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Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory #1
Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory: Truth of the World
Theo-Logic is the third and crowning part of the great trilogy of the masterwork of theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, following his first two parts, The Glory of the Lord and Theo-Drama. Theo-Logic is a variation of theology, it being about not so much what man says about God, but what God speaks about Himself. Balthasar does not address the truth about God until he first reflects on the beauty of God (Glory of the Lord). Then he follows with his reflections on the great drama of our salvation and the goodness and mercy of the God who saves us (Theo-Drama). Now, in this work, he is ready to reflect on the truth that God reveals about Himself, which is not something abstract or theoretical, but rather the concrete and mysterious richness of God's being as a personal and loving God.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Hans Urs von Balthasar
455 books311 followersHans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and priest who was nominated to be a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is considered one of the most important theologians of the 20th century.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland on 12 August 1905, he attended Stella Matutina (Jesuit school) in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, gaining a doctorate in German literature. He joined the Jesuits in 1929, and was ordained in 1936. He worked in Basel as a student chaplain. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order, feeling that God had called him to found a Secular Institute, a lay form of consecrated life that sought to work for the sanctification of the world especially from within. He joined the diocese of Chur. From the low point of being banned from teaching, his reputation eventually rose to the extent that John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal in 1988. However he died in his home in Basel on 26 June 1988, two days before the ceremony. Balthasar was interred in the Hofkirche cemetery in Lucern.
Along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, Balthasar sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to Western modernism. While Rahner offered a progressive, accommodating position on modernity and Lonergan worked out a philosophy of history that sought to critically appropriate modernity, Balthasar resisted the reductionism and human focus of modernity, wanting Christianity to challenge modern sensibilities.
Balthasar is very eclectic in his approach, sources, and interests and remains difficult to categorize. An example of his eclecticism was his long study and conversation with the influential Reformed Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, of whose work he wrote the first Catholic analysis and response. Although Balthasar's major points of analysis on Karl Barth's work have been disputed, his The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (1951) remains a classic work for its sensitivity and insight; Karl Barth himself agreed with its analysis of his own theological enterprise, calling it the best book on his own theology.
Balthasar's Theological Dramatic Theory has influenced the work of Raymund Schwager.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland on 12 August 1905, he attended Stella Matutina (Jesuit school) in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, gaining a doctorate in German literature. He joined the Jesuits in 1929, and was ordained in 1936. He worked in Basel as a student chaplain. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order, feeling that God had called him to found a Secular Institute, a lay form of consecrated life that sought to work for the sanctification of the world especially from within. He joined the diocese of Chur. From the low point of being banned from teaching, his reputation eventually rose to the extent that John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal in 1988. However he died in his home in Basel on 26 June 1988, two days before the ceremony. Balthasar was interred in the Hofkirche cemetery in Lucern.
Along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, Balthasar sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to Western modernism. While Rahner offered a progressive, accommodating position on modernity and Lonergan worked out a philosophy of history that sought to critically appropriate modernity, Balthasar resisted the reductionism and human focus of modernity, wanting Christianity to challenge modern sensibilities.
Balthasar is very eclectic in his approach, sources, and interests and remains difficult to categorize. An example of his eclecticism was his long study and conversation with the influential Reformed Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, of whose work he wrote the first Catholic analysis and response. Although Balthasar's major points of analysis on Karl Barth's work have been disputed, his The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (1951) remains a classic work for its sensitivity and insight; Karl Barth himself agreed with its analysis of his own theological enterprise, calling it the best book on his own theology.
Balthasar's Theological Dramatic Theory has influenced the work of Raymund Schwager.
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July 17, 2020
For the most part, this text is Balthasar's response to Heidegger. The problem with knowledge, as Heidegger realized, is that we must always already have a pre-reflective ontological grasp of Being in order to know this or that particular ontical entities at all. Being as the ultimate horizon must be unveiled to us somehow in the first place.
Rather than truth being a correspondence between anaemic propositions and lifeless facts in the world onto which they 'map', truth has to be grasped as a warm participation in an object's 'unveiling' to a subject in which the capacity for gifting and receiving reaches its culmination in human animals. This network of participatory exchange encompasses the whole spectrum of created beings from non human things to sentient creatures in its circuitry.
Now, what is that mysterious Being which itself is only revealed as necessarily in excess of any particular revelation and as such, sustains the whole chain of unveiling? For Balthasar, it is nothing other than God in the form of the supreme unity of personhood (freedom) and necessity (facticity) whereas all other unities in the created world are only analogously in the image of this absolute unity.
All created beings partake in the share of the ultimate mystery--the excess of truth, grounded in the mystery of the Godhead itself, such that even a humble rock has interior being in excess of the naive attempt by will to knowledge to exhaust it. Contra Kant, Balthasar affirms that even though we cannot sense with our thinking, we can have analogical knowledge, kind of knowledge verging on and collapsing at the limit, of the real in-itself secure in its own interiority and mystery.
Rather than truth being a correspondence between anaemic propositions and lifeless facts in the world onto which they 'map', truth has to be grasped as a warm participation in an object's 'unveiling' to a subject in which the capacity for gifting and receiving reaches its culmination in human animals. This network of participatory exchange encompasses the whole spectrum of created beings from non human things to sentient creatures in its circuitry.
Now, what is that mysterious Being which itself is only revealed as necessarily in excess of any particular revelation and as such, sustains the whole chain of unveiling? For Balthasar, it is nothing other than God in the form of the supreme unity of personhood (freedom) and necessity (facticity) whereas all other unities in the created world are only analogously in the image of this absolute unity.
All created beings partake in the share of the ultimate mystery--the excess of truth, grounded in the mystery of the Godhead itself, such that even a humble rock has interior being in excess of the naive attempt by will to knowledge to exhaust it. Contra Kant, Balthasar affirms that even though we cannot sense with our thinking, we can have analogical knowledge, kind of knowledge verging on and collapsing at the limit, of the real in-itself secure in its own interiority and mystery.
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October 3, 2024This was my hilly, even mountainous, first foray into HUVB’s opus magnum. A great work to be certain, with many clear and stunning vistas—and some quite cloudy. I certainly need to understand more fully his incorporation (and distancing from!) Hegel. Part IV placed all in ironically great clarity. Looking forward to see the analogy applied throughout vols. 2&3.
December 20, 2018
This book was first published in 1947, and then re-issued as the first volume of "Theo-Logic"; maybe the earlier writing explains the differences between this and other volumes in this great trilogy ("The Glory of the Lord", "Theo-Drama", and "Theo-Logic"). This volume is shorter (only 275 pages) and more of Balthasar's own thinking (no surveys of other thinkers, so common in the other volumes).
von Balthasar outlines a radically different concept of truth, and explains what it means for truth to be a transcendental (that is, a property of all being, along with the other transcendentals - goodness and beauty). For von Balthasar, the truth is simply the way things really are, to use a phrase very familiar to readers of James Schall.
Hence, the Cartesian way of knowing things never reaches a conclusion. For Descartes, you understand something by breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces until you have a complete understanding of the whole. In this volume, von Balthasar illustrates the never-endingness of this process; even the smallest, least-spirit-filled particle never gives up all its secrets. It's like trying to enumerate every fractional number between two points on the number line... no matter how close the two numbers are, the space between them is filled with an infinite number of other numbers.
Hence, the role of faith in truth. Truth requires faith; we ask somebody or something about their internal state, and we believe the answer. This is most obviously true in the social "sciences" where we can't break up a person into small pieces, we can only ask him about his internal state. The object gives testimony, and the subject gives faith to this testimony... hence St. John's emphasis on testimony and faith in his gospel.
Hence the role of others in shaping our truth. The gaze of our spouse, our parents or children, or other loved ones can change us; they see something in us that we don't see ourselves; and our internal state changes to match this gaze. When done properly, say in a loving marriage, this is a great result and the main purpose of marriage: the spouses make each other holier people. It can also happen in a bad direction; the gaze of a bad influence can drag us down.
Hence the purpose of truth is to convey love. This is a radical statement, the one that will be hardest for moderns to understand, of this entire extremely anti-modern book. The purpose of truth and knowledge is not to dominate, neither nature nor other people, but to serve them. The whole structure of modern science, scientism, is to dominate nature and people, to impose our will on the world. This is in fact a perversion; when we look around us, we should not see things to be exploited, but beings to be served.
von Balthasar outlines a radically different concept of truth, and explains what it means for truth to be a transcendental (that is, a property of all being, along with the other transcendentals - goodness and beauty). For von Balthasar, the truth is simply the way things really are, to use a phrase very familiar to readers of James Schall.
Hence, the Cartesian way of knowing things never reaches a conclusion. For Descartes, you understand something by breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces until you have a complete understanding of the whole. In this volume, von Balthasar illustrates the never-endingness of this process; even the smallest, least-spirit-filled particle never gives up all its secrets. It's like trying to enumerate every fractional number between two points on the number line... no matter how close the two numbers are, the space between them is filled with an infinite number of other numbers.
Hence, the role of faith in truth. Truth requires faith; we ask somebody or something about their internal state, and we believe the answer. This is most obviously true in the social "sciences" where we can't break up a person into small pieces, we can only ask him about his internal state. The object gives testimony, and the subject gives faith to this testimony... hence St. John's emphasis on testimony and faith in his gospel.
Hence the role of others in shaping our truth. The gaze of our spouse, our parents or children, or other loved ones can change us; they see something in us that we don't see ourselves; and our internal state changes to match this gaze. When done properly, say in a loving marriage, this is a great result and the main purpose of marriage: the spouses make each other holier people. It can also happen in a bad direction; the gaze of a bad influence can drag us down.
Hence the purpose of truth is to convey love. This is a radical statement, the one that will be hardest for moderns to understand, of this entire extremely anti-modern book. The purpose of truth and knowledge is not to dominate, neither nature nor other people, but to serve them. The whole structure of modern science, scientism, is to dominate nature and people, to impose our will on the world. This is in fact a perversion; when we look around us, we should not see things to be exploited, but beings to be served.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews