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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar can be described 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.
2 Word and Revelation, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 162Google Scholar.
3 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), 59Google Scholar.
4 The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Vol 1, Fession, JosephS.J., & Riches, John (eds), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 72Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as GL.
5 Sherry, Patrick, Spirit and Beauty, 21Google Scholar.
6 GL I:431.
7 Dupré, Louis, ‘The Glory of the Lord: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetics’, Communio, XVI (1989), 386Google Scholar.
8 Quoted by Brown, Frank Burch, Religious Aesthetics. A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), 121Google Scholar.
9 Institutes 3.10.2n4.
10 Institutes 1.11.12.
11 See T. F. Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man.
12 Brown, , Religious Aesthetics, 122Google Scholar.
13 GL I:18.
14 Riches, John, ‘The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Part 1’, Theobgy, 45 (1972), 565Google Scholar.
15 GL I:388.
16 GL I:70.
17 GL I:388.
18 For an excellent exposition of the Biblical understanding of the beauty and glory of God, see Sherry, , Spirit and Beauty, 61ffGoogle Scholar.
19 On Virginity, xi. Cf, his Catechetical Oration vi.
20 Hom. 13 in Cant.
21 Divine Names, iv. 7. E.T. by Luibheid, Colm, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Classics in Western Spirituality, London, 1987), 76–77Google Scholar.
22 Sermon 241, 1–2; Cf. City of God, xi. 4.
23 GL II: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. ST la. iv. 2; xiv. 6.
24 Symposium, 211.
25 Symposium, 209 e 5–210 a.4. Cf 210 e 1–2.
26 GL I:121–2.
27 See von Balthasar, , ‘Theology and Aesthetic’, Communio, Vol. 8 (1), 62–68Google Scholar.
28 Republic, Bk. VII, 529c-e.
29 Phaedrus, 250d.
30 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.
31 GL I:151, 153.
32 GL III:105ff.
33 GL IV:28.
34 GL IV:31–2.
35 GL IV:31.
36 GL I:430.
37 GL IV:323.
38 Word and Revelation, 58.
39 GL I:452.
40 GL I:449.
41 GL I:431.
42 GL I:464.
43 See ‘Theology and Aesthetic’, Communio, III (1), 1981Google Scholar.
44 GL I:485.
45 Word and Revelation, 151.
46 GL I:29.
47 Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume II: The Dramatis Penonae: Man in God. E.T. by Harrison, Graham (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1976/1990), 26Google Scholar.
48 Cf. Sermon xxxvii, 6.
49 GL I:124.
50 O'Donnell, John, S. J., , Hans Urs von Balthasar, (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1992), 31'32Google Scholar.
51 Balthasar, ‘Theology and Aesthetics’, Ibid., 63.
52 GL IV: 115.
53 GL IV:115, Cf. fn. 21.
54 Riches, John, ‘Balthasar and the Analysis of Faith’, in The Analogy of Beauty, Riches, John (ed.), 50Google Scholar.
55 Ibid., 50.
56 GL I:181.
57 GL I:131ff.
58 O'Donnell, , Hans Urs von Balthasar, 23Google Scholar.
59 GL I:134–5.
60 GL I:366.
61 GL I:494–5.
62 GL I:38.
63 GL I:607.
64 The von Balthasar Reader, Kehl, Medard & Löser, Werner (eds), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 20Google Scholar.
65 GL IV:317.
66 GL IV:321.
67 Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968), 17Google Scholar.
68 Ibid., 59–60.
69 Ibid., 101.
70 Ibid., 162.
71 ‘Balthasar and Rahner’, in Analogy of Beauty, 20.
72 O'Donaghue, Noel, ‘A Theology of Beauty’, Analogy of Beauty, 6Google Scholar.
73 Gunton, Colin, The One, The Three, and The Many (Cambridge: CUP), 139Google Scholar.
74 O'Donaghue, , ‘Theology of Beauty’, in Analogy of Beauty, 8Google Scholar.
