knowledge. Our very first relationship--which psychology teaches us is so dominant in the rest of our lives--is the premiere analogy of God's love. God, the transcendent, awakens love in us with his glance; knowledge of him follows love of him.

God takes our response to his love for granted, in the same way the mother assumes her child will, eventually, smile back at her. His movement toward us is entirely at his command; it is not a bilateral movement. Our very response to his love is his grace-filled design, his planning. This is a little offensive to our American sensibilities, because we want to claim some control over the "good that we do." von Balthasar reminds us, however, that the revelation of divine love--which alone is credible--is entirely God's. We receive our entire being, in cluding our ability to respond to him, from him:

"[T]he bride must receive herself purely from the Bridegroom; she must be 'brought forward' and 'prepared' by him and for him and therefore at his exclusive disposal, offered up to him."

Then he lists the created "conditions of perception," by which I think he means those four elements of revelation which we must have to receive the meaning of divine love. This is fascinating, because they are not what you'd probably guess at the first try.

God created:
1. The Church in her essential being (the spotless Bride)
2. Mary (the Mother and Bride, in whom "the fiat of the response and the reception is real")
3. The Bible (at once the given Word and the response of the author in one literary work)
4. The Bride and Mother (the Church and Mary together) proclaiming this Word in a living way

I think I could spend the rest of my life unpacking that, because my gut instinct is that he is right. The inclusion of Mary in such a lofty list--she's right up there with Scripture!--is not incredible, but wholly credible. She is a concrete, human being whose very existence is the perfect response to divine love. Surely we, as human beings, need such a person to have lived on earth in a physical existence. The divine economy surely demands it. I think I need to start saying my Rosary again more regularly, and perhaps more wisdom will come to my little brain.

The last really profound point I caught here was this: You must love that which you wish to communicate. Von Balthasar talks briefly about the Holy Spirit's role in revelation. The Holy Spirit is, of course, the very love between the Father and the Son, who communicates their being to the world. "The site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love; it can only lie there, where the matter itself lies--namely, in the drama of love."

Of course, we might say, the Holy Spirit has to love what it communicates. After all, God is love. How obvious. But the implications of this for human communication are enormous: I think it explains why dissenters who write Church history or try explain Church teaching are so damaging to souls both in and estranged from the Church. They do not love what they are trying to communicate. While human love can blind us to faults, we must be infused with divine love in order to communicate God to others. Before we preach, we must be sure we love what we preach. And of course, that means we are trying to "be perfect as [our] Father is perfect."

What a great challenge for Holy Week.

Hans is found! (Part IV)

The book has resurfaced at last, and so I am back on board with the scintillating tale of Love Alone is Credible. Part I is here. And Parts II and III are also available, but not in hardback.

After introducing the glory of divine love, von Balthasar breaks into an account of the human experience of that love: "The Failures of Love."

When a man encounters the love of God in Christ, for the first time he realizes what genuine love is and also that he himself does not possess true love. His own failure to love has two parts: it is finite and it is frigid. (What a glorious adjective!) This failure is a call to conversion of heart, "which must in the face of this love confess that it has failed to love until now," and a conversion of the mind, "which must relearn what love after all really is."

The first failure of human love is its finitude. All of our little loves and desires are limited by time and nature. While some loves (erotic desire) can be gateways to a lifelong fidelity (marriage), not one of our human relationships accomplishes the journey our hearts desire. Spouses die or are unfaithful; the beloved's "faults and limitations become unbearable." Children find their parents' love to be smothering. Love, as it changes, becomes frigid, and dies.

We suffer from these contradictions in love: Our hearts know that "the here and now ought to be eternal--and at the same time ought not to be (lest it become an unberable hell). Thus, the heart remains a mystery to itself." We are aware of our heart's paralysis--it is torn between the desire to last forever and its inability to last forever. Nothing in the natural world gives us a solution. Human philosophies recommend resignation, or simply shrug off the impossibility of love, or compartmentalize our various loves into little boxes that cannot inform our lives as wholes.

The Christian answer, therefore, cannot primarily be a new "teaching" or knowledge. Gnositicism is guilty of making Christ into some secret knowledge that saves us. Rather, "the revelation of love must in the first place be an action that God undertakes ... The key to understanding the action lies solely in God's presentation of himself to human beings on the stage of human nature ... Indeed, the fact that God's love transforms [sinful man], converting him or hardening his heart, expresses not the essence of that love, but its effect." In the light of human standards, God's love will appear "foolish," but only because God does not tailor Himself to meet our expectations.

Thus, von Balthasar insists, a true experience of divine glory is received only in "the abiding shock." God's action breaks in upon our lives in the concrete struggles of daily life; it is the action of a Wholly Other. We cannot conceive a sufficient "reason" for this love. It is so perfectly piercing and beautiful, we cannot imagine why God would ever come to us in this way. Divine love is a scandal--a stumbling block: "The scandal is here [for man to] draw his eye to the uniqueness of the love that manifests itself and, in its light, to reveal his own inchoate, creaturely love quite concretely for the nonlove that it is."

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.

Hans III: The Third Way

So, after both the cosmological reduction and the anthropological reduction, we find that neither one can provide us with a genuine account of Christianity. Religious philosophy leaves us high and dry. Our own "experience" of existence just leaves us with ourselves for company (company which, however great, is rather overrated). Is there any way, then, Hans asks, that we can "perceive the genuine evidence of the light that breaks forth from revelation without reducing that light to the measure and laws of human perception?"

This is, of course, a dreadfully important question. As I read this book, I find myself thinking over and over, "Hey, I know someone who thinks that!" or "I think I've explained the faith that way too often!" The reason it's so important is that, if we're reducing Christ to our own ideas of goodness and right and beauty and to our own needs, we're not really getting at who He is. We are, in fact, hiding Him or hiding from Him. And I don't want to do that.

Hans presents two alternative approaches to his third way.

Eros. First, we can begin to think in terms of personalism: One person cannot presume to master intellectually another person's gift of love. I can't break down my husband's love empirically or even explain it in terms of his "humanity"--the minute I do, I lose him.

Beauty. The second approach to love is through beauty. "In the experiences of extraordinary beauty--whether in nature or in art--we are able to grasp a phenomenon in its distinctiveness that otherwise remains veiled. We encounter something we could not have invented, but which is nevertheless deeply compelling. It satisfies us in a way we could not have satisfied ourselves.

These two approaches are, of course, just "signs." Von Balthasar emphasizes that, unlike a piece of art, God's love is not something "produced," nor does it exist in order to "fill my need." But both eros and beauty come together and are transcended by God's revelation of his love.

Divine love replaces human love as "agape"; divine beauty is "glory." Von Balthasar insists that both terms are needed for us to perceive that majesty of divine love: because it is beauty, it possesses an authority. When this authority shows itself, it demands our obedience; we long to be obedient when we see it, because it is at once so glorious and so intimate.

He has a beautiful little meditation on authority in the middle of the chapter--addressing the authority of the ecclesial office (bishops), the Bible, and the "living proclamation of the Word." All three, he says, are "merely word." They do not take on flesh until God himself takes on flesh: "The sole authority is the Son, who interprets the Father in the Holy Spirit as divine Love." The authorities we obey here on earth have authority in obedience to Christ's mission. They--the Church--"prepare man to perceive the manifestation of God's love and to give it its due." This is a lovely way to think about Church authority and all the "rules" that some people find so puzzling; they exist to prepare us to see God face-to-face and to give his love the reverence it is due.

The rest of the book will examine aspects of this "Third Way" of love. Von Balthasar prepares us by warning: We must interpret Christian revelation "either wholly in terms of the self-glorification of absolute love or else we simply fail to understand it." Receiving the beauty of love--the glorious majesty of God--requires the eyes of faith, eyes that neither presume too much nor shrug with false simplicity.

Hans II: The Anthropological Reduction

This is part II of our Lenten Hans for Housewives.

Part I is here.

Chapter 2: The Anthropological Reduction

If the first danger to the Christian understanding of divine love was the tendency to reduce everything to human reason and logic, the second danger reduces everything to human experience (hence, "anthropological"). Our ability to know truth is man himself, "who recapitulates the entire world in himself."

Thinkers who got their anthropology right were, of course, ancient Greeks, the Church fathers, and Pascal (oh, rapture!). "According to Pascal, man is a monstrous chimera that thwarts all attempts at rational interpretation; he is a creature that can harmonize his irreconcilable proportions, his dialectical intertwining of grandeur et misere, only by looking at his reflection in [Christ]." (Side note: Hans Urs reads like poetry or liturgy--you have to go slow to soak in his language.)

During the Enlightenment, this way of approaching Christ's love, however, turns immediately into a secular Christianity. The church (lower-case "c") is just a group of people trying to be "good people." They practice a sort of "natural religion" that honors God but primarily cultivates "the best in man, a religion in which priests have no authority" whatsoever. Christ is simply a good guy who preached a new wisdom--the greatest human teacher, but just a teacher. The idea of an atoning sacrifice has no place in this reduction.

Kant--dear old Kant--marks the apex of this reduction (although I think the Unitarian communities keep it alive quite nicely). The unfathomable depths of human nature produce of their own power a "pure religious faith." That faith deposes reason, which has nothing to do with religion. This is because reason deals with objective truth; religion, in Kant's structure, is all about the subjective. The divine is just subjectivity, consciousness, and inner feeling.

The anthropological reduction is the central error of modernism: "Every objective dogmatic proposition must be measured in terms of its suitability to the religious subject, in terms of its positive effects on and capacity to complete and fulfill that subject." This process does involve some measure of "conversion," but here conversion only means an increasing feeling of fulfillment. If I am not feeling fulfilled by the teaching of Christianity, then that teaching has no hold on me. I am the measure of all things.

The main concern for Hans, however, is not so much the destruction of all teaching as it is this new making of God in man's image. We now justify the ways of God as revealed in Christ by pointing to our own needs. God came, not because He loved us first, but because we needed Him. The underlying assumption, He came because we called. When we stop calling, He stops coming.

The truth of this anthropology, of course, is that we do need to relive subjectively the objective redemption of Christ: "If Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem, but not in you, you would remain lost forever ... The Cross on Golgotha cannot redeem you from evil if it is not raised up also in you" (Angelus Silesius). But the tradition never justifies Christ's love in terms of "the pious human subject." "It never measured the abyss of grace by the abyss of need or sin, it never judged the content of dogma according to its beneficial effects on human beings."

That is the basic problem, although Hans Urs goes on for a bit longer, teasing out the meaning of this reduction in more recent thinkers, such as Marx and Kierkegaard. Then he looks forward: "If we cannot verify or justify God's Sign of himself in terms of the world or in terms of man, then what else do we have?"

God, he ends, is going to interpret himself for us. There is no human text or system that will make him more legible or more intelligible. God's way of doing this, we can be sure, "will not consist in anything that man could have figured about the world, about himself, and about God, on his own..."

Stay tuned for Hans's (or, rather, God's) "Third Way."

Hans for Housewives I: The Cosmological Reduction

Here I go on another set of synopses. This is a Lenten discipline, and it very well may take the entire six weeks of Lent. I'm reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's Love Alone is Credible (trans. D.C. Schindler) and want to put it into accessible language. It's a great place to start with Balthasar; the book is short and sums up nicely the project of his entire life. The main difficulty is that the first two chapters are, well, pretty inaccessible to me. But I'm game for a good shot.

Chapter One: The Cosmological Reduction

The purpose of this little book is to understand more deeply what love means, what divine love is, and how we can become lovers of the Divine. It's sources of inspiration are Therese of Lisieux, John of the Cross, and Frances de Sales; Balthasar, however, also calls upon the philosophical traditions of Augustine and Pascal.

He begins with two chapters on partially true systems. These two systems of thought--the cosmological reduction and the anthropological reduction--are the Scylla and Charibdis of Christian thought. He will argue that Christianity "disappears" the moment we fall into one or the other of these traditions.

The cosmological reduction comes from the tradition begun by the Church fathers, including Justin, Origen, Augustine, and Eusebius. Their explanation of divine love was basically "external" or "extrinsic." Christianity is "the fulfillment of the fragmented meaning of the world." Human beings have ever tried to express religiously their desire for divine love, or for God. In all the world religions and philosophies, we see human longing for the transcendent, absolute Godhead. Only in Christ, the Word of God (Logos), are these longings fulfilled.

Therefore, all truths--however partial--and beautiful things are, ultimately, Christian. Justin wrote: "Everything that is good and beautiful belongs to us." Socrates is a disciple of Christ. Buddha was inspired by the Christian God. The beautiful art of China and Japan is beautiful because God--or Christ--is beautiful.

This conviction, however true, led during the Renaissance to Christian humanism. Scholars such as Erasmus wanted to shed their minds of all the "extras"--liturgical pomp, ultra-scholastic theology, devotionals--to get back to the pure Christ, the "pure Logos" pursued by pagan and Christian philosophers alike. Thomas More wrote about the "natural religion" of Utopia, which was in fact quite like Christianity. As soon as the pagan Utopians learn about Christ, they fit him easily into their perfect human religion. He was the one they were seeking all the time, by reason alone.

Again, there are a lot of truths to be had here. Unfortunately for Christianity, in the history of ideas, these ideas led quickly to the complete dismissal of revelation. If human beings can get at the truth of God, the pure Logos, by reason alone, what need is there for an historical Christ? "Revelation, in this sense, becomes a mere outward shell covering the inner religious dimension of mankind." Revelation is just something that got us to Christ more quickly than if we'd had to do it all ourselves.

The "cosmological reduction" means that all religions--with Christianity being the best among them--boil down to one, great cosmic mystery. That mystery reveals itself through our rituals and traditions that evolve progressively through history. We can only justify the fact that we are Christians by pointing to Christ as some sort of evolutionary necessity--the forced expression of the divine God. And love has been reduced to evolution and progress.

Is Balthasar rejecting the fathers? Absolutely not. But he is pointing out the dangers inherent in this way of thinking and arguing about the Christian faith. Do we really want to end up saying Christianity is just one--albeit the best--expression of God's love? Is the love of Christ really something we could have eventually arrived at on our own?

That's Scylla. Stay tuned for Charybdis.