This book investigates Balthasar's early explorations of music and the other arts, before launching into a ramifying but controlled survey of his - often highly original - interpretations of major philosophers and literary figures in the European tradition from the early modern period until the 1930s. Balthasar seeks not only to discover elements of truth, goodness and beauty generally in a rich range of figures, where especial attention is given to the classical German philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and Nietzsche, as well as to dramatists and novelists (notably Goethe, Schiller and Dostoevsky), as well as to intellectual giants of his own century, such as Bergson, Scheler and Barth. He also intends to prove that writers who had lost a living contact with the biblical revelation carried by Christianity were incapable of reconstituting a synthesis of ideas about the goal of man and the universe which could be taken for granted in the high Medieval epoch. At the same time, the modern writers he investigates add, in his view, crucial enhancements of human understanding - particularly in relation to history and the human subject - which must be factored into any new overall vision of the future of the human soul and indeed the human species in its cosmic environment.