Presence and Thought by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Author:Hans Urs von Balthasar [Balthasar, Hans Urs von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898705218
Published: 2013-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

2

TRANSPOSITION OF BECOMING

This is the immense revelation that has been granted to us by the Incarnation: God is Life. Most certainly he had appeared to us, from the time our desire had its first awakening, as that Ocean of Being that our thought would never be in a position to capture. His own life, his pure infinity, his repose, his light, would never be our life, which would eternally remain a life of movement, of struggle, and of desire. We believed that becoming and Being were opposites, two forms, as it were, analogous without a doubt, but irreducible. Through the Incarnation we learn that all the unsatisfied movement of becoming is itself only repose and fixity when compared to that immense movement of love inside of God: Being is a Super-Becoming. In constantly surpassing ourselves, therefore, by means of our love, we assimilate ourselves to God much more intimately than we could have suspected.

In order to understand love, it was neccssary for our desire to become love. But our desire could become love only through the initiative of divine love. Indeed, knowledge through desire could only grasp in God his very incomprehensibility. This knowledge turned on this paradoxical limit: to understand is not to understand God (to know that the object is ungraspable); not to understand is to understand God (in the self-negation of the intellect, to grasp the object). The impenetrability of the object stimulated the intellect to be broken and to fail constantly, again and again, when ranged against it. Only one thing was necessary to substitute the quiet movement of love for this movement, broken and irregular like flashes of lightning that succeed each other: that incomprehensibility, while remaining ungraspable, should be clarified, so to speak, by what is within, that it should be revealed. There is only a shade of difference between the two movements, for it is no more a matter of understanding afterward than before. But while, beforehand, we were incapable of reflecting on this incomprehensibility, at present we cannot grow weary as we cast our gaze toward it. It is the miracle par excellence. It is as if God had become liquid: “Christ was, as the Apostle says, the rocky crag, barren and very hard for unbelievers. But for those who approach the authority of faith, he becomes a drink for their thirst and flows forth [εἰσϱέων] into them.”1 For faith gives us a sense of the positive quality that incomprehensibility represents. It is no longer only the perfection, understood abstractly, of being ungraspable as a free person, but what is more, the perfection, seen concretely, of being able freely to reveal this freedom. This revelation then produces in the contemplating being that kind of dazzlement and ecstasy that comes, no longer from the transcendence of desire with respect to representation, but from the transcendence of the object, which appears as such through the revelation:

Never does sight amount to a vision of the object such as our eyes have reproduced it in the soul.

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