Quote

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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hans Urs von Balthasar
Age: 82 †
Born: 1905
Born: August 12
Died: 1988
Died: June 26
Cardinal
Catholic Priest
Theologian
Translator
Writer
Lucerne
Switzerland
Balthasar
Hans-Urs von Balthasar
Cannot
Warm
Crystal
Everything
Fail
Observer
Hard
Failing
Enlightening
Joy
Radiant
Bathed
Struggle
Crystals
Unbiased
Wise
Observers
Enlighten
Clear
Gentleness
Penetrating
Words
Iron
Majestic

More quotes by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
The saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
Love alone is credible.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
Lovers are the ones who know most about God the theologian must listen to them.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
Christian obedience, by its very nature, has a heroic character.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar