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  • The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy by Matthew Levering
  • James J. Buckley
The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction to His Trilogy. By Matthew Levering. Foreword by Cyril O’Regan. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019. Pp. xxii + 253. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8132-3175-4.

As the title indicates, Levering’s book is a contribution to the still-growing literature on Hans Urs von Balthasar—an innovative contribution, as we will see. What the title does not suggest to readers is the equally important contribution Levering’s book makes to a larger argument over how different sorts of Catholic theologians can help (including by disputation) each other in the twenty-first century—specifically, theologians sympathetic to Thomas Aquinas (like Levering) and those more sympathetic to a kind of post-Thomist ressourcement (like Balthasar). I am deeply sympathetic to each of Levering’s aims—providing a charitable reading of Balthasar and doing so in service of a theological project that holds together ressourcement theology and Aquinas. However, by this review’s end, I will suggest that Levering’s book also embodies a tension between these two important contributions—a tension that is as helpful as Levering’s innovative reading of Balthasar’s achievement in the book’s title.

Before making this case, it should be said that this is an eminently readable book. As Cyril O’Regan’s helpful Foreword puts it, “Levering draws attention away from how much he actually knows and generously invites the far less learned reader to be a co-traveler on a voyage of discovery” (xvii). Scholars should value the book for the bibliographies alone. But this book will be readable by undergraduate majors and graduate students—and, perhaps even more importantly nowadays, the book is readable by Levering’s peers in theological fields other than systematics who are trying to figure out what in God’s name systematic theologians nowadays are arguing about. It is a remarkable rhetorical accomplishment—and, as O’Regan also puts it, “a far more Thomistic than Balthasarian pedagogy” (xvii).

Levering bookends his treatment of Balthasar with an introduction and epilogue that describe his aims. On the side of introducing Balthasar, Levering’s focus is on “setting forth in painstaking detail the concrete arguments that von Balthasar makes” (8) in the three introductory volumes of each series within Balthasar’s trilogy—the aesthetics, dramatic, and logic. Levering knows that a full-scale introduction (like those offered by Aidan [End Page 639] Nichols and Edward Oakes [13–14]) would involve much more than the volumes of the trilogy he covers here. But—and here is a transition to the second achievement of this book—this introduction (unlike others) is “for the theologically educated readers who mistrust von Balthasar [like some Thomists] or who mistrust Balthasar’s critics [like some Balthasarians]” (15). This is “an” (not “the”) introduction. And it is as much an introduction to “Catholic theology today” as it is to von Balthasar’s theology.

How then to introduce Balthasar’s achievement in light of this end? Levering’s strategy is ingenious. Focus on the first volume of each multi-volumed part of Balthasar’s trilogy—the aesthetics, the theodrama, and the theologic—rather than the subsequent volumes within each part which raise their own critical issues (15). Then read each of these volumes as a response to one major modern thinker: Kant (for the aesthetic), Hegel (for the theodrama), and Nietzsche (for the theologic). Then show that each first volume of Balthasar’s trilogy can be read as what Levering calls a Kantian critique of Kant, a Hegelian critique of Hegel, and a Nietzschean critique of Nietzsche (17)—I would say, a critical absorption of Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche into Balthasar’s Trinitarian and Christological theology. Thus, each of Levering’s three parts (embracing the three parts of Balthasar’s trilogy) is similarly structured: an introduction to the key thesis; an overview of relevant texts by Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche; a survey of the first volumes of each of the three parts of Balthasar’s trilogy showing how...

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