The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.