한스 우르스 폰 발타살의 계몽주의에 대한 비판 고찰 - 괴테와 짐멜의 연구 방법을 중심으로 -

Abstract

Hans Urs von Balthasar, as a modern theologian, reflected on ‘religious nature’, which has been lost in current period. He worried about being depreciated of the human spirit and minds, and losing religious reality accordingly. He faced such a reality, and then pointed out that ‘the Enlightenment’ was the cause of it. It was possible that the ‘The Enlightenment’ got the positive interpretation in nominal terms of ‘transfer in terms of humanity’, but in fact, it brought about the mistake which made everything came to think within the matrix of empirical, objective and intelligent. Further, in Christianity point of view, the Enlightenment has been analyzed that God centering thinking was collapsed, and land up in the situation that modern Christian’s faith also has been devastated. Those problems, starting from the Enlightenment, have been developed to rationalism, idealism and humanism. The Enlightenment concentrated on more positive output, and so metaphysical values focusing on human mental activities started to be dissolved. To solve these problems, von Balthasar asserted that to try again contemplating and self-examining about ancient ideology. With this, he claimed to restore the metaphysics. In the points of recalling human ‘religious nature’, which has been prevailed through the ages, and the ancient ‘glory’, von Balthasar presented, as a solution, the literature introspecting through Goethe. The other methodology, which is different from the Enlightenment thinking, is the new attempt of theological aesthetics, which is based on this literature foundation, expanded to the reflection on ‘beauty’, then this became the methodology to recall God’s ‘Gestalt’. The concept of Goethe’s recognition about praising and awing God has become the base of von Balthasar’s theology. Such works could be more embodied as comparing Kant’s thinking, with Kant’s theory which was derived from the form of ‘universal human nature’ of the Enlightenment at that time. Then, criticized Kant’s idealism through Simmel’s work, which was quoted and studied by von Balthasar. Through such a von Balthasar’s theological self-examination and efforts, this study is to restore the metaphysical value through the spirit and minds of human himself, not empirical ideological thinking of the Enlightenment. And also consider the consequential meaning of ‘Christianity religious nature’.