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Seeing the Self As Beautiful: Hans Urs Von Balthasar on Beauty and the Divine Exegesis of the Self KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 49 No. 3 Seeing the Self as Beautiful: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty and the Divine Exegesis of the Self PARK Shin-Young, Ph.D. Student, Systematic & Philosophical Theology Graduate Theological Union, USA I. Introduction II. Seeing the Form (Gestalt) and the Divine Exegesis of the Self III. Seeing [the] Gestalt Christi, the Exegesis of God, and Redeeming Beauty IV. Seeing the Self through the Mother’s Loving Gaze V. Conclusion Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology Vol. 49 No. 3 (2017. 9), 215-235 DOI: 10.15757/kpjt.2017.49.3.009 216 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 49 No. 3 Abstract This article is an aesthetic and theological inquiry into the self. The author draws on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics to explore how one perceives oneself in seeing the form—or, more specifically, how the aesthetic experience of the formal archetype, the Christ form (Gestalt Christi) shapes the self-identity of the seer. The article argues that seeing the form is an act of knowing God and the self, for one awakens to consciousness by seeing God’s loving gaze viewing the self as beautiful, which is true self-knowledge. Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt played a key role in the theological aesthetics that he developed in the first volume of his trilogy The Glory of the Lord, and his work reveals in what sense seeing the form is receiving the divine exegesis of the self. The Gestalt Christi, the concrete analogia entis, offers a vision for perceiving the beauty of the self through Christ’s mission, and self-identity as known and revealed in Christ’s “I-Thou relation” to the Father. Finally, Balthasar’s use of the analogy of a mother smiling at her child in Love Alone Is Credible manifests how the truth of the very existence of the self is awakened and realized by the primordial experience of the mother’s love, which originates in God. Keywords Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theological Aesthetics, Self-Exegesis, Mother’s Smile, Analogy Seeing the Self as Beautiful: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty and the Divine Exegesis of the Self DOI: 10.15757/kpjt.2017.49.3.009 217 Ⅰ. INTRODUCTION The theological aesthetics of the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar triggered a revival of the appreciation of the beautiful in the theological inquiry.1 His notion of form, which is fused with Gestalt, is filtered through German idealism and Thomism, has Christ at the center, and addresses the epistemological and ontological condition of the self in relation to the world and ultimately to God. Christ, who is a concrete analogia entis, is at the heart of Balthasar’s theology of beauty, for Christ is both the archetype of creation and the Gestalt of God, the exegesis of the Father; Christ manifests the divine exegesis to the self when the self sees the Son. My interest in von Balthasar’s work lies in his notion of the form (Gestalt) and how one perceives oneself in seeing the form: to be more specific, how the aesthetic experience of the formal archetype, Christ form (Gestalt Christi), shapes self-identity of the seer. In this paper, I will attempt to show that seeing the form is an act of knowing of God and the self, for one awakens to consciousness by seeing God’s loving gaze seeing the self as beautiful, which is true self-knowledge. I will begin by exploring how Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt played a key role in the theological aesthetics that he developed in one of the volumes of his trilogy, The Glory of the Lord, in order to grasp in what sense seeing the form is receiving the divine exegesis of the self. Next, I will discuss how seeing the Gestalt Christi, the concrete analogia entis, offers a vision for perceiving the beauty of the self by exploring Christ’s mission and self- identity as known and revealed in his “I-Thou relation” to the Father. Finally, I will draw on Balthasar’s use of the analogy of a mother’s smile at her child in Love Alone Is Credible, in order to examine how the truth of the very existence of the self is awakened and realized by the 1 James Fodor, Theological Aesthetics After Von Balthasar (New York: Routledge, 2016), xiii. Balthasar’s retrieval of theological aesthetics derives from his diagnosis of the loss of beauty in the contemporary theological inquiry as Fodor claims, “aesthetics is damaging to both aesthetics and theology. Whereas disconnecting beauty from the true and the good means that aesthetics loses it roots as a philosophical discipline, banishing aesthetics from theology results in the loss of a vital area of human experience that has always been a way of connecting with the divine.” 218 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 49 No. 3 primordial experience of the mother’s love, which originates in God. II. SEEING THE FORM (GESTALT) AND THE DIVINE EXEGESIS OF THE SELF Two inseparable poles, namely, subjective faith (perception of the form) and objective revelation (content of the form), are grounded in Balthasar’s aesthetic inquiry. Following Thomas Aquinas, Balthasar delineates the dual structure of two expressions: the discipline of the form (the root of the Latin formosa, meaning ‘beautiful,’ is forma) and of glory.2 For Balthasar, form (Gestalt) is fundamentally regarded as material and particular, for it is both “a sign and appearing of a depth and a fullness that, in themselves and in an abstract sense, remain beyond both our reach and our vision.”3 He further describes form as follows: The form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed, and this manifestation and bestowal reveal themselves to us as being something infinitely and inexhaustibly valuable and fascinating. The appearance of the form, as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths.4 2 Oliver Davies, “The Theological Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. T. Oakes SJ and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 133. 3 Han Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form (New York: T&T Clark, 1982), 1:115. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetic I is cited hereafter as CL followed by the page number. See also, Shin-Young Park, “‘Self- Love of Selfless Eternal Love’: Holy Narcissism in Balthasar’s Christological Aesthetics,” Korean Presbyterian Journal of Theology 47(2015), 138. Shin Young observes that “The inner reality of Gestalt, manifesting itself through an external medium, is central to Balthasar’s idea of beauty.” 4 Ibid. Seeing the Self as Beautiful: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty and the Divine Exegesis of the Self 219 This visible manifestation of nonappearing depths is the concrete structure of being, which reveals that God opens up Godself by rendering being as form and enables it to give off in turn its own glory.5 Although Balthasar begins with “a theory of vision” as an exercise in aesthetic perception in the Kantian sense, in the second category of the dual structure of the beautiful, the radiating glory, Balthasar moves beyond the subjective idealism of the Kantian tradition that considers the transcendental as a prior condition of possibilities for all knowledge and experience of the world.6 Instead, he places his notion of splendor within the classical tradition, from the Greeks to the Romantic revival. In this tradition, Being (the absolute) has an interior attractiveness or splendor that is particularly connected to the theme of eros as the active principle of longing.7 This reshapes his understanding of the ground of faith as a “movement” of the soul by locating it firmly in “the divine initiative.”8 As Balthasar notes, “Christian faith is not merely idealistic; it is rather, an enthusiasm which derives from and is appropriate to actual realistic Being.”9 This is because, for Balthasar, Christian eros and Christian beauty are revealed in the divine self-manifestation in the specific form of Christ, which is a higher plane where Plato’s idealistic metaphysics and Aristotle’s causa et finis realism come together.10 The Christian eros of faith, as “a movement of the entire person, leading away from himself through the vision to the invisible God,” may employ the language of “opening” to the divine rather than “closing.”11 For Balthasar, Dante’s confessions when he meets with the destination of his love, Beatrice, in the earthly paradise is the aesthetic center of the commedia, similar to his own conviction that earthly beauty must be open to the divine glory to be saved.12 As Balthasar 5 Angelo Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Grand Rapids, MI: William b. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 39. 6 D. C. Schindler, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical investigation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 352. 7 Davies, “The Theological Aesthetics,” 134. 8 Ibid. 9 GL, 1:120. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 1:118. 12 Christopher D. Denny, A Generous Symphony: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Literary 220 KOREA PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY Vol. 49 No. 3 nicely puts in, “the thought of the eyes, smile and even laugh of Beatrice was enough to lead Dante to her; but the sight of her leads him to the vision of God.”13 Dante’s confessions allow him to be ready to experience a new intimacy with Beatrice through their journey to paradise and Beatrice’s heavenly joy, and finally her laugh (riso) lifts Dante “ever-closer to God.”14 Balthasar explains this intimacy in terms of freedom, not of slavery.
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