Phenomenology and theological aesthetics: Notes on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Thought
Phenomenology and theological aesthetics:
Notes on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Thought
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology analyzes the downfall of science into techne, deprived of its necessary foundation in objective evidence. It responds to this impoverished self-understanding of science, the human being and the goals of reason themselves, unconvering in the roots of this episthemological and cultural crisis the true foundings of our understanding and praxis of human experience.
In a seemingly different arena, the possibility of religious experience has been object of a sharp criticism that has uncovered and denounced its ideological social function, the uncouncious constitution of its symbols and categories, and its denial of the worldliness of the human being, escaping to another ficticious world. After its own troubled polemics with modern reason the last century, christian religion has come to understand its role in this dialogue, not as that of an enemy, but in any case, of a possible companion or inspiration for the quests of humanization that trigerred those critics. Nonetheless, catholic christianism still faces some aporetic consequences of this critic understanding of its faith, as well as the vital questioning from those to whom religion says nothing, or apparently offers nothing but another ethical proposal. This complex situation, due to, for example, different local developments, is not reductible to oversimplified oppositions or labels.
The swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) stays in the crossroad of these contemporary interpelations and reaffirms: it is possible to experience
God, and to give a reasonable account of this experience. Following the first volume of his The Glory of the Lord – A theological aestheticsi we can point out some of the central challenges he seeked to face. (1) Is it possible to speak about certitude and truth in the space of faith? About the misleading “either …or” approach to faith and
Notes on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Thought
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology analyzes the downfall of science into techne, deprived of its necessary foundation in objective evidence. It responds to this impoverished self-understanding of science, the human being and the goals of reason themselves, unconvering in the roots of this episthemological and cultural crisis the true foundings of our understanding and praxis of human experience.
In a seemingly different arena, the possibility of religious experience has been object of a sharp criticism that has uncovered and denounced its ideological social function, the uncouncious constitution of its symbols and categories, and its denial of the worldliness of the human being, escaping to another ficticious world. After its own troubled polemics with modern reason the last century, christian religion has come to understand its role in this dialogue, not as that of an enemy, but in any case, of a possible companion or inspiration for the quests of humanization that trigerred those critics. Nonetheless, catholic christianism still faces some aporetic consequences of this critic understanding of its faith, as well as the vital questioning from those to whom religion says nothing, or apparently offers nothing but another ethical proposal. This complex situation, due to, for example, different local developments, is not reductible to oversimplified oppositions or labels.
The swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) stays in the crossroad of these contemporary interpelations and reaffirms: it is possible to experience
God, and to give a reasonable account of this experience. Following the first volume of his The Glory of the Lord – A theological aestheticsi we can point out some of the central challenges he seeked to face. (1) Is it possible to speak about certitude and truth in the space of faith? About the misleading “either …or” approach to faith and