The Inspiration of the Divine Calling of all People 29 Wonder is not only the beginning of philosophy,30 but also of theology, „the speech about God“, for the mouth speaks of that of which the heart is full. (Mt 12, 34). That applies to Vincent Pallotti as well: His emotion, his deep concern and his fi ery love are striking when we read his writings. He is a man of deep wonder. While the talk of God’s love in the daily life of the Church often appears to have become routine and for the most unspectacular, the great triggers of this wonder for Pallotti were precisely the infi nite love and mercy of God. Pallotti’s wonder has its beginning in the fascination with the reality of creation. God’s love and mercy can be made immediately manifest in the reality of creation, an utterly incomprehensible event for Pallotti. For Pallotti, the fact that the infi nite God, who needs mothing and no one, who is the author of all creation, created human beings above all other creatures is an expression of an incomprehensible love and mercy. God, happy in himself, impelled by His infi nite love and his infi nite mercy, accomplishes the work of creation, in order to communicate Himself fully to His creatures.31 This is what Pallotti writes at the start of his meditations. It was toward the end of his life, during the chaos of the revolution in the year 1849, because of which he withdrew for several months into the Irish College. There he composed the short writing “God, the Infi nite Love”. The complicated and not entirely explicable background to these meditations is summarised by Ansgar Faller in the preface of his edition. It remains unclear to him, why Pallotti did not ensure the dissemination of his writing, which was to become a kind of spiritual testament of his life. For he was otherwise very anxious to pass on the treasures of his faith to others. This writing was at fi rst neither printed nor noted by others. “Don Vincent knew that his days were numbered. Then he bemoaned, perhaps not without wistfulness, the imperfection of his fi nal book. As incomplete as it was, he never published it. Furthermore, he measured his own work with an increasingly smaller scale. Thus it came to be, that the writing, which was born out of a deep inner desire, was unread and unnoticed for decades.”32 One can refer to it as a “prayed dogmatic theology”, yet more a prayer than dogmatic theology, more meditative prayer than an explanation of the faith.33 It is the work, which, according to Faller, reveals Pallotti as a “religious genius”, a writing, which presents his most personal thinking in the fullness of maturity 30 So Aristotle and Plato. 31 Vinzenz PALLOTTI, Gott, die unendliche Liebe, hg. von Ansgar Faller, Friedberg 1981. 32 Ibid., p. 19. 33 Ibid., p. 21.
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