"The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes"
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Balthasar is picking a fight with the modern instinct to treat theology as philosophy’s junior partner: a speculative hobby for people who like big abstractions. He’s insisting on a different order of operations. If you start here, you’re doing it wrong - not morally, but methodologically. Theology, for him, isn’t the first brick in an intellectual tower; it’s the keystone you can only set after the rest of the structure has weight.
The phrasing matters. “Embark” signals risk and voyage, but he immediately narrows the audience: the “philosophical person,” the type trained to begin from principles, to clear the ground, to build from certainty. Balthasar implies that this temperament, left to itself, makes theology either premature (a shortcut to ultimate answers) or impossible (because philosophy can always keep its options open). His counterclaim is that theology begins not with openness but with a wager already made: revelation received, a tradition inhabited, a form of life that has done the persuading before arguments arrive.
The subtext is a critique of a certain academic posture: theology as an object on the seminar table rather than a reality that rearranges the room. In the 20th-century Catholic context - post-Kant, post-Heidegger, post-war - Balthasar is responding to the suspicion that faith-talk must justify itself in philosophy’s court. He flips the courtroom. Philosophy can prepare the mind, sharpen categories, expose idols. But the “first volume” of theology is still, in his view, something you reach only after being claimed by what philosophy can’t manufacture: disclosure, encounter, grace.
The phrasing matters. “Embark” signals risk and voyage, but he immediately narrows the audience: the “philosophical person,” the type trained to begin from principles, to clear the ground, to build from certainty. Balthasar implies that this temperament, left to itself, makes theology either premature (a shortcut to ultimate answers) or impossible (because philosophy can always keep its options open). His counterclaim is that theology begins not with openness but with a wager already made: revelation received, a tradition inhabited, a form of life that has done the persuading before arguments arrive.
The subtext is a critique of a certain academic posture: theology as an object on the seminar table rather than a reality that rearranges the room. In the 20th-century Catholic context - post-Kant, post-Heidegger, post-war - Balthasar is responding to the suspicion that faith-talk must justify itself in philosophy’s court. He flips the courtroom. Philosophy can prepare the mind, sharpen categories, expose idols. But the “first volume” of theology is still, in his view, something you reach only after being claimed by what philosophy can’t manufacture: disclosure, encounter, grace.
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