I was in love with St. Augustine for a while. After years on my bookshelf, I finally managed to read his Confessions. Why did his writting appeal to me? It was introspective and personal. Pope Benedict in his prior role as Cardinal put it this way, "With Augustine ... the passionate, suffering, questioning man is always right there, and you can identify with him."
My current love affair is with Hans Urs von Balthasar. He was a prolific thinker and writter as well. Why did I fall in love with him? It was Richard Neuhaus' fault. I read the following commentary by Fr. Neuhaus on his writtings in an issue of First Things.
"He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one's effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counterintuitive nature. One spends pleasurable hours reading Balthasar not so much in an analytical mode as in surrendering oneself to the beauty of how his mind works and its adventurous probings of theological imagination. Reading Balthasar is in large part a meditative exercise bordering on the contemplative."
In the opening pages of volume one of Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics he observes that if man is to live in his original form “one must possess a spiritual eye capable of perceiving the forms of existence with awe. … a life-form which is determined … to bestow nobility upon a person’s everyday life itself.”
So began my desire to develop an eye capable of perceiving with awe the ordinary life I live and to believe it to be a noble endeavor.
I fall in love easily. The thing about love though, is that it is infinitely distensible.
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