The approach based on engaging ancient or medieval texts using the modern notion of aesthetics as a starting point of the dialogue still faces a challenge: in order to proceed with a dialogue, one must delimit the field, which, in the case of aesthetics, has been traditionally extremely broad. Is it possible to establish certain common characteristics of the concept of the aesthetic that have developed in the Western European philosophical tradition since the time when the principles of aesthetics as a separate discipline were formulated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Baumgarten?¹ Aesthetics as a separate discipline appears against...

In view of the general importance of the discipline of aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as of its universalization by such thinkers as Nietzsche, it seems only logical for contemporary theology to take the aesthetic seriously. Yet the most obvious observation is that this is precisely what does not happen. Perhaps the most notable figure in contemporary thought who noticed and lamented the loss of the aesthetic dimension in theology, as well as realized the need to restore it, is Hans Urs von Balthasar.¹

As was mentioned above, von Balthasar’s project to restore the aesthetic element...

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...

In the previous chapters, von Balthasar’s project of interpreting ancient and medieval texts in terms of aesthetics was shown in general to be hermeneutically valid. It was also shown that his exegesis of ancient and medieval texts could be improved upon. The re-examination of von Balthasar’s extensive project by fine-tuning his hermeneutic approach, which is undertaken in Part Two of this study, is well justified. Von Balthasar’s construction of theological aesthetics includes an attempt to show, through a careful interpretation of traditional texts, how an earlier tradition can be seen as a precursor to contemporary ideas. In his own readings...

Our first ancient author, Plato, presents a challenge before we even start: to assess his legacy in aesthetics in one chapter is all but impossible. Therefore we will limit our study to a rather narrow task: Plato’s contribution to the idea of aesthetic experience as revealing, where ‘aesthetic’ is understood as described in the preceding chapters. As will become clear from what follows, Plato is one of the main sources of inspiration for von Balthasar’s discussion of theological aesthetics in Antiquity precisely as someone who noticed and described the revealing aspect of worldly beauty. However, with so much having been...

A careful analysis of ancient and medieval texts shows that despite the disappearance of the Old and Middle Stoa as a continuous textual and school tradition, Stoic ideas did play an important role in ancient and medieval aesthetic thought. The surviving texts fit well within the textual tradition under consideration in this study. At the same time, as will become clear from what follows, von Balthasar fails to present this tradition adequately, perhaps for the reasons outlined immediately below. The Stoic tradition in aesthetics thus deserves a particularly close look.

The presence of what a present-day scholar would call “aesthetic...

Augustine is of utmost importance, not only for von Balthasar, but for the whole history of theological aesthetics. However, the enormity of Augustine’s contribution to Western culture, as well as the existence of a vast secondary literature about him, makes this author difficult to approach. As was the case with Plato, the only way to focus the discussion on a small number of contexts is by limiting the task to the question whether concrete aesthetic experience in Augustine appears as revealing. Augustine presents a unique case in another respect: as a figure that is transitional from the ancient pagan to...

Despite Augustine’s tremendous contribution to theological aesthetics, he remains, with respect to aesthetics, an “ancient” author. Augustine uses aesthetics almost exclusively for apologetic purposes, with the simple aim of revealing the existence of the divine principle to the general observer: the transcendent divine principle, to be sure, but by no means a specifically Christian one. Augustine, of course, does develop a specifically Christian, Trinitarian, systematic theology, but as the contexts show, aesthetics remains in the purview of his fundamental theology.¹ It is interesting that aesthetics shares a similar fate in the hands of even later medieval authors, such as Anselm....