A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

by Aidan Nichols

Hans Urs von Balthasar is widely recognized as perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. No writer has better revealed the spiritual greatness of the revelation to which the art of the church and the historic liturgies bear witness. Yet students and nonspecialist readers often find Balthasar daunting and difficult. This volume is the ideal introduction to his work. It unlocks the treasure of his theology by focusing on the beautiful, the good, and the true. These are the three qualities of being around which his great trilogy--The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic--revolves. Though brief, the book captures the essence of what Balthasar wished to say.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Religion

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

John Christopher "Aidan" Nichols O.P., S.T.M. (born 17 September 1948) is an English academic and Catholic priest.

Nichols served as the first John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oxford for 2006 to 2008, the first lectureship of Catholic theology at that university since the Reformation. He is a member of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and is the Prior of St Michael the Archangel in Cambridge.

Reviews

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Key to Balthasar has been on my list for a long time, and it's good to finally get to read it. Aidan Nichols crisply and comprehensibly explains the biggest ideas of one of the twentieth century's greatest Catholic theologians. Although concise and just over a hundred pages, this book is dense with content and necessarily slow going, but all the more worthwhile for that.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a brief book that supposedly makes von Balthasar more digestible is this hard, I don’t wanna know how hard reading Hans’ original Trilogy is 🙈

Profound reads. It is oddly dense and philosophical yet inspiring. Von Balthasar goes from abstract concepts such as reality and being to taking form into beauty with ease, and Nichols captures that well. “One of the special functions of the beautiful, in [von Balthasar’s] view, is to make us aware that in knowing we receive more than we project. Reality is more fundamentally a gift to us than it is a construction by us. How could we be amazed by being in its beauty if what we call knowledge of the world tells us more about us than it does about it—more about ourselves than about the world in all its variegated splendour?”

“This for Balthasar is where appeal to pulchrum, the transcendental we call ‘the beautiful’, can help restore the integrity of a Christologically-given revelation of the God of all being. The significance of the beautiful is that it indicates how an object might be outside us, facing us, and yet at the same time draw us into itself. Of all the transcendentals, the beautiful is the closest to our senses. It is, therefore, more directly present to us than are the other transcendental properties of being. The beautiful is a fully objective property of being, but it is the nature of this property to be communicative, to communicate itself to observers. The beautiful is reality under the aspect of form, known as such by imaginative intuition, just as truth is reality as best known through propositions and the intelligence, and goodness is reality as best known through values, by the moral sense.”

I don’t know if von Balthasar makes these references himself, but Nichols’ stress in mentioning, for example, Hopkins or Coleridge as aesthetic forerunners grounded him well in history: “As Samuel Taylor Coleridge divined, the highest unity the imagination can conceive is that which joins the finite and the infinite. But as Balthasar stresses with a vigour absent in Coleridge, this joining is supremely carried out by God himself in assuming human nature into unity with his divine Word.”

With denser concepts such as analogy of being, i.e. we as creatures are like God, but more unlike than like, allows a participation into His being and reality while yet staying independent and beholding. In this critical step that we do not construct or control, but rather receive and respond, allows for a way for von Balthasar to lead into Theo-Drama, envisioning us as actors with the freedom to act in right and good response, and Theo-Logic, allowing truth to be revealed in a personal way to us through Christ. And it is in Christ—his visible form, obedient act, and identity—that allows for these transcendentals to be centered around the personhood of God.

While the location of truth in Christ was not the newest concept for me, Theo-Drama and goodness was a concept that made me ponder if contemporaries such as Wells, Wright, and Vanhoozer were inspired by van Balthasar.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short summary of the work of a complex, but important theologian.

[Tom Barmaryam · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, Father Nichols, perhaps made an understatement when he described Von Balthasar as not only a prolific author, but a prolix one as well. To me, brilliant and profound though Von Balthasar's insights were, his philosophy and theology needed the utmost dedication of time in order to understand them clearly. Unless one possesses the gifts of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, among others, one is inclined to exercise due care in trying to decipher the works of this great philosopher. And towards this goal, Father Nichols' work is of immense help. Although it might not do justice to the arguably greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century to reduce his work to a mere 115 pages, I credit Father Nichols for doing his best to, at the very least, attempting to provide a concise but nonetheless exemplary introduction to Von Balthasar, particularly to his views on the "transcendentals" of beauty, good, truth and unity. Accordingly, I give this book five stars.

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nichols is remarkably clear in thought and writing, though he can give the impression of being overly artificial in his synthetic view of Balthasar. I also wish he'd given more time to criticisms such as Pitstick's as an opportunity for deeper reflections. The chapters on the aesthetics and dramatics especially are helpful guides.

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather difficult read for students unfamiliar with Balthasar's work.