Theology and European culture in Hans Urs von Balthasar's trilogy

The article is a review of the recent publication in Russian of the several volumes from the theological trilogy by a Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). Special attention is paid to his key theological ideas and concepts in the context of his creative plan, in which the two millennia experience of European culture is interpreted as a setting for the Divine drama. The article demonstrates the internal unity and universal scale of this creative plan, reveals its key elements - the triad of the beautiful, the good and the true, and also offers a new interpretation of their relations, with the Divine drama representing the core element of the theological construction, while the first part of the trilogy, connected with theological aesthetics, is considered as a preamble to the dogmatics of the central part of the trilogy and plays the role of fundamental theology. The main reference point of von Balthasar’s creative plan and its semantic center is the Trinitarian love, which reveals itself in being through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, through the drama of Golgotha as the ultimate fullness of Divine love, the most perfect expression of the essence and identity of the Triune God. And only in the context of the Divine drama, the logic of Trinitarian love becomes reconstructible.