Reviews for The glory of the Lord

The average rating for The glory of the Lord based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-18 00:00:00 Svetlana Popelka This is pure genius - I really love Balthasar. This is the second volume of the first part of Balthasar's trilogy, and it's just wonderful. The first volume (Seeing the Form) was all about theoretically describing the loss of beauty as a fundamental aspect of being, and of God (beauty as a transcendental), and Balthasar's introduction to how we ought to discuss beauty in relation to God (primarily as the form of Christ). This is just an introduction. This volume is the first of two parts, and in it Balthasar looks at the "clerical" styles of talking about beauty (the next volume is "lay" styles, by which he means figures like Dante, Peguy, and Hopkins). "Clerical" seems to mean 'doctors of the church' - so the five thinkers he looks at are Irenaeus, Augustine, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Anselm, and Bonaventure.In all of these thinkers he's looking at their aesthetics - how they conceive of beauty in relationship to God. For Irenaeus, he focuses on the famous "the glory of God is a living human" idea - that the beauty of God is most evident the notion of a temporal salvation, and in the incarnation. In Augustine, he focuses on the aesthetics of the "Idea," or how the beauty of the God (the Idea) is instantiated through the love of God. For Dionysius, the founder of the idea of the analogia entis, he focuses on Dionysius' notion of how the form of the world points to God, even as God is beyond all form and beyond all being. With Anselm, he focuses on Anselm's notion of "rectitude," or appropriate reasoning, and how the beauty of God's salvation is seen in God's appropriate relationship with creation, and vice versa. In Bonaventure he focuses on the fact that the form of Jesus the crucified is the measure of all things, and as such the wealth of beauty is fully expressed in the poverty of the cross. Of all the theologians, I found Dionysius and Bonaventure the most interesting - and so does Balthasar, since he spends the most time on these two figures (Bonaventure is a full 100 pages, more than any other, and, as Balthasar says, the most aesthetic of all theologians). Balthasar has a fascinating way of allowing these figures to speak for themselves (he quotes them a lot), and framing their aesthetic concerns.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-27 00:00:00 Ronald Samson Great summary of the beautiful in Iranaeus, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Anselem, and Bonaventure "If everything in the world that is fine and beautiful is epiphaneia, the radiance and splendour which breaks forth in expressive form from a veiled and yet mighty depth of being, then the event of the self-revelation of the hidden, the utterly free and sovereign God in the forms of this world, in word and history, and finally in the human form itself, will itself form an analogy to that worldly beauty however far it outstrips it."