A Generous Symphony: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Literary Revelations

Lord.

Introduction: A Theology of Literature as Christian Revelation

The world is like a vast orchestra tuning up: each player plays to himself, while the audience take their seats and the conductor has not yet arrived.[1]

– Hans Urs von Balthasar

Literature and the Horizon of Transcendence: Surveying the Past

There was a time in the history of Indo-European literature when the voice of poets and the voice of the gods spoke with the same voice, and the communion between the muse and the seer was undisputed. At the beginning of the Iliad, the shadowy figure we name Homer sings not his own wrath, but the wrath of the goddess Athena. In his more earthy poems Theogony and Works and Days, Homer’s contemporary Hesiod too invoked the Muses. According to the ancient rishis, the Rig Veda had existed eternally, long before priests committed its hymns to writing. In this previous era of ancient naiveté, the religious question addressed by this current book would not have arisen because audiences assumed that literature was divinely revealed as a matter of course. We moderns live in the shadow of Plato’s Socrates, who, in the Republic’s exquisite dialogic prose, informed readers that the visionary claims of the poets were not to be trusted, and so the poets were banished from his ideal city. Socrates’s logos cast a long historical shadow that plunged mythos into the shade of a younger rival—philosophy. Introducing one of the narratives about Jesus of Nazareth, the anonymous first-century Christian later believed to be John of Zebedee did not invoke the muse of poetry when recounting the life of his master. Paying its debt to the first-century BCE Jewish writer Philo and his surrounding Hellenistic culture, the Gospel of John cast its lot with logos, the word. In the late second-century CE, the church father Irenaeus of Lyons attempted to do for Christianity what Plato accomplished for Greek polytheism, as the first book of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies exalts the incarnate logos over the empty myths of the Gnostic Christians. Irenaeus’s work became the prototype for generations of patristic heresy-hunters seeking to separate an emerging Christian orthodoxy from the Greco-Roman religious milieu that had proved so adept at domesticating Near Eastern mythologies within its pantheon.

Even after the fourth-century-CE triumph of monotheism in the Roman Empire, however, many Christians were never able to reconcile themselves to the tidy split between Greco-Roman myth and philosophy prescribed by Socrates and the Christian political establishment in the wake of the emperors Constantine and Theodosius. For some Christians pagan literary achievements, whatever their errors and impieties, were foreshadowings of their later fulfillment in Christian revelation.[2] In the first of his second-century Apologies, the church father Justin Martyr drew a parallel between Christianity’s denunciation of idolatry and the writings of the fourth-century BCE comic dramatist Menander.[3] Though Justin’s contemporary Theophilus of Antioch held that Homer and Hesiod were, for the most part, inspired by demons, he admitted that on occasion, such pagan authors conveyed doctrines that corresponded to the Hebrew prophets.[4] Basil of Caesarea was emphatic that Homer’s poetry inculcated the proper moral disposition in perceptive readers.[5] The young Augustine denounced Terence for the filth in the comedy Eunuchus, but found the logos of the New Testament rustic by comparison with the oratory of Cicero.[6] In his hymns, Augustine’s contemporary Prudentius promoted Christianity in odes that find their formal inspiration in Horace’s poems.[7] Much later, Dante too found it difficult to break free of Virgil’s trance, and large parts of the Divine Comedy form a religiously-mottled tapestry of Christianity and paganism in which mythical personages such as Charon, Statius, and Rhipeus share eschatological space with Judas Iscariot, Justinian, and Thomas Aquinas. In his Manual for a Christian Soldier, Erasmus commended the study of Homer and Virgil as long as these pagan poets were interpreted allegorically, as an intermediary stepping-stone to the appreciation of Christian literature.[8] At the conclusion of his Defense of Poesy, the Renaissance humanist Philip Sidney urged his readers to believe that it pleased the heavenly Deity, by Hesiod and Homer, under the veil of fables, to give us all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, natural and moral.[9] For Sidney, ancient Greek poetry—for all its superstition—was preferable to Greek philosophy, with what he judged to be the latter’s admixture of atheism.[10]

By contrast, other Christians such as Jerome experienced their religious calling as a bitter command to leave the earlier recipients of revelations from the Muses behind. When Dante, in the edenic Paradise at the summit of Mount Purgatory, turns back to find that his pagan mentor Virgil has vanished, he breaks down in tears. Not every person could banish the poets from the ideal city or garden as blithely as could Socrates, who himself did not weep at his own death. Dante the pilgrim’s tears indicate that for him the age of poetic naiveté had passed; Virgil, for all his genius, was still a damned poet. Dante’s tears mark the emergent schism between literature and revelation in mainstream Christian tradition. The deliberate attempt to demonstrate that imaginative literature can serve as a medium for revelation reveals that Christians have been quite conscious that literature might not serve in such a capacity.

While Christians in the patristic and medieval eras, such as Augustine and Dante, could be torn between their loyalties to literature and to God, by the Romantic era, a new third way presented itself in Germany through what Nicholas Boyle has called the secularization of the clerical class and its social function.[11] As theology was secularized in the face of historicist critiques of biblical authority, a new brand of philosophical idealism collapsed the distinctions between religion, aesthetics, art, and literature. In this post-Kantian maelstrom, literature—be it a message from the Muses or from YHWH—is not the instrument of divine revelation, but rather, attains divinity for itself. When Friedrich Schelling, including literature under the heading art, wrote in 1803, the universe is formed in God as an absolute work of art, earlier Christian debates regarding the proper balance between secular and sacred canons of literature were being relativized and were receding in importance.[12] The artistic and literary imagination (Einbildungskraft) for Schelling is a numinous human capacity not simply directed at creating a work of art or literature. Human Einbildungskraft mirrors God’s own imagination, and our imagination encapsulates our ability to integrate the world and to heal the cosmic rifts that the Enlightenment exposed—nature and culture, body and mind, sensation and intuition, humanity and divinity. With this exalted status granted to imagination, Schelling insisted that methodical study of the arts was a religious duty, writing: The inner bond uniting art and religion . . . makes the scientific knowledge of art in this respect a necessity for the genuinely religious person.[13] Schelling’s artistic-cum-religious mandate interprets the agonizing choices of Augustine and Jerome as false dichotomies. The work of literature has been restored to its ancient revelatory status, as the Muses are now transmogrified into what some German Romantics called the en kai pan—the one and the all.[14]

While Schelling found the en kai pan embodied in works of art and literature, his contemporary Hegel denounced this aesthetic temptation as a futile return to a bygone era in his famous words: In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.[15] In Hegel’s thinking, art has been in decline since the Hellenistic age and cannot recover its former importance; art is now downgraded to the mere sensible appearance of the Idea (Idee). Yet, despite his views on the decline of post-classical art, Hegel continued to use literary—and specifically, tragic—categories to describe all of existence, as in his early work On the Scientific Manner of Treating Natural Law: This is nothing else but the performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy which the Absolute eternally enacts with itself, by eternally giving birth to itself into objectivity, submitting in this objective form to suffering and death, and rising from its ashes into glory.[16] While the age of philosophy has both superseded literary texts and religion as a vehicle for truth in Hegel’s rendition of history, imaginative literature reemerges as a heuristic category that has outgrown both the printed page and the stage. Redefined and raised into the self-transcendence of absolute Spirit (Geist), literature is now employed to describe the process by which idea overtakes image (Bild) as the vehicle for Spirit’s manifestation in the world.[17]

These contrasting positions of Schelling and Hegel regarding literature illustrate what Andrew Bowie has identified as the paradigmatic division in attempts to formulate the relationship between the arts and philosophy. In Bowie’s binary formulation of this division, Hegel is the progenitor of modern science’s attempt to define the world upon universally applicable foundations, while Schelling, particularly in his early works, is the spiritual father of those philosophers who push back against science’s totalizing ambitions via the hermeneutic sensibilities disclosed through the particularities of art and literature.[18] In the face of Hegel’s transformation of Plato’s division between the philosophers and the poets, to where have religion and the Muses disappeared?

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s privileging of idea over image rests upon his evaluation of the respective means by which each successfully manifests Geist’s ongoing process of surpassing (aufhebung) itself toward its ultimate goal of absolute consciousness. William Desmond has demonstrated that there is an ambiguous conflation of means and teleology in Hegel’s writing on ultimacy, which Desmond explicates by the way in which transcendence functions in Hegel’s oeuvre.[19] Desmond identifies three competing definitions of transcendence, which he calls transcendences. First, there is the act of transcending the external beings in the world. Second, there is the interior capacity of the human person to transcend himself or herself. Finally, Desmond identifies a more comprehensive definition of the word, which he himself wishes to promote as an alternative to Hegel’s succession of consciousness transcending itself:

Here I refer to original transcendence as still other to the above two senses. What might this be? Can we speak of transcendence itself? Rather than the exterior transcendence or the interior, can we speak of the superior? How superior? Transcendence itself would be in excess of determinate beings, as their original ground; it would be in excess of our self-transcendence, as its most ultimate possibilizing source. It would be beyond the ordinary doublet of possibility/reality, as their possibilizing source; it could not be just a possibility, nor indeed a determinate realization of possibility. It would have to be real possibilizing power, more original and other than finite possibility and realization. It would have to be possiblizing beyond determinate possibility, and real beyond all determinate realization.[20]

At this point, the reader may think such metaphysical speculations take us far beyond the concerns of a Christian theology of literature. Yet both Desmond’s contrasting definitions and this cursory outline of historical watermarks in formulations of the relationship between religion and literature are of importance. Launching into a disquisition on the alleged ways in which one’s favorite works of imaginative literature illustrate or enhance Christian faith is naive unless we understand how this historical synopsis inculcates the following three crucial points. First, just as the early church father Tertullian sought to sequester the pagan influence of Athens from the Christian tradition springing from Jerusalem, principled and formidable reasons have been proffered that call upon Christians to reject any constructive relationship between the life of faith and imaginative literature.[21] In propounding and critiquing the thought of its protagonist Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), this volume will analyze several of these cautionary warnings. Any Christian theology of literature must take these challenges into account, rather than assume an a priori affirmation of the good to be gained by allying Christianity with literary creation. Second, this opening survey should indicate that conceiving relationships between Christianity and literature places the inquirer on contested terrain, in which similar conclusions can be reached by varying means. This, in turn, provides a clue that Christian theologies of literature might do well to support a pluralistic rather than an exclusively canonical approach to their subject matter, both in respect to the literary texts which are read and interpreted and in respect to the theologies of nature, grace, creation, and imagination that emerge from encounters with these texts.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Desmond’s explication of the different ways in which we define transcendence must remind us that a Christian theology of literature cannot be circumscribed merely by attending to texts and the literary tropes found within them. That would be to mistake the means for the end, and the letter for the spirit. For example, theologies of literature that limit themselves to demonstrating how imaginative literature analogously references the Christian Bible may well demonstrate how selected classic texts transcend other more prosaic creations, but they fail to address the more fundamental issue of how the literary imagination can achieve religious transcendence in the first place. By contrast, theologies of literature that understand literary creation simply as the subjective means by which an author achieves self-transcendence fail to identify what makes such self-transcendence specifically Christian. Only when Christian theologies of literature understand religious transcendence in the broadest possible definition can the most comprehensive horizon of this discipline be glimpsed. Christian transcendence is the encounter of the human person with God in the world, an encounter in which the empirical facticity of the external world is sacralized in light of God’s creative activity, and in which those subjective human limitations that can be ascribed to egoism are healed by a grace whose ever-receding horizon makes any exhaustive understanding of salvific transcendence impossible to attain. Recognizing such transcendence is, therefore, an exercise in what, using theological terminology, is called apophatic theology—that is, recognizing what something is through paradoxical negation of any positive attributes or qualities that can be ascribed to it.[22]

The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Literature as Christian Revelation

Respecting divine transcendence, therefore, means that sound Christian theologies of literature must be dialectical and analogous. How should Christians honor this analogy as they develop theologies of literature that maintain the theological value of literature while not conflating literature with divinity? How can they hold that an infinite Creator can be revealed in finite texts? Answering these questions requires examining the ways in which a Christian theology of literature overlaps with a Christian theology of revelation, because one’s approach to the latter subject conditions what one will judge acceptable religious parameters for the former.[23] A close examination reveals two opposed and contradictory dangers.

If divine revelation is exclusively or primarily conveyed through the language embedded in texts, then acceptable theologies of literature gravitate toward sacralizing particular scriptures, leaving other texts out of this process through active denunciation or tacit omission. In the early centuries of Christian history, for example, the sacralization of the texts that would later comprise the New Testament was promoted with a deliberate aim of excluding gnostic texts that were judged unreliable as witnesses to the life of Jesus and the practices of the earliest Christian communities. The result of this battle of texts was the formation of the Christian canon, and the later Reformation-era debates were, in large part, a reopening of the question about the extent to which God’s revelation coincided with the accumulated body of biblical and ecclesiastical literature.

At first glance, it could appear that this textually-rooted view of revelation, which Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck has termed the cultural-linguistic model of religion, is congenial to a Christian theology of literature. According to Lindbeck, the cultural-linguistic model claims that religion is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments. Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities.[24] Since literature is a medium defined by language, what could be more congenial for a theology of literature than to identify revelation with the formative capacity of language itself? This solution, however, can lead to a classicist theology of literature that does not distinguish between what is revealed and the transcendent source of divine revelation. Christians can reject a dialectical approach to literature, including biblical literature, and reify a literary canon deemed impervious to the philosophical and theological reflections needed to understand literature as a means to faith, rather than as an end in itself.[25] In practice, such a classicist theology of literature often superimposes the biblical text upon other texts in an asymmetrical relationship in which a text’s literary value is measured exclusively in terms of whatever formal similarities it shares with the Christian Bible. One might believe that this view of an acceptable theology of literature would be limited to theologically conservative Christians adhering to traditional understandings of biblical authority, but such conservatism is by no means the only grounds out of which such a restrictive understanding of religious literature can spring. Christian theologies of literature can also grant exclusive religious approbation to texts based upon their literary genres, their stylistic composition, or their historical provenance. Just as casual museum-goers may reject Abstract Expressionism tout court as they rush to see a travelling Impressionist exhibit, so too, many Christians can make a priori rejections of entire classes of literature that are judged insufficiently realistic, too realistic, not didactic enough, overly didactic, or too recent in origin. If these rejections are made specifically on religious grounds, that modern literature is not like that produced in the good old days for example, then critical observers must notice that a tacit theology of revelation is often operative in these aesthetic judgments.

In a radicalized form, this conflation of divinity and revelation can outgrow classicist restrictions to embrace all literature without confessional boundaries. Elements of this worldview can be glimpsed in the comments from Schelling above, and in what follows in this present book, Hans Urs von Balthasar will struggle to distance his own theology of literature from what he calls aesthetic theology, manifested in the recurring temptation to make an idol out of human literary creations.

On the opposite side of the conflation of religion and literature lies the position that would deny the religious value of imaginative literature altogether. One finds aspects of this stance in the pessimistic views of Jerome, who like puritans before and after him sought a simpler solution to the problem of pagan contamination of Christian life. Often, this pessimistic assessment of literature was wedded to a vulgar Platonism that pitted image and essence against each other. The puritanical position is not the only version of this tendency, however, and there are more subtle variants operative within history. Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62), the Enlightenment-era German philosopher primarily responsible for inaugurating aesthetics as a distinct field of philosophical study, defined aesthetics in 1735 as the science of sensory cognition, but in his subsequent work Aesthetica, Baumgarten claimed that aesthetics could not attain the clarity of rational thought. Because of this subordination of the sensual to the rational, the development of aesthetics as an explicitly formulated discipline was ironically linked to its subsequent marginalization, despite the efforts of some German Romantics such as Schelling to reverse this disciplinary hierarchy.[26]

Variations of this position crop up in any Christian theology that patterns itself after the methodologies of mathematical science, and cordons off literature in a bid to protect religious faith from corruption. In a worldview that mirrors the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde’s attempt to divorce literature from morality and religion, albeit from the opposite religious persuasion, one can admit that literature is merely of aesthetic interest without religious import.[27] Perhaps one can grant that literature might serve therapeutic and psychological goals related to self-expression and private edification. While these admissions would distinguish their advocates from the denunciations of the puritans, from a theological perspective, the end result is the same—a chasm between literature and the life of Christian faith.

Literature as a Mask of Christ

By definition, any dialectical and analogous Christian theology of literature that navigates the strait between the two opposing positions defined above must do so with reference to Christ. When we search for literary analogues to Christ, what qualifies as evidence that we have found such analogues? What are we hoping to see? Are we looking for formal categories and parallel structures that we find in texts, or for our own intuitive responses as readers? Restricting such a search for literary analogues to formal and thematic textual similarities does not make these questions easier to address. Given the radical diversity in the portraits of Jesus of Nazareth that appear in the New Testament canon, even establishing the archetype for our literary comparisons is formidable. To adapt Jesus’s question to Peter in Matthew 16, we can ask, Who should we say he is and was? Should we take our cue from the post-Enlightenment search for the figure of the historical Jesus, unearthed beneath New Testament inconsistencies, centuries’ worth of ecclesiastical dogma, and political structures? Perhaps, but then even those who have pursued this scholarly trajectory have reached no lasting consensus, and the interpretative conflicts show no signs of abating in recent decades. Ed Sanders argued that Jesus was at root a charismatic prophet proclaiming God’s approaching kingdom.[28] Was Jesus at root an itinerant Jewish rabbi, a marginal Jew, as biblical scholar John Meier has suggested?[29] Or is John Dominic Crossan correct in claiming that Jesus was most likely a peasant revolutionary advocating for economic reforms?[30]

Given this unsettling kaleidoscope of perspectives, Christians are admonished by others to trust the biblical text, rather than digging beneath it for historical clues. This provides little help in fixing an archetype of Jesus for literature. Which New Testament Jesus do we prefer? Mark’s suffering Jesus who is reticent to disclose his messianic identity? Matthew’s teacher who imitates Moses in giving his new commandments on a mountain? Luke’s stylized protagonist with his concern for the outcast and the gentile? John’s omniscient Logos who was with the Father before the world began? The figure whose sacrificial death reconciled both Jews and gentiles previously alienated from God, as found in Paul? The apocalyptic judge disclosed in Revelation? Relying upon the New Testament’s Christ of Faith and its faith-commitment does not mitigate the diversity of Jesus-portraits available for the Christian literary imagination.

With this biblical plurality, there should be no surprise that subsequent literary adaptations of the moving target of Jesus Christ have proved so malleable throughout history. In the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, Christ is a brave liege lord whose bloody death liberates the human race.[31] The ninth-century German Heliand is a feudalist transformation of the life of Christ in which this first-century Mediterranean peasant becomes a warrior-chieftain who must compel his apostolic thanes to accept the necessity of his impending arrest and death.[32] The transfiguring execution of Melville’s beautiful Billy Budd, who blesses his judge in the clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig, unites the onlookers in aesthetic ecstasy.[33] In The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis’s savior staggers through life wracked by existential doubts about his mission.[34]

For those who are guided by historicist and positivist criteria for ascertaining truth, this literary diversity is further evidence that imaginative literature either undermines the historical claims Christians have made on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth over the centuries, or that literature is irrelevant to theological truth-claims. But if we remember Desmond’s third definition of transcendence outlined above, and the apophatic distinction between human conception and transcendence to which Desmond’s definition appeals, then such a pessimistic appraisal of literature’s revelatory capacity is unwarranted. Far from removing the uncertainties that might be present in a theistic, pantheistic, or deist understanding of God, the diversity in Christian understandings of the Incarnation throughout the centuries only intensifies the distinction between Jesus’s person and human understanding. Far from distilling the Godhead into an easily circumscribable human form digestible for human understanding, the Word’s assumption of flesh only induces more questions and new mysteries. Theologian Graham Ward, a member of the radical orthodox movement in contemporary postmodern Christian theology, has called attention to what he calls the displaced body of Jesus Christ[35] and reminds readers that the person of Jesus Christ is only indirectly present to us through the giving and receiving of signs.[36] Though the incarnate deity that orthodox Christianity worships is witnessed through the recounting of the canonical Gospels, Jesus is not confined to his earthly existence in first-century Palestine. His person achieves so great a degree of transcendence that Peter, James, and John are blinded while looking at Jesus on Mount Tabor.[37] In apparent violation of the covenant the God of Israel made with Noah and Judaism’s abhorrence of cannibalism, Jesus offers his body and blood as food and drink and tells the disciples that consumption of his flesh and blood is a prerequisite for life.[38] Finally, Jesus dies and in apparent contradiction to the law of death to which all people are subjected, rises to new life. The image of Jesus’s body reappears in a form that John 20:11–18 describes as at first unrecognizable to Mary of Magdala. His image vanishes again for a final time according to the ending of Luke and Acts 1:1–11. The Gospels retroactively describe a community that failed to recognize fully Jesus’s identity or his mission until he was absent—first, after his death, and finally, after his ascension. These successive displacements prompt a shift in interpretative perspective that moves from Jesus to his followers.[39]

Historicist approaches to Jesus’s life have their place in scholarship, as they use critical methodology to attempt to discover who the first-century Jesus of Nazareth was in se, in himself. The Nicene Creed, however, is more concerned with the Word of God’s incarnation "hemas tous anthropous / pro nobis, for us," that is, the community of Christian believers. Assessments of Jesus’s value for literature are different from the criteria used in historical research. Here, the example of the masks used in classical drama illustrates the point nicely. A theatrical mask conceals the actor’s face from the audience and simultaneously reveals a character to the spectators. The mask is meant to be seen by others rather than by the performer who dons it, and this concealing and revealing mask also makes theater possible by placing an embodied person on a stage, integrating the actor within the context of an audience, within history, and within the world. An actor on stage only meaningfully exists in relationship to an audience. Those familiar with the work of sociologists such as Erving Goffman can understand how this theatrical metaphor can be extended to explain human social interaction, including that of Jesus with his disciples and the community of early Christians who would later be called church.[40] For Christians, literature can present the mask of Christ to readers who, if they are critically astute, can recognize that literary presentations of God’s word reveal divine transcendence without exhausting it. The mysteriousness of things and human persons, Kevin Mongrain writes, lies in the fact that in the dynamic of self-expression they simultaneously reveal and concel themselves. In showing, saying, and giving themselves, they also communicate that there is a depth that is not shown, said, or given.[41] This dialectical metaphor of the mask will be the compass for what follows in the present volume. By studying how one of the twentieth-century’s most influential Christian theologians sought for and identified sacralized masks of Christ in classic works of the European literary tradition, contemporary theologians can appreciate how the God who hides himself (Isa 45:15 NRSV), can appear in literary works in which even the most inquisitive reader would be surprised to find the mask of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 7–8. ↵

To illustrate this point, one can read an argument that the non-canonical second-century Acts of Andrew is deliberately modeled upon the Odyssey. See Dennis R. MacDonald, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and The Acts of Andrew (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). ↵

See Justin Martyr, First Apology, 20. ↵

See Theophilus of Antioch, Apology to Autolycus, 2.8. ↵

See Basil of Caesarea, Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, 5. For the similar cultural strategy employed by Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa, see also Ellen Muehlberger, Salvage: Macrina and the Christian Project of Cultural Reclamation, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 81/2 (Jun. 2012): 273–97. ↵

See Augustine, Confessions, 1.16; 3.5. ↵

See Prudentius, Poems, vol. 1, trans. M. Clement Eagan, Fathers of the Church (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1962). ↵

See Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 2. ↵

Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 157. ↵

See Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, 142–43. ↵

Nicholas Boyle, ‘Art,’ Literature, Theology: Learning from Germany, in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Robert E. Sullivan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 91. ↵

Friedrich Schelling, Die Philosophie der Kunst [5/385], in Schriften 1801–1803, vol. 2 in F. W. J. Schelling: Ausgewählte Schriften, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, no. 522 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 213; trans. by Douglas W. Stott as The Philosophy of Art, vol. 58, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 31. ↵

Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des Akademischen Studiums [5/352], in Werke 3, 374; trans. by E. S. Morgan as On University Studies, ed. Norbert Guterman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 151. ↵

See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 309–12. ↵

See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [3/2; 2/2/2], vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 11. ↵

Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 104. For more on this point, see Robert R. Williams, Theology and Tragedy, in David Kolb (ed.), New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 39–58. ↵

See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [699–704, 708–808], trans. by A. V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 424–27, 428–93; also, Ästhetik [3/ii]; Aesthetics, 8–14. ↵

See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 140–46. ↵

See William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 2–4. Desmond is careful, however, to note that transcendence is not a word that Hegel himself employs. ↵

Ibid., 3. ↵

See Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, 7. ↵

For a historical overview of apophatic theology and spirituality in the Christian tradition, see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and William Franke, On What Cannot Be Said: Philosophy, Literature, Religion, and the Arts, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). ↵

For two of the most comprehensive surveys of various approaches to the theology of revelation in recent decades, see George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) and Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992). ↵

Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 33. ↵

For an attempt to forestall this problem from a theologian influenced by Lindbeck, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005). ↵

See Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae de nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Theoretische Ästhetik: Die Grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der Aesthetica (1750/58), ed. and trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer, vol.