The Threefold Garland: The World's Salvation in Mary's Prayer

by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Book Overview

The renowned Swiss theologian offers in this little book very beautiful and practical reflections for praying and living the 15 mysteries of the Rosary. He makes the profound truths and events of our salvation take on a freshness and splendor by allowing the reader to enter his own contemplation of the mysteries. Von Balthasar's theology is a theology that does not read like theology, but one that derives from prayer and leads back to prayer.

Contemplating...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898700159
• ISBN13: 9780898700152
• Release Date: October 1982
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Length: 146 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Praying Theology

Get this book, and run with it. You will be enlightened, and you will pray as you have never prayed before. Balthasar always contended for a kneeling theology, for theologians who prayed. This small book on the rosary is the manual for a kneeling theology. We are all theologians engaged in the journey of faith seeking understanding. That quest is inseparable from prayer.

Handmaid of the World's Salvation

In The Threefold Garland, Hans Urs von Balthasar unveils the Rosary as a form of meditation on the central mysteries of the Christian faith through the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Mary, His mother. The great theme of this compact (146 page) volume is the salvation of the world: God the Father plans our salvation from all eternity; Jesus, God the Son, becomes flesh to accomplish the Father's will; God, the Holy Spirit, is the Spirit of mission who guarantees the conformity of the Son's response to the Father's will. God did not will that humanity be saved without our consent, so He proposed the divine plan of salvation to Mary, as representative of the human race. In response, Mary speaks a pure, human, creaturely "fiat" or "yes" to God's will. In Mary, the Church is the pure and immaculate bride who always says yes to God's will. Mary carries the body of the Lord within her, a body that will later incorporate her. Similarly, the Church contains Jesus and is contained by Him. These rather broad strokes hardly do justice to the richness of von Balthasar's reflections. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (translator) describes in his preface what he calls von Balthasar's "concentric vision": ". . . he never treats a subject in isolation from all those other subjects which are naturally bound to it, but sees them as interacting concentric circles, distinct yet inseparable and springing from a common center"-- the Paschal Mystery ( p. 9). For all this richness, this book should be quite accessible to college educated, non-specialists. One should, however, be prepared to alternate periods of reading with periods of prayer. With Leiva-Merikakis, I agree that "this book, without diluting it, contains the essence of von Balthasar's weightier tomes," as he says because, "the style is so non-technical, at times poetic and always full of prayer" (9). I recommend this book as an excellent introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar and even to the thought of the mystic, Adrienne von Speyr. I also recommend it for spiritual reading to deepen one's prayer life.note: contains reflections on the Joyous, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries of the Rosary.