Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was a Swiss Roman Catholic priest and theologian who wrote a critical study of Karl Barth’s theology and built his own theology around the idea that beauty is a starting point for theology, not a decoration added to it afterward.¹ Reformed writers working on theological aesthetics and on the doctrine of personhood have engaged his work directly, even where they reject his Roman Catholic commitments.^{2 3}

Life and Ministry

Von Balthasar was a Roman Catholic priest and theologian who studied Karl Barth’s dogmatics closely enough to write a critical exposition of it, and concluded that Barth “has not succeeded in really shaping and transforming Protestant theology.”¹ Where he judged Barth to have stopped short, on beauty as a properly theological category, Balthasar tried to go further in his own work.

Theological Contribution

Theological aesthetics, not aesthetic theology

Balthasar drew a distinction, since taken up by later writers on theological aesthetics, between “aesthetic theology” and “theological aesthetics.” Aesthetic theology lets “this-worldly” standards of beauty set the terms for talking about God, measuring revelation and the church against “a criterion and a measure of this-worldly, human, and cultural beauty” that properly belongs only to Christianity’s effects, not its essence.² Theological aesthetics reverses the direction: it starts from the contemplation of God’s own beauty and refuses to project “worldly, limited” conceptions of beauty back onto him.² Balthasar made the same point about the wider theological tradition he worked within: “contemporary Protestant theology nowhere deals with the beautiful as a theological category. For the time being, the only question posed by Protestants is that concerning the relationship between revelation and this-worldly beauty, certainly a justified question, but not a sufficient one.”⁴

Beauty as a transcendental

Balthasar argued that beauty belongs alongside unity, truth, and goodness as a transcendental property of being itself, asking, “May we not think of the beautiful as one of the transcendental attributes of Being as such, and thereby ascribe to the beautiful the same range of application and the same inwardly analogous form that we ascribe to the one, the true, the good?”¹ Here he followed Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas: created beauty and divine beauty are related analogically rather than univocally, so God’s own beauty defines and grounds creaturely beauty rather than the reverse.¹ Balthasar treated this as a pastoral point, not just a speculative one. Strip a culture of confidence in the beautiful, he warned, and the good loses its self-evident claim on the will, and the proofs of truth “lose their cogency,” reduced to syllogisms that “clatter away like rotary presses or computers” without capturing anyone’s assent.¹ His aesthetics was also Christ-centered: Christ, for Balthasar, is “the Word, the Image, the Expression and the Exegesis of God,” and he warned against any desire to see God more clearly than God is seen in Christ.¹

Personhood as dignity, not mere individuality

Balthasar argued that individuality alone cannot make something a person, since individual, non-personal beings exist even in the animal kingdom. What distinguishes a person, he held, is dignity.⁵ Darron Chapman’s dissertation on the concept of person in Christian theology takes up this argument, noting that later writers such as Gilles Emery have followed Balthasar in treating dignity as an essential mark of personhood, and connecting it to Thomas Aquinas’s own defense of applying the word “person” to God on the ground that “the dignity of the divine nature excels every other dignity.”³

Historical Significance

Balthasar’s main theological interlocutor was Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics he studied closely enough to publish a full critical exposition of Barth’s theology.¹ Protestant theologians working on theological aesthetics have engaged his work directly: a 2008 essay collection, Theological Aesthetics After von Balthasar, included Lee Barrett’s essay “Von Balthasar and Protestant Aesthetics: A Mutually Corrective Conversation,” which reads him from a Reformed vantage point.⁶

Related Doctrines

• Karl Barth
• Theology of Karl Barth
• Roman Catholicism
• Person
• Trinity
• Glory of God

References

1. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 1, “Introduction and Prolegomenon,” §”Historical Precedence,” 33-35: “Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) concludes that Barth ‘has not succeeded in really shaping and transforming Protestant theology.’” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 1, §“‘Theological Aesthetics’ vs. ‘Aesthetic Theology,’” 7-10. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Darron Thomas Chapman, “Boethius’ Definition Examined and Defended,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 147-148. ↩ ↩²

4. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Kenneth Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, 2nd ed., 7 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 1:55. ↩

5. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” Communio 13, no. 1 (1986): 18. ↩

6. Lee Barrett, “Von Balthasar and Protestant Aesthetics: A Mutually Corrective Conversation,” in Theological Aesthetics After von Balthasar, ed. O. V. Bychkov and James Fodor (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 97. ↩