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Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa
Hans Urs von Balthasar Von Balthasar presents one of the few serious studies available on the thought of one of the most important, and yet most neglected Fathers of the Church, Gregory of Nyssa. He was the most profound Greek philosopher of the Christian era, a mystic and an incomparable poet whom St. Maximus designated as the "Universal Doctor" and the Second Council of Nicaea declared him "Father of Fathers." Less prolific than Origen, less cultivated than Gregory Nazianzen, less practical than Basil, Gregory of Nyssa nonetheless outstrips them all in the profundity of his thought, for he knew better than anyone how to transpose ideas inwardly from the spiritual heritage of ancient Greece into a Christian mode.
194 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1995
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230 people want to read
About the author
Hans Urs von Balthasar
456 books312 followersHans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and priest who was nominated to be a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is considered one of the most important theologians of the 20th century.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland on 12 August 1905, he attended Stella Matutina (Jesuit school) in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, gaining a doctorate in German literature. He joined the Jesuits in 1929, and was ordained in 1936. He worked in Basel as a student chaplain. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order, feeling that God had called him to found a Secular Institute, a lay form of consecrated life that sought to work for the sanctification of the world especially from within. He joined the diocese of Chur. From the low point of being banned from teaching, his reputation eventually rose to the extent that John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal in 1988. However he died in his home in Basel on 26 June 1988, two days before the ceremony. Balthasar was interred in the Hofkirche cemetery in Lucern.
Along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, Balthasar sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to Western modernism. While Rahner offered a progressive, accommodating position on modernity and Lonergan worked out a philosophy of history that sought to critically appropriate modernity, Balthasar resisted the reductionism and human focus of modernity, wanting Christianity to challenge modern sensibilities.
Balthasar is very eclectic in his approach, sources, and interests and remains difficult to categorize. An example of his eclecticism was his long study and conversation with the influential Reformed Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, of whose work he wrote the first Catholic analysis and response. Although Balthasar's major points of analysis on Karl Barth's work have been disputed, his The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (1951) remains a classic work for its sensitivity and insight; Karl Barth himself agreed with its analysis of his own theological enterprise, calling it the best book on his own theology.
Balthasar's Theological Dramatic Theory has influenced the work of Raymund Schwager.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland on 12 August 1905, he attended Stella Matutina (Jesuit school) in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich, gaining a doctorate in German literature. He joined the Jesuits in 1929, and was ordained in 1936. He worked in Basel as a student chaplain. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order, feeling that God had called him to found a Secular Institute, a lay form of consecrated life that sought to work for the sanctification of the world especially from within. He joined the diocese of Chur. From the low point of being banned from teaching, his reputation eventually rose to the extent that John Paul II asked him to be a cardinal in 1988. However he died in his home in Basel on 26 June 1988, two days before the ceremony. Balthasar was interred in the Hofkirche cemetery in Lucern.
Along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, Balthasar sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to Western modernism. While Rahner offered a progressive, accommodating position on modernity and Lonergan worked out a philosophy of history that sought to critically appropriate modernity, Balthasar resisted the reductionism and human focus of modernity, wanting Christianity to challenge modern sensibilities.
Balthasar is very eclectic in his approach, sources, and interests and remains difficult to categorize. An example of his eclecticism was his long study and conversation with the influential Reformed Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, of whose work he wrote the first Catholic analysis and response. Although Balthasar's major points of analysis on Karl Barth's work have been disputed, his The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (1951) remains a classic work for its sensitivity and insight; Karl Barth himself agreed with its analysis of his own theological enterprise, calling it the best book on his own theology.
Balthasar's Theological Dramatic Theory has influenced the work of Raymund Schwager.
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March 14, 2021
It seems I’m not the only one who found this essay a bit hard to follow; but while I labored over every sentence, the scintillae of spiritual wisdom that managed to penetrate my furrowed brow were both perplexing and deeply intriguing. Gregory of Nyssa is a favorite of cerebral Christians. His legacy has been preserved with greater integrity by the east, but his writings are also being quietly rediscovered by westerners of various theological stripes. He has earned kudos from the modern sensibility for having been the first thinker of the patristic age—perhaps the first in all of Greco-Roman antiquity?—to explicitly condemn the practice of slavery as intrinsically evil and anti-human. Many are likewise attracted to his apparent belief in universal salvation; that in the end, God’s infinite capacity for love and mercy will overcome all resistance and the whole of created nature—including every human individual—will be restored to God in and through Christ; and God will be, in Saint Paul’s phrasing, all in all.
Gregory sits at an important historical and theological juncture for the Church. Among the last major touchstones in the stream of Greek philosophy, a synthesizer of Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Plotinus, and Origen, a precursor to the Areopagite and Palamas, he was also a contemporary of Saint Augustine. The two are widely considered the most brilliant theologians of their age—standard-bearers of their respective Greek and Latin traditions. What if, one wonders, the Latin Church—and by extension, a preponderance of Christians globally and historically—had elevated the Nyssen vision instead of the Augustinian one?
Gregory begins, like Pseudo-Dionysius after him, with a commitment to apophaticism. God is a mystery hidden beyond all knowledge, and every human conception of the divine—indeed, the very effort to conceive of it—becomes a form of idolatry. But as the Author of all things, God is also infinite goodness as such, and this infinitude envelops the interval—the “spacing”—of temporal-material nature, i.e., creation. Because time “constitutes the foundation of material being”, and time is manifested as an endless process of alteration, the totality of created nature is “quite entirely becoming.” Indeed, even this material foundation of becoming is undergirded by a metaphysical one: the primordial “movement” of creation from nonbeing to being. The core of the creature is change, while only uncreated nature—namely, God—is fixed and immutable.
This fundamental state of becoming is experienced differently from the respective standpoints of material and spiritual creation. On the material plane, it manifests as an infinite quantitative procession: of number, of events, of physical space, of emptiness; in a word, as time. For created spirit, on the other hand, this becoming, or potentiality, is represented in a never-satisfied longing for union with the uncreated infinitude that is both its beginning and its end. As a composite of matter and spirit, Man stands at the intersection of two infinities, one “horizontal” and one “vertical”. As a created spirit acting in the theater of materiality, the spiritual nature of Man reaches perpetually towards God as its supreme object of desire; but because of the unbreachable chasm between God and creature, it can seize hold only of material and contingent objects.
But rather than being repulsed by the falsity of the objects it thinks it desires, the attainment of each contingent object only further excites the spirit’s desire for the infinite goodness that it repeatedly and mistakenly believes to be embodied in it. Each contingent object is itself, according to Gregory, a concretized collection of qualitative ideas. The insufficient things we desire as the good are themselves the products of our longing, and so that longing is never disgusted, but only intensifies with the fulfillment of each end, which turns out to be a new beginning. “[B]etween desire without satisfaction [material infinity] and possession without desire [the self-sufficient, undesiring being of God], created spirit realizes that paradoxical synthesis of a desire that can only grow in joy, because the infinity of the object loved increases and rejuvenates in it for all eternity an impetus that tends toward an end that cannot be attained.”
It is thus desire itself, and not its fulfillment, that forms the locus of spiritual ecstasy. But there is a profound bittersweetness to this reality, because even as the spirit becomes more joyful in its perpetual ascension, the truth remains that the chasm between God and creation can never be bridged—at least not by us. Getting what we want doesn’t get us what we want. The Smiths have a song about this. Gregory’s Christian answer to this dilemma is borne out in his understanding of salvation history.
God created human nature at a stroke; and this primordial nature precedes (ontologically) and makes possible the existence of each individual person. God created human nature—Man as such—before He created Adam and Eve. In the order of nature, there is in fact only one human being; each individual is an instantiation of this singular nature, just as the Persons of the Trinity are instantiations of one God. Here is the foundation of Gregory’s two most popularly celebrated teachings: the immorality of slavery and the shared eschatological destiny of humanity. There is one human body, and that body is constituted by every actually-existing person. If some were to be condemned at the Last Judgment to eternal perdition while others were granted paradise, this would be as if some parts of one’s own body went to Heaven and some to Hell. Whatever the final verdict rendered on humanity, it will be rendered on the singular nature that we all share. We will all be saved or condemned together.
The Fall of Man, the tragic corruption of the human image typified by Adam, marked a bisection of Knowledge and Life. It inaugurated an aporia between the “anguish of becoming” and the “tranquility of being.” In Adam, Knowledge grasps at Life—which is God—but does so in futility, because Life always exceeds it. But with the Incarnation and the penetration of divine grace into the heart of human nature, the Life of God, in Christ, becomes the new axis of human ecstasy. The Incarnation does not make God accessible to our knowledge, but rather gives the mystery of God a positive quality and reveals it as an indwelling Presence in the Soul. The becoming of the creature and the being of the Creator are united by love in the Christ-self. The “outward” event of the Incarnation is a “metahistory” revealing an inward truth: it is the Presence of God in the Soul, rather than the gulf between them, that forms the space “in which love accomplishes its necessary course.”
The movement of our love, by which created spirit has long sought to reach God, is in truth predicated upon the movement of love inside of God Himself. In the very surpassing of ourselves in love, we assimilate ourselves to God, whose being is a “Super-Becoming”.
I close with an excerpt from Gregory himself, a gorgeous meditation from his commentary on the Song of Songs:
“We have learned from Sacred Scripture that God is Love and that he sends his chosen arrow, his only Son, to those who need to be saved . . . , so that this Love may introduce into the one it pierces the archer himself, together with the arrow—as the Lord says: ‘The Father and I are one, and we shall come and dwell in him. . .’ O lovely wound and gentle injury by which Life penetrates within, forcing its way through the tearing of the arrow, as if it were a door and a passageway! For scarcely does the soul feel herself struck by the arrow of love, when already her wound is transformed into nuptial joy . . . Our Bridegroom and our Archer are one and the same . . . for him the pure soul is Bride and Arrow. As an Arrow he directs her toward the blessed target. As a Bride he takes her up into intimate communion with incorruptible eternity. . . . Thus she says: His left hand rests under my head and through it the bolt is directed toward the target. Conversely his right hand pulls me toward himself, it draws me to him, it renders me light for my journey toward the heights, me, who, once I am launched toward these heights, do not, for all that, leave the archer. All at once I am launched through space, and at the same time I rest in the hands of the Lord.”
Gregory sits at an important historical and theological juncture for the Church. Among the last major touchstones in the stream of Greek philosophy, a synthesizer of Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Plotinus, and Origen, a precursor to the Areopagite and Palamas, he was also a contemporary of Saint Augustine. The two are widely considered the most brilliant theologians of their age—standard-bearers of their respective Greek and Latin traditions. What if, one wonders, the Latin Church—and by extension, a preponderance of Christians globally and historically—had elevated the Nyssen vision instead of the Augustinian one?
Gregory begins, like Pseudo-Dionysius after him, with a commitment to apophaticism. God is a mystery hidden beyond all knowledge, and every human conception of the divine—indeed, the very effort to conceive of it—becomes a form of idolatry. But as the Author of all things, God is also infinite goodness as such, and this infinitude envelops the interval—the “spacing”—of temporal-material nature, i.e., creation. Because time “constitutes the foundation of material being”, and time is manifested as an endless process of alteration, the totality of created nature is “quite entirely becoming.” Indeed, even this material foundation of becoming is undergirded by a metaphysical one: the primordial “movement” of creation from nonbeing to being. The core of the creature is change, while only uncreated nature—namely, God—is fixed and immutable.
This fundamental state of becoming is experienced differently from the respective standpoints of material and spiritual creation. On the material plane, it manifests as an infinite quantitative procession: of number, of events, of physical space, of emptiness; in a word, as time. For created spirit, on the other hand, this becoming, or potentiality, is represented in a never-satisfied longing for union with the uncreated infinitude that is both its beginning and its end. As a composite of matter and spirit, Man stands at the intersection of two infinities, one “horizontal” and one “vertical”. As a created spirit acting in the theater of materiality, the spiritual nature of Man reaches perpetually towards God as its supreme object of desire; but because of the unbreachable chasm between God and creature, it can seize hold only of material and contingent objects.
But rather than being repulsed by the falsity of the objects it thinks it desires, the attainment of each contingent object only further excites the spirit’s desire for the infinite goodness that it repeatedly and mistakenly believes to be embodied in it. Each contingent object is itself, according to Gregory, a concretized collection of qualitative ideas. The insufficient things we desire as the good are themselves the products of our longing, and so that longing is never disgusted, but only intensifies with the fulfillment of each end, which turns out to be a new beginning. “[B]etween desire without satisfaction [material infinity] and possession without desire [the self-sufficient, undesiring being of God], created spirit realizes that paradoxical synthesis of a desire that can only grow in joy, because the infinity of the object loved increases and rejuvenates in it for all eternity an impetus that tends toward an end that cannot be attained.”
It is thus desire itself, and not its fulfillment, that forms the locus of spiritual ecstasy. But there is a profound bittersweetness to this reality, because even as the spirit becomes more joyful in its perpetual ascension, the truth remains that the chasm between God and creation can never be bridged—at least not by us. Getting what we want doesn’t get us what we want. The Smiths have a song about this. Gregory’s Christian answer to this dilemma is borne out in his understanding of salvation history.
God created human nature at a stroke; and this primordial nature precedes (ontologically) and makes possible the existence of each individual person. God created human nature—Man as such—before He created Adam and Eve. In the order of nature, there is in fact only one human being; each individual is an instantiation of this singular nature, just as the Persons of the Trinity are instantiations of one God. Here is the foundation of Gregory’s two most popularly celebrated teachings: the immorality of slavery and the shared eschatological destiny of humanity. There is one human body, and that body is constituted by every actually-existing person. If some were to be condemned at the Last Judgment to eternal perdition while others were granted paradise, this would be as if some parts of one’s own body went to Heaven and some to Hell. Whatever the final verdict rendered on humanity, it will be rendered on the singular nature that we all share. We will all be saved or condemned together.
The Fall of Man, the tragic corruption of the human image typified by Adam, marked a bisection of Knowledge and Life. It inaugurated an aporia between the “anguish of becoming” and the “tranquility of being.” In Adam, Knowledge grasps at Life—which is God—but does so in futility, because Life always exceeds it. But with the Incarnation and the penetration of divine grace into the heart of human nature, the Life of God, in Christ, becomes the new axis of human ecstasy. The Incarnation does not make God accessible to our knowledge, but rather gives the mystery of God a positive quality and reveals it as an indwelling Presence in the Soul. The becoming of the creature and the being of the Creator are united by love in the Christ-self. The “outward” event of the Incarnation is a “metahistory” revealing an inward truth: it is the Presence of God in the Soul, rather than the gulf between them, that forms the space “in which love accomplishes its necessary course.”
The movement of our love, by which created spirit has long sought to reach God, is in truth predicated upon the movement of love inside of God Himself. In the very surpassing of ourselves in love, we assimilate ourselves to God, whose being is a “Super-Becoming”.
I close with an excerpt from Gregory himself, a gorgeous meditation from his commentary on the Song of Songs:
“We have learned from Sacred Scripture that God is Love and that he sends his chosen arrow, his only Son, to those who need to be saved . . . , so that this Love may introduce into the one it pierces the archer himself, together with the arrow—as the Lord says: ‘The Father and I are one, and we shall come and dwell in him. . .’ O lovely wound and gentle injury by which Life penetrates within, forcing its way through the tearing of the arrow, as if it were a door and a passageway! For scarcely does the soul feel herself struck by the arrow of love, when already her wound is transformed into nuptial joy . . . Our Bridegroom and our Archer are one and the same . . . for him the pure soul is Bride and Arrow. As an Arrow he directs her toward the blessed target. As a Bride he takes her up into intimate communion with incorruptible eternity. . . . Thus she says: His left hand rests under my head and through it the bolt is directed toward the target. Conversely his right hand pulls me toward himself, it draws me to him, it renders me light for my journey toward the heights, me, who, once I am launched toward these heights, do not, for all that, leave the archer. All at once I am launched through space, and at the same time I rest in the hands of the Lord.”
March 4, 2014
Something may have been lost in translation here, but the winding, vague, and dizzying prose of this volume makes for much tougher reading than Gregory of Nyssa himself. As is typical of von Balthasar's forays into patristics, this book is as much about von Balthasar's theological context and questions as it is about Gregory's. The book remains essentialist in approach, seeking in Gregory those timeless or Catholic truths that can again be applied to today's post-modern breakdown between the limited, subjective individual and the world that individual seeks to understand. Von Balthasar situates Gregory as, more or less, anticipating Heidegger's deconstruction of our casual or common understanding of "being." Gregory's appeals to faith, the imago dei, God's self-emptying love, and our eternal movement into God's infinity can then come to be utilized as answers to the problem established by Heidegger. This makes this book a fascinating, if only partially successful, attempt to integrate and address post-modernity from and within a Catholic Christian tradition. Certainly, for his efforts, Von Balthasar managed to pull Nyssa from relative obscurity (both in the East and West), and one can hear echoes of this text throughout the Eastern Orthodox neo-Patristic synthesis. As an introduction or guide to reading Nyssa himself, though, the text leaves much to be desired. The problematic methodology and obvious anachronisms makes the text difficult to "trust" - if one were already a scholar of Nyssa broadly familiar with his corpus, then this text would be an interesting attempt at a synthesis of Nyssa's thought. Apart from that, though, it serves little contemporary purpose and is quite dated (both in method and concerns).
June 6, 2016
Von Balthasar's Argument: our being is rooted in time and is a “becoming in infinity,” or creaturely infinity. This doesn’t mean the creature is infinite, but has the capacity for endless growth. Since we can never fully “grasp” God, “there arises Being itself” (von Balthasar 22). Out failure to grasp it conceptually brings “a feeling of presence” (Gregory In Cant. II; 1, 1001 B).
There are two infinities for Gregory. One is the infinity proper of God, which can never be applied to the creature. The other is the “infinity of growth in man.” In heaven, the soul is always moving towards God, yet because God will always be “beyond” the soul in heaven, the soul will always be growing. The self “perpetually surpasses the self” (Balthasar 45).
Spirit and Matter
This section is hard. Throughout this chapter von Balthasar will say things like “sensory knowledge is the foundation of spiritual knowledge.” As it stands, besides the statement being laughably false; no early Christian (or pagan) thinker would have said something like that. So he must mean something else. What I think he means is that the divisions between spirit and matter become so porous that they can be switched. We can almost speak of a materialization of the soul (which Balthasar says explains ghosts in cemeteries--those people who had given themselves over to matter).
Our knowledge is rooted in time and “the creature can never go outside itself by means of a comprehensive knowledge” (Gregory, Contra Eunomius 12; II, 1064 CD). We know the logos of a thing by an ascensional movement towards the logos (Balthasar 93). It is ana-logical (upward-to-the-logos).
Every limit involves an essence beyond it (98). This means the soul can only rest in the infinite. Knowledge by representation takes us right to the limit. One can never be face-to-face with God because that would place the knower “opposite” to God, and anything opposite to the good is evil (102). Therefore, in order to see God we must see “the back parts of God.”
Gregory sees our knowing God as imaging God and he sometimes sees the image as an active mirror, “whose interior activity is entirely ‘surface’” (115). Indeed, “image-mirror-life” are the three terms that “designate the whole created medium that allows the soul to see God” (116).
Balthasar has the interesting suggestion that Gregory rejected the distinction between image and likeness, since image for Gregory was dynamic (117-118).
The Incarnation reconciles the opposites and contraries of human nature. Becoming, to be sure, is contrary to Being, but it is not negatively so anymore. Now, notes Balthasar, we can summarize this book in three points:
1) The immediate communication between God and man is now rendered accessible (147).
2) This fact is a social fact; our nature is “common.”
3) This dynamism requires a free response on man’s part.
This is a rich and learned work. Von Balthasar captures the nuances of Gregory’s thought. Some passages are exquisite in their beauty.
Key Terms
Spacing: the exterior limit--finite being’s being “enveloped” by the infinite. It is the receptacle of the material being (29ff). Spacing is the mode of creaturely being. It is the same thing as diastesis/diastema.
Time: a progress by alteration (31). It is a tension directed towards its end but always within “the bounding limit” of spacing.
Concrete universal: priority of genus over individual (65).
Epinoia: subjective representation which does not reach the essence of a thing (91). It is an “inventive approach to the unknown.” It is the middle term between dominance and ignorance.
Dianoia: human intelligence in its entirety; no distinction between inferior and superior reason.
Ontological kinship: the middle term and link between representation and motion (115).
There are two infinities for Gregory. One is the infinity proper of God, which can never be applied to the creature. The other is the “infinity of growth in man.” In heaven, the soul is always moving towards God, yet because God will always be “beyond” the soul in heaven, the soul will always be growing. The self “perpetually surpasses the self” (Balthasar 45).
Spirit and Matter
This section is hard. Throughout this chapter von Balthasar will say things like “sensory knowledge is the foundation of spiritual knowledge.” As it stands, besides the statement being laughably false; no early Christian (or pagan) thinker would have said something like that. So he must mean something else. What I think he means is that the divisions between spirit and matter become so porous that they can be switched. We can almost speak of a materialization of the soul (which Balthasar says explains ghosts in cemeteries--those people who had given themselves over to matter).
Our knowledge is rooted in time and “the creature can never go outside itself by means of a comprehensive knowledge” (Gregory, Contra Eunomius 12; II, 1064 CD). We know the logos of a thing by an ascensional movement towards the logos (Balthasar 93). It is ana-logical (upward-to-the-logos).
Every limit involves an essence beyond it (98). This means the soul can only rest in the infinite. Knowledge by representation takes us right to the limit. One can never be face-to-face with God because that would place the knower “opposite” to God, and anything opposite to the good is evil (102). Therefore, in order to see God we must see “the back parts of God.”
Gregory sees our knowing God as imaging God and he sometimes sees the image as an active mirror, “whose interior activity is entirely ‘surface’” (115). Indeed, “image-mirror-life” are the three terms that “designate the whole created medium that allows the soul to see God” (116).
Balthasar has the interesting suggestion that Gregory rejected the distinction between image and likeness, since image for Gregory was dynamic (117-118).
The Incarnation reconciles the opposites and contraries of human nature. Becoming, to be sure, is contrary to Being, but it is not negatively so anymore. Now, notes Balthasar, we can summarize this book in three points:
1) The immediate communication between God and man is now rendered accessible (147).
2) This fact is a social fact; our nature is “common.”
3) This dynamism requires a free response on man’s part.
This is a rich and learned work. Von Balthasar captures the nuances of Gregory’s thought. Some passages are exquisite in their beauty.
Key Terms
Spacing: the exterior limit--finite being’s being “enveloped” by the infinite. It is the receptacle of the material being (29ff). Spacing is the mode of creaturely being. It is the same thing as diastesis/diastema.
Time: a progress by alteration (31). It is a tension directed towards its end but always within “the bounding limit” of spacing.
Concrete universal: priority of genus over individual (65).
Epinoia: subjective representation which does not reach the essence of a thing (91). It is an “inventive approach to the unknown.” It is the middle term between dominance and ignorance.
Dianoia: human intelligence in its entirety; no distinction between inferior and superior reason.
Ontological kinship: the middle term and link between representation and motion (115).
November 10, 2017
Gregory of Nyssa is an enigma Church Father. By far the least known of the Cappadocian Fathers (apparently, it's disputed whether the three--Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa--should be categorized together), Nyssa dissipates as soon as one tries to systematize his thoughts. Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the most luminous, Catholic theologians of the 20th century, puts his hand to it in his short collection of essays. Balthasar centers Nyssa's thoughts as anthropological. His three-step format--(1) Philosophy of Being, (2) Philosophy of Image, and (3) Philosophy of Love--emulates Nyssa's dialectical ascent into God, who is love. Starting with the human subject problem (what is it? A soul? A body? Both? How?) to the human uniqueness problem (what does it mean to be in the image of God?), he finishes with the human fully realized problem (how can we become like God/Christ?).
Balthasar is undoubtedly known for his intellect. This text, however, is nothing short but a difficult read. Perhaps it is the translation (French to English) or Balthasar's writing style (I cannot comment on this since this is my first text on him, but definitely more to come). Or maybe, again, it is just the Nyssa-enigma.
*this will need to be read again.
cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com
Balthasar is undoubtedly known for his intellect. This text, however, is nothing short but a difficult read. Perhaps it is the translation (French to English) or Balthasar's writing style (I cannot comment on this since this is my first text on him, but definitely more to come). Or maybe, again, it is just the Nyssa-enigma.
*this will need to be read again.
cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com
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