Theological Aesthetics & a Pedagogy of Love

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988)

I wrote a piece for Transpositions in which I summarize, as it were, what I think is at stake in Hans Urs von Balthasar's writings on theological aesthetics. Go here for the full piece. Here is an excerpt (though I think perhaps my favorite part is the bio note that includes Phaedra's interpretation of the matter).

663 pages of writing on theological aesthetics, then, yields a surprising result: von Balthasar is much less interested in “aesthetics,” even less so in the arts, than he is in love. Put otherwise, von Balthasar finds theological aesthetics to be a proper starting point for theology inasmuch as it allows him to speak about beauty, which for him rightly pushes the discipline of theology to confront the twin movement of beholding and of being enraptured by the Triune beauty—which again brings him back around to love, to desire.