Table Of ContentTranscendentality
and Gestalt
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Every beautiful Gestalt
has this openness, which
expresses more than the
sum of its components.
No metaphysics of Being as such and its transcendental qualities can
be separated from concrete experience, which is always of the senses.
“The True,” the disclosure of Being in its totality, only becomes visible
where a particular thing is adjudged true. The goodness of Being is
only visible where one meets with some good thing which both
brings “the Good” near and—through its finitude, fragility and
relative “badness”—causes it to retreat again. And we know that there
is beauty from the sensible experience which presents and withdraws
it, reveals and again conceals it, evanescent, in myriad layers: it is
most obviously visible as an attractive individual form or as the
striking illumination of a landscape or a particular atmosphere or
receptivity. Beauty is visible less obviously when the unremarkable—
for example, the face of an old man or a mother’s quiet, suppressed
pain—suddenly reveals an arcane beauty. It is most hidden of all
where in certain experiences even the coarse, the downright ugly, the
near meaninglessness of pain, even the humiliating exposure to
vulgarity, can appear comprehended within a totality which demands
to be affirmed and can be affirmed as it is, unsweetened.
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It would be unworthy of us to dismiss the ancient and modern
versions of this world-affirmation in their attempt to comprehend in
one ultimate, peaceful harmony the extreme tensions of the world,
suspended above the abysses of death and guilt—e.g., tragedy, or in
Heraclitus and Empedocles. Great tragedy—for example, King Lear—
compels the spectator to include even the most terrible and
excruciating elements in that affirmation. There is no “classical” art
without this open wound in the heart of Being and in the heart of the
man in whom Being is transparent. In the very middle of our era Paul
Häberlin succeeded in putting forward this point of view in his
Allgemeine Ästhetik (1929), according to which the philosophical act is
identical with the aesthetic, and hence religious, affirmation.
Here, where, with greater or lesser clarity, the totality of Being
radiates within the individual being, the concept of Gestalt suggests
itself. It signifies a coherent, limited totality of parts and elements
perceived as such, yet which demands for its existence not only “a”
context, but “the” context of Being in its totality. In making this
“demand,” Gestalt is, as Cusanus says, a “contracted” representation of
the Absolute, in so far as it too, in its restricted field, exceeds its parts,
governs its members. This concept, inherited from Plato and Aristotle
(as eidos and morphē), was at the heart of medieval ontology (as species
and forma) and also of the nature doctrine of Herder (against Kant) and
Goethe. It was tentatively but successfully enough rescued from the
havoc wrought by atomistic association psychology and reinstated by
Christian von Ehrenfels (Über Gestaltqualitäten, 1890; Kosmogonie,
1916; Das Primzahlengesetz, 1922). Subsequently the concept was once
again contaminated by Berlin Gestalt psychology (M. Wertheimer, W.
Kohler, K. Lewin, W. Metzger), since, for the sake of the measurability
of the “exact sciences, “Gestalt here was treated as a “unity of
correlations” of psychic “elementary functions.” These shared the same
Gestalt as their physiological and physical substrata only through
interposition of the “theory of isomorphism.” This view betrays the very
governing center which forms the core of the concept of Gestalt
“Every existing thing . . . has its existence (Dasein) in itself, and
hence also the consonance according to which it exists,” says Goethe, and
he goes on: “the measuring of things is a crude business which can only
be applied in a highly imperfect manner to living bodies. A living
existing thing cannot be measured by anything outside itself; if it were to
be measured at all, the thing itself would have to provide the norm—but
this latter is highly spiritual and cannot be discovered by the senses.” In
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unity with the great tradition, Goethe can only think of the individual
Gestalt as “participating in infinity” or in “perfect existence” (in the
actus essendi illimitatus of Scholasticism), so we “cannot completely
grasp the concept of the existence and perfection of even the most
limited living thing”; thus Goethe arrives at his ontological version of
the concept of the Sublime:
When the soul becomes aware, as if in germ, of a relation, the harmony of which,
fully developed, it could not completely comprehend or savour, we call it sublime; it is
the most glorious impression a human soul can experience.
We can see from this passage why it was necessary to introduce
the concept of Gestalt in the first volume of Herrlichkeit. All instances of
the real partake of Gestalt in analogical degrees. The degree of elevation
of Gestalt is adjudged according to the greater unitive power of
assembling like manifolds (Ehrenfels) and relating all intellectually
perceivable Gestalten to that complete and perfect Being which is beyond
itself and which, according to Goethe, “cannot be conceived by us.” Thus
the light which breaks forth from the Gestalt and opens it up to the
understanding is both (and indivisibly) light of the form itself (splendor
formae in Scholastic terminology) and light of Being in its totality, in
which the form is (and must be) bathed if it is to have real (seinshaft)
Gestalt at all. As the degree of immanence is raised, so is the degree of
transcendence. In aesthetic terms, the higher and purer a Gestalt is, the
more light springs from its depths, and the more it indicates the mystery
of the light of Being in its totality. In religious terms, the more spiritual
and autonomous a creature is, the more interior knowledge it has of
God, and the more clearly it points to God. It is impossible for the biblical
revelation to be an exception to this fundamental law of metaphysics, for
God acts in human history, taking on human form (Gestalt) and through
this human Gestalt grafting humanity on to himself in the Church. In
this way absolute Being, in order to manifest itself in the unfathomable
depths of its personhood, makes use of mundane Gestalt in its twofold
language: that is, the unalterable finitude of the individual Gestalt and the
way this Gestalt points unconditionally to, and transcends towards, Being
in its totality.
If this inescapable truth were kept in mind, the endless battle
between biblical orthodoxy (nowadays in the guise of a judaizing species
of exegesis) and liberalist Hellenism (nowadays dominated by general
historical or systematic sociology of religion) would not be of such
mediocre quality as it now is. Then it would be possible to retain the
metaphysical and religious meaning of the individual Gestalt as it points
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to “the Perfect” which is its ground, still recognizing the uniqueness of
the biblical Gestalt over against all others. It would be possible to
“become aware” of it in germ, in the Goethean sense, and hence to
believe in this “harmony, fully developed” (eschatologically)—all the
more since what is offering itself in germ is the Word of God graciously
manifesting himself in sovereign freedom. The dispute over
demythologizing the biblical revelation would correspondingly be
carried on in a less narrow-minded manner, more in the lofty manner
of later Schelling, by collating all the logoi spermatikoi of human and
world destiny, these partial Gestalten scattered throughout the mythos,
and summing them up in the final revealed Gestalt of Jesus Christ.
This would create a more relaxed relationship between genuine art
(rooted in mythos) and Christian faith, for there is no reason why the
revealed Gestalt should not shed a guiding and clarifying light on art’s
significant Gestalten which point to the Totality.
Conversely, we can see how questionable it is to exclude a
metaphysics of the Gestalt and try to confront modern scientific
criticism and functionalism directly with the biblical revelation. The
fact that the one has the total “invisibility” of pure calculation, the
other of pure faith, is a spurious similarity, deceptive because it is
purely negative. In such a case Christian faith would have to
renounce all visibility, all Gestalt in the world, all human credibility,
making all mission activity impossible.
Ehrenfels discovered his “Gestalt qualities” primarily in
connection with melodies; he only began to understand spatial
Gestalten by analogy with those of time. This points back to the
aesthetics of Augustine (and further back to that of the ancient
drama), proving that the Gestalt concept is by no means closed to the
notion of history and event. It is true that art has inherited this
character from its mythical origins (G. Nebel),1 but nothing prevents
us from viewing the revelation uniquely written by God into history—
as Irenaeus does—as a work of art, a Gestalt, which, precisely in its
main articulation, in the transition from Old to New Covenant, from
promise to fulfilment, from law to gospel, is uniquely and
unsurpassably history and event. In the biblical revelation we have a
limited Gestalt, in motion yet definitively fixed, which not only points
to the Absolute but declares it substantially and authoritatively: this
marks it out as God’s work of art, utterly beyond man’s grasp. It is not
1 Das Ereignis des Schönen (Klett, 1953).
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only art in the medium of time, however, that exhibits this “event”
quality; great spatial art evinces it too: the image of the god recalls his
epiphany and somehow causes the observer to look forward to it . It
makes present the Eternal by reminding him. (anamnēsis) of what has
been and revealing what is to come (elpis). Pillars and triumphal arch
recall Caesar’s victory and cause the spectator to hope that his
influence will remain present. Like the arts of time—music, dance,
theatre—they commingle different times, very far from trying to give
to an abstract moment the appearance of timeless eternity. The only
way an “eternal” content is made present is by “letting go” (fahren) an
enclosed moment in order to bring into being (into “experience,” Er-
fahrung) what is absent (what is past and to come). Thus one can
speak of a protological, paradisal/eschatological aspect of beauty
hovering around the beautiful thing and lending it, if it will receive it,
a further openness to the biblical revelation, provided that this
openness is not understood as pre-empting the Word of God. Virgil’s
chief opus is a particularly impressive example of this kind of
commingling of times, not annihilating temporality but on the
contrary demonstrating that man exists in memory and hope. Thus
the Aeneid became the model of the great Christian epic. It portrays
an historical Gestalt of grand proportions, namely the Augustan
empire, yet leaves many issues and themes open, rendering it a kind
of artistic simile of Old Testament faith—going back to the Covenant
and reaching forward to the Messiah. Every beautiful Gestalt has this
openness, which expresses more—even where the Gestalt is most
complete and definite—than the sum of its components. This “more”
is the infinity of glory (Herrlichkeit), and it means that the Beautiful,
as such, can be used as a Gestalt for the purpose of revelation.
We cannot anticipate here the extent to which it can be so used.
It will be indicated in outline at the end of the third volume of
Herrlichkeit, at the point where it is seen that Western culture moves
from the practice of art to the reflex theory of the Beautiful and gives
birth to a “science of aesthetics.” This science will be ambivalent,
tending to reduce transcendental glory (Herrlichkeit) to the intra-
mundane (even categorial) Beautiful. But even in this restricted form it
will distinguish more clearly certain basic themes of beauty which will
be of service, in this form, in understanding better the basic themes of
divine revelation. The more correct the analogies appear, the wider, in
the end of the day, will yawn the gulf. This applies not only in the case
of the objective structures of beauty which are governed by concepts of
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“form” (Gestalt), “harmony” (proportion) and “radiance” (claritas)—the
three elements of beauty in Thomas Aquinas—but even more in the
case of the subjective structures which have come into the foreground
since the Kantian metamorphosis of the concept of transcendentality.
For where beauty is concerned—as Bonaventure had already observed
—the relation of subject to object is decisive. In his late period
Schelling saw and reflected upon these analogies. We shall have to
inquire how far, in terms of a Christian perspective, he was right.
This “scientism” is, however, already a thing of the past. In
matters of beauty as in other areas the twentieth century pursues new
paths of its own, more and more self-assured and less and less
anchored in tradition. Crumbling structures are swiftly and painlessly
demolished. Abstract configurations arise out of the void. Gestalten
handed down by tradition, deprived of their context, seem merely
museum-pieces, looked after by curators and photographed by
unseeing tourists. Where, on all these blind paths, is the Christian to
walk? If the 2,000 year-old pact between metaphysical and theological
aesthetics is now to be terminated, what then? When things become
serious are we to say goodbye to this inheritance and cling to the
naked rock of the Bible? Or—which is even more difficult—is the
Christian, from the vantage-point of this naked glory, to endeavor to
discern and distinguish a beauty which has become tarnished and
neglected, and to cultivate it, since there is no one else to do it? Is
such a thing possible?
It would only be possible provided that no ideological
compromise were involved. Compromises are made against the
background of false equivalences: univocity is assumed where at most
there are irreducible analogies. Here are a few such cases which are
of significance historically: first, it is common knowledge that
theology and philosophy arose out of a mythical origin in poetry, that
Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus were the first prophet-poets. But to
conclude from this—as the moderns have done, from Boccaccio, via
the Baroque, to Herder and Creutzer, and on to Guénon and Leopold
Ziegler—that theology and poetry are at root the same thing, is a
monism which leads to a false sacralizing of art and a false
aestheticizing of religion.
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Second, Catholicism espouses the visibility of the Church and
the theological authority of tradition. But this does not justify anyone’s
absolutizing its historical and cultural Gestalt and attributing to it such
an importance as under certain circumstances could exceed the
importance of the biblical revelation (Ch. Maurras) or equal it (the
Catholic Romantics and many modern integralists). The relativity of all
the Church’s forms vis-à-vis Christ has already been discussed in
Herrlichkeit (vol. 1, pp. 535f.). The same applies far more to all the
artistic and cultural consequences of revelation.
Third, as a result one must beware of openly or covertly
equating the “mythical thought-form” with “sacramental thought” (G.
van der Leeuw), or of making a monopoly of the concept of mysterion
(O. Casel). It is difficult to apply the requisite analogy stringently here,
because while the similarity must be emphasized (against the attack of
theological rationalism), the greater dissimilarities must be
emphasized (against the danger of aestheticizing the mystery of
Christ).
Fourth, the modern tendency is towards eliminating the Gestalt:
Bultmannites, anthropocentric transcendentalists, philosophical
functionalists, pure “rhythmics” (like E. Przywara), Teilhardian
evolutionists—all these, irreconcilable to one another, follow the trend
towards that which is without Gestalt. We must be anti-modern enough
to oppose their strange univocity by maintaining that revelation has
Gestalt qualities. For the infinite dimensions of Pneuma can only be
understood as the glorification of the Logos (John 16:14) and not as his
dissolution, upon the premise of the once-and-for-all incarnation of the
Logos. Even dialogue with Asiatic forms of metaphysics—which avoid
all Gestalt—will not succeed in changing this. The history of the
Western spirit (which will be outlined in the rest of the third volume of
Herrlichkeit with a view to our particular inquiries) by no means lacks
instances of inner dialogue with the Orient. I am thinking less (with J.
A. Cuttat) of the Patristic-Byzantine mysticism of the “ascent” than
(with R. Otto) of the spirituality of indifference, developed consistently
since Eckhart: in the perfect Christian love this approach, apparently
beyond all Gestalt, reaches what the Asiatics tried to attain primarily
through gnosis. As early as Plotinus and Dionysius, too, we find
exhibited other elements of the East-West dialogue, and again in the
ultimate attitude of great founders like Benedict and Francis.
Fifth, the theology of kenosis leads up to this last. It would seem
lacking in taste to apply aesthetic concepts to it, for its path leads into
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God’s utter concealment, not as the hiddenness (as Dionysius
understood it, as kruphiotēs) of the God who is always greater, not only
as the veiling of the spiritual Word in inert, transitory flesh (as the
Alexandrines saw it), but as concealment under the form of its
opposite, opposition to God, namely sin (as grasped by Luther). Here
the only purpose of Gestalt is to be crossed out, distorted and
disfigured. And yet, however true this is, is not precisely this
concealment the conclusive revelation of the hidden God of wrath and
love? And what does revelation mean but unveiling, making visible in
some shape or form? And does not God show the victory of his
shaping power (Gestaltungskraft) in the very chaos of sin by
encompassing even the most hideous form (Ungestalt)? Does he not
achieve what all tragedy was attempting to do with human and
ultimately unsuccessful means, namely, reconciliation in ruin? And
might it not be (as Ferdinand Ulrich tried to show2) that the ultimate
mystery of God’s kenosis in Christ has an analogy in the metaphysical
mystery of Being, which radiates both light and death, which
mediates the radiance of the divine but at the same time points
forward to the extreme humility of the Cross?
If that were the case, a metaphysical history of aesthetics
would reveal a wealth of lasting, highly seminal theological decisions,
since Being in its totality, in its elusive transparency, lets us glimpse
either God or the void, depending on the particular light man throws
upon it.
We glimpse the void wherever man imagines he can master
Being on the basis of his own transcendental reason. For then the
heavens “praise the glory of man,” and the glory they seemed to be
praising goes out like a light. To that extent no transcendental is as
demonic as the kalon. As the last of the four (after the One, the True
and the Good), the Beautiful is only an appearance (Schein) breathed
over the transitory: who knows whether it is the shining light
(Scheinen) of God or the plausibility (Scheinbarkeit) of the void? But
where Being is conceived in a scientific/neutral way—a hackneyed
notion—a decision has already been taken deep down, in favor of the
void. The last of the transcendentals, Beauty guards and sets her seal
2 Homo Abyssus. Das Wagnis der Seinsfrage (Einsiedeln, 1961).
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on the others: in the long run the True and the Good do not exist
without this luminosity which is both graced and gratis. And if
Christianity, following the modern trend, were to embrace merely the
True (faith as a system of correct propositions) or merely the Good
(faith as the subject’s greatest advantage and benefit), it would have
fallen from its true eminence. If the saints interpreted their existence
as being for God’s greater glory, they were also always the guardians
of the Beautiful.
The history unrolled in what follows (in my third volume) will
be shown as the history of a continuing submerged decision which
comes to the surface inescapably at particular points: for example, in
the original decision to pursue philosophy; in the search for the sum
of meaning bequeathed by the world of antiquity (in Virgil and even
more clearly in Plotinus); also in the issues of Aquinas’s circle and the
collapse of metaphysics after him; in the symbolic figure of Cusanus,
to the extent that the basic decisions of the modern age are taken
here. For it is the free, thinking spirit which makes history; its
fundamental decisions, once made, have repercussions and re-echo
through the following centuries. In this way history is the apocalypse
(i.e., the “revealing”) of the human spirit’s decision for or against
God.—Translated by Graham Harrison3
3 This article is a translation of Fr. von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit III/I (Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1965), pp. 29–39. The English edition of Herrlichkeit I is now
available through Ignatius Press (Distribution, 15 Oakland Ave., Harrison, NY
10528). Volume II will be available soon; Volume III should be available within the
year.
Author’s address: Arnold Böcklinstrasse, 42; Basel, Switzerland
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