Christian History Home > Issue 70 > A Cathedral of Ideas
A Cathedral of Ideas
From elements of many traditions, Dante fashioned a towering new theology.
Hans Urs von Balthasar | posted 4/01/2001 12:00AM
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1998) was an influential, if sometimes controversial, Catholic thinker. A doctor of literature who had also studied theology and philosophy, he drew his ideas from a range of sources. Though his thinking was broadly Thomistic, he became frustrated with Scholasticism and investigated writings of figures like Hegel and Heidegger. He conducted conferences with Martin Buber and counted Karl Barth as a friend. Von Balthasar finds a similar eclecticism and creativity in Dante, whose theological aesthetics he describes in this excerpt.
Dante wrote his major works in the vernacular in about 1300 and, in so doing, was conscious of taking a momentous step in the history of mankind. He was, of course, the inheritor of Latin scholasticism, but that tradition lay behind him. Apart from Thomas Aquinas (and even he was more of a philosopher than a theologian), … no theologian writing subsequently in Latin made a really significant contribution to the history of the human spirit. ... To view this item, you must be a member of ChristianHistory.net.
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