Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

Above all we must not wish to cling to our suffering. Suffering surely deepens us and enhances our person, but we must not desire to become a deeper self than God wills. To suffer no longer can be a beautiful, perhaps the ultimate sacrifice.

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.

it can only be conceived as a shuttling back and forth within the bounds of finitude, while genuine unity withdraws beyond the circle of creation into the realm of the inconceivable. So "every created thing has the divine and ineffable monad, which is God himself, as its origin and its end, because it comes forth from him and ultimately returns to him".

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 illuminate the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.

The world seeks it for us, who have need of such illumination. So also the Word became flesh, not for himself, but rather to bring the mystery of the Incarnation to reality for our sakes.

When everything is blocked off,' I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, "one must try to live in the interstices.' Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.

For us humans, that will mean that our obedience, which we owe to our Creator and Lord and to all his direct and indirect commands, can be, in Jesus Christ, and even must be, an expression of our love; so that any love of God or other human beings which excludes obedience, or wishes to get beyond it, does not at all deserve the name love.

An affirmation of a paradoxical unity of ontological opposites, rooted in the Chalcedonian Understanding of the Person of Christ—"one individual or person subsisting in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation".

In the union of person and existence are forced to draw together, and from the same depths of being—which is more than all intelligible essence—arises the invitation of a personal God to his created child, an event that belongs to another realm altogether than all the in-built natural orientations—however mystical—of intellectual beings.

The man who follows Christ in full, who denies himself and and dies to himself and to the world, can never, ever be a "bourgeois."

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.