Papa Bene !!
WELCOME TO “NOTA BENE!”: my notices of books I have found to be good and worthwhile for me, and I hope for you. There is no rhyme or reason to how these books are listed excepted as they occur to me or have influenced me. Some will have reviews attached; others will be cited with a brief comment. My desire for you, my companions in Christ, might find a few offerings that attract your attention.
ICONS AND ICONOGRAPHY
A random bibliography
Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty.
(Rodondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1990)
̈Michael Evdokimov, Light from the East: Icons in Liturgy and Prayer.
Large Format; Color Plates. (NY: Paulist Press, 2004)
Jaroslav Peklikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons.
Large Format; B & W Plates (Princeton: Princeton U.Press, 1990)
Leonid Ouspensky & Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons.
Large Format: Color and B & W Plates
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983
John Baggley, Doors of Perception: Icons and Their Spiritual Significance.
(Color Plates; Small Intro Book)
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995)
Michcael Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom.
Intro. Book; Color + B & W Plates.
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996)
Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon.
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994)
Sergius Bulgakov, “Icons,” and “The Name of God.”
Two essays; “Icons” is most of the book.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2012)
Books that inspired my conversion to the Catholic Church
I started looking around at my wall-to-wall bookcases and realized a list of “favorite books” could go on and on and on . . . . So I thought I would list the dozen books that, over time, convinced me that Rome is home.
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church
Yves Congar, Diversity and Communion
Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones
for a Fundamental Theology
Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy
Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy
Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship
Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and
John Zizioulas in Dialogue
Joseph Ratzinger, Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Beliefs
Frederick M. Jelly, Madonna: Mary in the Catholic Tradition
Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy
To this I need to add two of Pope St. John Paul the Great’s encyclicals:
Ut Unum Sint and Redemptoris Mater
All of these are worth reading, even if you are not planning to cross the Tiber.
BOOKS OF NOTE AND A FEW REVIEWS
(additions every now and then)
Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press 1994)
The shorter writings of the premier Catholic theologian of the 20th century, Hans Urs von Balthasar (sharing that accolade with Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzingrer) are not necessarily “easier” to read than his major works, but are more focused on a single subject. This is a Balthasar “must read” as it is the great Swiss theologian at his iconoclastic brightest.
I did my Ph.D. studies at The Catholic University of America, and was one of only four candidates accepted into the Department of Theology program in 1989. Each of us had different paths we pursued, and one of us found himself in a course in which this Balthasar book was required reading. I have a vivid memory of three of us standing together in our first year of residency, still figuring out what doctoral-level graduate studies meant, discussing our courses, when my friend pulled out A Theology of History and asked if either of us had read it or had it assigned in a course, which we had not. In utter frustration, he said,” I cannot make any sense out of him (Balthasar). What does this have to do with the human experience in historical time? Who is this written for?”
So, it took me twenty years to finally read it, and I fully understand my classmate’s perplexity. If you approach this book with the usual “theology from below” anthropological, fundamental theology alignment, it will indeed make no sense. But it will be indecipherable under those preconditions of hermeneutics because the genius of von Balthasar is to reject that whole paradigm. If one is going to explore precisely the theology of the universal reality of history, then one must begin, not with anthropology and hermeneutics, but precisely with “theology”, that is, with “thinking along with God,” Theos-Logos. And the “God” whose mind one follows is the Logos of the Father, Jesus Christ. So my friend’s frustrated questions were the very opposite of the questions von Balthasar is concerned to answer.
History begins with the Incarnation of the Logos, Jesus Christ. History “begins” at its mid-point, where the Logos of God enters into time and turns the emptiness of time into the fullness of the specific history created at the moment of the Incarnation of the Logos.
The theology of history thus gives precedence, not to repetition, but to “the Absolutely Unique.” History gives time its motion, which starts from the midpoint of the Incarnation of the Son of God, and so returns to the Father at Creation and to the Holy Spirit at the Consummation in the same instant. All of the past and all of the future meet in Christ, the Incarnate God.
Christ’s historical existence is thus one of non-doing from himself. It is pure receptivity of the will of the Father and the power of the Spirit. History moves toward Christ – from the Father, to the Son in the eschatological Spirit. Jesus receives his mission from the Father in the Spirit, and the whole existence in history of Jesus is taken up in the fulfilling of that mission which is not his own, but the one he has received. For Balthasar, this is how the Son as Second Person of the Trinity is both the Son from all eternity and the person Jesus in time. The mission of the Son is to reconcile the world in all time to the Father by the power of the Spirit. The life of the “immanent” Trinity includes from all eternity the participation of the Son in created history as the Redeemer of time, history and so the world. History then, “happens” within the Triune life of God by the begetting of the Son and his obedience as the begotten one, sent in mission by the Father endowed with the life of God, the Holy Spirit, to “reconcile all things to God.” (For Balthasar in general, the distinction of “immanent” and “economic” Trinity confuses more than helps, because the Triune God, who is pure Act, is both at once, and so the priority in God goes to his “economic” Act of creation and redemption; this leaves speculation about an “imminent” Trinity devoid of any real substance other than the “economic” Trinity. This is a piece of the famous running debate between Balthasar and Karl Rahner.)
Balthasar now has an entirely different hermeneutic – one absolutely the reverse of the conventional anthropocentric hermeneutic – with which to investigate the theological center and reality of the movement and action of history. History is all about Christ, not “man before God.” Christ’s existence in time and the human existence in time coincide at the center with faith in Christ.
Christ is not “in” time. Time is “within” the life and mission of Christ. Grace is the origin of history as the divine pattern of creation and redemption. Man does not determine history out of his own existential or immanent experience of it. Christ is the norm of history. Christ forms history by the Holy Spirit as his recapitulation of time, receiving it from the Father, redeeming it by his mission of reconciliation, empowering it with the Holy Spirit, through whom Christ restores time and history, now perfected as existing in God and for God, to the Father. The concept of creation-redemption-new creation as “recapitulation,” anakephalaiosis, worked out by St. Irenaeus is the “reform” of the theology of history which Balthasar seeks to develop. The image or icon of the recapitulation of all time and history in Christ is manifest in Christ’s forty days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan, and in Christ’s bestowal of the Sacraments as the foundation and mission of the Church.
Of course, this means man, progress, inventiveness, independence, self-respect, self-assurance, self assertion and all the other themes of psychology and anthropology are not the forces or abilities which control history. Christ is King of history, and history lives under the norm of Christ, whether we believe it or not, or cooperate with Christ or not in the movement of history.
Balthasar’s A Theology of History is perhaps even more relevant and important for the Church of our time than it was when written in 1959. A world convinced of its own self-divination by artificial and selfish “progress;” a world wholly given over to anthropology without God as its norm and process; these cultural and social works of the demise of humane civilization find an elegant and refreshingly counter-cultural response from von Balthasar.
Come Down O Love Divine 