In 1955 Hans Urs von Balthasar considered all of his writing to date (with the exception of his compilations of Augustine) ‘as an attempt not to underestimate the utterly mysterious step that revelation takes beyond the eschatology of the Old Covenant (which must be understood prophetically!) into the eschatology of the New and eternal Covenant’ (My Word in Retrospect, p. 25). Nichols here turns to Balthasar's writings on philosophy and the arts from 1925-1946, thereby shedding light on this early, all-consuming theme of eschatology. The principal appeal of this volume for an English-language audience lies in its summation of untranslated and often ignored material. Eight of the thirteen chapters, for instance, painstakingly present the lineaments of a study on eschatology many Germans consider unreadable, viz., the three-volume Apocalypse of the German Soul (1937-1939). Anyone unwilling or unable to work through this text in particular will highly prize Nichols's latest. Surreptitiously, the lack of existing English translations permits Nichols's humour and clear prose to shine more evidently than in previous volumes where he was perhaps too reliant upon bulk-quotations. This makes wading through the murkiness of early balthasariana more enjoyable, even if the reader is confused at times – as when reading Balthasar – just whose voice one is attending to.
Chapters one (pp. 1–8), two (pp. 9–15), and three (pp. 17–32) summarize single essays beginning with Balthasar's first publication at the age of 20, The Unfolding of the Musical Idea: Attempt at a Synthesis of Music (1925). It is often cited for its use early use of Gestalt theory so central to his later Christology. Complementary to Nichols's analysis here are two articles by Francesca Aran Murphy, ‘The Sound of the Analogia Entis’, New Blackfriars 74 (1993), pp. 508–521, 557–565. Next, the key to ‘Art and Religion’ (1927) is shown to be the word ‘Hingabe’, for it shows the twofold nature of ‘surrender’ to objectivity of the Absolute and the beautiful; united through the subject's response, together they most fully enliven human subjectivity and so creativity. Lastly, Nichols interprets ‘The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves’ (1939) as Balthasar's via media between the excesses of the nouvelle théologie and the Thomism of the strict observance on the subject of which epoch stood most normatively for Catholic theology. His answer: no epoch of the Church entirely trumps another, so let us take what is best, even from modernity, in order to express truth more fully.
Chapter four (pp. 33–44) introduces Apocalypse of the German Soul. According to Balthasar, ‘Eschatology can be defined as a teaching about the relation of the soul to its eternal destiny, whose attainment (fulfilment, assimilation) is its apocalypse’ (Apokalypse I, p. 4; Nichols, p. 36). He uncovers the often unstated ‘apocalypses’ of his interlocutors in order to judge their visions according to the degree that they remain open, or even anticipate, Christian teachings concerning the eschaton.
Chapters five (pp. 45–67), six (pp. 69–108), and seven (pp. 109–132) cover volume one of Apocalypse. Enter the Prometheans: Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Hölderlin, Goethe, Jean Paul, Hegel, Hebbel, Wagner, and an assortment of lesser playwrights and literati. Balthasar ends this volume with a chapter entitled ‘The Dual of the Idea’. In what Nichols calls a ‘daring comparison’, Balthasar dubs the dualists Nietzsche and Kierkegaard ‘two flames’ and, like the two eschatological witness of the Johannine Apocalypse, ‘he hails them as ‘judges of time’, two witnesses to the Last Day’ (p. 129). Also called ‘Dionysus and the Crucified’, they represent the two ultimate options for the human soul.
Chapter eight (pp. 133–178) is a compendium of volume two, subtitled ‘Under the Sign of Nietzsche’. This ‘sign’ stands generally for Lebensphilosophie, hence the inclusion of Henri Bergson amongst the Germanophone literature. Unfortunately Nichols/Balthasar perpetuates the rumour that Bergson underwent a death-bed conversion to Catholicism (p. 135). (Truth be told, he died not long after marching onto the streets of Paris to register himself a Jew, choosing the public indignity of suffering with his people over his attraction to Catholicism.) From Bergson, Balthasar assesses Ludwig Klages, theoretician of the Narcissus-problem, along with George, Beer-Hofmann, Spitteler, Keyserling, Rilke (only partially in the world of Lebensphilosophie), and most importantly Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Balthasar plays Nietzsche and Dostoevsky off against one another in order to permit one truth to emerge: ‘it is their willingness, in a situation which may broadly be termed “mystical”, to ask after the essence of love’, despite their failures to allow love its full flowering (p. 173).
Chapters nine (pp. 179–202), ten (pp. 203–229), and eleven (pp. 231–244) polish off volume three, subtitled ‘The Divinization of Death’. After evaluating a series of War Poets for their reactions to the judgment of humanity exercised in the Great War, we get Balthasar's depiction of Scheler, the fallen-angel of 1920s European Catholicism. Heidegger and Rilke are then paired based upon an early claim by the former that the Duino Elegies‘put into poetic form the same thought that I have laid out in my writings’ (p. 203). Rilke is judged the sounder visionary due to his coupling of lamentation with song, suffering with joy in the ambiguity of poetic form. Yet the paradoxical unity of life and death evident in both Heidegger and Rilke's work cannot lead to the Christological mystery: in Christ alone the eschaton is realized (p. 228). Karl Barth's recovery of Christocentricity provides Balthasar with this much-needed graced transition. Penultimately, Balthasar reflects on the ‘mid-point’ of history, the Christ-event, in terms of myth, utopia, and kairos. In Christ, myth became fact, and the ascending history of man meets the descending history of God in a truly utopian fulfilment of time. Importantly, readers are alerted to the fundamental thought-form guiding this study by Balthasar: the Thomistic ‘real distinction’ between essence and existence (p. 241). Finally, invoking the hermeneutical spiral and anticipation of the beatific vision, Nichols/Balthasar ends Apocalypse with words of the angel from Hofmannsthal's ‘Kleine Welttheater’: ‘Up then! Go before the Master's face!/Prepare yourselves for enormous light’ (p. 244).
Chapter twelve (pp. 245–252) moves to an essay published in 1946 entitled ‘On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in our Time’. Nichols hopes that this chapter will serve as a transition piece to his forthcoming fifth and final volume in his ‘Introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar’ series. Like the essay examined in chapter two, this essay belongs to the period dominated by la nouvelle théologie. It is interpreted as Balthasar's answer to Labourdette's worries about the undermining of Scholasticism via overly Hegelian readings of patristic theologians. Corroborating the work of Peter Henrici SJ, Nichols argues for the primacy of Aquinas's influence on the paradox Balthasar identifies as central to a balanced understanding of the relationship of nature to grace: ‘the natural desire for the vision of God belongs to a spiritual nature created by God which, without being able to make any claim to grace, is ordered to a uniquely supernatural end unattainable, however, except by God's free gift’ (p. 251).
Chapter thirteen (pp. 253–254) remains true to its title; it is ‘A Very Summary Conclusion’. We are told that perhaps the entirety of the study furnishes evidence for Balthasar's conviction that the human ‘measure’ so valued by modernity ‘has collapsed’. The best paganism, to the contrary, ‘always knew that man was “girdled by an ultimate measure that gives him his being and his spirit”[Balthasar]. I am thought, therefore I am’ (p. 253). Given that Baader's anti-Cartesian polemic (cogitor ergo sum) is only now being rediscovered lends weight to Nichols's judgment that Balthasar indeed treaded presciently in his early work (cf. p. vii). English-speaking Balthasar enthusiasts owe Nichols a debt of gratitude, for assuredly he has granted access to material that would otherwise have sat heavily, and ever-so-quietly, upon library shelves.
