Hans Urs von Balthasar

Abstract

The broad questions which inform this paper are: What has literary imagination to gain from religion? What has religion to gain from the literary imagination? These are highly generalised forms of the two questions which are fundamental to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief, namely: How may I believe what I cannot understand or absolutely prove? and How does what begins as an impression on the imagination become a creed or system in the reason? These questions are as they are formulated by Newman; they are ours still. But I want to look at them from another perspective — that of Urs von Balthasar in his great work The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, of which three volumes out of seven are now available in English translation. He begins with a challenge: ‘How could Christianity become such a universal power if it had always been as humourless, anguished, and grumpy as it is today?’ Von Balthasar’s answer is that there is a missing element, and that element is beauty:¹

When it is no longer 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. (B.i, p. 18)