Balthasar was educated in Benedictine and Jesuit secondary schools and went on to study in Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich. In 1928 he underwent his doctoral examination at the University of Zurich, a liberal Protestant institution, having completed a dissertation on the "History of the Eschatological Problem in Modern German Literature." In November 1928 he entered the Jesuit novitiate for two years, after which he studied Scholastic philosophy with a Jesuit faculty near Munich, followed by four years of theology near Lyon. Thus he was a licentiate in both philosophy and theology, though his doctorate remained only in literature.