Rival versions of Dante and theologies of Beauty: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Pierre Mandonnet

On the occasion of celebrating his first mass as a priest on the 31st July 1936, the Feast Day of St Ignatius, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was presented with a copy of Pierre Mandonnet (1858-1936)’s Dante le théologien (1935) by one of his six closest student friends, Berthold Neidhart (1903-1975). This article analyses contextually Balthasar’s and Mandonnet’s rival versions of Dante, and provides a comparative reappraisal of their theologies of beauty. First, it critiques Balthasar’s presentation of Dante as inaugurating a new “lay style of theology,” an “existential theology” in the vernacular, which resolves “the problem of eros” through the “form of eros.” Second, it shows how Mandonnet’s interpretation of Dante is its photographic negative: for Mandonnet, Dante—a failed cleric—is a scholastic (and largely unoriginal) theologian who, with supreme artistic mastery, constructs an extraordinary poetic fiction. Third, it addresses the relationship between Balthasar’s programmatic interpretation of Dante and his understanding of his own life and work, including some distinguishing features of his celebrated “theological aesthetics.” Fourth, it reconsiders Mandonnet’s account of natural and supernatural beauty in Dante’s Commedia, an account which may well have influenced Balthasar, even as his own “theological aesthetics” took a radically different turn.