Seeing the Form (1961) is the opening volume of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, the first part of his magnum opus, the Trilogy. Synthesizing dogmatics and fundamental theology, Balthasar shows how Christ himself is the form of revelation as well as its content. At the core of this project is a re-thinking of God’s self-disclosure in light of the beautiful, a move that reverses the modern priority of the subject while retrieving subjectivity as reception of divine glory. As Balthasar himself would write a few years later, only “such a stance can perceive the divine as such, without obscuring it beforehand by an instrumental relationship to the cosmos (which, imperfect, calls for divine completion) or to man (who, still more imperfect and lost in sin, requires a savior). The first desideratum for seeing objectively is the ‘letting be’ of God’s self-revelation. . . . This first step is not to master the materials of perception by imposing our own categories on them but an attitude of service to the object” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect, 1965).