Pojęcie miłości w „Credo” Hansa Ursa von Balthasara

Abstract

The paper discusses the question of love in the little book of H. U. von Balthasar: “Credo. Meditations on the Apostles’ Creed” (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark 1990, 105p.) It is his last publication summarizing his theology. It is called a little “summa” of his theology. Love can be described as beautiful and omnipotent knowledge, which brings happiness and inspires the acts of free will. An important peculiarity of love is that it has no defined form. Its form is love itself. It is like an unlimited abyss that attracts a person or a flowing wellspring with no holding-trough beneath it. The essence of the innertrinitarian love is difficult to define because it is identical with the essence of God himself. Von Balthasar sees it in an anticipating “yes” to everything that is going to happen and in the gratuitousness of such attitude. So the anticipating “yes” is meant also as an acceptance of another being, of another person or thing. To “love” means to “be for (somebody)”. The love in God consists precisely in the perfect being of one person for the other. Then love creates space for someone else or for something else. This means also self-limitation. That is why the innertrinitarian love of any divine person consists in the total self-surrender, in its κένωσις. Acceptance of any being poses the question of the relation between love and being. Von Balthasar’s idea is that love and being are co-extensive (“Sein und Liebe sind koextesiv”). This means that love reaches as far as being. The reason is that every being, even an impersonal one, is the result of a loving act of the triune Creator, whose essence is love. Thanks to this every created being holds an impressed mark of that act. The question posed by the author at the end of this paper is how we could define this “impressed mark”. In an answer he proposes a new notion of “prosistence” (from Latin pro-sistere), which means “being for (an other)”. Prosistence is the basic feature of any being: personal and impersonal, that of the divine persons and of all created beings. This feature explains the following aspects of reality. It allows the personal beings to form communities and the impersonal ones to form any kind of a whole. Prosistence is also the base for the sense of anything (for more on the notion of prosistence see: J. D. Szczurek, The Notion of Love in the Encyclical Letter «Dominum et Vivificantem» of John Paul II. Summary, “Analecta Cracoviensia” 35:2003, p. 271). The author hopes that this notion can contribute to developing the ontology of love.