[397.1] STRETCHING OUR CREDIBILITY

"Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the ‘work’ of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience, against every ‘rational’ concept of God, which thinks of [God] in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not in terms of an inconceivable and senseless act of love."
~Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, pp.101-102.

Not of course that we can capture this love, or render it's 'senselessness' as prescriptive reasoning. The point, rather, is to seek ways of inhabiting it - and so to discover through repaired relations that love is not primarly "an emotion", but an intention of concerned dispossessiveness toward 'the other'. What Balthasar is pointing out is that God, having no need to compete within our world of objects and relations, is the wholly non-possessive Other. And therefore the unrestricted source of all possibilities of love.

Comment on this post: FaithInSociety