‘Desire nothing except to be pleasing to him and to do his most holy will’ [CRE I 28]. This simple formula, inspired by the relationship between Christ crucified and his Father, and lived ever more intensely in the most radical way by Catherine, provides the key to an integrated reading of her spirituality, of which it is the heart. But how does it actually take shape in practice? Will it not don the emaciated face of renunciation, gloomy earnestness, human frustration, all-enveloping pain, self-denial and deprivation? The reality is in fact quite different. There is not a single letter in which Catherine does not invite people to be ‘cheerful’ [cf. CRF VII. 3 163-167], This certainly does not mean a superficial, silly cheerfulness which is only skin-deep and unpredictable in its durability. What Catherine encourages is a cheerfulness which does not exclude the heights and the depths of the various states of spirit people find themselves in as their circumstances vary, whether internally or externally, but which remains constant even in times of pain and tribulation. It is a cheerfulness which is rooted in its depths in the very mystery of God and whose intensity flows from faith, hope and the love with which it abandons itself to God’s plan in the specific life of each individual.

Urs von Balthasar’s theology is attuned to a realism which becomes more attractive as Rahner’s engagement with Kantianism seems less pertinent. This realism ‘turns the rudder hard over’, as von Balthasar said of Barth; but how did he acquire it? Rowan Williams has suggested that von Balthasar’s seamanship originates partly with Heidegger. This article will place him within the German Catholic revival of the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, German Catholics delved into phenomenology, and into Newman’s theology. They appraised Aquinas’s thought differently than did English or French neo-Thomists.

The Memoirs of the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) supply some sidelights on von Balthasar’s writings. Both men attended the University of Vienna between 1922 and 1926. There von Balthasar is said to have “. . . heard the Plotinus lectures of Hans Eibl: there being was . . . interpreted as . . . the self-communicating good.” He will later say that the affinity between Thomas and Heidegger derives not from Aristotle, but from “. . . that Plotinus for whom being remains a supraconceptual mystery.. ,” Kolnai places Eibl in his time and place: