Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar

3. Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Aesthete and the Hermeneute

78 ChAPter 3 hans Urs von Balthasar The Aesthete and the hermeneute having established that von Balthasar’s understanding of the aesthetic —as something immediately sensed that has the capacity to reveal the transcendent or the “unseen” through a direct intuition or “seeing ”—is typical of the german idealist tradition and its successors, we come to the observation that is crucial for the present study. Although his view of aesthetic experience is essentially modern, he claims (in GL2 and GL4) to have retrieved his understanding of the aesthetic from several ancient and medieval texts, thus asserting, contrary to the typical restrictive position within the historical school (the “historicists”), that some key aesthetic (in the modern sense of the term) issues were already being discussed in antiquity and the Middle Ages, long before they were articulated by Baumgarten and kant. like some key elements of von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, the very idea of going back to the preReformation tradition comes from Barth. Barth says that by referring to beauty “we reach back to the pre-Reformation tradition of the church,” in particular to such Patristic and medieval authors as Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Anselm of canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas.1 noting Barth’s proposal to go back to the pre-Reformation tradition (GL1 54), von Balthasar calls it a “decisive breakthrough” in Barth’s dogmatics: “if his call to return to pre-Reformation theology inspires such trust, it is because he claims for his theology only those elements of Patristic and scholastic thought which can be justified from 1. see CD ii/1, 651, 656, 661. According to kerr (BEM 8), Barth, finding no roots for the concept of beauty in Protestant theology, goes back to the Patristic and scholastic tradition. The Aesthete and the hermeneute - 79 revelation itself ” (GL1 56). it is precisely pre-Reformation theology that inspires Barth’s approach of attaining an interior form—the main task of von Balthasar’s theological approach as well—through “tranquil, attentive contemplation” (GL1 56). According to von Balthasar, Barth’s call to return to the study of pre-Reformation texts is important not only for contemporary Protestant theology, which still has no place for beauty, but also for the attempt within the catholic tradition to restore the lost aesthetic element in theology. von Balthasar, of course, greatly expands Barth’s project by including not only christian but also ancient pagan texts. once again, by going back to the pre-modern tradition in aesthetics , von Balthasar hopes to rescue both aesthetics and theology: the former , by helping it overcome its narrowing into an autonomous and overly technical discipline, at the expense of the loss of “wonder” at reality, its original inspiration; the latter, by making it, again, more experiencebased , and thus attractive and convincing, rather than a collection of “scientific” methods. such a move can also be interpreted as an attempt to counter the nihilism of postmodernity. on the one hand, this move would be a shift from a theology based on a “system”—the main object of postmodern attacks—to a more “organic” and flexible hermeneutic model . on the other hand, it would provide a more positive view of reality by drawing attention to the revelatory nature of reality, with a mystery at its core—as opposed to an empty structure of the “trace.” in general, the value of von Balthasar’s move to the pre-modern seems clear. however, in view of the variety of existing approaches to the hermeneutics of ancient and medieval texts described in our introduction, the concrete aspects of his hermeneutic approach still must be clarified, because they can either validate or discredit his whole project. in addition, the main task of the current study—to re-examine von Balthasar’s analysis of ancient and medieval aesthetic texts—automatically involves a judgment on the appropriateness of his hermeneutic strategies. Further, as we have already noted, in many ways von Balthasar’s “aesthetics” is just another name for his theological hermeneutics. The way he handles premodern texts makes this clear, for he not only extracts from them the idea of aesthetic as revelatory, but he does this in a way that is essentially aesthetic, which is exactly the way he, as a systematic theologian, handles scriptural texts. Therefore, an assessment of his hermeneutics is at the same time an assessment of his aesthetics: one of our central tasks. so 80 -The contemporary horizon...