Quote

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

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
Truth
Anew
Power
Foundations
Without
Handed
Vital
Merely
Foundation
Lost
Thought

More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
Love alone is credible.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
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.
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
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
The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.
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
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
Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
No one should think he can quickly dispose of questions posed here offhandedly. It was precisely because writers were in the habit during the time of the Reformation of theologizing with a hammer that the split in the Church became irreparable. And to work at overcoming this split means much effort. Only the patient need apply.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image
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
Image
Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs von Balthasar