Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is an explosion of cultural throwbacks and cinematic contortions, not to mention Beatle’s hit after hit, “like endless rain into a paper cup”. But it’s not simply vintage nostalgia. Buried in the plot is a power struggle between two deep human urges that bears theological fruit in its reflection of Love as a pole averring, mediating factor that ultimately funds the best of human efforts.
Early in the film, Taymor appears to squarely pit social and militant activism and artistic creation against each other, and gives the impression that the infamous Love will side with the latter. It’s only an impression, and one that many on both sides mistakenly take to as the final word for better or ill. On one side, there’s the declaration of fealty to an ambiguous and numinous Love, the great fictional panacea. On the other, there’s the concession that Love is indeed ambiguous, impotent to effect change; the there’s an argument for the need for something else, something more jarring, even violent. And thus we have the polarization of the 60s set before us: the peaceful, inward, even insular arts culture on one side (Woodstock par excellance); and the boisterous and often violent activist movement concomitant and strangely akin to the oft harsh and violent government (Kent State/Vietnam). And then, in wake of this “revolution” there’s the late 70s and 80s, perceived by many, and certainly portrayed in the film, as the waning of Love and meaning - “You know, it’s gonna be alright, yeah”.
It’s clear to me that Taymor doesn’t settle on other side, but wants to re-present love. The films yearns to rise above the short-lived psychedelia and manufactured hysteria of the 60s. It’s not about a return to an earlier time: the ideal 50s suburban life is seen at the beginning as unsustainable and artificially limiting to human potential. And it doesn’t seem to be a trust in the future as beneficent: the characters are broken by the end of the film. Rather, if it’s a return to anything, its about seeking the source of the good, that which funds our actions and desires, that of which we continually fall short - “There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known / Nothing you can see that isn’t shown / Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” We’re radically insufficient for the task. But all we need is Love. So, the question I was left with at the end of the movie was, “What is Love”. Now that we know we need it, all we need to do is figure out what it is.
Adrian Walker’s article “Love Alone: Hans Urs von Balthasar as a Master of Theological Renewal” helps us see Balthasar’s answer to this question pretty quickly. Love, throughout Balthasar’s corpus, is not only the object of reflection (Christ’s Love), but is the “source-architectonic” of all being, and as such it is the “intelligibility” of theology that not only explains the theological task, but is also “capable of illumining all of reality,” that which makes theology “universally relevant,” the principle that overcomes the static division between being and becoming. Balthasar’s answer to the two questions “What makes Christianity Christian” and “What makes Christianity credible” is
that the only ‘logos’, the only principle of intelligibility, which makes Jesus’ figure cohere into that single, compelling Gestalt whose luminous whole could captivate the entire existence of a Francis or a John Paul II - the only such logos is a love that comes uniquely from the trinitarian God… Jesus is the convincing Gestalt he is only because he is the appearing of trinitarian love in person, which means: only because he is himself the Logos of divine Love in the flesh.1
In a footnote below that, Walker notes, “in light of other affirmation of Balthasar, that Christ is both the incarnation of God’s love for us and of our love for him - the covenant in person.”2
Some may fear that such elevation of Love above ratio somehow undermines rational discourse. Further, we may ask how this matrix of relation affects the nature of God’s attributes and our participation in them? If both Thomas and Augustine place the true over the good “in the manifestation of the intelligibility of being”, then is seems Balthasar is breaking ranks for the sake of novelty with grave consequences to both the way we understand Christ’s being the Word and “[Christ’s] ability to communicate anything like a sacra doctrina that delivers to us the objective truth about God.”3
Walker argues that by “grounding truth in love” Balthasar has reclaimed for ratio entis its sense of “whylessness”. That is, the truth as characterized by the good, by gratuitousness.
The pulchrum … is the primordial appearing of love’s gratuity, which, as such, contains both the good (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity) and the true (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity, which therefore appeals to logos). For their part, the good and the true reciprocally ground each other as it were in the light of beauty: the good thematizes the gratuity that founds the logos-character of the true; the true emphasizes precisely this logos-character, without which gratuity would be irrational, and so could never be real gratuity at all. The oneness of the good and the true, already announced implicitly in the beautiful, then becomes thematic in the unum (which had always been present as the foundation of the other transcendentals)…4
Walker goes on to flesh out the rest of his proposal re: trinitarian relationships and the ramifications for a theology of nature that I may come back to at a later point. But, what I want to draw out here in closing is the robust essence of Balthasar’s concept of Love and its fecundity for reflection on Love as a theme or anti-theme in contemporary work. Love has lost its currency in modern work, whether because of its gradual decline in integrity as a concept, or its decline stature, matters little. If Balthasar is right that Love is the very soil in which the theological roots grow and then grow to reflect on, then it is certainly the responsibility of the theological program to reclaim and declare the universal relevance of love. What’s left is to discover how much such a recovery of Love would change the very face of the theological dialogue.
I’m a little confused: does Balthasar want to argue with Thomas’ positing of intellect over will? Does Balthasar want to argue with Plato’s grounding of the True, Beautiful and Good in the One? Where does Love fit into all this? It seems that Balthasar spends a lot of energy drawing Beauty and Love quite closely together. . . is Love like the One, grounding the other transcendentals?
Aron, that’s a good question and highlights that I probably tried to explore too many aspects of the article in conjunction with my reflection on the film.
Simply put, in the section you bring up, Balthasar is not asserting anything about God’s nature qua nature. He is rather exploring the relationship, or symmetry of the divine attributes - their relation to each other. So, in the classical construction, truth (verum) comes before the good (bonum) and beauty (pulchrum). In Balthasar’s scheme, he doesn’t necessarily deny this linear projection, but also wants to highlight the reciprocal action between the three. hence the long quote about goodness as the appearance of the beauty, etc…
Sort of off the point, but still, just to be clear, to the best of my knowledge, Plato doesn’t actually ground the so-called transcendentals in the One. If there is anything that grounds all the other major Forms, it is “the Good” that is said to be “beyond being” in the Republic (and that is criticized a bit by Aristotle in the Metaphysics — how can any one formal entity be beyond the others?).
But I sort of think the Good for Plato is very like Aristotle’s realization or actualization of the formal potentiality of things, each thing striving to be perfectly good in its own kind or participating in that ideal. Something is Good because it is the most beautiful and the most true state of any kind of thing to be what it “formally” is to the very fullest. If we have a universe like that, a universe impelled by desire (love, need) of the Good, then we have a fundamentally good universe, in Plato’s view, in spite of darkness and error. That light of the sun, remember, in the parable of the Cave, is specifically designated as the Good!
Heidegger talks about Plato’s “the good beyond being” somewhere, really excitingly. Is it in What is Metaphysics?
I remember being taught that in certain texts Plato puts the ‘Good’ on top of the other separated immaterial Forms, and in other texts puts the ‘One’ in that place. If this is true, then, as with other teachings of Plato, it might better to say, in ‘X text, Plato asserts A; in Y text, Plato asserts B’. Anyways….
Dan: When Von B. discusses the order of the transcendentals, do you think he is making an epistemological ordering, an ontological ordering, or just both at once? What is, perhaps, to be discussed with this is divine simplicity. Since Aquinas has a fairly strong acct. of divine simplicity, a distinction btwn. divine attributes (perfections) would be one that is ‘according to reason on the part of the thing’ (secundum rationum a parte rei)—as opposed to ‘according to reason from how humans understand’.
Besides the ordering question, there’s another one which is a textual question of sorts, namely, whether what Aquinas says about the transcendentals applies straightforwardly to what he says about divine attributes? Do he explain being, unity, etc. when talking about divine attributes, or is that discussion of transcendentals first about creation, and then somehow mapped onto God. This, I believe, is Jan Aertsen’s reading (_Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case for Thomas Aquinas_).