The word with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a word with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes. The Trilogy is an attempt to understand God through Christ’s three-fold description of himself in the Gospel of John as “the way, the truth, and the life,” and he does this by means of the transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Whoever confronts the whole truth-not only man’s truth and that of the world, but the truth of a God who bestows himself on man, the truth not only of the historical Gospel and of the Church that preserves it, but the truth of the growing Kingdom of God both as it now is in the fulness of God’s creation and also in the weakness of the grain that dies in me and in all my brothers, in the night of our present and in the uncertainty of our future: whoever, I say, confronts such wholeness of truth desires to choose as his first word one which he will not have to take back, one which he will not afterwards have to correct with violence, but one which is broad enough to foster and include all words to follow, and clear enough to penetrate all the others with its light. And it is also free enough subsequently to expand the horizons of one who has chosen too narrow a starting point and to help him to his feet. God’s truth is, indeed, great enough to allow an infinity of approaches and entryways. But the introduction to his magnum opus, the Theological Trilogy, is lucid and readable:īeginning is a problem not only for the thinking person, the philosopher, a problem that remains with him and determines all his subsequent steps the beginning is also a primal decision which includes all later ones for the person whose life is based on response and decision. He is also, by reputation, notoriously difficult and inaccessible.
Hans Urs von Balthasar is one of the most famous modern Catholic theologians.
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