In The Realm of Metaphysics: The Modern Age (1965), Hans Urs von Balthasar presents volume III1/2 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (the third part of his Trilogy). Balthasar’s theme is the historical unfolding of the analogy between created beauty and divine glory. While the previous volume explored Christianity’s reception of the ancient perception of the “kalon,” this volume follows the story into the modern era, “where the catastrophe of nominalism robs creation of every light of God” and “night falls.” Which ways remain? thus becomes the decisive question. “For the time being,” Balthasar answers, there are three, the exploration of which takes up the bulk of these pages: First, “the Christian theology of self-abandonment (forming a single spiritual family from Eckhart via the women mystics to Ignatius and the Grand Siècle): But what is now the status of the world? Secondly, the renewed anchoring of theology in the foundations of antiquity (a strain that runs from Nicholas of Cusa through the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Enlightenment to Goethe and Heidegger): But then where is the distinctiveness of the Christian element? Finally, the philosophy of spirit (again from Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa to Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and the Idealists): but if the (human) spirit masters all being conceptually, the splendor of Being is extinguished and is replaced by the ‘sublimity’ of the thinker (Kant, Schiller), which with Hegel once again becomes entrapped in the past; what then remains is only grim materialistic fatality” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect, 1965).