Seeing the Form by Hans Urs von Balthasar

As with the good, so also with the truth. A perusal of the daily news headlines reveals that goodness is slipping away. All types of vulgarities affront us when we turn on a television set, radio, or take a stroll down a city street. Beauty has been tossed out of every sphere of modern society as evidenced by modern art, music, literature, and manner of dress. This is precisely where we have arrived in modernity.

Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil. In a world without beauty-even if people cannot dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it-in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Thus, von Balthasar begins where Kant ends and affirms that without beauty as the starting point, the other transcendentals are lost. Kant began with his critique of pure reason (truth), then moved to a critique of practical reason (good), and finally a critique of judgment (beauty). He envisions his project as a reversal of the ordering of the transcendentals in the works of Immanuel Kant.

In the first book of the first part of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trilogy, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, von Balthasar lays out his plan for a theological aesthetics. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics a remedy for the breakdown in modern biblical exegesis and the groundwork of an approach to revelation that allows the glory of God to show forth in all of its splendor.

Seeing the Form by Hans Urs von Balthasar