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."

Bully for Benedict!

Here's some perspective on the recent rash of criticisms leveled at the Church for refusing to promote condom use in Africa. As per usual, watch for the lack of hard, factual evidence. It's a sign of ideology untethered from reality.

Twitch of the mantilla to the First Things blog.

UPDATE: Here's another response from Inside Catholic.

March 25, Annunciation

Fiat. Serviat. Magnificat.

This Annunciation is by John Collier--an interesting take.

Fading back to life.

Another week of another bout with flu--this time Philosopher Mom was in bed for three days while Scientist Dad valiantly sacrificed Very Important Experiments with rodents for Very Imporatant Experiments with small children. What a man.

In the process, I violated every last one of my Lenten resolutions. It would be easy to say I was a victim of the circumstances. After all, when you've been in bed for hours and can't sleep, surely you're excused from sacrifice?

But my realization was... I'm not exempt. There is no moment of my life--even when delirious with flu--that I do not need to "return to God with my whole heart." And I noticed that, sadly, there is not a moment in my life when I'm not thinking things could be better or more conducive to holiness. Surely, if I wasn't sick right now, I would be less grumpy. Surely, if I had a few hours to myself, I'd be more patient later on. Surely, if this kid would stop chattering, I'd be able to be a better mother.

But everything, every moment is from God's hand. He's not sitting up in the sky wishing I had it "better" or "easier." He's inviting me now to let his will reign.

Welcome back to Lent, little mom.

No duh.

Well, simple logic and moral imagination would tell you this would come up.

If it's okay to harvest embryos for research... why not fetuses? As one "doctor" put it, "If they're going to be terminated anyway, it's a shame to waste their organs."

My one consolation in the darker moments is the fact that our civilization will eventually collapse. (Or, rather, my one consolation is the cross of Christ!)

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.

"Zeal for thy house will consume me."

The ruins of St. Andrew's Cathedral, Scotland. Second Sunday in Lent.