Broken Open by Beauty: Art and Metaphysics in the Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The work of the influential Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) has become a common point of reference in discussing the relationship of theology and the arts. However, the full significance of his theological aesthetics for both the emerging field of theology and the arts, as well as for interdisciplinary conversation with contemporary art and theory, remains to be unfolded. Indeed, his continued relevance to theological aesthetics has been called into question from a number of angles. Taking heed of such criticisms while ultimately moving beyond them, this project contends that Balthasar’s theo-aesthetics, when taken together with his theological dramatics and theo-logic, yield a theologically informed phenomenology of the work of art with rich implications for postmodern and contemporary theologies of art. This phenomenological approach is consonant with Balthasar’s controlling analogy (“seeing the form”) between Christ (as supreme “form”) and the work of art. As is demonstrated, Balthasar’s nascent phenomenology of art is best seen in the light of Martin Heidegger’s fundamental questioning of the “origin” of the work of art, a question which Balthasar answers ontologically and ultimately christologically through his concept of “form.” In investigating the nature and disclosure of Being through art; Balthasar’s theological re-reading of Heidegger; the dramatic relation of all forms to Christ; and his phenomenology of truth, Balthasar’s philosophical and theological insights into the nature of art are presented as a resource for a constructive theology of art which “springs” from the depths of his theological aesthetics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".