THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR

AESTHETIC THEOLOGY?
Some Reflections on the Theology of Hans Urs
von Balthasar1

by Dr Roland Chia

1. Orientation: Theology’s Elimination of Aesthetics

theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar can be described

he

T as an attempt to provide an exposition of a verse in one

of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s most memorable poems in
which the Jesuit poet declared that ‘The world is charged with
the grandeur of God’. This verse, and indeed the poem as a
whole, affirms the Christian’s cosmic experience of God. Just
as the mythological view of the relationship between god and
the world is that the world is a sacred theophany, the world is,
for the Christian, the theophany of God’s glory and beauty.
Beauty, according to Balthasar, is the most neglected of
God’s attributes in modern theology.2 Though there has been
a renewed interest in the traditional theological problems
associated with God’s existence and nature, Beauty as an
attribute of God is very seldom discussed.3 This is due to the
seperation of aesthetics from theology. In the first volume of
The Glory of the Lord, Balthasar traces this phenomenon to its
historical and intellectual roots in Catholic and Protestant
theology.
According to Balthasar, theology’s elimination of aes­
thetics can be traced to Luther’s radical innovation of making
the doctrine of justification the axis of his theology. The
platonic non-dialectic schemata of Catholicism is replaced by

'This is a revised version of a paper read at a conference of the Research Institute

in Systematic Theology, King’s College London, on 23 September 1993 on theologi­
cal aesthetics.
■'Word and Revelation, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 162.
’Sherry has observed that this neglect is found not only in academic theology but
also in the preaching of the Church and in popular religious books, spirit and Beauty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 59.

75
76 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

the Death-and-Resurrection dialectic of the Christ event.

Luther’s theology promotes a wholesale denial of any form of
‘aesthetic’ theologising in which the creature can approach
the Creator ontologically, ethically and mystically. Cartesian
dualism has also forced the separation of theology and phi­
losophy. Philosophers have become more enchanted by and
dependent on the ideals and methods of the natural sciences.4
The great theological systems which were modelled on the
ancient unity of philosophy and theology were abandoned.
Modern theology is both declared and declares itself to be a
‘specialisation’. It has become subservient to the methods of
the exact sciences. This paradigm shift has inevitably resulted
in the intellectualisation of theology and the emptying from it
of all aesthetic elements. The emasculation of aesthetics from
theology is completed with Kierkegaard for whom there can
be no meeting place for religion and aesthetics. The resur­
gence of interest in Kierkegaard’s thought in modern Catholic
and Protestant theology has signalled the widening of the gulf
between theology and aesthetics. Beauty is treated like a
Cinderella compared to the attention that modern theolo­
gians have been paying to her two sisters, goodness and truth
or ethics and doctrine.5
It was in the light of this development that Balthasar
wrote his theological aesthetics. At the centre of his theologi­
cal enterprise stands a very simple idea. In the Incarnation
God has transformed the very meaning of culture. All forms
must therefore be measured by the supreme form of the
Incarnation. Theology is indissolubly united with this form. It
has therefore acquired an aesthetic quality. The very structure
and diction of theology must display the ‘diversity of the
Invisible radiating in the visibleness of the Being of the world’.6
But theology has, as we have seen, moved to the opposite
direction and has satisfied itself with a rational interpretation
of scripture (exegesis), of nature and history (fundamental
theology), and of the ecclesiastical tradition (dogmatic theol-

' The Glory ofthe Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Vol 1 Joseph Fession S.J. &John Riches
(eds), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 72. Hereafter referred to as GL.
5Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, 21.
6GLI: 431.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 77

ogy). By neglecting the form in this way theology has failed to

do justice to the concrete revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
Balthasar’s theological vision is ‘to reintegrate grace and
nature, thought and feeling, body and mind, culture and
theology within a synthetic comprehensive, theological reflec­
tion on form’.7
Balthasar, to be sure, is right to highlight the tenuous
relationship between theology and aesthetics. But one won­
ders if he has overstated the problem, especially in his assess­
ment of the emasculation of aesthetics from theology in the
Protestant tradition. The Protestant tradition’s emphasis of
the transcendent God, the God who is wholly Other, does not
preclude the fact that this God wills to be encountered and is
able to make use of aesthetic forms to mediate his self­
disclosure. Balthasar’s emphasis on form locates his concep­
tion of aesthetics almost exclusively in the leitmotif of the
visual arts. This has caused him to overlook the aural and
therefore intangible aesthetics of the Reformed tradition.
Calvinists and Anglicans alike could say with Luther: ‘After
theology I give music the highest place and highest honour’.8
The emphasis of the Reformed tradition on the Word has also
produced an aesthetic appriasal of the Bible as God’s exem­
plary art in which God’s providential power, judgement, law
and grace are revealed. The visual arts, though given a less
significant role, are not totally left out either. Calvin gives value
to beauty, therefore ascribing to it more than just utility,9 and
sees aesthetic sensibilities and artistic talents as gifts from
God.10 Calvinists typically also sees nature and its beauty as a
theatre for divine action.11 Frank Brown, in his book Religious
Aesthetics, offers an alternative assessment of the role of the
aesthetics in the Reformed tradition:

... all in all, Reformed piety affirms the power and activity of a
radically transcendent God. This is a God who graciously

’Louis Dupre, ‘The Glory of the Lord: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological
Aesthetics’, Communio, XVI (1989), 386.
8Quoted by Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics. A Theological Study of Making
and Meaning (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), 121.
^Institutes 3.10.2n4.
"Institutes 1.11.12.
“See T. F. Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man.
78 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

chooses to communicate through particular forms - even

aesthetic. Although in principle reserving the right to grace
and bless everything equally, the God of radical transcendence
makes most use ofwhat is plain and humble and pure, in sense,
form and imagination.12

2. The Definition of Beauty: Beauty as a Transcendental

Balthasar invites us to look at theology under the sign of

Beauty. ‘Beauty is the word that shall be our first’, he writes
emphatically as he introduces his great theological schema.
‘Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to
approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour
around the double constellation of the true and the good and
their inseparable relation to one another’.13 Balthasar uses the
concept of form rather than harmony as his key concept:
Beauty gravitates towards the mystery of form (Gestalt) and
figure (Gebilde). Beauty radiates from within transforming the
forma (shape) into the formosus (beautiful) and the species
(likeness) into the speciosus (comely).
According to Balthasar, Beauty is a transcendental, a
fundamental determination of Being. Beauty is not a property
of certain objects. Rather all things partake in some way in
Beauty.14 As a transcendental, Beauty is also seen in visible and
finite things. Bonaventura measures the beauty of visible and
temporal things by their ability to manifest ‘an archetypal
reality that transcends all forms’. That which is manifested in
the beauty of created and finite forms is the glory of Being, d er
Glam derSeins. The transcendentality of Beauty, according to
Balthasar, does not destroy or dull the finite’s own expressive­
ness, ‘for the form constitutes no attempt to copy its divine
source, but to manifest a God who remains hidden, and
precisely in its ability to do so lie its formal (i.e., aesthetic)
perfection’.15

12Brown, Religious Aesthetics, 122.

"GL 1:18.
HJohn Riches, ‘The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Part 1’, Theology, 45
(1972), 565.
,SGL 1:388.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 79

Balthasar argues that the ontological nature of Beauty is

lost to modern aestheticians whose subjectivist attitude has
caused them to turn away from the ‘sure light of being’
(Thomas). This has resulted in the reduction of poetry and art
to formalist exercises that are marginal to the deeper concerns
of human existence. He argues further that only theology can
have transcendental Beauty as its object. Philosophy alone
cannot do this. At most philosophy can envisage the absolute
as the prindpium et finis mundi, ‘the limiting concept of a
worldly ontology’.16 Without theology, therefore, philosophy
can only suceed in making formal statements about Beauty.
Only theology can properly perceive Beauty as a transcenden­
tal which belongs to an is the primary manifestation of being
itself.17
Balthasar, in ascribing beauty to God, has the support of
the Fathers of the early Church.18 St. Gregory of Nyssa, for
example, maintains that god alone is beautiful, and that he is
the very essence and archetype of all beauty.19 Commenting on
the Song of Songs 5:10ff, he wrote, ‘He who has looked at the
sensible world, and has considered the wisdom shining forth
in the beauty of things, reasons from what is seen to the
invisible beauty, the fount of wisdom’.20 Pseudo-Dionysius
ascribes beauty to God who imparts beauty to all things. God,
or the Good, is for him the ‘superabundant source in itself of
the beauty of everything beautiful’.21 Thus God is super­
beautiful because of his exceeding greatness. Because of his
causality God is the source of all beauty. In a similar vein
Augustine wrote, commenting on Romans l:19f., that we
know of the eternal and immutable beauty of God through the
beauty of visible and material objects.22
Though God’s beauty and its relationship to the inner-
worldly beauty of the created order is described in Platonic

16CL 1:70.
17CL 1:388.
18For an excellent exposition of the Biblical understanding of the beauty and glory
of God, see Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, 61 IT.
,9On Virginity, xi. Cf, his Catechetical Oration vi.
KHom. 13 in Cant.
21 Divine Names, iv. 7. E.T. byColm Luibheid.in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works
(Classics in Western Spirituality, London, 1987), 76-7.
22Sermon 241, 1-2; Cf. City of God, xi. 4.
80 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

terminology, the idea however is not derived from Plato and

Neo-Platonic terminology, the idea however is not derived
from Plato and Neo-platonism, but from scriptures. Psalm 27,
for instance, ascribes beauty to God himself: ‘One thing I have
asked for ... that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the
days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord! ’ The difficulty
arises, however, when it is said that not only is God beautiful
but that he is Beauty itself - God is the source and archetype
of all beauty (Gregory of Nyssa). Though this problem applies
to all of the divine attributes, it is felt more acutely in the case
of beauty. Patrick Sherry points out the fact that one can get
‘some handle on these [other] attributes by trying to discern
the relevant divine actions, for instance God’s wise governance
of the universe ...’, but, in the case of beauty, ‘it is difficult to
find any corresponding actions other than God’s creation of
beauty in the world’. Hence Balthasar says that ‘the cosmos is
experienced as the representation and manifestation of the
hidden transcendent beauty of God’, since God, in creating
the world, doe not only give it being but also imparts his own
qualities in it so that it bears some likeness to him.23
Although it has been said that Balthasar does not work on
a well defined aesthetic theory, the above discussion shows
quite clearly his affinity to the original Greek sense of aesthet­
ics as ‘perception’. Furthermore, Balthasar’s transcendental
aesthetics is reminiscent of Plato’s theory of Forms. Absolute
Beauty gives meaning to all lower beauties. Only it is stable,
permanent and eternal, while the many beauties of the world
come into being and pass out again.24 In the Symposium, Plato
describes a soul’s ascent to true Beauty under the motivation
of Eros.25 Balthasar, along with Denys the Aeropagite, in
baptising the Platonic eros, envisages a Christian eros which is
taken up by the condescending divine ekstasis in the move­
ment which God effects in man as he draws man to himself.26

2,C/. 11:154. Aquinas argues, in more abstract terms, that the beautiful and beauty
are not separated in God: God contains all perfections in his essence. As First Cause
he comprehends all in one. STla. iv. 2; xiv. 6.
24Symposium, 211.
25Symposium, 209 e 5-210 a.4. Cf 210 e 1-2.
26GL 1:121-2.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 81

Absolute Beauty, then, is the final and unifying principle.

Plato maintains that Beauty cannot be separated from Virtue:
the Absolute Beauty of the Symposium must be inextricably
related to the Absolute Good of the Republic. This main
impulse can be found in Balthasar who never tires of stressing
that there can be no divorce between aesthetic and moral
considerations. In his own theological system he attempts to
show the circumincessio of the three transcendentals, the Beau­
tiful, the Good and the True. Hence his Herrlichkeitis followed
by Theodrama, which is an exposition of his divine ethic, i.e.,
God’s action on and with human beings. And this is followed
by Theo-logic which explores the possibility of expressing the
mysterium in humanly understandable and responsible lan­
guage.27
Another parallel between Balthasar’s and Plato’s concep­
tion of Beauty is their use of the analogy between light and
Beauty, for Plato, the best parallel to the Ideal Goal of Being
is the sun.28 In the Phaedrus, Plato asserts that Beauty is the
loveliest and the most clearly seen of all forms. Beauty shines
through the clearest of our senses, which for Plato (as it is for
Balthasar) is sight.29 This connection between light and spir­
itual beauty is also to be found in the thought of the early
Fathers of the church as well as in the theological aesthetics of
the theologians of the Middle Ages.30 The two elements that
control every traditional aesthetics, species and lumen, provide
the infrastructure for Balthasar’s theological aesthetics. ‘The
beautiful is above all a form, and the light does not fall on this
form from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from
the form’s interior... The content (Gehall) does not lie outside
the form (Gestalt) but within it’.31 It follows then that the eye is
for Balthasar the primary theological organ since only it is able
to perceive the luminosity of Beauty.
Balthasar’s affinity to Platonic categories of thought
cannot be denied. Furthermore it is difficult to see how he can

S7See von Balthasar, ‘Theology and Aesthetic’, Communio, Vol. 8(1), 62-68.
28Republic, Bk. VII, 529c-e.
nPhaedrus, 250d.
“Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, uses Plato’s analogy between the sun and the
Form of the Good in his description of God. Sherry, Spirit and Beauty, 61-2.
S'GL 1:151, 153.
82 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

avoid accepting Platonism and Neo-Platonism explicitly, if not

implicitly, given his affinity to the Great Tradition of Western
theology - Augustine, Scotus Eriugena, Bonaventura and
Aquinas. His is also a theology which assimilates the deeply
Platonic Dionysian mystical Tradition typified by St. John of
the Cross. Though it has been said that Balthasar’s use of
Platonism shows itself as eloquence rather than analysis, there
can be no doubt that his thinking has been profoundly shaped
by it.

3. The Appearance of Beauty: the Unfolding of the Form

I have pointed out earlier that Balthasar has chosen to use the
concept of form rather than harmony as his key concept. This
emphasis can be seen as his deliberate polemic against the
tendency in modern theology to neglect and even destroy the
form. Bultmann’s existentialism, Rahner’s anthropocentric
transcendentalism and Teilhard’s evolutionism are but some
examples of the modern predilection. Balthasar argues that
theology must be careful to preserve the form of revelation ‘for
only when we accept the unique Incarnation of the Logos can
the infinite dimensions of the Pneuma be understood as his
glorification (Jn 16:14) and not his dissolution’.32
Furthermore, there can be no metaphysics of being qua
being which is separated from concrete experience. And this
experience is necessarily sensuous in nature. The ‘truth and
openness of being as a whole will be seen only when a
judgement is made about some precise thing that is true; the
goodness of being will be experienced only where something
that is good meets one, something that simultaneously brings
near the good and (through its fmitude, fragility and lack of
goodness) takes it away again’.33 Here he is arguing that the
concept of form is not only appropriate but essential because
the reality of the totality of Being expresses itself in various
degrees of clarity in the individual things that exist. The
universal can only be known in the particular, the latter being,
in the words of Nicholas of Cusa, the ‘contracted’ representa-

S-GL III: 105fT.

>SGL IV:28.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 83

tion of the absolute. ‘And so absolute Being makes use of the

form of the world with its duality of language (inalienable
finitude of the individual form and conditional, transcending
reference to this individual to Being as a whole) in order to
make itself known in its unfathomable personal depths’.34 In
this sense Balthasar envisages a concurrence between Biblical
revelation and what he calls the fundamental law of metaphys­
ics.35
Balthasar’s insistence on the concrete resulted in his
realist and objectivist view of the revelation of God. But the
ontological difference between God and the world requires a
sacramental view of revelation. On this view, the spiritual
reality is mediated only through the worldly and material
condition since there can be nothing of a ‘pure communica­
tion between the two interiorities’. Even the most intimate
revelation of God ‘in the soul has a “form” ... the form of
experiences, sensations and illuminations, which are not the
self-disclosing God himself.36
So God uses the forms of the world to reveal himself. For
Balthasar the general revelation of God in the world and the
special revelation of God in Jesus Christ are continuous.
Balthasar says that the Renaissance and the Reformation have
destroyed this unreflected configuration from opposing di­
rections. The former’s enthusiasm for Antiquity has ‘dissolved
Christian beauty into an all embracing cosmic revelation’,
while the latter so stressed the distinctiveness of biblical glory
that ‘by comparison all cosmic beauty faded and was sub­
merged’.37 Balthasar is therefore very critical of those theolo­
gies which gloss quickly and irresponsibly over the revelation
of nature in order to focus their attention on the revelation of
grace.38 The latter is not to be seen as the establishment of a
new form within the created order. Rather the revelation of
grace is a new manner of God’s presence in the form of the
world.39 He speaks of the revelation of nature acting as a

3iGL IV:31-2.
KGL IV:31.
XGL 1:430.
>7GL IV:323.
58 Word and Revelation, 58.
“CL 1:452.
84 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

‘ciphercode’ of the world’s being, and that the difference

between this revelation and the revelation of grace is a differ­
ence of intention: ‘the first word was directed to man as a
creature that had come forth from God, and the second word
addresses him personally as a child of God’s grace and calls
him home to the heart of God’.40
In the Incarnation, the ‘whole ontology and aesthetics of
created being’ is perfected. The revelation of God in Jesus
Christ is therefore the fulfilment or culmination of the
revelatory forms of the world. ‘Beyond all creaturely hope and
expectation ... the revelation in Christ was to bring together in
one divine and human Head everything heavenly and earthly,
which is thus endowed by grace with a crown the radiance of
whose glory belonging to the Kyrios of the world, was to shed
its rays over the whole of creation’.41 The uniqueness and
ultimacy of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is here empha­
sised. Because Jesus Christ is the unique ‘hypostatic union
between archetype and image’, he is for us the Gestalt Gottes
and the Gestalt der Gestalten.
Jesus Christ is therefore the supreme revelation of God in
the world. This revelation, for Balthasar, is objective. By this he
means that this revelation has intrinsic within it the objective
evidential force which ‘emerges and sheds its light from the
Phenomenon itself.42 The form in-forms the person who
contemplates it. The illuminating factor lies in the Christ-form
in two senses. Firstly, as we have seen above, the form of Christ
has its own ‘interior rightness’ and ‘evidential power’. Balthasar
sometimes compares this with a work of art. In a paper read on
the occasion of his receipt of a doctorate from the Catholic
University in America, Balthasar posed the following question:
‘There are many good works of literature, music and art, and
of other spiritual or human activities. How can we recognise a
masterwork that, though belonging to particular category,
transcends it and becomes unique?’ He compares the eviden­
tial power of the revelation of God injesus Christ analoguously
with those works of art and philosophy that have become

mCL 1:449.
41GL 1:431.
AiGL 1:464.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 85

incomparable in their ow genre. He cites, as examples, Goethe’s

‘Nightsong’, Mozart’s Magic Flute, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and
the philosophy of Plato.43 Secondly, the ‘interior rightness’
possesses not only the power to illuminate but to transform the
perceiving subject. Hence Jesus Christ is the form that in­
forms and trans-forms the Christian. The image of Christ
unfolds itself into the one contemplating it, transforming the
beholder. The perceiving subject is metamorphosised into the
image he beholds. This, Balthasar explain, is ‘an assumption
of form, the receiving of Christ’s form in us (Gal 4:19), the
character and impress in us of the only valid image of God’.44
Hence the Incarnation of the Word is central in Balthasar’s
theological aesthetics. The form of the Incarnation is for him
‘God’s greatest work of art’, a work which gives expression to
‘God’s absolute divinity and sovereignty and of the perfect
creature’, the eternal two-and-one, ‘the Father and Son in the
unity of the Holy Spirit’.45Jesus Christ is the Word, the Image,
the Expression and Exegesis of God. In his unique hypostatic
union with the Father, Jesus Christ is what he expresses, that
is, God, but not whom he expresses, that is the Father.46 Jesus
Christ is therefore the historical form of the transcendent
God; he is the revelation of supreme beauty.
But the beautiful one for the sake of love plunges into the
abyss of chaos, hate and ugliness. At the end of it all, Jesus
reveals himself as the formless one: ‘He had no form or
comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we
should desire him’ (Is 53:2). In this way, the Cross introduces
to us an understanding of beauty that is a complete reversal of
our normal values. At the centre of the Gestalt of God’s self­
revelation injesus Christ stands the Ungestaltof the Cross. The
penetrating faith of the believer perceives in this the Ubergestalt
of the beauty of the trinitarian love of God.47 It is in the light
of this that Augustine could therefore say that the deformity of

”See ‘Theology and Aesthetic’, Communio, III (1), 1981.

«CL 1:485.
ibWord and Revelation, 151.
«GL 1:29.
^Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume II: The Dramatis Personae: Man in
God. E.T. by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1976/1990), 26.
86 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Christ on the Cross is our beauty.'18 Balthasar maintains that

the Cross does not lead theology to Luther’s Deussub contraricr,
it is not to a contradiction that we are led but a paradox.
Balthasar maintains that ‘we ought never to speak of God’s
beauty without reference to the form and manner of appear­
ing which he exhibits in salvation history’.'19 Grounding his
theology of the Cross on the Johannine literature, Balthasar
argues that Christ’s true glorification on earth is to be seen not
in the Transfiguration but in the Crucifixion. For Jesus, when
speaking about his own death, said that ‘I, when I am lifted up
from the earth, will draw all men to myself (Jn 12:32). The
Cross for Balthasar is the revelation of divine love, and in this
there can be no contradiction. But the Cross reveals also what
God’s love looks like in the face of human rejection. O’Donnell
puts it like this: ‘On the Cross we see the consistency of love
perduring under the conditions of hate. Moreover, even the
Cross invites us to contemplate: “They shall look on him whom
they have pierced” (Zech 12:10; John 19:37)’.48 50 *
If the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is objective, and if
the form of Christ has within it its own evidential force and
interior rightness, does this then mean that the form will
enlighten anyone? How does Balthasar explain the fact that
this form has been misapprehended by so many people?
The form will not enlighten just anyone because what is
at stake here is nothing short of the ‘correspondence of the
human existence as a whole to the form of Christ’. The
apprehension of the form is not only a matter of an intellectual
and technical adaptation to certain thought patterns and
concepts. Certain prerequisites are needed. Again an analogy
is drawn from general aesthetics. The expert who is able to spot
a master work must develop a sensorium. The layman who
does not possess this capacity will make general subjective
statements like ‘I like this music’ or ‘that music does not please
me’. Balthasar maintains that the sensorium of the expert with
which he is able to apprehend the uniqueness of the quality of

48Cf. Sermon xxxvii, 6.

45 CL 1:124.
“John O'Donnell, S. I., Hans Urs von Balthasar, (London: Geoffrey Chapman,
1992), 31-2.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 87

a work of art is objective. The expert is able to see the ‘inscape’,

to use the word coined by Hopkins - he has the mind which
‘sees an organised whole, with all the articulation of detail
necessary for the comprehension of the basic idea manifest in
its fullness’.51 Our next section examines Balthasar’s under­
standing of the sensorium that is needed to perceive the
revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

4. The Perception of Beauty: Fatih as an Aesthetic Act

For Balthasar, faith is the pre-requisite for seeing the form of

God’s revelation. Faith, Balthasar maintains, is notonly needed
for seeing the form correctly, it is also the ‘act whereby the
event lets itself be seen correctly’.52 Balthasar
* therefore makes
a sharp distinction between the theology which ‘pre-supposes
faith and does its thinking within the nexus of the church’ and
that which ‘rejects faith as methodically dubious and irrespon­
sible’.58 He categorically considers the latter as ‘false theology’.
Faith involves aesthetically the whole person. It cannot be
disengaged from the context of man’s entire life. Such a
dichotomy would lead to a supernaturalistic rationalism which
in turn will result in a purely abstract interpretation of faith.
Balthasar’s conception of faith seeks to achieve a ‘re-integra­
tion of faith into the personal encounter between believers
and God through which they are drawn deeper and deeper
into the knowledge through his self-disclosure injesus Christ’.54 * *
Here again we see his polemic against the superficial notions
of faith found in Romanticism and Idealism on the one hand,
and the artificial dichotomy in the Catholic notion which
resulted in the analysisfidet15 on the other. Because faith is not
in the first instance an act of the mind but involves the whole
person, it can never really be separated from a life of obedi­
ence. Thus, in the aesthetic experience of faith, the light which

5lBalthasar, ‘Theology and Aesthetics’, Ibid., 63.

i3GL IV:115.
“G/. IV: 115, Cf. fn. 21.
“John Riches, ‘Balthasar and the Analysis of Faith’, in The Analogy ofBeauty, |ohn
Riches (ed.),50.
“Ibid., 50.
88 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

emerges from the Christ-form gives the believer the eyes of

perception. The form of Christ impresses itself upon the
believer. Subject and object become so united that in the act
of faith the believer become Christoformic. Thus faith is
understood as the lumenJidei: ‘The light of faith stems from the
object which, revealing itself to the subject, draws it out beyond
itself ... into the sphere of the object’.56
For Balthasar, the relationship between faith and the
human senses must be maintained. He is in concert with the
scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages which taught the
conversio ad phantasma, i.e., that all knowledge has its origins
from sense experience. Furthermore, and this is the more
decisive factor, God has chosen through the Incarnation to
reveal himself in the realm of worldly reality. Thus all our
access to God, even the Beatific vision, must be mediated
through the humanity of Jesus. Faith is therefore not ab­
stracted or isolated from natural experience. Rather faith
fulfils as well as transforms all our natural experiences.
What then is the relationship between faith, knowledge
and reason? Faith and knowledge are inextricably united one
with another: in the Old Testament, faith, as man’s response
to God, a response which listens, yields, trusts and hopes, is
founded on the knowledge of God’s historical leading of his
people by grace; in the New Testament, Paul speaks about
knowing the mysteries of faith andjohn asserts that ‘we believe
and know thatyou are the holy one of God! ’ (Jn 6:69). Thus the
Bible teaches a circumincession of pistis and gnosisF
Reason and faith are also inextricably intertwined one
with another, the former being drawn into the latter. Unaided
reason cannot ‘perceive’ nor understand the revelation. Rea­
son therefore requires the help of God’s grace since there can
be a genuine seeing only within faith. One must therefore
understand the doctrine of the preambula Jidei in this more
dynamic way. O’Donnell explains: ‘... what reason can do is to
lend in advance a certain credibility to the sign, which makes
it possible to see what is objectively visible’.58 Balthasar’s

XCL 1:181.
57 Cf. I:131fT.
“O'Donnell, Hans Urs von Balthasar, 23.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 89

understanding of faith surmounts that of the scholastics who

taught that the fides informis, consisting in a mere intellectual
assent to the truth, and the fides formata, which is a faith
augmented, vivified and determined by the power of love, are
to be distinguished. Balthasar’s aestheticising of the experi­
ence of faith removes this distinction. For him, ‘faith can
appear as being the initiation and the way of Christian knowl­
edge ... Or, conversely, faith can proceed from knowledge,
which makes just as much sense, since knowledge of Christ’s
divinity engenders an attitude of adoring acceptance of every­
thing that proceeds from it ,..’59
This brings us to another important aspect of Balthasar’s
theological epistemology, his doctrine of spiritual senses. As
we have seen above, Balthasar understands perception as a
fully human act. This not only necessarily includes the senses
but emphasises them. But with man’s encounter with God who
is Spirit, one should not only speak of sensibility but of spiritual
sensibility. Following the footsteps of Origen who was the first
to expound the doctrine of the ‘five spiritual senses’, Balthasar
argues that the Christian, as a person who has risen with Christ,
is a spiritual man who does not only possess a ‘spiritual intellect
and will, but also a spiritual heart, a spiritual imagination and
spiritual senses’.60
Here we see the function and role of the Spirit in the
theological aesthetics of Balthasar. His concern about the
modern neglect of the epistemic function of the Holy Spirit
can be seen from the following sentence: ‘The Holy Spirit is a
reality which is ignored by the philologists and the philoso­
phers of comparative religion, or which is at least “provision­
ally bracketed” by them’. ‘If one makes this excision ’, Balthasar
continues, ‘from what perspective is it that one intends to
understand the phenomenon better than it understands it­
self? From the perspective of the general philosophy of reli­
gion? Or from the perspective of a (modern?) self-understand­
ing of our own which cannot admit the form stamped upon

mCL 1:134-5.
“CZ. 1:366.
90 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

history because this form “no longer says anything” to that self
understanding?’61
The Holy Spirit’s role is to enable us to perceive the form
of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit creates within us a faculty to
apprehend and relish the form of God’s revelation. Along with
the ontic order that orients man and the form of revelation to
one another, the grace of the Holy Spirit creates a faculty that
can apprehend this form, the faculty that can relish it and find
itsjoy in it, that can understand it and sense its interior truth and
rightness’. In other words, the Holy Spirit gives us the ‘senso-
rium’ needed to perceive the form of God’s revelation in Jesus
Christ. One might say then thatwhile the Son is the expression of
God, the role of the Holy Spirit is to make an impression. To put
it in another way, the Spirit’s mission is to be the beautifier. Now
since beautifying involves giving form, the Spirit might be said
to be the ‘Spirit of Formation’. In this way the mission of the Son
and that of the Spirit are very closely related.

5. An Analogy of Beauty?

From the very start Balthasar announces his intention to work

out a theological aesthetics based on God’s revelation. He
cautions theologians against making a mere theological appli­
cation of aesthetic concepts. Such an approach, he says, will
inevitably result in an ‘aesthetic theology’. By this he means a
theology which uses the methods and concepts of general
aesthetics thereby ‘betraying and selling out theological sub­
stance to the current viewpoints of an inner-worldly theory of
beauty’.62 One must attempt instead a theological aesthetics, i.e.,
‘a theology which does not primarily work with the extra-
theological categories of a worldly philosophical aesthetics
(above all poetry), but develops its theory of beauty from the
data of revelation itself with genuinely theological methods’.
But although Balthasar stresses that there can be no speaking
about the beauty of God without reference to the ‘form and
manner’ of his appearance in salvation history on the one

61GL 1:494-5.
62 GL 1:38.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 91

hand, on the other he says that the beauty and glory of God can
be inferred from his epiphany in the world. This constitutes an
inner tension in Balthasar’s theology which can be attributed
to the dialectic of his thought and derives from the polarity
between the philosophical principle of his mentor Erich
Przywara (and, indeed of Catholic theology since Aquinas)
and that of Karl Barth, who had a powerful influence on him.
Balthasar wishes to develop a standpoint which takes the
revelation of God in Jesus Christ seriously without trivialising
the aspirations of self-transcendence that are manifested in
human civilisation and culture. His is the standpoint that seeks
to uphold the totally unique work of God in the Incarnation
without forgetting or undervaluing the work of God in the
world of mythology, philosophy and religion. It is a standpoint
which gives equal consideration to the special revelation of
God in the Incarnate Word and his general revelation in the
world. For the revelation of God in Christ simultaneously takes
on ‘form’ and radically destroys all forms and beauty. Thus,
the Word is given a central place without, however, overlook­
ing the Catholic and Orthodox requirement of‘giving glory in
contemplation’. The question is, Is his theological aesthetics
successful in articulating this reality? We are doubtful that it is.
The super-structure of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics
is built on the philosophical foundation of the analogy of
being. ‘The fundamental principle of a theological aesthetics,
rather, is the fact that, just as this Christian revelation is
absolute truth and goodness, so also is it absolute beauty; but
this assertion would be meaningless if every transposition and
application to revelation of human categories from the realm
of logic, ethics (“pragmatics”) and aesthetics, if every analogi­
cal application of these categories were forbidden ’ ,63 Balthasar’s
concept of the analogy of being is deeply influenced by Erich
Pryzwara. Medard Kehl has provided us with a succinct sum­
mary of Pryzwara’s concept of the analogy of being:

... finite reality is profoundly analogous in its being, that is,

simultaneously similar and dissimilar to the being of God. It is
similar in so far as it really ‘is’, and thus it forms a union between

aCL 1:607.
92 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Sein and Wesen (being and nature) and between Dasein and
Sosein (existence and essence); yet it is dissimilar in so far as it
does not mean any full identity or any unity consequent upon
an inner essential necessity, but only an external factually
posited ‘unity of tension’.64

The doctrine points to a great difference, an infinite distance

between God and all created beings. But alongside this ‘infi­
nite distance’ is also a line of similarity and hence an analogy.
By weaving this strand of Catholic thought into the aesthetic
motifs of his own theology, Balthasar has given this traditional
doctrine a new face. The analog)' of being is for Balthasar a
principle which is absolutely indispensible since it is the only
solution that would enable Christian theology to work respon­
sible between a philosophy of identity on the one extreme and
an absolute dialectic on the other.
The analogia entishds opened a way for Balthasar to speak
of the theological a priori of philosophical beauty. The anoma­
lies in his theological aesthetics are just as pronounced here as
he tries on the one hand to affirm that the Christian event
‘ushers in a completely neiu experience of divine glory; [that] it
completely tranforms it’; while on the other hand he speaks of
the Christian event as something which is not of newness but of
uniqueness.65 He appeals to Paul’s statement in Acts 17:23 - ‘What
therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you’. Thus
Christianity, without renouncing its demands for penitence and
conversion, is seen predominantly in terms of fulfilment.

Christians feel themselves to be the legitimate heirs of all

revelation of God in the world (Homer, Aristotle), of all
reference to and exposition of God by man (the tragedians), of
all loving assent to God and attachment to the Absolute (Plato,
Stoic), every homecoming of the creature to the One (Plotinus),
every courageous pilgrimage, full of renunciation, through
time towards the future civitas (Virgil).66

It is therefore not wrong to say that Balthasar’s theology of

MThevon Balthasar Reader, Medard Kehl & Werner Loser (eds), (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1982), 20.
“CZ.IV:317.
mGL fV:321.
 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 93

continuity is, in a sense, a re-statement of the dictum of

Thomas Aquinas that ‘grace presupposes nature; it does not
destroy it but completes it’.
Balthasar’s concept of the theological a priori is intended to
be a rebuttal and re-formulation of Karl Rahner’s anthropocen­
tric transcendentalism. Rahner’s transcendental method is an
inquiry into the ‘ apriori transcendental condition for the possibil­
ity of [human] subjectivity’.07 His so-called objective investiga­
tions of ordinary experiences brought him to the conclusion that
humans are naturally oriented towards the holy mystery that
Christians call God. He spoke of this human capacity as

a capacity of dynamic self-movement of the spirit, given a priori

with human nature, directed towards all possible objects. It is
a movement in which the particular object is, as it were, grasped
as an individual factor of this movement towards a goal, and so
consciously grasped in a pre-view of this absolute breadth of the
knowable.08

Rahner calls this self-transcendence of humanity its potentia

oboedientalis, i.e., obediential potency for divine revelation.
The potentia oboedientalis means that ‘man is that existing thing
who stands before the free God who may possibly reveal
himself.09 The family resemblances of this conception (and
also the religious aprioriofSchleiermacher) with the theologi­
cal a priori of Balthasar cannot be denied. But as Rowan
Williams rightly points out, Rahner’s ‘metaphysics of a potentia
oboedientalis for the revelation of the supernatural God’67 70 is* *
different from Balthasar’s concept of the theological apriori in
that the first speaks of a Vorgriff (formal ‘pre-apprehension’ in
man) of limitlessness while the latter speaks of the
Gestalthaftigkeit des Wesens, the potential orientation of being
towards concrete form.71 More critically, Balthasar’s theologi­
cal a priori is formulated from the standpoint of the absolute
gratuity of grace. It is an attempt, in concert with Henri de

67Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968), 17.
“Ibid., 59-60.
“Ibid., 101.
70Ibid„ 162.
’'“Balthasar and Rahner’, in Analogy of Beauty, 20.
94 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Lubac’s notion of Sumaturel, to surmount the neo-scholastic

and Rahnerian notion of the natura pura.
Given Balthasar’s affinity with Platonism and Neo-
Platonism, and those Christian traditions which are deeply
imbued by them, one wonders if Balthasar has himself fully
accepted this absorption of the natural by the supernatural.
There is evidence to indicate that he has not. In his theological
aesthetics is to be found a strong philosophical structure that
allows if not emphasises the integrity and positivity of the
natural. In practice therefore, his theological aesthetics falls
into the nature-supernature schema of scholasticism.
O’Donaghue’s statement in this regard is perceptive:

The central drama of Balthasar’s theology comes from e fact

that he has accepted the disappearance of the traditional
natural man and natural law philosophy in theology, but yet
shows at every step that he has been formed in the old way and
brings along with him, without looking at it directly, the central
principle of the traditional way, the principle of the continuity
of the natural and supernatural, the principle that Karl Barth
called somewhat ambiguously the analogy of being ...72

Barth’s objection to the analogy of being is based on the fact

that this conception is based, not on a faithful reflection of
revelation, but on the standpoint of a general theory of
causality and philosophical ontology. He has correctly identi­
fied the analogy of being as the Grundprinzip of Catholicism; it
is an attempt to force revelation and theology into the pre­
existent Procustean bed of a particular conceptual system. It is,
in other words, idolatrous. Balthasar’s rebuttal that Catholic
theology does not take its point de depart from philosophical
metaphysics, a general epistemology or from any conceptual
system, but is dependant on revelation has failed to convince.
So has his insistence that Catholic theology, and here he
mentions Pryzwara, Guardini and Mersch, is primarily
Christocentric. Catholic analogy works rather from a concep­
tion of causality and transcendental ontology, independently
from christology, pneumatology, and revelation. It is even
independent of general revelation, for, as Max Scheler pointed

7!Noel O’Donaghue, ‘A Theology of Beauty’, Analog/ of Beauty, 6.

 THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OR AESTHETIC THEOLOGY 95

out, the causality argument, taken by itself, does not presup­

pose revelation. Rather it operates on the basis that human
reason is placed over against the ‘fact’ of nature. In other
words, the knowledge of the first Cause is deduced from the
‘fact’ of nature, regardless of how it appears and apart from
revelation. In this regard, Barth’s objection holds. In the
notion of the analogy of being, ‘a system of transcendentality
is developed independently of the historical becoming on the
basis of which Christian theology is distinctively what it is’.73
In the final analysis, Balthasar’s theology collapses into the
old nature-supemature mould. Thomas O’Meara is right when
he said that ‘Balthasar’s originality lies in structure more than in
content... We have not a new theology ofgrace in history but new
arrangements of biblical and theological insights, phrases, and
modfs’. This is indeed inevitable, given his affinity to platonism
and the significance he accords to Catholic analogy. As
O’Donaghue comments, again very perceptively, it is difficult to
remain in this tradition and accept the Lubacian absorption of
the natural in the supernatural. Balthasar’s Aestheticshas within its
system a philosophical structure which actually allows for

... the integrity of the natural, and which demands some principle
of distinction between the natural and supernatural orders, a
distinguirpour unirin Maritain’s sense. This in practice heralds the
return ofphilosophy as a discipline formally and adequately distinct
from theology, yet nevertheless providing its proper context as well
as its essential prelude and principle of understanding.7,1

The anomaly in Balthasar’s aesthetic theology is located in the

discordance between the author’s announced intentions and
its actual form and content. His claims, in the final analysis,
appear to be more strategic than substantive.

Roland Chia
Fairfield Methodist Church
1 Tanjong Pagar Road
Singapore 0208

"Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and The Many (Cambridge: CUP), 139.
"O’Donaghue, Theology of Beauty’, in Analogy of Beauty, 8.
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