Balthasar on Love

I have been reviewing Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Truth of the World over the course of several posts. In my previous comments I indicated that this first volume of the Theo-Logic is devoted to investigating the nature of knowledge, that interaction between the subject and the object in the act of knowing. After separate investigations of the role of the object and the role of the subject, von Balthasar describes the converging of the two.

“Now, at this point we see a convergence between the question about the meaning of the subject and the question about the meaning of the object. In the object, the truth is consisted in and increasing self-revelation, in which the revealer was always more, and always remained richer, than its revelation. But this movement is none other than the interior illumination of being, in which the object becomes a subject. Therefore, looking at things from the point of view of the subject, we can make a complementary observation: Behind the subject’s factual state of openness, there is a movement of self-opening; hence, behind the intellectual luminosity characterizing the subject as intelligence, there is an abiding will to the act of self-disclosure and to the state of being disclosed” (page 111).

The process of disclosure (on the part of the object) and opening up a space for said disclosure (on the part of the subject) is, in the thought of von Balthasar, akin to the process of gift and reception. The object gives itself over through a presentation to the subject, who in turn receives the object. The process, however, is reflexive in that the offering of the uninhibited space on the part of the subject is also a gift to the object. In fact, the whole process of disclosure is a delicate dance of giving and receiving, and through this process, both the object and the subject find their identity and fulfillment. The object, for its part, is meant to be disclosed, and thus in the process of giving itself away is an act of trust (for there is no guarantee that the subject will “see” the object in its truth), it becomes what it is meant to be. In other words being = being-for-disclosure or even being = being-for-another. The subject also finds fulfillment in this process as the knowledge of the object become a part of its being. This process is “the supreme, crowning meaning of all ratio itself. It is the ultimate justification of all being, in its essence and its existence” (page 111).

Even in this attempt on my part to describe this relationship, it is hard to avoid the climactic conclusion of von Balthasar: knowledge = love.

“A being has meaning only if it has being-for-itself, but this being-for-itself is meaningful only if it possesses the movement of communication. What is more, being-for-oneself and communication are one and the same thing; together they constitute the one, indivisible illumination of being. But this implies that the meaning of a being consists in love and that, in consequence, knowledge can be explained only by and for love. The existent object’s will to disclose itself and the knowing subject’s will to open itself in receptive listening are but two forms of a single self-gift that manifests itself in these two modes. Having seen this, we realize that love is inseparable from truth” (page 111, emphasis mine).

I spoke last time about the crucial role that mystery plays in metaphysics. Every being has an incommunicable core that can never be fully disclosed or exhausted by the knowledge process. This does not mean that the subject gives up on the object with the recognition that it will never be able to “solve the puzzle” of the object’s being. Rather, it means that the subject recognizes that the more it comes to “know” the object, the more it realizes the infinite depth that lies behind the self-disclosure, and the knowledge of this gap is true knowledge. Thus, in a paradoxical manner, the subject comes to know more of the object precisely in that recognition of the mystery of the object.

This has much to do with love:

“Love is not something lying on the farther side of truth. Rather, it is the element in truth that guarantees it an ever-new mystery beyond every unveiling. It is that never-failing ‘something more’ than what we already know, without which there would be neither knowing nor anything to be known. It is what keeps a being from ever becoming a sheer fact; it is what forbids knowledge to rest in itself but makes it the servant of something higher. The concept of love is an integral part of the concept of truth” (page 112).

As a non-academic example, my wife recently found herself in a conversation about the relationship between a husband and a wife. The group she was with was stressing the need to “stay interesting” to one’s husband so that he does not “become bored with you.” What was on particular interest to me was that the entire conversation revolved around the word mystery. The women in the conversation were brainstorming ways in which a wife can maintain a certain “mystery” in the mind of her husband. When she came home, my wife asked me if I still found her “mysterious.” Little did she know that I had been contemplating this precise thing from my reading of von Balthasar (which meant that she was in for a dissertation rather than a simple yes or no, which I suppose is part of my own mystery in her mind).

The mystery that a wife has before her husband is part of her ontological core as a being-for-herself. Any object necessarily has a mystery before a knowledge-seeking subject. Even in an act of self-disclosure, an act of total self-gift on the part of the object and an act that is necessary for the fulfillment of the object qua object, the incommunicable mystery remains. Thus, if a husband fails to see the mystery in his wife, the fault lies not with the wife but with the husband. The mystery is present, but he must voluntarily recognize it. There does exist, however, the possibility that the wife may chose to deliberately guard the mystery of her being from her husband. That is, she might offer a disclosure of herself that is not motivated by total self gift, but is motivated by hesitation. (While not healthy in a marriage, such a hesitation is fully appropriate in other relationships.) In a similar paradox as before, when she voluntarily withholds a part of herself in her act of disclosure, the husband, not presented with the infinite depth of her mystery, comes to believe that her fullness-of-being is somehow finite and consequently that he can know all there is to know about his wife, and from thence arises the feared “boredom.” This is paradoxical because many might think that the answer to remaining “mysterious” to one’s spouse is to withhold a part of one’s self in the act of disclosure. Instead, the only way in which a wife can maintain her own mystery in front of her husband is to voluntarily and fully disclosure herself to him. In other words, the more she discloses of herself, the more mysterious she becomes, and the more she conceals herself, the less mysterious she appears. In the presence of the wife’s full disclosure, any absence of the sense of mystery is the fault of the husband.

(It should go without saying that the entire discussion regarding the wife-husband relationship applies also to the husband-wife relationship. I present it in the above format strictly because it was the context of the conversation.)

“Love is the ground that accounts for all truth” (page 112). Just as in love, it holds for truth that both the giver and the receiver must self-surrender. Certainly the object (the giver) must surrender itself in humble and complete self-disclosure, and along with this come a certain risk for abuse on the part of the subject. Perhaps less obvious, but no less important, is the self-surrendering effort required on the part of the subject. “It requires no small exertion of the subject’s spontaneity to bring it to the point of deciding once and for all to be nothing but receptivity” (page 113). That is, the subject must surrender all preconception and prejudices so that he can receive the being of the object in truth, on its own terms. This ensures that the truth of the objective is rescued from arbitrary creativity in the part of the subject. Nonetheless, this too comes with a certain risk for the subject who must surrender himself to the object’s self disclosure, trusting that this disclosure is truly a gift-of-self and not a disclosure of untruth.

The objectivity of the disclosure is only the beginning. There is a whole other level to this disclosure in love. When the subject gazes lovingly on the object, it is a gaze that is both objective and idealizing (page 114). It is objective because it begins with the self-disclosure of the object not with subjective preconceptions of the object. Trusting that the object is disclosing itself in truth, the subject is able to come to an understanding of the object’s being, always with the understanding that the mystery of the object transcends the presentation being offered (and in fact transcends all presentations considered separately or in their totality). However, the subject, being outside the object, also creates an ideal of what the object can become. “[The subject] knows or guesses what it could be, what splendid possibilities are present in it” (page 114). It is precisely in the space opened up by the subject that the object can come to realize its own possibilities.

“The ideal picture that the knower cherishes when he is also a lover is as much subjective as it is objective. Its subjectivity does not consist in the fact that, say, it does not conform to the truth; it is subjective because its truth attains to real, objective truth only through a subject.... Unless the knower presented the ideal, the object known would never have dreamed of aspiring to it, or else it would have grown faint because the attempt would have seemed too fantastic. It takes faith and confidence of the knower animated by love to give the thing known faith and confidence in the truth of the ideal held before it. At love’s bidding, the object ventures to be what it could have been but would never have dared to be by itself alone” (page 115, emphasis added).

It is important to stress that this ideal is not something invented by the subject. “The lover will always consider the image that he presents [to the beloved] to be something objective. He knows that the possibility he sees is truly embodied in the beloved; the lover does not invent it but simply observes it” (page 115). If the contrary were true, that the image presented to the object were the result of personal imagination, the image would no longer be offered in truth and would only serve to damage the trust established in the gift-reception relationship. It would be a tragedy indeed for the loved to offer an ideal to his beloved that is not conceived in truth, all the more tragic if the beloved trustingly attempts to attain this false ideal. The loving relationship can find its transcendental perfection only when the ideal offered is one that is received and offered in truth.

There is a double recognition that occurs when the ideal is offered properly. On one hand, the subject correctly recognizes that the ideal was not his own concoction but finds its existence in the depths of the object’s own mystery. On the other hand, the object comes to recognize that the realization of his best potentialities is not something that it could have accomplished on its own. The realization of the ideal, the perfecting of the object, occurs only in relationship. The ideal was born from and finds its completion in a creative act of love.

In reflecting on these ideas it is tempting to see them only in light of the love between a man and a woman. I cannot help but be reminded of the line spoken by Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets: “You make me want to be a better man,” which, in a strange Hollywood kind of way beings to get at the heart of that presentation of the ideal to the beloved on the part of the lover described above. However, as important as it is to understand the gift-ontology in the context of marriage, we must avoid the temptation of reducing these reflections to married love. The relationship of love is the relationship of truth, and so these reflections govern not only marriage, but all relationships between persons. We must not stop even there. The loving relationship between subject and object must also govern the general pursuit of knowledge.

Nonetheless, the profound relationship between a husband and a wife does seem to hold a special place among all relationships of knowledge. Holy Scripture, after all, uses the phrase “to have knowledge of” to describe the marital relationship. The love between a man and a woman can serve as a prototype of these ideas but only insofar as we recognize that our relationship to God is the archetype. If being is being-for-disclosure and consequently a particular being is only being insofar as it is known, then we arrive at the perennial truth that we are only held in existence insofar as we are known by God.