Published in French in 1942, Presence and Thought is the first volume in a trilogy devoted to three speculative giants among the Greek Fathers: Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and Maximus the Confessor.

Here the subject is Gregory, who (as Balthasar writes in My Work: In Retrospect) develops “a philosophy of ‘becoming’ . . . with such a dynamism and openness that it has the effect of a Christian anticipation and superseding of German Idealism and of many of Heidegger’s intuitions.”