hands almost nightly with his roommate Rudolf Allers. Later, as a Jesuit chaplain, he would perform a transcription of Mozart's Don Giovanni from memory. Education Educated first by Benedictine monks at the abbey school of Engelberg in central Switzerland—during the time of the First World War—von Balthasar transferred to the more academically rigorous Stella Matutina, a preparatory school run by the Society of Jesus in Feldkirch, Austria, whose alumni include Arthur Conan Doyle and the Thomist cardinal Franz Ehrle. Aside from music, von Balthasar also took a strong interest in literature, later citing Dante and Goethe as key early influences. A year before graduation from Stella Matutina, he enrolled early at the University of Zurich to study German literature. After stints researching in Vienna and Berlin, he obtained his doctorate in 1928, with a dissertation on the theme of Eschatology in German and Germanophone thought, drawing heavily from Catholic theology. Writing in the 1980s, he said of this latter work that "its fundamental impulse was the desire to reveal ... the ultimate religious attitude, often hidden, of the great figures of modern German literature. I wanted to let them, so to speak, 'make their confession'. The work was of insufficient maturity—most of the chapters ought to be rewritten—and yet some of it may still be valid." According to Henrici, submitting a dissertation of this nature to the "Liberal Protestant" University of Zurich was academically risky for a student at that time, but the faculty awarded von Balthasar his doctorate summa cum laude. Society of Jesus Though a practicing Catholic, with "untroubled faith" and "devotion to our Lady," von Balthasar had remained largely uninterested in theology and spirituality until his university years. At the University of Vienna—where atheism was prevalent—he was influenced in his religious thinking by Professor Hans Eibl and, more decisively, his friend Rudolf Allers, a convert to Catholicism. While studying in Berlin, too, he heard lectures by the theologian Romano Guardini. In 1929, von Balthasar attended a retreat for students in Wyhlen, Germany, and sensed what he believed to be a sudden call to follow Jesus Christ:Even today [in 1959], after thirty years, I could still find again the tree on the lost path in the Black Forest, not far from Basel, under which I was struck as if by lightning.... [I]t was neither theology nor the priesthood that, at that moment, appeared in a flash before my