Hans Urs Von Balthasar Quotes

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

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.

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

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

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

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.

The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.

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

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.

God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.

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.

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

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

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

Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].

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

Love alone is credible.

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

What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.

The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.

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.

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.

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

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible 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.

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.

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.

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.

Every mystery of life has its origin in the heart.

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