After forays into Islam and Andre Dubus, I’m back to Balthasar and volume five of his trilogy (I’m still working on that Swiss math). Here he is talking about the thinking of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a German philosopher who turned philosopher after rejecting theology and Catholicism. Balthasar describes his thoughts on suffering. The philosopher can’t leave the path of Christian thought before taking some fork in the road that leads back to the main Christian highway.
“In the cycle of grace and homage to grace, everything is structured towards a dominant … love …. This dominant love is groundless self –giving, self-expending. … the simplicity of the one thing necessary … the need that is fulfilled in the freedom of sacrifice. Sacrifice … is raised above all compulsion because it emerges from the depths of freedom. In sacrifice there occurs a concealed act of giving thanks. Therefore sacrifice can tolerate no calculation, by which it can be judged only in terms of usefulness or uselessness, whether its aims are noble or base. … The self-giving of Being unquestionably has no justification but that alone which it derives from itself.”
The philosopher Heidegger prefers the term “Being” rather than the theological term “God”. The byway of Christian thought is clear however. In his writings, Heidegger quotes lines from Angelus Silesius, a 17th century Catholic mystic and poet.
The rose has no why and wherefore:
It blooms because it blooms,
And has no regard for itself, and does not ask
If it is being looked at.
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