Hans Urs von Balthasar – Theological Aesthetics Against Dialectical Reason
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Antagonist
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), a Swiss theologian, was Rahner’s great antagonist. Both were Jesuits (Balthasar later left the order), both shaped the twentieth century. But their paths were fundamentally different.
While Rahner carried out the transcendental turn – reading Thomas through Kant and Heidegger – Balthasar went another way: back to the Church Fathers, to patristics, to gestalt. His monumental work “The Glory of the Lord” (1961-1969, 7 volumes) develops a “theological aesthetics” – a theology that starts from the beautiful, not from the true or the good.
“The Glory of the Lord”: Beauty Before Truth
Balthasar’s basic thesis: modern theology has forgotten beauty. It argues, proves, explains – but it does not show. It has lost sight of the “glory” of God.
The Bible speaks of the “glory” (kabod, doxa) of God – his radiant presence, which both attracts and terrifies. This glory is not derivable, not demonstrable – it shows itself. Whoever sees it is seized; whoever does not see it, no arguments will help.
The Critique of Hegel
Balthasar’s critique of Hegel: the system “swallows” the concrete. The dialectic works with general concepts – being, nothing, becoming, essence, concept. But the concrete, the singular, the unrepeatable gets lost in it.
The Incarnation – that God became human in this man Jesus of Nazareth – is not derivable, not necessary. It is fact, event, gestalt. Whoever wants to press it into a system misses it.
What Is Justified in This Critique – And What Is Not
Balthasar has a point: there is a tendency in some systematic philosophies to dissolve the particular in the universal, to degrade the concrete to a mere “example.” Against this tendency his insistence on the singular is important.
But does this hit Hegel? Hegel knows the individual – it is a central moment of the logic of the concept. The Universal-Particular-Individual structure shows precisely how the universal realizes itself in the individual, not how it extinguishes the individual. For Hegel, the individual is not a “mere example,” but the concrete reality in which the universal first becomes real.
Balthasar’s critique hits rather an abbreviated Hegel – the Hegel of the handbooks, who exercises systemic compulsion and conceptual violence. Whether it hits the real Hegel is another question.
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