His time in France also opened up for him a new world of literature and he subsequently published a major study of Bernanos as well as translations into German of the writings of Claudel, Péguy, and Calderón. His Jesuit scholastic studies at Fourvière-Lyons under the influence of Henri de Lubac led to a lifelong love affair with the Church Fathers and the publication of pioneering studies of Origen, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, among others. His doctoral studies in German philosophy and letters culminated in the publication of a vast three-volume thesis, The Apocalypse of the German Soul, on the idea of the end of the world in modern German literature from Lessing to Ernst Bloch. Any one part of his published works could fairly be said to constitute a respectable life’s work for a lesser man. From the point of view of sheer literary volume, he is almost alone in the sheer monumental proportions of his written corpus. There are a number of reasons why it could be said, albeit from different perspectives, that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) occupies a unique place among the great thinkers of the twentieth century.
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