Hans Urs von Balthasar quotes - page 2

The exalted moment of love is always full of promise: it is not closed in on itself, but open; we see its natural fruitfulness revealed in the child, even if its spiritual fruitfulness remains hidden. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Adrienne von Speyr has brought mysticism back from the clandestine existence into which, increasingly misunderstood, indeed scorned, it had been exiled and silenced by official theology and proclamation and has returned it to the center of salvation history. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
In his Gospel, St. John, through long and deep contemplation, acknowledges Jesus to be the Logos of God. In his epistles he points entirely away from himself toward Christ. Finally, in the Apocalypse, in the vision of the Lamb of God, Old and New Testaments are united, and the whole drama of salvation is summed up. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
God deserves more love than the world gives him. Men, too, need more love than they receive from the world. Our community wants to take her place where these two needs meet. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Mystical Body of Christ does not rest on abstract principles but on concrete persons who have missions, or on missions which are personal. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Christ's Passion, viewed from within, is of a diversity that the biblical texts and images leave hidden; but numerous mystics through the centuries have been allowed to experience a great deal of it in ever-varying aspects-if only by drops, as it were, compared with the Son of God. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
There were many mystical phenomena in Adrienne's life-stigmata, transferences, the radiating of light, levitation, speaking with tongues, and other things of that kind, but they all occurred in a totally unemphatic way. They were mere accompaniments to show forth the heart of the matter: what was to be passed on to the Church, invisibly through prayer and strenuous penance, visibly through the dictated works. The criterion of her mysticism's authenticity lies primarily, if not exclusively, in the quality of what she did and what she had and has to say. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
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. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar
What you are is God's gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)
Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the "work” of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience ("credere contra fidem” like "sperare contra spem”), against every "rational” concept of God, which thinks of him in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not in terms of this inconceivable and senseless act of love. View quote
Hans Urs von Balthasar