To confront the whole truth, Balthasar tells us, of man and world and God, of the historical Gospel, church and Kingdom, “in the night of our present and the uncertainty of our future,” one must choose a first word that will not need to be taken back and twisted into shape later on, one broad enough to nourish, clear enough to irradiate all the words that follow it. It is a word theology has marginalized, philosophy has postponed, the exact sciences have never had time for. The word is “beauty,” the point of junction between the good and the true, the “primal phenomenon” underpinning the
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