In The Realm of Metaphysics: The Modern Age (1965), Hans Urs von Balthasar presents volume III.1.1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (which is the third part of his Trilogy). His goal is to trace the historical unfolding of the analogy between divine glory and created beauty that undergirds his re-centering of theology on Christ as the unique form of revelation. Thus, whereas “in the preceding volumes the radiance of Christian thinking proceeded kerygmatically from the (still invisible) sun of biblical revelation,” in the present volume “the Christian element must be immersed as deeply as possible in the thinking of humanity. The splendor of the divine in the world was (in Homer) the first formed experience of the West; and it becomes evident that art is begotten and itself begets only so long as it is created out of a mythos lived and experienced. Philosophy (in the pre-Socratics and, indeed, in a Plato still steeped in the light of myth) replaces it, posing the ambiguous question of the fundamental meaning of transcendence: man’s power and autonomy or God’s revelation? Virgil and Plotinus provide the grand finale for antiquity with the same question. What will Christianity do with the ‘kalon’ of antiquity? Forge from it a monstrance for the bread of ‘glory’? Boethius, Erigena, the Victorines, Thomas, Nicholas of Cusa: What precisely happens here? Is this Eros a raiment of Agape? What place has the Cross?” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect, 1965).