The fact that the ‘doctrine of the spiritual senses’ serves an important function for numerous patristic and medieval theologians may not surprise contemporary scholars. What might be unexpected, however, is the high level of significance the doctrine has for the two most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century: Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In his 1996 article on the topic, Stephen Fields draws long-overdue scholarly attention to the versions of the doctrine found in Balthasar and Rahner, highlighting their divergent readings of Bonaventure as his key point of contrast. At the conclusion of his study, however, Fields indicates that more work needs to be done on this subject. Most intriguingly, he suggests that Rahner's investigations into the spiritual senses ‘may have inspired [his] idea of the pre-apprehension’, referring to Rahner's notion of the Vorgriff auf esse, first developed in Spirit in the World.

Although I make some qualifications regarding this hypothesis below, I argue in this chapter that the spiritual senses do eventually come to inform a reworked version of this aspect of Rahner's theology. This claim not only suggests that one of the core features of Rahner's theological anthropology was influenced by his study of the spiritual senses; it also helps to account for the seeming disappearance of the doctrine from Rahner's theological considerations after 1934, as I suggest that it had an ongoing, albeit ‘subterranean’, influence on Rahner's thought.