Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

 

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 (The 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781681495811

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

Book preview

PRELIMINARY NOTE

The subdivision of our proposed theo-logic into two volumes (the present volume and the sequel) is, in the end, an artificial one; the two parts must be seen as a whole. Theo-logic begins with the self-revelation of the triune God in the Incarnation of the divine Logos, and the Logos is the Word, the Son, and the expositor [Ausleger] of the Father.¹ It is as such that he understands himself and as such that he wishes to be understood. Yet who could understand him to be such if there were no Pneuma to lead us into the truth of the Logos and, therefore, into his relationship to the Father? There is also a double fact to bear in mind: on the one hand, the Logos promises us the Pneuma as his interpreter for the time of his return to the Father; on the other hand, all that he did and underwent in his coming in the flesh, his Passion, and his Resurrection, he did and underwent in the Pneuma whom the Father had sent down upon him without measure. Ultimately, then, the line of demarcation between the work of the Logos and the works of the Spirit is artificial. There are works such as the institution of the Eucharist and its continuation through the millennia—and many more like it—that we cannot ascribe to the one or to the other. We will therefore follow the Apostles’ Creed in listing the expositing [Auslegung] of the works of the Son—the Church, justification and sanctification in the sacraments, the communion of the saints, the resurrection of the dead, and the life everlasting—as works of the Spirit. To be sure, we must never forget that the indivisible triune God performs all his saving deeds in unity, even as each hypostasis operates according to its proper being.

Since, however, the subject at hand is theo-logic, let us first treat independently the central question: How can God’s Logos express himself in the finitude of the creature? Once we have shown that he can, all that the Holy Spirit unfolds in explication of the One Event shall follow like an echo resounding endlessly through all space and time.

THE JOHANNINE ENTRY WAY

1. "I Am the Truth"

There is no continuous transition from what the first volume considered under the heading of truth to this utterance of Jesus. There is only a leap. No person who rises up from below can say I am the truth (Jn 14:6);¹ he has to descend from above, to perform the movement of one who has come from above in order both to testify to and to be this truth on earth: "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness [martyrein] to the truth (Jn 18:37). The two statements are parallel: Jesus is the truth, and he testifies to the truth. They may have the same content, but they indicate a difference. How they differ in their identity becomes loud and clear when Jesus declares, Even if I do bear witness to myself, my testimony is true, for I know whence I have come and whither I am going (Jn 8:14). Now, appealing to the Jewish custom of admitting only the testimony of two as credible evidence, Jesus goes on to explain where he comes from and where he is going: It is I who bear witness to myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness to me (Jn 8:18). If, then, we harmonize our two statements, we can say that Jesus is the truth as the one sent by the Father. The point is not that Jesus bears witness to the Father as the truth (the Scriptures of the New Testament call God love but never the truth").² The point is rather that as the one sent, indeed, sent to save the world (Jn 12:47), and thus the one who reveals the will, the disposition, and the work of the Father, Jesus is the truth. Is, not merely bears witness to.

To be sure, Jesus bears witness to what he himself has seen: Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen (Jn 3:11); He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard (Jn 3:31-32). But other witnesses have also seen yet are not themselves the truth. The Baptist, for example, says, I have seen [the Spirit descending and remaining upon Jesus] and have borne witness that this is the Son of God (Jn 1:34). Christians, too, can say that the life was made manifest, and we saw it and testify to it (1 Jn 1:2). The same is true for the disciple of love standing under the Cross: He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth (Jn 19:35). But seeing and saying something true is not the same as being the truth. Jesus alone can at once be and bear witness to the truth, because he is the only one who comes from the Father, is sent by him, and exposits him (Jn 1:18).

Jesus exposits, not by means of words alone, but, even more plainly, through works (even though you do not believe me, believe the works [Jn 10:38]). But because both words and works exposit the Father within the task that Jesus is sent to perform, the truth that Jesus is speaks its words, not as if he were their absolute source, but in relativity to the Father whom Jesus exposits (I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak [Jn 12:49]). Nor does this truth do its works as if he were their absolute source (the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; what he does, the Son does likewise [Jn 5:19]; If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me [Jn 10:37]). The inseparability of word and work here is of a piece with the fundamental claim that the Word that in the beginning was with God (Jn 1:1-2) became flesh (Jn 1:14) and as flesh, that is, as a mortal, bodily human being, is the exposition of the Father—not only in the words he speaks, but also in the entirety of his actively operant bodiliness.

But what does Jesus exposit insofar as he is the truth? The disposition and deed of the Father, who so loved the world that he gave his only Son (Jn 3:16). Of course, Jesus can be the truth only if he is not just the object of the Father’s act of giving but himself accomplishes this giving in his own person: The Father loves me, because I lay down my life. . . . No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay it down (Jn 10:17-18). Jesus has this power in himself, even though he receives it from the Father (5:26). Pilate, before whom Jesus confesses at the beginning of his Passion that he is a king come into the world to bear witness to the truth, would have no power . . . unless it had been given . . . from above (Jn 19:11)—but Pilate does not have it in himself. Jesus, by contrast, bears witness at once to the fact that he is the truth (and, in this sense, to his absoluteness) and to the fact that he receives his being the truth from the Father (and thus to his relativity).

But how can anyone understand such a truth, which claims to be a human exposition (Jn 1:18) of God the Father and then makes the further claim to be, not only the exposition of the truth, but also therein the truth itself in person? Who can understand the unity that obtains here between two witnesses: between the Father who bears witness on behalf of his expositor and the Son who bears witness to himself as expositor (It is I who bear witness to myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness to me [Jn 8:1])? Who can understand that this does not give rise to two truths, because there is only one truth that is itself interpretation?

Such understanding requires an exposition of the expositor; there must be someone who, utterly relative to this truth, can himself be called truth. This someone is the Spirit of truth (1 Jn 4:6). For, at the climactic consummation of the expositor’s expository act (Jn 19:30), the Spirit becomes a fellow witness (together with the water and blood from the wound in Jesus’ side: The Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is truth [1 Jn 5:7]); as such, he opens up and leads into (as eisegete) the truth of the expositor, not bis own: The Spirit of truth . . . will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but . . . he will take what is mine and announce it to you (Jn 16:13-14). He will make it credible, in the same way that an advocate (paraclete) can irrefutably demonstrate the credibility of a fact and convict (elenchein) the contrary opinion of error (Jn 16:7-11). But he will do so, not only in an outward, forensic way, but inwardly, and so will generate in the interested parties (1 Jn 3:23-24) belief in the truth attested to (1 Jn 5:7) and exposited (Jn 16:13). So much so that, together with him, they can become witnesses to the one and only truth (The Spirit of truth . . . will bear witness concerning me . . . and you also are witnesses [Jn 15:26f.]). In this sense the Spirit’s exposition is total: he convicts outwardly and initiates inwardly, even into all the truth (Jn 16:13), and thus also into what Jesus has not yet said because the Cross and the Resurrection, the consummation of his truth, still lie ahead. Hence, the Spirit will lead also into what is still to come, into what is properly speaking eschatological, which rounds off Jesus’ exposition and, at the same time, opens it to infinite exposition through all ages (Jn 16:13). The Spirit’s expository work will not present yet another truth beyond the truth of Jesus’ exposition; rather, it will be a bringing to remembrance of the inexhaustible depth of Jesus’ exposition. The Spirit’s teaching will be a bringing to remembrance that is relative through and through to Jesus’ expository word (Jn 14:26).

Thus, the one truth—the exposition of the Father by the Son (which in turn is expository by the Spirit)—is ultimately a trinitarian truth. As a-letheia (unveiling), this truth is one that is unveiled in and for the world. And we cannot speak about, much less conceive, God’s immanent Trinity except in reference to—and never in abstraction from—this truth that is unveiled in and for the world.

2. Truth as Glory and "Goodness"

The truth that Jesus is both as expositor and as the one exposited is not theoretical in the abstract sense but is beheld concretely (theorem), for it is the truth of the incarnate Word: We have seen [it] with our eyes, and our gaze has beheld it (1 Jn 1:1). This truth beheld is nothing other than what the first part of this trilogy termed glory: the exhibition of God in the world, an exhibition with no worldly analogy. For this reason, the glory beheld in contemplation (he revealed his glory [Jn 2:11] as the glory of God [Jn 11:40]) and the exposited truth of the Father are one and the same: We have beheld his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of . . . truth (Jn 1:14). Ultimately, the two words, glory and truth, express the same thing: the Son’s exposition of the Father, which is true and glorious, not only because it is able to make visible God’s truth and glory, but because it is itself truth and glory—precisely as the exposition of the only begotten Son.

But we have already seen that the Son reveals nothing other than the goodness or love or grace of the Father, so that the total exposition he performs by his life, death, and Resurrection—and only that—manifests God as love (1 Jn 4:8). The second installment of this trilogy thus also becomes an integral part of our understanding of truth. Charis and aletheia can henceforth be named in one breath: We have beheld his glory . . . full of grace and truth (Jn 1:14), and (in contrast to the law of the Old Testament given through Moses) Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (Jn 1:17). Grace is, once again, not only what is revealed, the love of the Father who sends the Son, but also the Son’s act of revealing it. Grace and truth has thus rightly been called a hendiadys. One could even speak of the grace (or giving over) of the truth. But there is a further aspect to bear in mind. The goodness of the truth is revealed in the whole of the Son’s existence, up to and including the Cross. We cannot, however, speak of a conclusive revelation until the Father-Son relation as a whole is itself handed over in the expositing Spirit. It is he who mediates the charis-aletheia into the world. He does so outwardly as the advocate and inwardly as the anointing in the hearts of believers whom this anointing makes into knowers (1 Jn 2:27f).

It is thus that the trilogy, in spite of, or precisely because of, its Christocentrism, proves, at a deeper level, to have a trinitarian structure in each of its three parts.

We can bring out this point even more clearly by doing two things: first, by showing that the truth exposited in the only begotten Son is, on closer inspection, the witness of the totality of his life; second, by giving a more intelligible account of how the external relationship between his exposition of the Father’s love and his being exposited by the Holy Spirit is the definitive gift of the Father and the Son to the world.

It is important to bear in mind that Jesus utters his crucial statement about having come into the world to bear witness to the truth at the beginning of his Passion and that he makes it precisely as an affirmative answer to Pilate’s question as to whether he is a king. In John’s Passion narrative the word king occurs twelve times. Pilate presents Jesus to the Jews as their king (Jn 19:4), a king who has been crowned with thorns (Jn 19:1-3), is cloaked in a mantle of royal purple (Jn 19:5), and will hang on the Cross beneath the superscription bearing the title king of the Jews in three languages (Jn 19:19). It is in this context that Jesus gives the testimony that the Pastoral Epistles will call his good or glorious confession before Pilate (1 Tim 6:12-14). This expression is doubtless yet another allusion to the situation in which Jesus makes this confession: in the face of his imminent death on the Cross.³ Both the kingship and the truth of Christ find their completion on the Cross.⁴

So true is this, in fact, that the Cross, where testimony to the truth and lived witness unto death are one, presents a compact summation of the whole many-sided development of the concept of testimony in the New Testament. The archetype of the Christian ‘witness’ is the Crucified One himself.⁵ Bearing witness is by definition more than merely making a statement; it includes a personal commitment, a personal answerability for what one declares to be true. For this reason, Christ consistently described his exposition (Jn 1:18) as a witness-bearing, a witness-bearing that he carried out, as we have already mentioned, not by means of mere words for whose truth he vouches, but by means of works. These works do not, as in Paul, stand in opposition to faith; rather, they are unmistakably God’s own deed coming to pass through Jesus’ activity: "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me, and to accomplish [teleioun] his work (Jn 4:34). Even more clearly: I have glorified you on earth, having accomplished [teleioun] the work you gave me to do (Jn 17:4). Jesus’ last words attest to this accomplishment: it is finished [tetelestai] (Jn 19:30). The accomplishment of God’s work, which Jesus also calls the glorification of the Father, intrinsically calls for the decisive work of the Father that will be the Resurrection: the Father’s glorification" of the Son (Jn 13:31f.). This high point of Jesus’ witness-bearing sheds light on why the New Testament notion of witnessing to Jesus, even though at first meaning a simple missionary proclamation (the immediate sense of martyrion), is nonetheless bound up, already in the Synoptics, with Jesus’ sayings concerning persecution—and concerning the necessity that those who wish to be his witnesses take up their cross daily (Lk 9:23). Paul embodies this paradigmatically in his own testimonial existence. Every day of his life (and not just at the moment of his death), Paul bears the dying of Jesus in his body . . . so that the [resurrected] life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies; while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the [resurrected] life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. And it is precisely this martyrial existence that is apostolic and missionary: So death is at work in us, but life [of the Resurrection] in you (2 Cor 4:11-12). Paul is a witness, a martys, because the death and Resurrection of Jesus give form to his entire life. He refuses to work by means of mere talk; rather he wants to preach, in his own weakness and much fear and trembling, nothing but the Cross of Jesus. Only thus does his preaching furnish the demonstration of the Spirit and power (1 Cor 2:1-4). Three moments interpenetrate here: the word of the Cross (1 Cor 1:18) is scandal and folly for the world to which it is addressed; it therefore necessarily provokes persecution; but this persecution is subverted by the martyrial form of Jesus that the Holy Spirit’s power etches into the witness. Only in the Apocalypse, in the book where there remains only a final Yes or No to the truth of Jesus Christ the faithful witness (Rev 1:5), does the martys definitively become a blood witness. The bearing of witness in death is so conclusive that it can no longer be refuted (Rev 11:10). Throughout the history of the Church, the concept of the martyr will remain associated with this life-concluding testimony, even though Pauline theology, which understands the life of the witness as molded by the dying and rising of Jesus, contains a more comprehensive concept of martyrdom.

The second point that remains to be shown in this context is the intrinsic solidarity that links the testimony of Jesus and the testimony of the Spirit. The first indicator of this unity is that Jesus’ entire life-witness was accomplished in the Holy Spirit, whether we understand his Incarnation itself as the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s action (Lk 1:35) or whether, looking at the scene of Jesus’ baptism, we highlight the conferral of the Spirit of his mission in view of his public activity (Mt 3:16 par.). The upshot in either case is that the Spirit is present in Jesus’ life, not only as a witness, but also as a collaborator (Mt 12:28) and as the permanent mediator of the Father’s will and that, in Jesus’ death, he is breathed out laden with this whole experience (Jn 19:30, where, as in Luke 23:46, the Evangelist speaks of an actual handing over of the Spirit to the Father). Therefore, when Jesus, raised from the dead and exalted from obedient slave to Lord (Acts 2:36), bodily breathes his Spirit into his disciples, we can be certain that this Spirit has, not only grasped, and thus can attest to, the divine fullness and ever-contemporary significance of what Jesus lived through, but, more importantly, can also make it understood in the hearts into which he is poured out (Rom 5:5) as the experienced truth (of the interpretation of the Father), as the goodness, love, unreserved gift (charis) of this truth. We can be sure, indeed, that he can do this precisely from within his perpetually calling to mind the mutual glorification of the Father and the Son experienced in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus (Jn 14:26). After all, the Spirit is at one and the same time the one sent out by the Father (ekporeuetai: Jn 15:26)⁶ and sent by the Son (pempso, ibid.). He is, in other words, the gift of both, who, better than any other, knows and can also tell us about the depths of God (1 Cor 2:10) and of his trinitarian love for the world, of the love that in its appearance for us is truth and glory.

3. Truth as Fullness

Only when truth is conceived in christological-trinitarian terms can it be linked with the notion of fullness. For it then includes, not only the other transcendentals on the ontological level (glory, goodness, and, in the definitiveness of the enfleshed display of the divine Word, unity), but also the Son’s constitutive, indissoluble relationship to the Father and to the Spirit on the trinitarian level. And that is not all: this christological-trinitarian truth holds absolute primacy over everything that can call itself true within the world. The affinity between pertinent statements in John and in Paul provides a suitable demonstration of this claim.

The clear declaration in Colossians 2:9 is a fitting beginning: "In him the whole fullness [plērōma] of deity dwells bodily and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. The fullness of God, whose triunity is not mentioned in the text, dwells in the Incarnate One; from this fullness, believers receive their own fulfillment, even as Christ’s fullness overrules, as head, everything that prevails in the world and tries to assert its own headship. Colossians 2:9 is almost a self-quotation from the Christ-hymn"⁷ in Colossians 1, which is more difficult to interpret: For in him it pleased that all fullness should dwell and that through him all things should be reconciled unto him (Col 1:19f). It is not said here whom this pleased, but it is most likely the Godhead mentioned in 2:9, and not the fullness as such. Nevertheless, Christ’s fullness is characterized by the fact that all division is reconciled, overcome, by and toward it. When, therefore, the text says that the fullness indwells Christ, it cannot mean anything comparable to earlier divine inhabitations, such as God’s dwelling upon Zion, in the Temple, or in the chosen people. No, the good pleasure that decrees it decides the destiny of the whole of creation; it is an eschatological reality distinguished from all others by the fullness of the times (Eph 1:10) recapitulated in Christ’s fullness. Here, too, it is the fullness of Christ that, on the one hand, definitively fills up the Church as his body (so that she becomes the fullness of him who fills all in all: Eph 1:23) and, on the other hand, is enthroned in cosmic sovereignty far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:21). Christ’s indwelling in believers is supposed to enable them, for their part, to be filled into the whole fullness of God, that is, to have a (real) knowledge of a truth by which one can only be overwhelmed. This paradox of a truth that is meant to be known, even as it surpasses knowledge, recalls the Pauline texts in which Christian knowledge finds its surpassing fulfillment in Christians being known by God (1 Cor 8:3; 13:12; 2 Cor 5:11; Gal 4:9; Phil 3:12). Once again, Ephesians 4:10, in connection with Christ’s ascent above all the heavens, says that he ascends there in order from that supreme pinnacle to fill up all things, which in the sequel are described as growing through the Church toward him as the head (Eph 4:15). Finally, Paul calls this growth into the fullness of Christ the truth in Christ, a truth that has been learned in Christ (Eph 4:21; cf. 4:15: to announce and to live the truth in love; and 4:24, where the truth of being a Christian is seen in conjunction with being righteous and holy).

The inseparable connection between fullness and truth comes out even more clearly in the prologue to John’s Gospel than it does in Paul. The prologue first states (Jn 1:14) that charts and alētheia have reached their fullness (plērēs) in the incarnate Son of the Father—an affirmation best understood in light of the unity of the two (the unveiled goodness or loving, gracious unveiling) that we sketched above. This eschatological, unsurpassable fullness is underscored when the Baptist cries out in the middle of the text that the one who comes after him in time was before me, for he was the first before me. But, just as in Paul, the fullness [plērōma] of Christ, in which the triune God wishes to communicate himself to the world, is a fullness that is meant to be received by believers: From his fullness we have all received (Jn 1:16). Nevertheless, this fullness does not drop down unmediated from heaven; rather, it has been prepared by means of the grace already announced in the Old Testament. Abraham rejoiced to see my day (Jn 8:56); Isaiah saw and foretold something of Christ’s glory beforehand (Jn 12:41); Moses wrote of me when he gave the law (Jn 5:46). All of this was already a movement in grace toward the fullness of Christ. The prologue can thus continue: We have received [definitive] grace beyond [preparatory] grace. For the law was given through Moses, [whereas] grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ (Jn 1:16-17). The Old Testament was indeed already grace, but only insofar as it was a forerunner of Christ; and however much the Old Testament may have spoken of God’s truth and truthfulness,⁸ it could not yet mean this truth in the sense of fullness. This truth was, as John says, essentially nomos, law, God’s instruction about what sort of behavior he expected from his human covenant partner. The truth does not become fullness until the whole Father is unveiled and exposited in the whole incarnate Son and until this fullness can be received by men through the Holy Spirit. Even though an Elijah, an Isaiah, or an Ezekiel beheld a vision of glory, the last verse of the prologue protectively underscores the uniqueness of its message: No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is toward the bosom of the Father, has exposited him (Jn 1:18) and, in this exposition, has communicated him (the Father) in such a way that we can obtain an ontological share in his (the Son’s) sonship.

In a passage from his Logic, Hegel has this to say:

If the concept [in its highest form as the absolute idea] is defined to be the truth of being and of essence, we must reckon with the question why we did not begin with this concept itself. The answer to this question is that, where the knowledge proper to thought is concerned, it is impossible to begin with truth, because the truth that constitutes the beginning rests upon sheer assertion, whereas thought truth must as such stand the test of thought.⁹

Consequently, the philosopher begins with the neediest contents (being, nothingness, becoming, something, and so on), in order to ascend gradually by the dialectical method to the ultimate fullness (for Hegel, the absolute idea or absolute knowing). Theo-logic can afford to begin with the absolute fullness, because it is as such already God’s self-exposition for the world, which, furthermore, the Holy Spirit (who is not the absolute spirit of Hegel), in a never-to-be-concluded progression, simultaneously ex-posits and de-posits in created spirits. It could, of course, be said that there is a certain neediness in theo-logic that corresponds analogically to the neediness of the Hegelian beginning: the poverty of the fleshly existence of God’s Word. Yet this is a poverty, not of abstraction, but of love, a blessed poverty (the first words of Jesus’ preaching: Mt 5:3), because it is a poverty freely chosen in order to enrich us (2 Cor 8:9).

I. DIVINE AND HUMAN LOGIC

A. LOGIC AND LOVE

1. The Exigency of Logos

The question about truth in theology is the question about its object: God, who in his covenant, and ultimately in his incarnate Word, has become a God for and with us. We cannot detach the question about God from the double question about the reason for God’s being for and with us and about our answering attitude in the covenant begun in the Old Testament and brought to fulfillment in Christ. The answer to this question is given in the great commandment of the Old Testament (Deut 6:4), which was repeated and completed by Christ: "Hear, O Israel! Yahweh our God is the only Yahweh. Thou shalt love Yahweh thy God with all thy heart [leb, kardia], with all thy soul [nepheš] and with all thy strength. In the Bible, heart" means the seat of all conscious activity, whether intellectual, affective [gemüthaft], or ethical; soul is the seat of all the drives of will and desire. The Septuagint renders strength as dynamis. In Mark, Christ, when asked which is the greatest commandment, adds the power of thought (dianoia), and the doctor of the law confirms his statement using the three expressions heart, understanding (synesis), and strength (Mk 12:29-33). Luke likewise puts the four words heart, soul, power of thought (dianoia), and strength in the same place (Lk 10:27); Matthew inserts three of the component terms: heart, soul, and power of thought (Mt 22:37); clearly, dianoia was already firmly established in the tradition going back to Jesus.¹

This means that Jesus, even more expressly than the Old Testament, places thought, together with all the other faculties of the soul, in the service of divine love. This corresponds to the makeup of his own person: he is the incarnate Word of the Father only because he "expresses the whole Father [totius Patris expressio]"² as the act of his love. But insofar as the entire creation came into being through this Logos (Jn 1:3), and insofar as he came into this whole world as the true light in order to enlighten every man in the world [that he might know and choose the good]³ (Jn 1:9), Christ stands in the same immediate relationship to all flesh, to every fellowman, and the commandment to love one’s neighbor can and must be an ingredient in the chief commandment (the commandment to love one’s neighbor is like the first, Mt 22:39). "The ultimate word between God and man is at the same time the decisive word between man and man: agapān, love."⁴

But, as the expression of the love of the Father who gives him up for the world, Christ demands the same love for himself. He can do this because he expresses the Father in his own attitude. If God were your Father, you would love me (Jn 8:42); if you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father (Jn 14:28); he who loves me will keep my word (Jn 14:23); if you love me, keep my commandments (Jn 14:15); he who loves me will be loved by my Father (Jn 14:21); the Father loves you because you have loved me (Jn 16:27); do you love me more than these? (Jn 21:15); in this we know love, that he gave his life for us (1 Jn 3:16).

Thus, whether one defines God (Thomas Aquinas) or Christ (Bonaventure) as the formal object of theology, the first thing this object demands is to be loved. This love requires for itself all the powers of the soul, among them thinking and knowing. Any cognitive relationship that does not serve this love has no claim to be a part of theological logic. God is not an object that can be dominated by knowledge as power, in the way that, since Descartes, and especially since Francis Bacon,⁵ the modern physical sciences, together with the anthropological sciences patterned (largely) after them, have related to their objects. In theology, the knowing power is requisitioned for something that transcends it, as Paul says in the incomparably pregnant words to know the love of Christ that transcends knowledge (Eph 3:19). In the Bible, knowledge has a comprehensive meaning that, far from being purely theoretical and abstract, comprises the full range of man’s concrete cognitive possibilities, including sexual experience (the man knew Eve, his wife: Gen 4:1). All of these possibilities are to enter the service of love. In the words of Heinrich Schlier:

Christians must be aware that the love of Christ that they are supposed to know—and the term gnōnai in this context has the . . . sense of experiential knowledge—is more than all knowledge, hence, even more than the knowledge of the love of Christ. It is superior to every possible experiential knowledge of the love of Christ. Ultimately, this knowledge knows something unknowable, something that bursts the limits of, and exceeds, all knowing.⁶

Consequently, theological knowledge can exist only on the basis of faith,⁷ understood as the act of holding the truth of something surpassing knowledge. This does not mean, however, that the knowledge Paul calls for ceases to be real knowledge; indeed, as the text says immediately afterward, it is to be filled into the whole fullness of God (Eph 3:19). Schlier thus goes on to say: "The gnosis which the Apostle prays for is the movement in which existence moves from faith in love and from love in faith to the experiential knowledge of the incomprehensible love of Christ, which is the foundation of everything."⁸

2. The Logic of Love

The first question that arises at this point is whether a knowledge that sublates [aufhebt] itself in love in the way just described has any room left for a logic. Maurice Blondel offers a way toward an affirmative answer to this question by postulating the necessity of a logic of moral life.⁹ How can such a logic exist, though? Is logic not governed by the principle of noncontradiction, whereas in life good and evil really contradict each other and thus suspend the principle of noncontradiction—unless we consider good and evil as indifferently interchangeable? Such a logic becomes possible when we realize where the real origin of the principles of logic lies: they are disengaged from our life in the midst of its vital unfolding and its inevitable obligation to decide. In the facts themselves there is neither contradiction nor identity (they are merely similar to one another). In our transformative action, however, we set things in opposition according to whether or not they fit into our destiny: they contradict one another in relation to our tendency, to our decision about our overall orientation. A missed opportunity to do what we ought to have done is an irremediable deprivation (stérēsis), which appears as a mere negation (apóphasis) only from the outside. When this external viewpoint is adopted, speculative reason, though bound in solidarity with the real and actual use of the practical reason is artificially separated from it. The result: bloodless concepts and words, which then, by reason of their purely abstract mutual in- and exclusion, give rise to an empty logology (school logic) outside of real being.

To be sure, this abstract logic is not without its use. When we find ourselves face to face with a decision, its assertions of identity serve as a warning to, and a trial of, ethical consciousness, lest it cede to the dogmatism of naked drives or of abstract reason. Furthermore, the acosmic validity of the principle of noncontradiction keeps this ethical consciousness from settling down in some intraworldly thought and action. Authentic choice always intends the whole: being or nonbeing. In this sense, negation has a subordinate legitimacy, but nothing more. There is no purely formal logic; every thinking is an act, and every act is initiative and synthesis. For this reason, ideological logic is only a partial expression of the dialectic of action. But where is the latter’s logic? Where every real decision among a thousand possibilities means deliberation for a reality that must be brought into being. To act is both to take possession (to gain) and to renounce—in view of the sense (the real logos) of our existence as a whole.

This real logic, or logic of life, can be expressed in rigorous forms. (1) The original alogism or polylogism of the vital drives has to be ordered by means of the instinct for true vocation or reflection in the face of decision. (2) These opposing forces are not destroyed in decision, however. In the best case, they are tamed. We thus avoid ending up where an abstract dialectic would lead us; action eludes every analytic deduction. (3) On the strength of this insight, we must aim higher than the partial goal, that is, we must look to our ultimate responsibility. (4) We must be able to calculate how we can wrest our freedom from the spontaneous dialectic of life, which precedes, accompanies, and follows our freedom. This labor of taking possession of oneself is entrusted to the supervision of integral logic. (5) Every decision particularizes us; it is a renunciation, but its result is either enrichment or loss of self. Things require, of course, only relative sacrifices, but the intellectual vision of the principle of noncontradiction leads us into a suprarational life. Rational logic can live only within ethical decision, while morality, for its part, can exist only thanks to formal logic’s principle of noncontradiction—either as the realization of freedom through mortification or as its loss. "Negation [antíphasis] is only an inadequate symbol of privation [stérēsis]."

Such, then, is the scope of Blondel’s justification of a logic of life that transcends the abstract logic of knowledge. For Blondel, this logic of life makes sense only in the face of the absolute, divine, and, ultimately, divine-human Logos. It is meaningful only as an answer to him. In the last analysis, what is at stake is, not the value of self-realization, but the norm of love for the totality of truth. Jesus makes himself this very norm when he says: He who is not with me is against me; he who does not gather with me scatters (Mt 12:30). How absolute Jesus means this decision to be becomes clear when he goes on to say immediately afterward that there is an unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit.

Here, too, we have the natural context for what in the Johannine corpus is termed doing the truth (Jn 3:21; 1 Jn 1:6), being of the truth (Jn 3:19; 18:37; 1 Jn 2:21), walking in the truth (2 Jn 4-6), and the like. All of these terms indicate that the total Logos, before whom the believer makes his decision, is an encompassing sphere of trinitarian logic, which in one way or another must be experienced, if, listening to [horchen] and obeying [ge-horchen] him, we are to know the truth (2 Jn 1; 1 Jn 4:16; Jn 8:32), to have knowledge about the truth (1 Jn 2:20-21, and so on), and to orient ourselves by it. Whoever is of the truth hears my voice (Jn 18:37). Every truly ethical choice or decision presupposes some kind of knowledge of the totality of the good, to which I am necessarily oriented and which I have to choose in freedom.

The believer is initiated into this totality by the Spirit (he will lead you into the totality of the truth: Jn 16:13), a totality Jesus immediately and plainly defines as trinitarian: He will take from what is mine and will announce it to you; everything that the Father has is mine (Jn 16:14). This totality is, in Christ, truth. In order to recognize and love it, one must believe him when he says I am (Jn 8:24; 8:29; 8:58). It is the unity of the revealer with the one revealed and with their infinite expositor.

What, though, about the immense number of those who do not know him, or do not know him in this way? John unfurls a gradual progression of faith, knowledge, and love within the actual living out of life. This progression moves from the dimly guessing question (Who is this, that I should believe in him?: Jn 9:36), through an open-ended amazement (No man has ever spoken like this one: Jn 7:46), to the desire to know him (Jn 12:12) and, still further, to a faith that does not yet understand (Jn 13:7; 14:5, 9). We pointed out above that all things were created in the Logos and that he comes into the world to enlighten every man (Jn 1:5, 9); the world and man can therefore be called his own, whether they actually receive him or not (Jn 1:11). Therefore, since all men, despite their ignorance of him, are enlightened by him,¹⁰ it must be possible to have an implicit