Beauty as Signpost to Enriched Theology and Spirituality: Hans Urs von Balthasar & Teresa of Avila’s Love Mysticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis argues for the need to return to living the revelation of God’s sovereign grace in the world expressed in the most fundamental of all truths: God is love (1 John 4:8). It explores the fruitful connections of this love reflected in theologian and mystic, systematic and narrative theology and discusses Balthasar’s understanding of beauty as a transcendental and principle for a return to intimacy with God. It considers the early fathers and scholastics who understood and practiced this interpretation in ways Balthasar feels have been lost. The argument then engages in a study of the life of Saint Teresa of Avila who lived in transparency before God, elevated to a place of “beauty” and “love” of the Beloved. Teresa’s life, which reveals that mystical experiences provide dense material for systematic theological analysis, corroborates Balthasar’s answer to the contemporary dilemma regarding the nature and function of theology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".