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410 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1992
Since God, the Absolute, is essentially "above" and can only encounter his creature by freely bending down to the later's level; and moreover, in this inclination, absolute love cannot gain anything for itself but condescends freely and for nothing, it follows that the descent is primary in the whole incarnational movement.... The descent goes from the act of incarnation right down to the obedience unto death, death on a cross (Phil 2:8), and continues downward in the descent into hell in solidarity with all those who are lost to time. It goes farther: from the obedience of the Cross to the atomizing of his bodily being, shared out in the Eucharist.
Here, at last, the gratis quality of the divine self-giving in Christ, this eternally overflowing love, is perverted into meaningless superfluity and hence absurdity. Where dependent being, which is nothingness, aspires to self-sufficiency, there can only be contradiction, the contradiction in which being's being consists in negating, in the freedom to put a question mark over everything. This means that every positive, loving relationship to one's fellow man, who represents an attack on my freedom, is fundamentally and finally destroyed.