This week with Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Huvb)

Dan and I are reading Volume 5 right now of A Theological Aesthetics, and we're going to be posting often on our reading and subsequent discussions. We just looked at his section on Nicholas of Cusa, who he definitely respects as being kind of a super-Catholic--I say this because Cusa, like Pico, was obsessed with explaining all phenomena and all religion in terms of the catholic faith. Kudos to Cusa says Hans. Apparently Cusa was down with the analogia entis as well, which Hans likes, but what we gleaned this past week was that the analogy may be a little too tight with Cusa, as Hans accuses him of preparing the ground (eventually) for Idealism, which equals loss of feeling for eros, and an inability to see eros and God in the same picture. Every metaphor must limp it seems. I agree here, we must be careful about tightening these comparisons too much. The analogy must grow in both directions. Advice I take seriously as I critique Carl Jung's notion of quaternity for my thesis, definitely an example of too clean a symbol. Wrapping up an analogy should always falter at the last step (between the 3 and the 4) like Bjork says in Dancer in the Dark, where she hoped the penultimate song would never end.