In the midst of the confusion following the Second Vatican Council, Hans Urs von Balthasar sought to retrieve the Council’s true center: not rupture with the past, but return to the “source of the Christian Mystery” and its unity in the face of fragmentation. Hence the project of the present volume, originally published in 1969 by Kösel: “First we will show that between Christian thought and life (theology and spirituality) there exists such a unity that each of them can have a proper truth only through the other and together with it. We will then show how within theology, which seems to dissolve into many and ever more numerous disciplines, the unity of dogma governs and directs all specializations. Then we will consider the dreadful multiplicity of churches and its pseudo-justification through the alleged variety of theologies already in the New Testament; and we will seek the path, the frequently covered and overgrown path, which opens ways back for the lost ones, the ones who have drawn apart from each other, who have clambered out into the branches. Finally, each person must think briefly about himself, and ask himself where the point vièrge, the integrated simplicity of his own existence might lie” (from the author’s Foreword).