Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.

Such a person can see without "pre-judice", that is, without judging in advance; he will judge only on the basis of what he has really seen for himself

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.

The beautiful is the radiance which something gives off simply because it is something, because it exists.

In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.

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.

To live with another within the compass of one heart: I must move to the side, must make myself small, so that the other has space and does not feel crowded.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

Maximus knows and expressly states that "faith is true knowledge (?????? ??????) based on unprovable principles, because it is the testimony to things that lie beyond both theoretical and practical reason."69

God is so wide that, within his spaciousness, even the longing for unfulfillable longing can soar freely.

In principle this implies something else, something harder to grasp, namely, that his whole suffering—a suffering that goes to the utter limits—follows from and actually expresses his eternal, triune joy.

Maximus remained a child of his time, a disciple of his master. But the fact that he was able to develop his own basic insight, in spite of such influences, makes him one of the greatest thinkers in Christian intellectual history.

theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

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.

Nature, then, is incapable of conceiving what lies above nature. As a consequence, no creature can achieve divinization for itself naturally, simply because it cannot grasp God. It belongs wholly to God's grace to distribute divinization by grace, according to the measure of each being, to enlighten nature with supernatural light and to lift it above its own limitations by the superabundance of glory.45

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.

His being is "absolutely inaccessible, equally so (???? ?? ????) to visible and to invisible creation".10 The "difference between uncreated and created nature is infinite (???????)"11 and grows ever greater and less controllable

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.

this, too, is a way of reaching out for the divine peace in the universe, a peace that so preserves each thing that it never deviates from being itself . . . and continues to perform its own operation.

God "has placed in all intellectual beings, as their hidden but primary power, the potentiality of knowing him; ever a generous Lord, he has planted in us lowly men, as part of our nature, the longing and desire for him

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor's first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures.42 Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

he praises the unknowability of the world and the miracles, far exceeding all comprehension, that lie hidden in the unfathomable depths of the least of its parts. Only such a sense of reverence can be the true presupposition for knowing the far more unknowable God.

Maximus expressly says that the Incarnation—more precisely, the drama of Cross, grave, and Resurrection—is not only the midpoint of world history but the foundational idea of the world itself.

But if Maximus is "a mystic like Dionysius", he is surely "a mystic who is also a metaphysician, an ascetic who has reached, through his familiarity with Aristotelian philosophy, a consistency and precision of thought that one looks for in vain in the works of the Areopagite.