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

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix PrefACe ANd ACkNowledgmeNtS in this age of interpretation it is all but impossible to make a credible claim without laying out the entire hermeneutic process of arriving at it, which often means going back to the roots. This task becomes increasingly difficult as the postmodern critique subverts the traditional modern rationalist techniques of interpretation, as well as the modern systems of thought: hence our renewed interest in retrieving our premodern roots. our condition is also characterized by two great losses. We suffer from the loss of the aesthetic element, which has been stifled by science, technology, and formal logic. our longing for the lost element of beauty renews interest in aesthetics. The equally profound loss of the divine dimension of reality once again generates interest in theological topics. The present study combines all these areas of contemporary interest by reanalyzing the retrieval of theological aesthetics from premodern thought by hans Urs von Balthasar. no such project has previously been undertaken, because scholars who possess the linguistic skills to tackle ancient and medieval material —classicists and medievalists—rarely are interested in, or possess an extensive knowledge of, contemporary philosophical, hermeneutic, and theological issues. on the other hand, the scholars who possess the latter rarely have the linguistic skills required to carry out a detailed analysis of ancient and medieval texts in original languages. The current project acquired its present shape gradually, starting with the classicistmedievalist approach of textual analysis and extending into contemporary theoretical areas as the deficiencies of the interpretive techniques practiced in present-day classicist and medievalist circles became obvious. More specifically, this project started as an attempt to disentangle the conceptual issue of ancient and medieval “aesthetics.” An interest in the premodern history of aesthetics was generated at the beginning x - Preface and Acknowledgments of the twentieth century in view of the importance of the academic discipline of aesthetics at that time. Presently, it continues to be fueled by the nostalgia for our premodern roots that follows the deconstruction of modern rationalism. however, studies on ancient and medieval aesthetics available at the inception of the project seemed to lack conceptual coherence and to many appeared anachronistic, given the modern origin of the discipline. one of the most coherent approaches to the question of aesthetics in ancient and medieval traditions, surprisingly, came from hans Urs von Balthasar, who examined the issue not as part of an academic study of aesthetics, but in the context of his discussion of philosophical and systematic theology. in their quest for ancient and medieval aesthetics, earlier academic studies had tried to pull together scattered ancient and medieval philosophical theories and to find unity among them based on the unified structure of the modern discipline, which includes art, beauty, and the mechanism of sense perception as its necessary components. often these areas do not belong together in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and such contemporary studies become discordant collections of notes on ancient psychology, theory of art, and definitions of beauty. von Balthasar, by contrast, attempted to find the “unifying center” for ancient and medieval theories that would naturally emerge from the tradition itself. The ancient and medieval insight that the origin of the world is divine became, for him, that unifying center: the insight that reality is based on certain eternal principles, and that we can directly perceive these principles, or the divine, that radiate from its depth. it is the radiation of these eternal principles, as well as our ability to perceive them directly, that the ancients and medievals associated with the type of experience we now call aesthetic (the beautiful, the sublime, etc.). The study of ancient and medieval texts, moreover, reveals that even the terms used by the ancients and medievals for this type of experience were much broader than their modern counterparts and extended into areas other than aesthetic. Thus what we call the aesthetic (for example, the beautiful) to the ancient and medieval mind represented some universal aspect of different types of human experience , rather than forming an area of its own, as it does in many recent aesthetic theories. it was thus logical to follow von Balthasar’s lead and approach the question from this direction. The renewed interest in the question of theological aesthetics as a whole added to the appeal of this direction. in part because of von Preface and Acknowledgments - xi Balthasar’s efforts, theological aesthetics has become an important contemporary discipline...