Hans Urs von Balthasar was very clear that he owed his most distinctive theological insights to Adrienne von Speyr. ‘On the whole I received far more from her, theologically, than she from me, though, of course, the exact proportion can never be calculated’; she often gave him suggestions for sermons ‘but only rarely ... did she read my books’; ‘following her advice’ he took the extremely painful decision to leave the Society of Jesus; he ‘strove to bring [his] way of looking at Christian revelation into conformity with hers’; and although she has no part in the writing, without her ‘the basic perspective of Herrlichkeit would never have existed’ (First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, 1981, page 13). ‘Today, after her death, her work appears far more important to me than mine, and the publication of her still-unpublished writings takes precedence over all personal work of my own’. He predicted, scornfully, that theologians would try to disentangle his insights from hers. Those who read the volumes of Herrlichkeit as they came out in 1961-67 (I was impelled towards them by the enthusiasm of Cornelius Ernst and Donald MacKinnon), of course, knew little or nothing about his indebtedness to von Speyr. Indisputably, some of his most characteristic themes draw heavily on her mystical experiences; other motifs, however, that are central and of great interest, seem independent of his meeting her.

There is as yet no proper biography. Born in 1902, in the Swiss Jura, in a comfortably-off family of doctors, clergymen and merchants, settled in Basel for centuries, Adrienne von Speyr was brought up as a Protestant.