Scattering the Seed: A Guide Through Balthasar's Early Writings on Philosophy And the Arts

Aidan Nichols’s newest book in his ongoing Introduction to Hans Urs Von Balthasar series investigates Balthasar's early explorations of music and the other arts, before launching into a ramifying but controlled survey of his—often highly original—interpretations of major philosophers and literary figures in the European tradition from the early modern period until the 1930s.

Balthasar seeks to discover elements of truth, goodness, and beauty in a rich range of figures. He gives special attention to classical German philosophers (such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche), as well as to dramatists and novelists (notably Goethe, Schiller, and Dostoevsky), and to intellectual giants of his own century (such as Bergson, Scheler, and Barth). He also intends to prove that writers who had lost a living contact with the biblical revelation carried by Christianity were incapable of reconstituting a synthesis of ideas about the goal of man and the universe, an accomplishment that could be taken for granted in the high medieval epoch. At the same time, the modern writers whom Balthasar investigates add, in his view, crucial enhancements of human understanding—particularly in relation to history and the human subject—which must be factored into any new overall vision of the future of the human soul and indeed the human species in its cosmic environment.