Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes

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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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Beauty
Truth
Courage
Decision
Act
Goodness
Sisters
Today
Vengeance
Will
The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Love
God
Christian
Trinity
Unity
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Death
Life
God
Being
Existence
Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Faith
Love
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Love
God
Being
Fact
Wishes
World
If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Fact
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Beauty
Religion
Absence
Man
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Beauty
Sadness
Word
World
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Love
Time
History
God
Possibility
Appearance
Man
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
God
Man
Philosophy
The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Love
Reality
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Being
Limits
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
First
Passion
Unity
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Work
First
Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Infinite