As part of Holy Week, I want to blog each day. I am going to finish this week, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, as part of my holy week observance. Reading von Balthasar is simultaneously an act of intellect and devotion, a quickening of mind and spirit, thought and prayer combined into one. In sharing with you, I hope that I can share “in the form” through faith that takes us into the heights of participation into what really is.

We live in a day where being has been collapsed into becoming. Transcendence is sustained, if at all, only to keep immanence “open” to what is yet to come. History has become a larger category than God. No place is this more evident than the loss of the Beautiful or Beauty as a theological category. Ironically, the American holiness movement has one of the few Protestant groups (if we truly are “Protestant”) to sustain a discourse of “beauty.” In pictures from the past, one can often see banners over sanctuaries that would proclaim “Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.” Aaron Friberg’s reconstruction of H. Orton Wiley’s First Pasadena College “Presidential Address” (google Friberg and Didache to find his excellent article) shows how theological aesthetics were at the core of the early Wiley’s understanding of Christian liberal arts education. As modernist Methodist influences came into the holiness movement, the movement moved in Kantian directions in which theology and the Christian life became understand, not in aesthetic, but moral terms – moral duties to the “Law”. Von Balthasar’s work helps us to return to the category of theological aesthetics from early 20th century holiness Romanticism to reclaim the Christological focus of the beauty of holiness.

Von Balthasar begins in the “Foreword” to speak of his mission in this volume, a mission that still stands important today in the emptying of theology to its political implications as a variation of its modernist, Kantian roots: “We here attempt to develop a Christian theology in the light of the third transcendental, that is to say: to complement the vision of the true and the good with that of the beautiful (pulchrum). The introduction will show how impoverished Christian thinking has been by the growing loss of this perspective which one so strongly informed theology. It is . . . our intent . . . to restore theology to a main artery which it has abandoned. But this is in no sense to imply that the aesthetic perspective ought now to dominate theology in the place of the logical and the ethical. It is true, however, that the transcendental are inseparable, and that neglecting one can only have a devastating effect on the others” (p. 9).

He goes on to entice us, “If all beauty is objectively located at the intersection of two moments which Thomas calls species and lumen (‘form’ and ‘splendour’), then the encounter of these is characterized by the two movements of beholding and of being enraptured” (p. 10). Von Balthasar here challenges us to see and to participate in Beauty, not as a form of aestheticism, to be participate joyfully in what really is – a joy that is often taken from us by the “solemnity” of the modernist commitments to the “true” and the “good” or “justice.” This morning the little Swahili girl beheld and became enraptured – the rest of us were too still too uncomfortable in the awkwardness of different languages, social groupings, differences, and so on. Yet in the movement of the beauty of the music singing praises to God, she beheld, and in beholding saw the joy that really was there and became enraptured in the movement of the Palm Sunday procession. She witnessed to the very Reality that von Balthasar seeks to make intelligible to us in his volume.