Theology of Beauty, Bose
Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
Beautiful Logic
Some Aspects of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Thought on the Circumincession
(perichōrēsis) of the Transcendentals
Hans Urs von Balthasar is well known for his theological aesthetics, particularly through his influential
7-volume first part of the trilogy The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (Herrlichkeit – Eine
theologische Ästhetik). The trilogy also includes Theo-Drama (Theodramatik) [5 vols.] and Theo-Logic
(Theologik) [3 vols.].1 It is organized according to the classical philosophical-theological
transcendentals the beautiful, the good and the true, and presents what is probably the most
important and original contribution to the Christian understanding of beauty and the unity of the
transcendentals in recent times. As the unity of the transcendentals can be regarded as the theme of
Balthasar’s voluminous theology and philosophy, the focus must here be narrowed (hence the “some
aspects” of the subtitle).2 This paper will, partly for pragmatic reasons pertaining to my own doctoral
study,3 focus on one aspect of this unity in some of Balthasar’s important writings,4 namely the
relation and unity of the beautiful and the true, of beauty and logic. The questions guiding the
discussion are: What is the relation of beauty to truth? Why do we need a beautiful logic? What does
this notion mean? The good is also taken into the discussion, but for pragmatic reasons it is not
treated at the same length as its two sisters.5 Even if the paper is not a complete treatment of any of
its topics either as study of Balthasar or as a systematic treatments of the problems discussed, my
hope is that the paper will be both interesting and stimulating, pointing out the direction for further
reflection on those issues.
The heading “Beautiful Logic” may cling to some ears as a dissonance, as truth often is described in
dry and formal theoretical ways and has little to do with beauty, while the beautiful is regarded only
as a matter of taste and has less to do with thinking and logic. To Balthasar, however, the truth is
1
For simplicity I refer only to the English editions of the volumes of the trilogy (and other works), abbreviated
as GL=The Glory of the Lord, TD=Theo-Drama and TL=Theo-Logic, followed by the English volume number. The
Epilogue to the trilogy is abbreviated by E. The details for all volumes are found in Balthasar’s Bibliographie
1925-2005, Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, Freiburg 2005, or on the web pages of Ignatius Press and Johannes
Verlag Einsiedeln.
2
“The theme of the interplay between the beautiful, the good, and the true, (..) is the fundamental ordering
principle of Balthasar’s thought.” David C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of
Truth : a Philosophical Investigation, Perspectives in continental philosophy, no. 34 (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2004), 368. Schindler devotes chapter 5 of his study (pp. 350-421) to “The Transcendentals.”
This chapter to a large degree informs this paper. For a more complete study of the transcendentals in
Balthasar, focusing on the development of his thinking and the construction of the trilogy, see Mario SaintPierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Presses de l'Universite Laval, 1998).
3
My dissertation concerns the relation and unity of Spirit and truth in Balthasar, that is, it is a dogmaticpneumatological study starting in a philosophy and theology of truth as a basis to discuss the work and
character of the Spirit as the Spirit of truth. It is scheduled for completion in 2014.
4
Theo-Logic will be the main material for my dissertation and consequently in this paper as well. However,
anyone who is to say much about beauty in Balthasar has to take GL 1 into consideration. I will also give some
references to works were Balthasar explains his reasoning and aims in these works, namely the Epilogue to the
trilogy and My work: In retrospect.
5
The notion of the transcendentals as “sisters” is taken from Balthasar. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the
Form, vol. 1, The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18; ———,
Truth of the World, vol. 1, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 29.
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Theology of Beauty, Bose
Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
symphonic6 – like a beautiful piece of music, full of tensions between different orchestrated voices in
living dependence and reciprocal fruitfulness, and beauty is the objective appearance of God’s glory
in the world through creation and redemption. The development of a beautiful logic may therefore
require a rethinking and reflection on the character of both truth and beauty.
The plan of the paper is as follows: First I discuss a tension in Balthasar’s works regarding which of
beauty and truth is ‘the first word’, temporally in his works and principally, with respect to content.
From there I proceed to a discussion of the relation of theology and philosophy along the same lines,
which prepares the discussion of the circumincession of the transcendentals, first shortly in general,
then focusing especially on the beauty of truth and the truth of beauty. From there I proceed to
discussion of what is for Balthasar the transcendental par excellence: Trinitarian love. Before the
conclusion, I try to complete the picture by referring to D. B. Hart, a contemporary Balthasarinterpreter, whose theology of the beauty of God as love as points in the direction of a beautiful
logic.
Which Is ‘the First Word’?
“Beauty is the word that shall be our first,” Balthasar writes at the start of GL 1, Seeing the Form,
because beauty “dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and
the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”7 The statement is set forth as a response to
the question of where thought is to begin, both philosophically and theologically. It is not without its
tensions, however, both in its own context and seen in light of Balthasar’s bibliography and the
construction of the trilogy. The relation between the transcendentals may not, after all, be as easy to
construct as to postulate a first, a second and a third. The tension in the context in GL 1 is seen by the
notion that this first word is chosen “in order to bring the truth of the whole again into view”. As
such ‘the first word’ seems to be chosen instrumentally for a higher purpose: access to the truth of
the whole. A further tension is seen in the fact that Balthasar already in 1947 published his Wahrheit.
Ein Versuch. Erstes Buch. Wahrheit der Welt.8 In this work he aims to (as he later says) “open up the
philosophical access to the specifically Christian understanding of truth.”9 The true was thus in some
sense the transcendental which Balthasar first worked through at some length, quite a few years
before he began to publish The Glory of the Lord in 1961. The announced following theological
volume to Wahrheit on the truth of God did not see the light of day at first, and contributed to the
rising of an even more complex picture when Balthasar re-published Wahrheit as Theo-Logic vol. 1
(Truth of the World) in 1985, keeping its original wording, but placing a new general introduction to
the whole Theo-Logic at the front, where he also defended the structure of the whole trilogy, while
the long-time promised treatment of the truth of God was expanded into the two volumes Truth of
God (TL 2) and The Spirit of Truth (TL 3). With respect to the trilogy, then, this book is both something
like a pre-study and a part of the conclusion. It is also different from the rest of the volumes of the
trilogy with respect to form; the book contains only a few scattered references to other authors, a
6
This exact wording entitles one of his little beautiful books: ———, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian
Pluralism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987).
7
———, GL 1, 18.
8
In the following I refer to Wahrheit when the point is to underscore the book as a 1947-work, later I refer just
to TL 1.
9
Balthasar wrote guides/commentaries to his own books throughout his career at the turning of the decades
of his life, this statement is from 1955. Those texts are collected in Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: in
Retrospect (San Francisco: Communio Books - Ignatius Press, 1993), here at 24.
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Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
disappearing amount compared to the astonishing indexes and notes in the other volumes. That
might be a pointer to the fact that this book is very close to the original heart of Balthasar’s own
thinking, although it is marked by a strong stamp of Thomas Aquinas (which, of course, is exactly at
the heart of Balthasar’s thinking).10 It is also the volume of the trilogy which comes closest to
applying a pure philosophical method.11
How should these facts be interpreted? There are scholars who see a significant development in
Balthasar’s notion of the transcendentals.12 There may be something commendable to this idea
(every thinker develops his thinking–that is an inevitable and welcome result of thinking), but it puts
Balthasar’s republishing of Wahrheit as TL 1 in 1985 in a strange light. Why republish something
containing a way of thinking you have left behind? Another possible way to approach these facts is to
say that the two first parts of the trilogy in some sense is the product of Balthasar’s undertaking to
write the long-time promised second volume to Wahrheit. In danger of making an oversimplification I
propose that one can interpret The Glory of the Lord and Theo-Drama as a huge intermezzo between
Theo-Logic vol. 1 and vols. 2-3, not only temporally, but also in its compositional “logic” or train of
thought.
The central definition of truth in Wahrheit is truth as the unveiling of being.13 According to this
interpretation, GL and TD is the account of the unveiling of divine Being through the revelation in the
Christ-form which is needed to speak intelligibly of this revelation within a logical-rational framework
(as ‘the whole truth of God’), which is done later in TL 2 and 3.14 This interpretation is supported by
some statements from the Epilogue. At the start of the logics-section of the “Treshold”, Balthasar
says that “we can now see in what sense “truth” forms the conclusion to “beauty” and “goodness”,
in what sense the end must at the same time be the beginning.”15 Truth must be the end and at the
same time the beginning.16 This paradox describes Balthasar’s biographical intricacies strikingly, and
points to the tension in calling one of the transcendentals the ‘first’. There are also, as will be shown
shortly, passages in Wahrheit containing, as in a nutshell, important parts of Balthasar’s thought on
10
According to an American commentator to Balthasar, TL 1 “reads like an extended commentary on Aquinas’s
De veritate.” Rodney Howsare, Balthasar: a Guide for the Perplexed (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 72.
Howsare’s dissertation is published as ———, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Protestantism: the Ecumenical
Implications of his Theological Style (London: T & T Clark International, 2005).
11
Balthasar says at its end that it is a “philosophical inquiry that considers only the revelation of God given in
creation”, Balthasar, TL 1, 271. As I shall argue later, however, it is open to discussion whether Balthasar in fact
does restrict himself in that way, since there are examples of ideas in that work which can hardly be argued to
be pure philosophy, at least in one sense of that expression. In the introduction to the republished version he
says more discreetly that the work has a “predominantly philosophical method,” p. 10.
12
See the discussion in Schindler, Dramatic Structure of Truth, 361-4. He refers among others to Saint-Pierre’s
study mentioned earlier.
13
Balthasar, TL 1, 206, cf. 37, 43, 149, 196, 217, 269.
14
This interpretation is supported by the fact that TL 2 and 3 are, to my knowledge, the volumes of the trilogy
that most often refer back to and reflect further on sections in earlier volumes. Cf. for example the references
to different volumes of GL and TD in ———, Truth of God, vol. 2, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 81-85; ———, The Spirit of Truth, vol. 3, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 200-5.
15
———, Epilogue (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 77.
16
Schindler has also seen this point with reference to the same passage of the Epilogue: “Before Balthasar
presents truth, he observes that in a certain respect, truth is final, even while in another respect it should be
first.” Schindler, Dramatic Structure of Truth, 366. Schindler, however, does not in this context note the
important theological observations concerning language which Balthasar uses to support this notion.
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Theology of Beauty, Bose
Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
beauty, and also on goodness. In this way this huge intermezzo not only looks forward, but also
develops themes contained in the first part. Wahrheit thus functions both as Balthasar’s philosophy
of truth (as opposed to the theology of truth) and to a large extent also as the philosophical
framework for the whole trilogy.
By starting his trilogy with the aesthetics, Balthasar wanted to emphasize that God appears in Christ,
in a form [Gestalt] that can be apprehended by man. The fact – Verbum caro factum est [the Word
was made flesh] – is the starting point for all theology.17 In that sense beauty, conceived as the
revelation of God’s glory, is the first word. God appears as the radiation of his own glory, showing his
own love for the world as creator and redeemer. This idea will inevitably (to the thinking subject)
raise the question of how God appears, and how it is possible that God appears. That would be the
question of Theo-Logic. But even in the appearance of God there must be a kind of self-saying (an
expression used by Balthasar in the Epilogue), some logic, a kind of truth. In the early Wahrheit,
Balthasar wanted to pay attention among other things to “the verbal manifestation of all Being”18 –
that every appearance is in some way language-mediated when expressed and grasped. The same
idea is expressed in the Epilogue by the notion that aesthetics (self-showing) and dramatics (selfgiving) must also already be “inchoate” forms of logic (self-saying).19 Behind it Balthasar sees the
theological notion that everything is in a deep sense words: God speaks himself forth in his eternal
Word, the Son, and everything made is made by this utterance. For all beings, “even their epiphany
and their free gift of themselves include as indispensable moments their emergence into speech.”20
The preliminarily conclusion is that there are tensions in Balthasar’s notion of beauty as ‘the first
word’. However, one should also recall that he does not say that beauty is ‘first’ in a temporal or
logical sequence of the transcendentals, but that it is the first word chosen to begin his trilogy.21 The
sections on the elimination of aesthetics from theology in the “Introduction”-chapter22 of GL 1 shows
that he to a certain degree makes a contextual-communicative choice of starting point, choosing his
starting point out of considerations regarding what he wants to criticize: the positivistic aesthetic
forgetfulness and blindness of modern man, both with respect to philosophy and theology.23 In other
words, his choice of beauty as the first word has an apologetic motivation.
Philosophy and Theology in Symphonic Integration
The tension involved in finding ‘the first word’ among the transcendentals can, I propose, be further
illuminated by a reflection on the relation between theology and philosophy. Is one of those “first”
with respect to the other? “We start with a reflection on the situation of man,” Balthasar writes
early in his last Retrospective on his work, when he is to “present a schema of the trilogy”.24 In what
17
This is emphasized, for example, in Balthasar, E, 99ff; ———, TL 2, 281.
From the summary written in 1955, ———, My Work: in Retrospect, 24.
19
———, E, 77.
20
Ibid., 78.
21
Schindler adds the following note to a section where he points out that each of the transcendentals for
Balthasar has a certain “dominance”: “In fact, in Balthasar’s final summary presentation of his thought, he
describes the unfolding of the transcendentals in the following order: unity, goodness, truth, and beauty (RT, 3)
[= My Work: in Retrospect, 114]. This order seems to be unique in his writings, and underscores the fact that
even if there is an “ultimate” order, it is always “relativized” according to context.” (Emphasis mine). Schindler,
Dramatic Structure of Truth, 370-1n73.
22
Balthasar, GL 1, 45-57, 70-79. More broadly, one could refer to the whole section pp. 34-127.
23
———, TL 1, 20.
24
From the summary of his books written in 1988, ———, My Work: in Retrospect, 112.
18
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Theology of Beauty, Bose
Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
follows he reflects philosophically on the ‘real distinction’ (esse – essentia/Being – essences) of
Thomas Aquinas, ending with the question of the relation of the finite to the infinite: Why are we not
God? This question cannot be answered philosophically, he says, but only by the self-expression of
God in revelation, though this has its “counterpart” in man’s philosophical search. Again, a certain
tension is observed inherent in the first-ness of the appearing of God encountered in GL 1, which has
its presuppositions. The end must at the same time be the beginning here too: the question that GL 1
answers theologically is in some sense stated by Wahrheit, where Balthasar had already treated
among other things the subject of the real distinction and the transcendentals philosophically. That
is, revelation does not happen in a philosophical vacuum. Balthasar’s view of the relation between
philosophy and theology is expressed in the General introduction to TL 1 written at its re-publication
in this dictum: “Without philosophy, there can be no theology” (Ohne Philosophie, keine Theologie).25
This principle has a temporal-bibliographical expression in the relation between TL 1 and GL 1.
However, to conclude that philosophy for Balthasar represents truth and comes first, while theology
represents beauty and comes after, is mistaken. Philosophy, according to Balthasar, is in its essence
not a positivistic-rationalistic science settling questions once and for all. Philosophy is rather the
philosopher’s reflective response to the wonder (the act of thaumazein, as the Greeks have it)
invoked in him by being: “Wonder at Being is not only the beginning of thought, but (..) also the
permanent element (archē) in which it moves.”26 Theology, on its part, is not just the perceiving and
receiving of the beautiful-glorious divine revelation, but the undertaking to think its consequences
through, that is, it is theo-logy. Both philosophy and theology then, work with all the transcendentals
in their unity and fullness. With respect to succession, Balthasar’s dictum may also in some sense be
reversible: Ohne Theologie, keine Philosophie.27 The point would be that philosophy is always
inherently theological because it cannot appropriately handle the questions of man without handling
the question of God and reality as a whole. Revelation, in Balthasar’s view, is not an abolishment of
philosophy, but its radical critique and fulfillment. Another important point regarding Balthasar’s
view of this relationship is that he follows Henri de Lubac (and Karl Rahner among others) in the
criticism of the idea of a natura pura, a pure nature to be handled purely philosophically by reason
prior to and separated from theology and revelation.28 For Balthasar this idea disturbs the doctrine of
Christ as the mediator of creation. One could also add that such a totally pure nature would at best
be a pre-lapsarian phenomenon.29 Balthasar, referring to Romano Guardini, holds the possibility
open for a “third domain of truths” situated, as it were, between philosophy and theology, “that
genuinely belong to creaturely nature yet do not emerge into the light of consciousness until they
are illumined by a ray of the supernatural.”30
25
———, TL 1, 7.
———, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, vol. 5, The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics
(San Fransico: Ignatius Press, 1991), 614f. Cf. ———, TL 1, 208.
27
In the framework of Puntel (see note 31) this could be said more precisely: Without theology, there can be
no fully determined philosophy.
28
For an illuminating discussion of this topic, see section 3.7.4.2.1 of Lorenz B. Puntel & (trans.) Alan White,
Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and JeanLuc Marion (Northwestern University Press, 2011).
29
Cf. Conor Cunningham, "Natura Pura, the Invention of the Anti-Christ?: A Week With No Sabbath,"
Communio: International Catholic Review 37, no. Summer (2010).
30
Balthasar, TL 1, 13. Cf. ———, TL 2, 96. Nicholas Healy, in his study of Balthasar’s eschatology, points to this
idea and its potential for misunderstanding, clarifying the matter this way: “The light of grace enters the
26
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Beautiful Logic (H. U. v. Balthasar)
by Gunnar Innerdal
Although philosophy formally represents a kind of starting point for theology, the exclusion of a
natura pura reveals that this philosophical starting point is in fact both illuminated by the glory of
revelation, and presents an integral part of the universal philosophical-theological answer31 to the
questions of life presented in Balthasar’s work. Theology, then, does not start where philosophy
ends, rather theology and philosophy keep on deepening each other from the inside, through
“rigorous collaboration” and mutual “intrinsic openness,”32 both working with a logic based on
wonder at Being. Perhaps this reciprocity is also the case with truth and beauty – that beauty makes
truth more true, and truth makes beauty more beautiful?
The Circumincession (perichōrēsis) of the Transcendentals
Now the question arises: Where does all this confusion of first and last, beginning and end lead us? It
leads directly to the core of Balthasar’s thought on the transcendentals: to their mutual interplay,
indwelling and interpenetration. That is the background for the tension in finding ‘the first word’ and
in some respect also to the mutual interdependence of philosophy and theology.33 The idea of a very
close connection between the transcendentals followed Balthasar from his early years of thinking. In
the “Introduction” to Wahrheit, for example, he said that the interplay between them “is so intimate
that one cannot speak concretely about one of the three without drawing the other two into the
discussion.”34 The word circumincession is used to describe the interplay of the transcendentals by
consciousness of the philosopher at the level of primitive experience. For the philosopher, revelation as such
will remain implicit, and will not enter as part of the formal structure of a philosophical argument. The
philosopher will continue to make his or her case based on the evidence of worldly being, without, however,
pretending that one’s experience of being is neutral to grace or faith.” Nicholas J. Healy, The Eschatology of
Hans Urs von Balthasar: Eschatology as Communion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82.
31
The German philosopher Lorenz B. Puntel has discussed the relation between philosophy and theology with
great theoretical clarity in his articles Lorenz B. Puntel, "Das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Theologie: Versuch
einer grundsätzlichen Klärung," i Vernunft des Glaubens: wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre :
Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfhart Pannenberg : mit einem bibliografischen Anhang, red. Jan Rohls &
Gunther Wenz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); ———, "Der Wahrheitsbegriff in Philosophie und
Theologie," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, no. 9 (1995). See also sections 3.7.4 and 2.8.1 of Puntel &
White, Being and God. Puntel’s view on this issue can be seen as a fruitful complement to and theoretical
deepening of Balthasar’s, arguing along many of the same lines as the latter. He sees theology and philosophy
as constituting a single universal science. The disciplines mutually presuppose one another; philosophy
providing the initial ideas, formal instruments and language for theology, and theology as the full
determination of philosophy: philosophy’s inquiry into absolute Being cannot be completed without the
methodological break into the historical-hermeneutic research of Being in history, that is, religion (this last
element – not that clearly present to Balthasar, it seems, although that may be due to conventional definitions
of philosophy and theology – compromises a good third reason for the eventual reversal of Balthasar’s dictum).
The disciplines relate to each other as the whole (philosophy) to one of its indispensable parts (theology)
(Puntel, "Verhältnis," 36.). Schindler, at the end of his discussion of the transcendentals in Balthasar, points to
the fact that that an aspect of the “risk” the transcendentals entail for the philosopher’s questioning after the
meaning of being is just what Puntel means by his ‘methodological break’: “Whoever is open to the meaning of
being must remain open to the meaning of history.” He concludes the whole section at the same page: “The
paradox of the transcendentals is the opening up of being, in man’s dramatic engagement in the world, to the
God who is the lord of unity, beauty, goodness, and truth, because he is trinity–in other words, because he
himself is drama.” Schindler, Dramatic Structure of Truth, 421.
32
Balthasar, TL 1, 15.
33
Cf. the reasoning in ibid., 29-30.
34
Ibid., 29. Which was exactly what he did in this book (positively). Cf. in particular the section “Truth,
goodness and beauty,” 216-225. In anticipation of the next section, I add that this is also analogously true of
the persons in the Trinity.
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Balthasar himself, and the notion is worked out at some length by David C. Schindler.35 The term may
also serve to highlight some points of contact between Balthasar’s notion of the transcendentals and
the Trinity; the Greek perichōrēsis is an ancient term in Trinitarian theology.
As Schindler notes, each of the circumincessive transcendentals for Balthasar has a certain
“dominance”, but their order is ultimately relativized according to context.36 The point of Balthasar’s
emphasis on beauty is, as highlighted in the opening pages of GL 1, that wholeness and immediacy is
central aspects of beauty. Schindler observes Balthasar’s underlying reasoning well when he says that
beauty is what “allows truth to be true and goodness to be good.”37 Without beauty its two sisters
lack fullness and splendor. Or even more, they lack what gives them their own integrity and depth:
“We could say quite simply that without beauty, what both the true and the good lack is precisely
transcendence. Beauty has a key role in the fact that the transcendentals are transcendentals.”38
Balthasar’s repeated attacks on dry concepts and positivistic and mechanical attitudes in science and
ethics have as their cure the opening of one’s eyes to beauty. He laments: “In a world without beauty
[..] the good loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out.”39 Truth also
loses something if beauty is forgotten, as will be demonstrated in the following.
The Beauty of Truth
Truth is described by Balthasar in TL 1 as the unveiling of being (alētheia). In the third chapter of TL 1,
Balthasar aims to show that truth is mystery: that mystery is not something lying behind truth, but at
its center. To show this he starts by going into “The World of the Images”, which gives name to the
distinction between the essence (of a being) and its appearance. Truth, in this picture, is “the
revelation in the appearance of the very being that does not itself appear.”40 The significance of truth
(that is, what truth signifies, its Bedeutung, or sense) does not lie in the appearances as such, neither
behind them: “Truth can be found only in a floating middle between the appearance and the thing
that appears.”41 Balthasar exemplifies this by asking what a great work of art, like a Mozart
symphony or his Don Giovanni “mean”? The question can only be answered by adhering to its
“image”, its “outside”: by listening to it over and over again. Only then can the “essence” of the
piece, its “inside,” come into view in its incomprehensibility and word-surpassing quality. Only by
adhering to the image [Bild] one comes into contact with the sense [Sinn], and in a great work of art
those two coincide into a Sinnbild42 that transcend the sum of its parts. Its truth cannot be reduced
to something other than the depths of its own appearance. In the “empty dialectic between being
35
See the section “Unity and Circumincession,” Schindler, Dramatic Structure of Truth, 368-74. For Balthasar’s
use of the term, see many passages in the Epilogue and Balthasar, TL 1, 29.
36
Cf. the texts cited in n 21. A further example of the relativism of the transcendentals is found in ———, TL 2,
173-9. Here he follows Bonaventure quite far in ascribing the transcendentals unity, goodness and truth to the
Trinity, without discussing beauty.
37
Schindler, Dramatic Structure of Truth, 368.
38
Ibid., 373.
39
Balthasar, GL 1, 19.
40
———, TL 1, 137.
41
Ibid., 138.
42
Adrian J. Walker translates Sinnbild in the English version of the book as ‘symbol’ (in absence of a better
term, I suppose). It might be misleading as it suggests that the work of art symbolizes something else (as we are
accustomed to think of symbols), while Sinnbild actually points to the “meaning-image”, the sense-full Gestalt
[form] that the piece itself constitutes.
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and appearance”, the mysteriousness of truth is primarily incomprehensibility, but as a Sinnbild it is
also a moment of revelation.43 And here beauty comes into view:
[T]here is an especially close connection between this aspect of truth and the concept of beauty. For the
name of this radiant property of truth, which overwhelms by its splendor, its indivisible integrity, and its
perfect expressive power, is, in fact, none other than beauty. Beauty is the aspect of truth that cannot be fit
into any definition but can be apprehended only in direct intercourse with it; thanks to beauty, every
encounter with truth is a new event. […] [B]ecause of beauty truth is always intrinsically a matter of
grace.44
Here beauty is conceived as the ungraspable element of truth that Balthasar so often speaks of, “that
is lacking to purely logical truth, which has been explicitly siphoned off from being.”45 The notion that
beauty as an aspect of truth is also a matter of grace, is seen in its ability to save our relation to
things and the knowledge of them from becoming “insuperably boring”: “[T]he fact that the same
things can surround us day after day, appear before us every morning with the same existence and
essence, but not become unendurable is due to the mysteriousness of truth, which is always richer
than what we have been able to apprehend so far,” says Balthasar, adding that “that things exist at
all is part of this mystery.”46 This depth and superabundance of truth is actually what serves to keep
both the philosopher and the theologian in wonder as their primary attitude towards their object in
Balthasar’s thinking.47 Beauty is here seen to be the mystery of truth. It is what saves truth from
being mere logic or floating semantic propositions hovering loosely over the reality of being. From
beauty, truth receives its fullness, sense and splendor, and this gives rise to a beautiful logic informed
by the depths of being.
The Truth of Beauty
In the opening pages of GL 1, as noted above, the primacy (‘first-word-ness’) of beauty has a kind of
instrumentality pertaining to it. Beauty is there chosen as the first word “in order to bring the truth
of the whole again into view–truth as a transcendental property of Being, truth which is no
abstraction, rather the living bond between God and the world.”48 This ‘whole truth’, Balthasar says,
contains both the truth of man, world and God, and also the historical gospel and the Church that
preserves it, the truth of the growing Kingdom in its fullness and weakness and the truth of the night
of present and the uncertainty of future.49 Beauty, it seems, is like a spotlight illuminating the whole
landscape of truth. And spotlights are intended not only to show themselves, but mainly to show
what they illuminate. In addition, Balthasar speaks in TL 1 of beauty as “the pure irradiation of the
true and the good for their own sake.”50 That recalls a striking formulation from one of Balthasar’s
early essays on music: “When truth, which is thought, is found in matter, it is beauty.”51 The light that
43
Balthasar, TL 1, 140-1.
Ibid., 141-2.
45
Cf. here his remarks on truth in relation to goodness and beauty in the original introduction (1947) to TL 1,
ibid., 28-30.
46
Ibid., 142-3.
47
In the Epilogue, the notion that beauty is a matter of grace and gift that inspires wonder, leads further into
the act of worship, see ———, E, 66-7.
48
———, GL 1, 18.
49
Ibid., 17.
50
———, TL 1, 224.
51
From “Die Entwicklung der musikalischen Idee” (orig. 1925), cited, translated and discussed in Schindler,
Dramatic Structure of Truth, 404.
44
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beauty irradiates when it appears in matter (as Gestalt) is a light of truth and contains truth. The
truth of beauty, or the truth inherent in beauty, is seen by the fact that truth as unveiling of being is
grasped in the manifestation of the wonder-invoking beautiful Gestalts that grasps their observers.
The Ultimate Word: Love
The foregoing showed that the circumincession of the transcendentals is central to Balthasar’s
thought, illustrating this by a look at some aspects of the reciprocal relation between truth and
beauty. The circumincession of the transcendentals, however, so to speak has its own
transcendentality, as it points beyond itself:
Truth, goodness and beauty are so fully transcendental properties of being that they can be grasped only in
and through one another. In their communion, they furnish proof of the inexhaustible depth and
overflowing richness of being. Finally, they show that in the end everything is comprehensible and unveiled
only because it is grounded in an ultimate mystery, whose mysteriousness rests, not upon lack of clarity,
but rather upon a superabundance of light. For what is more incomprehensible than the fact that the core
of being consists in love and that its emergence as essence and existence has no ground other than
groundless grace?52
One could ask, of course, whether this citation is philosophy and not theology – and at best it is
philosophy in the ‘third domain’-sense of Guardini hinted at earlier. The quote, however, points to an
important aspect of Balthasar’s thought, namely that being and the transcendentals, if reducible to
something primary, is reducible to the deepest essence of both created being and absolute Being
(that is: God), viz. love. To give an example of this reduction in practice, notice how Balthasar later in
TL 1 reduces truth to love: “All truth is reducible to (..) the mystery of love.” In that context he also
says that beauty is a kind of ‘groundless ground’: “Beauty, in fact, is nothing other than the
immediate salience of the groundlessness of the ground with respect to, and out of, everything that
rests upon it. It is the transparency, through the phenomenon, of the mysterious background of
being.”53 This reduction of the transcendentals to love is later in Theo-Logic deepened by theological
insights. In TL 2 Balthasar uses a notion from Gustav Siewerth, who speaks of love as “the
transcendental par excellence [German: das Transzendentale schlechthin],” and thus conceives the
good (bonum) as what is “more transcendental than being and the true”.54 Seen in the theological
light, this groundlessness shows itself to be the Unvordenklichkeit55 [“unprethinkability”] of the
mysterious divine love (especially of the Father loving the Son) which both grounds God’s inner life
and the grace given in the creation and redemption of the world. The word also points to the fact
that human thinking cannot get behind God’s love, because this love is always known as something
that transcends knowledge (Eph. 3:19). In the Epilogue Balthasar says: ““God is love” and nothing
else; in this love lies every possible form of self-expression, of truth and of wisdom. But this is a
beauty/splendor that always transcends everything we can conceive.”56 The circumincession of the
transcendentals is in other words an analogous reflection of the Divine Trinitarian loving perichōrēsis:
In God beauty, goodness and truth live and intersect in the unity of the tri-personal love of Father,
52
Balthasar, TL 1, 225.
Ibid., 223.
54
———, TL 2, 176-7.
55
Ibid., 135-7.
56
———, E, 93.
53
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Son and Holy Spirit. Not that each transcendental is ascribed univocally to the different hypostases,57
and not that the identity of the transcendentals and the persons lie in some fourth substance or
element behind the three persons, but in such a way that “the manifestation of the inner divine life
(the processions) is as such identical with the transcendentals, which are identical to each other.”58
The entrance into this fullness of the transcendentals is the same as the entrance to God’s love,
namely the epiphany of God in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of the Son. “Above all,”
says Balthasar,
we must not overlook that everything in Christ–the circumincession in him of all transcendentals, even in
their intraworldly polarity–always remains a pointer to God’s wealth of love, because he is the Word of the
Father in the Spirit in such a way that the transcendentals appearing in him, as we have shown, are the
revelation of the tri-personal vitality of God.59
To conclude this section: Divine love is ‘the ultimate word’ in Balthasar’s beauty-centered
philosophical-theological interpretation of the circumincessive transcendentals as expressions of this
love.60
Beautiful Love
Balthasar’s thought on the transcendentals and their circumincession is in my view a very promising
way to approach contemporary theology. He may be criticized for not being theoretically clear in
every instance,61 but the critic should remember that his point is just that he does not want to settle
the discussion once and for all. His thinking is always open to the greater whole that he is trying to
grasp in bits and pieces. For our topic, he could receive critical questions regarding whether truth and
beauty does not slide almost into the same thing: a phenomenological appearance of being. The
tensions in determining their precise relation to each other, as pointed to in our earlier sections,
takes us in this direction. However, again, that is also a part of Balthasar’s point: the transcendentals
are interrelated and circumincessive. The vitality of his thinking rests to a large degree on these
tensions. There may be, though, contributions by other thinkers and theologians that could help us
to illuminate what a beautiful logic may mean in an even deeper sense. I will now turn to one of
them.
In the last section, I touched upon Balthasar’s notion of the reduction of the transcendentals to
divine love as their groundless ground. This notion points to a central place for the good in describing
God. This should not mislead us, however, into saying that the good is the only divine transcendental,
and that the beautiful and the true are only some kind of derivations from this goodness. To assess
the notion of a beautiful logic in theology, the other transcendentals must also be ascribed to the
57
Balthasar defends himself on this point against Karl Rahner in the 1985-introduction to TL 1. Balthasar
underscores that “the whole divine Trinity is in the focus in all three parts of the trilogy.” ———, TL 1, 20.
58
———, E, 93.
59
Ibid., 97-8.
60
For further elaboration of this point, I refer to ———, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). See also the article by the translator of TL 1 & 2, Adrian J. Walker, "Love Alone:
Hans Urs von Balthasar As a Master of Theological Renewal," Communio: International Catholic Review 3 - Fall,
no. 32 (2005).
61
Cf. Puntel & White, Being and God, 315-17. Here he says among other things that “Von Balthasar’s are
among the most beautiful and profound texts about Being, about “the wonder at Being [die Verwunderung
über das Sein],” which he describes in highly elegant and expressive terms, although not ones that are
theoretically refined.”
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divine love. God’s being as the Trinitarian loving perichōrēsis of Father, Son and Spirit is not only
good, it is also beautiful and true. The ‘greater transcendentality’ of the good referred to in the last
section must be related primarily to the good as the act of divine love that brings the transcendentals
in creation into being.
A promising way to think of God as beauty and beautiful is found in the American Eastern Orthodox
theologian David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, a work
that according to its author quite appropriately can be read as “a kind of extended marginalum on
some page of Balthasar’s work”62. The following remarkable passage on the beauty of God is quite
illuminating for the theme of a beautiful logic and perfectly in the spirit of Balthasar:
The most elementary statement of theological aesthetics is that God is beautiful: not only that God is
beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that [..]
God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures. [..] The
beauty of God is not simply “ideal”: it is not remote, cold, characterless, or abstract, nor merely absolute,
unitary and formless. [..] God’s beauty is delight and the object of delight, the shared gaze of love that
belongs to the persons of the Trinity; it is what God beholds, what the Father sees and rejoices in the Son,
in the sweetness of the Spirit, what Son and Spirit find delightful in one another, because as Son and Spirit
of the Father they share his knowledge and love as persons. [..] [T]he Christian God, who is infinite, is also
infinitely formosus, the supereminent fullness of all form, transcendently determinate, always possessed of
his Logos. True beauty is not the idea of the beautiful, a static archetype in the “mind” of God, but is infinite
“music”, drama, art, completed in – but never “bounded” by – the termless dynamism of the Trinity’s life
[..]. And because he is beautiful, being abounds with difference: shape, variety, manifold relation. Beauty is
the distinction of the different, the otherness of the other, the true form of distance. And the Holy Spirit
who perfects divine love [...] also makes the divine joy open to the otherness of what is not divine, of
creation, without estranging it from its divine “logic”[..]. The Spirit [is] the beautifier, the one in whom the
happiness of God overflows and is perfected precisely as overflowing, and so the one who bestows
radiance, shape, clarity, and enticing splendor upon what God creates and embraces in the superabundance
of his love. And this beauty is the form of all creaturely truth; thus no other can be known as other apart
from recognition and love, analogy and desire. Delight in beauty “corresponds”; joy in beauty, when it is
truly joy, reflects the way in which God utters himself. 63
From this passage, note especially how close Hart ties beauty to God as Trinitarian love, and how
creaturely beauty is conceived as an analogical reflection of the “super-beauty” and “super-form” of
God. Note also that the joy of beauty of the Spirit is an expression of a divine “logic”, the truly good
and beautiful logic of love.64 Beauty is the form of both divine truth and of creaturely truth. Later in
the book Hart discusses the notion of ‘God beyond Being’ (with reference among others to J.-L.
Marion).65 Here he says, in a careful critique of Marion, that “love is in fact ontological, and reveals
beauty as the world’s truth: love is the original act that makes beings to be, and so the being of
62
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids,
Mich./Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 2003), 29.
63
Ibid., 177-8. The passage is shortened for purposes of presentation, although it really deserves to be read as
a whole. Some of the [] contains references to Gregory the Theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite, the Psalms of
Scripture and Jonathan Edwards.
64
By the notion “logic of love,” I do not want to say that true love is in any way deducible or fully
understandable, only that it always fully corresponds to itself. The logic of love is to be groundless giving away
of oneself, and as such, as Balthasar says: “Love loves to surprise.” That’s its logic. See Balthasar, TL 1, 211.
65
Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 229-240. References are to Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
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beings is beauty, is light.”66 In this light, it should be clear that every theology or theo-logic that fails
to see that God, the trinitarian communion of love, is beautiful, is at its very foundations non-logic.
The truth of God is not only that he exists, but that he as Trinity is as supreme loving beauty, a
beauty always giving itself away in goodness. The same goes analogically for created being, it is not
just “there” as some logical, materialistic feature; it is beautiful and gives itself away to perception.
Therefore, a sound logic (in philosophy and theology) must give room for beauty; it must be a
beautiful logic.
Conclusion
In this paper I have discussed the interplay of the transcendentals in the thought of Hans Urs von
Balthasar in order to show why we need a beautiful logic and the implications of such a notion. I first
discussed what is ‘the first word’ for Balthasar; truth or beauty? The discussion proceeded into a
discussion of the relation of philosophy and theology. My proposal was that the tensions in those
relationships are fruitful instances of the circumincession of the transcendentals, which was outlined
with a special view of the relation between beauty and truth. I then turned to the underlying ground
of the transcendentals in Balthasar’s thought (‘the ultimate word’), namely the divine Trinitarian
love, and pointed to Hart’s theology of the beauty of God as a promising way to explicate why logic
must be beautiful.
In the end, we can speak, in the light of Balthasar’s thought, not only of a beautiful logic, but also of a
logic of the beautiful, the logic of love: the eternal God the Father who gives himself by creating the
world through his Son and sends him in the incarnation for the sake of our salvation, fulfilled through
the outpouring of the Spirit, and as such shows himself to be eternal, beautiful love, received as truth
through the revelation in the Son expressing the Father: “I am the truth – the one who sees me, sees
the Father, who loved the world” (John 14:6.9; 3:16). This prayer was his last will: "Father, I want
those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory, the glory you
have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24).
66
Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 240.
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———. The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. Vol. 5, The Glory of the Lord: a Theological
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———. Epilogue. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.
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