Citizenship and Humility

How does one navigate between the concept of a noble experiment in human freedom such as the English pilgrim’s attempt to extricate their lives from oppressive government rule to today’s effort to subject America to another oppressive subjugation to government rule? As a child of the 1950’s and 1960’s I became enamored and was educated in the heroic effort of Englishmen, disenchanted with English rule, hoping to form a greater society where human freedom was fused with the greater good in a way that gave equal respect to both. But I find the concept of “equal respect” unable to find a foothold in current, bias filled cultural attitudes. Many people seek to defend their beliefs at any cost in spite of obvious facts that that do not support them. I say facts not arguments. Truth is not a consideration, only the degree to which a particular spin can be placed on the facts and at times regardless of the facts. All arguments are attributed to bias and conspiracy. When will we understand that peace requires a willingness to see in those who disagree with us elements of truth in their positions? When will we have the humility to admit to the flaws in our own positions? In our Constitutional Republic we assign this task to our elected representatives. We ask them to consider the welfare of all citizens by seeking truth in humility. It is appalling to see the low level to which this principle is applied by our leadership. The most successful and well-endowed country in history deserves much better.

We can take some lessons from St. Bernard. I’m just sayin’.  

Balthasar' Theo-Logic

The following quote of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is from the April 2006 edition of First Things and was the motivation for my interest in Balthasar.

"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 counter-intuitive 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."

Once again I've gathered the fortitude to wade through more of Balthasar's "heavy duty intellection" in search of some "scintillating insights".

I don't know how scintillating one may find the quotes that follow. One may say, "Oh, yea, I knew that." But, have you ever attempted to put the ideas presented into your own words? Thanks to Hans Urs von Balthasar I am able to articulate some thing that I was previously able only to intuit.

From Theo-Logic Volume 1:Truth of the World

P.12 – “… the supernatural takes root in the deepest structures of being, leavens them through and through, and permeates them like a breath or an omnipresent fragrance.”

p.16-17 – “All of the perversions that human freedom can inflict upon being and its qualities always aim at one thing: the annihilation of the depth dimension of being, thanks to which being remains a mystery, even, indeed, precisely in its unveiling. The formula “A is nothing other than …” typifies this perversion, whatever the transcendental it affects. It is much rather the case that A is always “something other than …” Neither goodness nor beauty nor truth is exhausted by any definition; the multi-dimensional reality of the transcendentals can ever be flattened out by any kind of reduction, and there is no way to capture the mystery either of their existence or of their essence in a formula. Of course, the ultimate ground of the mysterious character inherent in the knowable is disclosed only when we recognize that every possible object of knowledge is creaturely, in other words, that its ultimate truth lies hidden in the mind of the Creator, who alone can speak the eternal name of things. …. It is God, then, who secures the transcendentals against all the assaults of human freedom – however much ruin this freedom might cause.