Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Press of Speculative Russian Religious Philosophy

This study examines the sometimes explicit but also inchoate, coded, or anonymous complex of relations between the work and method of Hans Urs von Balthasar and modern Russian religious thought, specifically the work of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov. Thematic, theological, and methodological affinities between Balthasar and the Russians include a shared broad-mindedness toward navigating between the ancient Christian tradition and modern philosophical developments, a variously critical reception of German Idealism and Romanticism, and in focused treatment of the relation of God and world, immanence and transcendence, freedom and necessity, as well as kenoticism, eschatology, Trinity, history, pneumatology, cosmology, and aesthetics. It is the burden of this study to demonstrate, as evidenced by his critical excavation of the Russians, that Balthasar's own theological method can' contravening the opinion of some of his critics' be characterized as quintessentially non-nostalgic, structurally hospitable to non-theological categories, non-canonic sources, and modes of speculative thinking which probe, but do not exceed the elastic boundaries of tradition. This thesis shall be tested systematically through an analysis and assessment of the principles according to which Balthasar allows, repeats, or excludes elements in the functional test-cases of the Russians along the following sites of inquiry: (1) art and aesthetics, (2) the problems of myth, freedom, and evil, (3) 'anthropocentric' eschatology, including death, judgment, and the postmortem state, and (4) 'theocentric' eschatology, including figurations of the Antichrist and paschal trinitarianism. Because Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov critically appropriate German Idealism and Romanticism to varying degrees in their religious philosophies, F.W.J. Schelling serves throughout as a tertiary conversation partner and a primary catalyst for productively analyzing Balthasar's process of adjudicating the value and reliability of philosophical and theological sources. Through constructing a dialogical space which keeps Balthasar, Schelling, and the Russians in conversation, this dissertation suggests that Balthasarian theological method operates fundamentally in a pneumatic register, grounded in orthodox commitments and structurally open to developments in theology.