We’ve started a reading group here in the office, and in early June we sat down to discuss Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone Is Credible. Published during the Second Vatican Council, this little book serves as a précis for Balthasar’s multi-volume project, The Glory of the Lord, a remarkable combination of systematic theology, metaphysics, and literary meditation. These days, Pope Francis is kicking up a lot of dust, pushing for a “pastoral” outlook that seems to play fast and loose with doctrine, or at least with settled assumptions about core Catholic teaching regarding things like divorce and remarriage. I found it useful to reread Balthasar.
There have been two basic approaches to illuminating the truth of Christ, argues Balthasar. The first held sway in the early Church and for many centuries thereafter. It frames God’s revelation cosmologically, showing how the Word made flesh affirms, corrects, and completes the sparks of divine truth that are latent in creation, often expressed by pagan religions and philosophies in partial ways. “The Christian message could thus be made credible, both because it unified what was fragmented and also because it ransomed what was held captive by converting what was perverted.” This approach was made possible by a comprehensive world picture, one that views reality against a vivid metaphysical horizon. Balthasar calls this approach “the cosmological reduction.”
He subscribes to the broad consensus that the Reformation and Renaissance triggered an intellectual revolution in the West. The cosmological frame of reference lost its grip, and the human person became the focal point. This led to a new approach to Christianity’s truth, one that emphasizes the way in which Christ fulfills inchoate human desires. This has precedent in the Christian tradition. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, Augustine wrote. But the subjective turn becomes more systematic in the modern era; to show the truth of Christ, Christian apologists adopt the rhetoric of inwardness. This approach he terms “the anthropological reduction.”