The collection / 33 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1946 AD

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

Hans Urs von Balthasar / quote

02c. 1946 AD

For all his gentleness and humility unto death on the Cross, God does not relinquish his attribute of being judge and consuming fire. Nothing is more majestic than his Passion; even his anxiety is sublime. And God never denies his attributes to those who are his light in the world. They shine like stars in the cosmos, and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.

Hans Urs von Balthasar / quote

03c. 1946 AD

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

Hans Urs von Balthasar / quote

04c. 1946 AD

The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar / quote

05c. 1946 AD

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 / quote

06c. 1946 AD

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 / quote

07c. 1946 AD

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 / quote

08c. 1946 AD

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 / quote

09c. 1946 AD

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 / quote