
“that which brings fulfilment can be understood only together with what it fulfils.” ( )

“This is therefore the encounter of the divine agape with the praying eros of the one who seeks wisdom-a thought that is in accordance both with the piety of the Psalms and with Platonist philosophy.” ( ) “this freedom of appearance is an essential element of the beautiful. “To have an inkling of the divine, to adore it from afar, to learn to be silent before it and to allow it to hold sway” ( ) You can easily search the subject of theological aesthetics to access an assortment of useful resources and perspectives from a variety of pastors and theologians. With the Logos edition the reader has an abundance of resources that offer applicable and insightful material for their study. It will find its strange and unexpected fulfillment in the new Covenant. The vision of the transcendent glory of God which is developed in the later writings is only fragmentary. In the 500 years before Christ, the Covenant relation is more of an idea than reality. There is no final version of God’s glory in the Old Testament.

But the breaking of that relationship by Israel means that in the later books of the Old Testament, the divine glory is seen in God’s willingness to bear with his people in the dark side of their history. Starting with the theophanies of the Patriarchal period, it shows how such glory is most fully expressed in the graciousness of the Covenant relationship between God and Israel. This volume initiates von Balthasar’s study of the biblical vision and understanding of God’s glory. Logos Research Subscription for Schools.This first step is not to master the materials of perception by imposing our own categories on them but an attitude of service to the object” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect, 1965).

The first desideratum for seeing objectively is the ‘letting be’ of God’s self-revelation. As Balthasar himself would write a few years later, only “such a stance can perceive the divine as such, without obscuring it beforehand by an instrumental relationship to the cosmos (which, imperfect, calls for divine completion) or to man (who, still more imperfect and lost in sin, requires a savior). At the core of this project is a re-thinking of God’s self-disclosure in light of the beautiful, a move that reverses the modern priority of the subject while retrieving subjectivity as reception of divine glory. Synthesizing dogmatics and fundamental theology, Balthasar shows how Christ himself is the form of revelation as well as its content.

Seeing the Form (1961) is the opening volume of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, the first part of his magnum opus, the Trilogy.
