Hans Urs Von Balthasar Quotes

In his person, life, death and resurrection, Jesus Christ is the 'form of God'. As presented in the New Testament writings, the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the 'style' of unconditional love. Love is always beautiful, because it expresses the self-diffusiveness of being, and so is touched by being's radiance, the pulchrum. But the unconditional, gracious, sacrificial love of Jesus Christ expresses not just the mystery of being - finite being - but the mystery of the Source of being, the transcendent communion of love which we call the Trinity.25 Thus through the Gestalt Christi, the love which God is shines through to the world. This is Balthasar's basic intuition.

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past
whether he admits it or not
can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.

Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more central even than humility: the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led.

God is not, in the first place, 'absolute power', but 'absolute love',

Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.

Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.

We are not only interested in those aspects of the mystery of the Roman Catholic Church which set her apart from the other Christian communities, but also to show how often they are central beliefs by describing what is specifically Catholic in such a way that the partner in dialogue can see, even from his own standpoint, the inner consistency.

As One and Unique, and yet as one who is to be understood only in the context of mankind's entire history and in the context of the whole created cosmos, Jesus it the Word, the Image, the Expression and the Exegesis of God.

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.

Almightiness consists much less in that which human beings imagine it to be, namely, changing things in accordance with one's own will - Jesus proved, through his miracles, that he could do that, too - than in exerting an influence on the freedom of human hearts without overpowering them. Enticing forth from them, through the mysterious power of grace, their free assent to the truly good.

Did the Redeemer so identify himself with his brothers, the sinners, that he will not distinguish himself from them in the presence of God, with the result that, like a lightning rod, he draws the judgment of God - a judgment upon the reality of opposition to God in the world - on to himself? Let no one object that the notion of an angry God is archaic and obsolete since a loving Father has given his Son for the world's sake (Jn 3:16; Rom 8:32). Nothing hinders God, who loves the sinner, from being angry on account of the sin he hates.

Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].

Firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God's language. Prayer is dialogue, not man's monologue before God.

The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminates the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.

Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.

Faith's table is always laid, whether the invited guest sits down or stays away with a thousand excuses and pretexts.

Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture's own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.

The word of God can require something of me today that it did not require yesterday; this means that, if I am to hear this challenge, I must be fundamentally open and listening.

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God's sight.

No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.

When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand ... but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, non-negotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom.

In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists
within his inseparable unity
the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

One can understand nothing of Christ without the mystery of the Trinity, nothing of the Church without faith in the divinity and humanity of Christ, nothing of the sacraments without the bridal mystery between Christian life without Christian faith. Thus, the present sermons revolve around the same center
the inexhaustible mystery of the one indivisible faith.

Syntheses between East and West based simply on a similarity of "spiritualities" or "mystical experiences" could not be achieved even then - how much less so today! So we must judge any program as inadequate that tries simply to let India and Europe encounter each other at the halfway-station of Byzantine hesychasm, in the practice of the Jesus prayer and of certain bodily positions and breathing exercises - all ways in which Eastern Christianity reorientalized itself after the period of the great synthesis.

Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity.

There is a moment when the interior light of the "eyes of faith" becomes one with the exterior light that shines from Christ, and this occurs because man's thirst, as he strives and seeks after God, is quenched as he finds repose in the revealed form of the Son.

The Hegelian babble about the real being the true is therefore the same kind of confusion as when people assume that the words and actions of a poet's dramatic characters are the poet's own. We must, however, hold fast to the belief that when God - so to speak - decides to write a play, he does not do it simply in order to pass the time, as the pagans thought. No, no: indeed, the utterly serious point here is that loving and being loved is God's passion. It is almost - infinite love! - as if he is bound to this passion, almost as if it were a weakness on his part; whereas in fact it is his strength, his almighty love: and in that respect his love is subject to no alteration of any kind. There

It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.

[God loves us, not such as we are by our merit, but such as we will be by his own gift]

The Church and her exegesis of revelation progress through the ever-changing periods of world history. New aspects emerge, while others wane; efforts are made to compensate for one-sided emphases, but not rarely they are simply replaced with the opposite extremes. Today too, then, it is a duty to restate the principles in a new and timely way - while being as measured as possible - and in so doing to retrieve what is of permanent value.

The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of the Church - a spiritual becoming which is incarnate and is lived within the Church's own process of becoming. It is the effort to develop what has been given, to discover what is hidden, the effort to attain to oneself by attaining, though the Church and within her, to the mystery of Christ, the Saviour'.

Gregory of Nyssa, in contrast, tries to advance philosophical and theological arguments to prove that the pains of hell cannot be co-eternal with God. His main argument is based on the essential superiority of good over evil; for evil, in its essence, can never be absolute and unlimited. The sinner inevitably reaches a limit when all his evil is done and he cannot go farther, just as the night, after having reached its peak, turns toward the day.18 This reasoning corresponds to the example of a physician who allows a boil to mature until it can be lanced. Thus the Incarnation, too, occurred only when evil had reached its climax.19 Gregory's position has never been condemned.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man.

We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.

The person who prays and who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the word he desires to worship (in order to be more single-mindedly at the word's disposal) will select with great care basic works for his studies which will observe the so-called exactitude of scholarship without losing sight of the most important exactitude, namely, the ordering of all thought toward prayer.

To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.

Only in Christ are all things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each.

In Mary this petition has been granted: she is, as it were, the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary's name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except "the Mother of Jesus".1 It is as if she had handed over her personal dimension, in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.

Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the father's love was already waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home - even if his father's love welcomes him in a way he never would have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love.

his view of perceiving God in Christ with the notion of looking at a painting and seeing what the artist has been doing in it.27 In Christian faith, the captivating force (the 'subjective evidence') of the artwork which is Christ takes hold of our imaginative powers; we enter into the 'painterly world' which this discloses and, entranced by what we see, come to contemplate the glory of sovereign love of God in Christ (the 'objective evidence') as manifested in the concrete events of his life, death and resurrection.28 So entering his glory, we become absorbed by it, but this very absorption sends us out into the world in sacrificial love like that of Jesus. This is

Everything in Irenaeus is bathed in a warm and radiant joy, a wise and majestic gentleness. His words of struggle are hard as iron and crystal clear, ... so penetrating that they cannot fail to enlighten the unbiased observer.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

The work with which we embark on this first volume of a series of theological studies is a work with which the philosophical person does not begin, but rather concludes.

Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.

There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God.

Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.

Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp ... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

Every kind of integralism, open or disguised, is contrary in principle to true catholicity, which can win to itself and comprise all things only if it delivers itself up and dies like the seed to rise again.

Wonder - the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge - promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing ... like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.

The saint is the apology for the Christian religion. He is holy, however, because he allows Christ to live in him and it is in Christ that he "glories".

There is a staggering perversity in all the human categories that are applied to the God-man; for if we could speak in a completely human way about Christ we would have to say that the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" show a want of patience and a want of truth. Only if God says it, can it be true, i.e., even if the God-man says it. And since it is true, it is also truly the climax of pain. The relationship to God is evidently such a tremendous weight of blessedness that, once I have laid hold of it, it is absolute in the most absolute sense; by contrast, the worldly notion that my enemies are to be excluded from it would actually diminish this blessedness. The

The Word, then, came into the world - came to what was his, but those who were his did not receive him. He beamed into the gloom, but the darkness turned away. Thus had love's revelation to choose a struggle of life and death. God came into the world, but a bristling barrier of spears and shields was his welcome. His grace began to trickle, but the world made itself supple and impenetrable, and the drops fell to the ground.

There will never be beings unloved by God, since God is absolute love.

Thus it seems that the Cross of Christ, laden with every sinful refusal of man, must stand at the very last extremity of hell; indeed, it must stand beyond hell, where the Son is forsaken by the Father in a way that only he can know.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.

A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.

Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.

Hell is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone. As part of the spiritual life it belongs behind the 'closed door' of my own room. From the standpoint of living faith, I cannot fundamentally believe in anyone's damnation but my own; as far as my neighbor is concerned, the light of resurrection can never be so obscured that I would be allowed or obliged to stop hoping for him.

For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute of being judge and consuming fire. Nothing is more majestic than his Passion; even his anxiety is sublime. And God never denies his attributes to those who are his light in the world. They shine like stars in the cosmos, and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.

The Spirit of holiness and love is also the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge about love; and they are in fact one and the same Spirit: Truth and love are inseparable wings - for truth cannot fly without love - and love cannot hover without truth

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.

God does not only oppose the enemy of the divine from an external or superior standpoint, but also does the unthinkable: he exposes himself to Satan's fascination, in order to burst the dazzling bubble from within.