Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Martin, Jennifer Newsome

Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar. By Oleg V. Bychkov. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8132-1731-4. Pp. vii + 349. $79.95.

The express aim of Oleg Bychkov's Aesthetic Revelation: Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans Urs von Balthasar is to engage in a reconstructive account, aided by the historical and linguistic tools of "precise philology, knowledge of context ... and certain principles of historicity" (xiv), of the antique and medieval texts which Hans Urs von Balthasar commends as evidential for the claim that the idea of beauty as revelation is extended historically. This book supplies a convincing genealogy of this revelatory capacity of aesthetics--"a fundamental feature of Western European thought" (323) which survives, Bychkov contends, even after the interventions of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche--from Plato onward, demonstrating by appeal to textual transmission, "an essential continuity between ancient and modern revelatory or 'transcendental' aesthetics" (323). The arrival of this valuable monograph represents a successful corrective on at least two fronts: first, for classicists and medievalists it supplies an explicit, reasoned hermeneutical apparatus for reading traditional texts in dialogue (a model borrowed from Gadamer and appropriated by David Tracy) with modern concepts; and second, through scrupulous philological analyses, it tightens the rationale--through textual and not theological means--for von Balthasar's rhetorical invocation of premodern texts for advancing the thesis of a relatively continuous "theological a priori" in aesthetics that extends from Antiquity to the "speculative aesthetics" of Kant, German Idealism, and Romanticism.

Methodologically, Bychkov utilizes a rather hybridized approach to great effect, calling both upon the resources of the hermeneutic method in the tradition of Gadamer and that which he considers to be non-objectionable elements of the historico-critical method--namely, adopting the precise attention to historical, grammatical, and semantic data at which it excels, while avoiding "the accompanying limiting and restrictive mentality uncovered by the contemporary hermeneutic theory" (101), thus permitting each method to correct the other where appropriate. Bychkov's book mirrors the same delicate balance, as meticulous attention to textual, philological, terminological, and linguistic detail in his treatment of individual texts moves beyond the archive to be met by an impressive theological suppleness and interest in contemporary issues.

The text is divided into two substantive parts: the first is more theoretical in nature, while the second functions to substantiate the first historically and textually. Bychkov's brief introduction ("The Hermeneutical Problem") invokes Gadamerian hermeneutics to open up and justify the possibility of recovering temporally and historically distant texts in conversation with what is essentially a modern concept, that is, the "aesthetic" (5). Part One, The Contemporary Horizon, includes chapters 1-4: chapter 1, "The Modern Philosophical Concept of the Aesthetic" provides an efficient account of the development of philosophical aesthetics from Baumgarten through Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer, troubling the working assumption that modern aesthetics can be characterized across the board as an absolutely autonomous or purely disinterested discipline. Chapter 2, "The Aesthetic in Theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar," skillfully summarizes von Balthasar's project of theological aesthetics as rescue effort for the loss of the beautiful from theology, notably ambiguating his designation of the beautiful as a transcendental, and cataloging the presence of Heidegger's influence regarding particularly the event-like, wonder-inspiring character of beauty's self-disclosure of being-as-truth, in a dialectic of Enthullen-Verhullen. Chapter 3, "Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Aesthete and the Hermeneute," appropriately suggests further similarities between certain features of Balthasarian and Gadamerian strains of interpretation. Chapter 4, "Retreading von Balthasar's Path" details Bychkov's own methodological presuppositions. Here "retreading" rhymes but does not repeat von Balthasar's exegesis, as it retains the latter's "intuitive judgment about the 'spirit' and Gestalt of the work" (123) but also--in its precise attention to philological data in tandem with a commitment to following the content and logic of a single text throughout--significantly broadens von Balthasar's appeal by extending the conversation to historians and other scholars who may not necessarily have an "insider's" theological orientation.

Part Two, The Ancient and Medieval Horizons, rigorously examines several historically "aesthetic" traditions--the Platonic (chapter 5), Stoic (chapter 6), Augustinian (chapter 7), and Bonaventurean/late medieval (chapter 8)--for a textually substantiated corroboration of the continuous presence of an understanding of the aesthetic as having a revelatory aspect, evaluating the adequacy of von Balthasar's treatment of each ancient or medieval author along the way. Though quibbles might arise with regard to which figures and texts are or are not included, Bychkov is, as we shall see below, perfectly transparent, principled and consistent regarding the grounds for inclusion and exclusion. The section on Plato, which tackles the Phaedrus, Symposion, Timaeus, Republic, and Hippias Major with careful attention to the way the meaning of the term to kalon elides from the properly aesthetic to the moral, finds the Platonic tradition to be decisive for the formation of modern aesthetic principles, emphasizing thematic parallels with Kant in particular. Another notable strength of this chapter is Bychkov's subtle explanation of Plato's censure of the arts in the Republic (169-75).

Though each chapter in Part Two is independently valuable and could easily be consulted individually as needed for the detailed analysis of the texts included, scholars may find chapter 6, "The Stoic Tradition," to be particularly significant insofar as it fleshes out what is both "understudied" by aestheticians (179) and only thinly and inadequately treated by von Balthasar, who claims the Stoics "were saying nothing new" aesthetically (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity [1989], 224), especially vis-a-vis Plato. Admittedly there exists the difficulty of a paucity of authentic extant Stoic texts (which our author acknowledges) and the subsequent necessity to rely upon secondary source material to reconstruct Stoic views, though here, as elsewhere, Bychkov remains the principled exegete. Again, the formal resemblance with Kantian aesthetics is prioritized. Chapter 7, "The Augustinian Tradition," analyzes selections from De magistro, De ordine, De musica, De vera religione, De libero arbitrio, De Trinitate, and the Confessions. As in earlier chapters, Bychkov notes thematic "convergences" with Kant's transcendental aesthetics, but also suggestively puts Augustine in dialogue with Nietzsche on the aesthetic justification of evil (both of which are resonances von Balthasar also gestures toward with respect to Augustinian aesthetics). Though a direct link between Bonaventure and later secular aesthetics is more troublesome to establish textually given his very determinate Christian orientation in which the revelatory function of the beautiful points specifically to Trinity and to Christ, Bychkov traces the textual transmission from the antique and medieval sources of the previous chapters (especially through Augustine, who provides both the backwards link to Platonic tradition and an adaptation of Cicero) to Bonaventure.

While Bychkov is a sympathetic, nonaggressive reader of von Balthasar, he is by no means uncritical. The precise philological work to which Bychkov attends, though confirming von Balthasar's aesthetic intuitions and interpretive process in general as "hermeneutically sound" (101), serves to reveal and correct interpretive deficiencies. Von Balthasar's intuitive, sometimes idiosyncratic hermeneutic practices--permitting a pastiche or symphony of disparate voices to speak all at once, a lack of regard for historical or logical chronology, a preference for following thematic repetitions like Ariadne's thread through multiple texts, privileging an "iconographic" mode (94, 97) which, in the manner of a Goethe, depicts in dense shorthand the essential Gestalt of a particular figure rather than a catalogue of individual details--while justified given both his background in literary criticism as well as the fundamental theological "preconception [of] the unity of aesthetic 'vision' in traditional Christian texts" (90), does come with its own share of limitations, not least of which is the fact that von Balthasar's mode of proceeding functions best (or perhaps only) when this theological presupposition of the unity of traditional texts is assumed.

Where von Balthasar is poetic, intuitive, and rhetorical, Bychkov's historical and philological investigation of texts is analytical, in his words "more traditionally academic" (114). Bychkov is a highly competent, conscientious reader, following a strict code of elegant principles that govern not only his specific textual analyses but also the rationale for including some antique and medieval texts or authors and eschewing others. The integrity of genealogical continuity through textual transmission, especially of the pagan philosophical tradition (Plato, the Stoics, and Cicero) with the Christian tradition (Augustine, Bonaventure) is ensured not theologically, as is the case with von Balthasar's appeal to an organic unity of vision, but historico-philologically, as only texts known to have been historically in conversation with one another are permitted entry, which excludes Plotinus. He further delimits the field according to a tightly circumscribed working definition of the aesthetic as "transcendental sensibility" (324), a signifier adequate both to the ancient and medieval traditions as well as their continuous historical extension to modern conceptions of aesthetics. First, aesthetics as transcendental sensibility requires the pointing or elevating function of the aesthetic toward something more transcendent, which occurs im-mediately, according to a direct intuition. Second, in an etymologically exact reading of aisthesis, it entails the (actual or analogous) presence of concrete sensible phenomena, which excludes pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, and the German Dominicans, though the "Dionysian and Anselmian moments" are treated concisely in terms of sources for Bonaventure (278-89). Though this circumscription is absolutely necessary and defensible on logistical grounds in order both to ensure a manageable scope of the project as well as remain in the orbit of von Balthasar's own approach, readers, along with Bychkov, will recognize the abundant incidence of aesthetic outliers: that is, "not all sensory (aisthetic) experiences are revelatory and not all revelatory experiences are sensory (aisthetic)" (326). To counter this objection, Bychkov's concluding remarks articulate a possible space for an original and productive new field of study he dubs revelatorics (326-34), which would include a "phenomenology" of broader aesthetic human experiences which are in excess of the sensual.

The patient reader who accompanies Bychkov through the occasionally dense thicket of the detailed textual analysis of Part Two will be well rewarded by a sophisticated, hermeneutically viable narrative of a continuous revelatory aesthetic tradition from Plato onward. Ultimately, Oleg Bychkov's creative, meticulously researched and lucidly written monograph makes a decisive contribution to a number of scholarly fields and will appeal to a wide array of readers, whether they are concerned primarily with the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, antique or medieval aesthetic theory, contemporary aesthetics, hermeneutics, theological method, or opening up heretofore uncharted byways for thinking the beautiful.

Jennifer Newsome Martin

The University of Notre Dame