The 31 essays gathered in this fifth volume of Balthasar’s Explorations in Theology are all devoted to unfolding a radically theocentric anthropology inspired by the “principle and foundation” of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God and in so doing save his soul.” The true shape of the human being, Balthasar argues, is disclosed primarily “from above”; it stand forth most clearly in the light of God’s unfathomably gracious descent to, and search for, man. Far from neglecting our embeddedness in the world and nature or denying the importance of human experience and desire, Balthasar shows that these goods, like everything created, do not exhaust their meaning in themselves. Rather, they reveal their own deepest truth only when illuminated by the rays of the Trinitarian love radiating in Christ’s self-emptying unto death on the Cross.
