New book introduces readers to central focus of von Balthasar’s theology

Richard Clements, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University, is the author of The Meaning of the World Is Love: Selected Texts from Hans Urs von Balthasar with Commentary (Ignatius Press, 2022). He has taught psychology at several universities and written articles for numerous psychological journals. Clements left academia to be a full-time father. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, with his wife, Jessica, and their five children.

Clements recently corresponded with CWR about his new book, the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the nature of God, love, truth, and much more.

CWR: How and when did you first discover and read the writings of Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar? What was the first book of his that you read? And what was your impression of what you read?

Rick Clements: I first started reading Balthasar’s work almost fifteen years ago. I had seen occasional references to his theology in journals like First Things and newspapers like the National Catholic Register. They were only passing references, but they intrigued me – Balthasar was generally referred to as a brilliant theologian, but one whose work could be challenging to grasp. I assume the latter characterization stemmed from Balthasar’s immense erudition, as well as the sheer volume of his writings, which run to tens of thousands of pages.

I don’t recall exactly which one of Balthasar’s books I read first, but I do recall that it was one of the volumes in his trilogy on the beautiful, the good, and the true. I remember being struck by the eloquence, boldness, and confidence with which he wrote, the profundity of many of his insights, and his extensive references to the works of an incredibly wide and varied group of thinkers: Fathers of the Church, other theologians both old and new, philosophers, novelists, poets, playwrights, etc.

That first book drew me in, and I immediately starting reading one Balthasar book after another.

CWR: What led to this book? How did it develop and come to fruition?

Clements: Having been struck by the beauty and profundity of Balthasar’s theology, I wanted to find a way to make some of his insights more accessible to a broader audience. Realizing that not many people have the time (or the inclination, I guess) to read all of Balthasar’s writings, I thought it would be useful for me to go through his work and select some of his most significant insights, organize them by topic, and provide commentary that would hopefully give readers some context for understanding those insights more fully.

Since the topic of love is central to Balthasar’s theology, and love is a topic of almost universal interest, I thought that putting together a collection of Balthasar’s most important comments on that topic would be a worthwhile project. Over the course of seven or eight years, I read a large chunk of Balthasar’s oeuvre and took extensive notes. I then spent about six months selecting the quotations to be included in The Meaning of the World Is Love and writing the commentary to accompany those quotations.

CWR: You write, in the Introduction (“A Theology of Love”) that, “For Balthasar (and I am firmly convinced that he is right about this), the answers to all of these questions revolve, in one way or another, around love.” What are some of those questions? And why is love so essential to addressing them?

Clements: One of the aspects of Balthasar’s work that has been really appealing to me has been his willingness to ask (and answer) the “big” questions about life, the existential questions that most of us wonder about at one time or another, such as: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we all here? Why am I, in particular, here? What is life all about? Is there any ultimate meaning or purpose to life? How can we attain ultimate happiness? How can we attain ultimate freedom?

It’s completely on target that you asked why love is so “essential” in answering these questions. Balthasar would say that love is essential to answering the deeper questions about life because love is the essence of life itself. More specifically, Balthasar would say 1) love is the essence of God (1 John 4:16); 2) God is not just one being among all other beings, but God is Being itself, existence itself, life itself; 3) therefore the essence of being/life is love. Love is what life is all about.

In Love Alone Is Credible, Balthasar asserts that love is the only credible answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, the question of why there is something rather than nothing. We human beings, and the entire universe itself, were all created from and for love. The inner-Trinitarian life of God is an eternal circulation of love, a communion of love, and God invites all of us to share in that divine life and love forever. That’s why we are all here. Only in love, only in sharing in the divine love, will we find the perfect happiness and freedom that we so deeply desire.

Balthasar called life a “theo-drama”, a drama in which the destiny of each and every one of us hinges on our free decision of whether to say Yes or No to God’s invitation to love. He also referred to life as a “grand school of love” – we are all here to learn how to love as God loves, to learn to love as Jesus showed us how to love, so that we can participate as fully as possible in the divine life of love. Each of us also has a unique, God-given mission of love to fulfill during our life on earth, a mission that fits within Jesus Christ’s overarching mission of love and that further contributes to the meaning and purpose of our lives.

CWR: What are some ways in which Balthasar defines or articulates the nature of love?

Clements: In The Meaning of the World Is Love, I draw upon several passages in which Balthasar discusses the nature of love in order to formulate a definition that I think captures Balthasar’s conception of love: Love is the selfless gift of self, given and received.

In the book, I discuss Balthasar’s thoughts regarding each of the elements contained in this definition of love. At the heart of love lies the gift of self. Balthasar, who wrote in German, liked to use the German term Hingabe to refer to this self-gift. Hingabe can be translated as surrender, or more specifically, in the present context, self-surrender. For many of us, the word “surrender” has negative connotations: if you “surrender”, this is a sign of defeat, failure, weakness, etc. But as Balthasar points out, loving self-surrender is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. To genuinely surrender ourselves in loving self-gift, we have to be strong, by which he means, at least in part, possessing a healthy self-love, being in control of ourselves, and having attained a fair degree of mastery over our fallen inclination toward egoism and selfishness.

Hence the related emphasis on selflessness in Balthasar’s definition of love. Selflessness involves ekstasis, breaking out of what Balthasar calls the “prison” of our ego and stepping outside ourselves in love toward the Other/other. Selflessness also requires kenosis, a self-emptying of our selfish tendencies in order to “be for” the other rather than being only “for self”. Balthasar speaks a great deal of the sacrificial nature of love, but he also refers to the joy that comes from making sacrifices, in love, for the sake of God or neighbor. Balthasar also speaks at length of the two movements of love (the giving and receiving of the gift of self), emphasizing repeatedly the openness that is required for a mutual exchange of the gift of self to take place and noting that both distance and “otherness” are required for the existence of genuine love.

CWR: Are there false or flawed notions of love that Balthasar addresses? What sort of direction does he give about both recognizing and embracing the authentic love of God?

Clements: In one of his books (The God Question & Modern Man), Balthasar laments the contemporary overuse, and especially the misuse, of the word “love”, commenting: “Must we really keep on using this word ‘love’ which has gradually become unbearable, and continue to tear it to rags?” But of course, he is not arguing that we should, in fact, stop using the word “love” (for how could we stop using the word that refers to the essence of God and to the essence of life itself?), but rather that we should stop misusing and abusing the word (for example, by using the word “love” to refer to a sexual relationship that is, at best, a thinly disguised egoism rather than a mutual exchange of the gift of self). However, Balthasar focuses almost exclusively in his writing on a positive description of genuine love rather than a criticism of the misconceptions and misunderstandings of love that are out there in society.

The authentic love of God is characterized by the elements of love that Balthasar emphasizes: self-gift, selflessness, and the free and mutual exchange of that gift of self. Jesus Christ revealed the divine love to us and literally “embodied” it, putting a face on the invisible God and making it possible for us to share in the divine life and love by embracing the divine love revealed in Christ.

CWR: “Balthasar’s theology, ” you emphasize, is “both thoroughly Trinitarian and thoroughly Christocentric,” and nearly everything he has to say about love and other vital topics flows from this. What are some examples of this? And how does this help ordinary Christians as they deal with the various struggles and challenges of life?

Clements: Balthasar’s definition of love itself as the selfless gift of self given and received is drawn from his understanding of love as it occurs within the intra-Trinitarian relationships among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Balthasar asserts that God is self-gift and self-surrender: God the Father gives himself entirely to the Son in begetting him; the Son returns that love in a thankful, reciprocal gift of self; and their mutual self-gift spirates the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is both the revelation of the nature of the divine love and our path into a participation in the divine life and love.

Many of the key concepts within Balthasar’s theology are also drawn from the nature of the Trinity and from the life of Jesus. For example, Balthasar emphasizes the centrality of kenosis within the divine life, asserting that God the Father empties himself of everything except his status as Father in begetting the Son, completely sharing the divine nature with the Son, and the Son, in turn, empties himself completely in his grateful reciprocation of the gift of self to the Father. He also describes the divine kenosis involved in creating a universe that includes free beings like ourselves, beings who can use that freedom to oppose the divine will. And of course, there is the kenosis of the Son in emptying himself of his divinity in order to take on our human nature. We are called to imitate this kenotic love of God in our own lives.

Balthasar also speaks of Jesus’ self-gift to us in the Eucharist and exhorts us, along with other theologians including Origen, to “break ourselves open and pour ourselves out” in love for other people, serving as figurative “food” and “drink” for others on their journey toward God in imitation of Jesus’ literal Eucharistic self-gift.

The divine bliss, according to Balthasar, consists precisely in the eternal circulation of love among the three Persons of the Trinity, and our ultimate happiness, the happiness that all of us human beings so deeply desire, is to be found in a participation in this divine bliss, a participation in the eternal exchange of the gift of self within the Trinity and among all the members of the Body of Christ.

If life is, indeed, a school of love in which we are here to learn to love as God loves, the more we know about the way God loves, the better we can learn to imitate his love in our relationships as spouse, parent, friend, co-worker, etc. in our everyday lives, and the more we will experience at least a foretaste of the divine bliss in this earthly life.

CWR: What is the relationship, in Balthasar’s theological work, between the Incarnation and human deification?

Clements: Balthasar would say that the Incarnation is the precondition for human deification, a necessary but not sufficient condition for our divinization. The paschal mystery (the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus) is the other crucial part of the deification process.

CWR: There are, in today’s world, many lacking or false understandings of love, as well as a relativistic or even nihilistic view of truth. What insights does Balthasar provide in his considerations of the relationship between love and truth?

Clements: Balthasar defines truth as the revelation, unveiling, or self-disclosure of being. Since love is self-gift, love is also self-disclosure, and thus one can say that love is, in this sense, truth. He tends to emphasize the interactive, relational aspect of the knowing process, particularly between persons. Learning the truth about others is a dynamic, interactive process involving the voluntary disclosure of one’s own being on the part of one person (the “object” in this case) and the voluntary receptivity of the other person (the “subject”) to that disclosure. The “object” to be known must disclose or give herself or himself to the other, and the subject to whom the gift of self-disclosure is offered must open himself or herself up to the proffered gift of self.

CWR: What do you hope readers will be able to glean from this book?

Clements: My hope is that readers will gain a deeper understanding of the nature of love and of the beauty, goodness, and truth of love, a greater receptivity to the divine love, and some inspiration to reciprocate the divine love more fully and pass the divine love along to others by striving to embody that love more fully in their own lives.

On a less significant level, I hope that The Meaning of the World Is Love will stimulate readers’ interest in the ideas of this brilliant theologian and enkindle in them a desire to read some of Balthasar’s books directly.

CWR: Any final thoughts?

Clements: People sometimes ask me, “What would be a good book by Balthasar for readers who are completely new to Balthasar to start with?” My personal favorite is Heart of the World, a beautiful book that Balthasar described as “a hymn to Christ in rhythmic prose”. Other good choices would be Love Alone Is Credible, Engagement with God, Prayer, or Credo. If a reader is looking for more of an overview of some of Balthasar’s key ideas, I would recommend My Work: In Retrospect or Epilogue.