"Those words which attempt to convey the beautiful gravitate, first of all, toward the mystery of form (Gestalt) or of figure (Gebilde). Formosus ('beautiful') comes from forma ('shape') and speciosus ('comely') from species ('likeness'). But this is to raise the question of the 'great radiance from within'which transforms species into speciosa: the question of splendour. We are confronted simultaneously with both the figure and that which shines forth from the figure, making it a worthy, a love worthy thing. Similarly we are confronted with both the gathering and uniting of that which had been indifferently scattered--its gathering into the one thing which now manifests and expresses itself--and the outpouring, self-utterance of the one who was able to fashion by himself such a body of expression: by himself, I say, meaning 'on his own initiative', and therefore with pre-eminence, freedom, sovereignty, out of his own interior space, particularity, and essence. Again, we are brought face to face with both interiority and its communication, the soul and its body, free discourse governed by the laws of clarity and language.

"Such, in short, is the primal phenomenon. Whoever insists that he can neither see it nor read it, or whoever cannot accept it, but rather seeks to 'break it up' critically into supposedly prior components, that person falls into the void and, what is worse, he falls into what is opposed to the true and the good. The original of beauty lies not in disembodied spirit which looks about for a field of expression and, finding one, adjusts it to its own purposes as one would set up a typewriter and begin typing, afterwards to abandon it. Nor is it a spiritless body which somehow 'throws itself together' through an inexplicable play of material forces ('impulses' would already be too strong), only to fall apart again soon after. Even Plato went behind the primal phenomenon by conceiving of a soul that fell into matter only as a second movement of its existence. This is understandable, since Plato thought he could salvage the unity of what dissolves in death only by locating such unity within a wholly seperate (ab-stract and ab-solute) realm of the spirit. Thus in order to uphold the freedom and dignity of the spirit, Plato reduced that which was original to the status of the derivative. In so doing, he became the father of all who have put allegory (i.e. discourse about something else) in the place of symbol (i.e. a true sign), and also the father of all those who adopt a wholly superfluous and only apparently scientific attitude in order to investigate psychologically how the soul can break out of its interiority and enter the so-called 'exterior world', and what the alleged 'reasons' for such a migration might be. Aristotle remained loyal to the phenomenon as such; for him man and world appeared in their given forms. But Aristotle's limitations also became apparent in his inability either to understand or to construct a promise of human wholeness beyond life on earth. Greek tragedy was the cry of transient existence as it came up against this limit. Only God's gift from the New Earth and the Flesh that rises to eternal life can quench this question and prevent the reversion to an intensified Platonism which has had such grievous consequences even for Christian theology."

--------------Hans Urs Von Balthasar