“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.”

Das ist sie, schlafend, versunken in die eigenen Finsternisse, in die eigene Herrlichkeit.

“For all the darkness to be found in von Balthasar’s Apokalypse, a world in which the human being lives in the shadow of total death without the Christian God, beauty has not died. Well into his theological career, von Balthasar begins a massive theological project: the trilogy (his “Triptych”), of which the first word is beauty. If Apokalypse and Glory of the Lord are to be viewed together, then the first word of the latter is a response to the first word of the former: beauty responds to terror.”

“Why is the first part of this synthesis called The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit)? Because it concerned, first, with learning to see God’s revelation and because God can be known only in his Lordliness and sublimity (Herr-heit and Hehr-heit), in what Israel called Kabod and the New Testament gloria, something that can be recognized under all the incognitos of human nature and the Cross. This means that God does not come primarily as a teacher for us (“true”), as a useful “redeemer” for us (“good”), but to display and to radiate himself, the splendor of his eternal triune love in that “disinterestedness” that true love has in common with true beauty. For the glory of God the world was created; through it and for its sake the world is also redeemed. And only the person who is touched by a ray of this glory and has an incipient sensibility for what disinterested love is can learn to see the presence of divine love in Jesus Christ. Aisthesis, the act of perception, and Aistheton, the particular thing perceived (radiant love), together inform the object of theology. The “glorious” corresponds on the theological plane to what the transcendental “beautiful” is on the philosophical plane. But for the great thinkers of the West (from Homer and Plato via Augustine and Thomas down to Goethe and Hölderlin, Schelling and Heidegger), beauty is the last comprehensive attribute of all-embracing being as such, its last, mysterious radiance, which makes it loved as a whole despite the terrifying reality it may hide for the individual existent. Through the splendor of being, from within its primal depths, the strange signs of the biblical events (whose very contrariness to all human expectations, unique, incapable of either invention or dissolution by man, reveals their supraworldly origin) shine out with that glory of God whose praise and recognition fills the Scriptures, the Church’s liturgy and the mottoes of the saintly founders religious orders.”

Liebe