Hans Urs von Balthasar
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Dissatisfied with the prevalent Neo-Scholasticism of his day, von Balthasar was drawn to the rich theology of the Church Fathers. Along with Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, and other Continental theologians of the ressourcement movement, he labored to bring theology and spirituality back to the Scriptures and Fathers as primary and direct theological sources. After moving to Basel in1940 to assume the responsibility of a university chaplain, he met Adrienne von Speyr (1902-67) who became a Catholic under his spiritual direction. Her writing became a major source of inspiration for his writing and he insisted that her work could not be separated from his own. Together they founded the Community of St. John, a “secular institute.” In light of his important role in this community, he left the Jesuits in 1950. Though he did not serve as a peritus (theological advisor to the bishops) during the Second Vatican Council, the influence of his writings can be seen in the conciliar documents. In 1972 he formed Communio: International Catholic Review with Daniélou, de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger. From 1961-87 he produced his most important work, a trilogy published in fifteen volumes: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic. After years of illness, Balthasar died on June 26, 1988, one day before he was to be made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II.
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Quotes
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The silence required of the Christian is not fundamentally and primarily of human making. Rather, believers must realize that they already possess within themselves and at the same time in God the quiet, hidden “chamber” into which they are to enter (Mt 6:6).
-Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) In loving our neighbour in the most ordinary earthly matters, we are encountering Christ in heaven. All this is hidden, of course, from our earthly senses at present, but when Christ returns it will become manifest, along with him, as something that was always there. -Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) Every contemplative (and not only the gifted mystic), if his contemplation is an expression of a living discipleship, must be prepared to experience the dark night to some degree. It is a sign that he is on the path of Christ, i.e., it is a sign of consolation, even though it is bound to take the form of a withdrawal of consolation. -Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) If we love our brother, our contemplation will be rich and absorbing… If we love, we shall never turn away from contemplation; we shall thirst for it more and more. -Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is. -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, Prayer “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, Unless You Become Like This Child “We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. 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. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form “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, Unless You Become Like This Child “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 “Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “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, The Christian and Anxiety “Once a person learns to read the signs of love and thus to believe it, love leads him into the open field wherein he himself can love. If the prodigal son had not believed that the father's love was already waiting for him, he would not have been able to make the journey home - even if his father's love welcomes him in a way he never would have dreamed of. The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible “We do not build the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “The Spirit of holiness and love is also the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge about love; and they are in fact one and the same Spirit: “Truth and love are inseparable wings—for truth cannot fly without love—and love cannot hover without truth” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible “No fighter is more divine than one who can achieve victory through defeat. In the instant when he receives the deadly wound, his opponent falls to the ground, himself struck a final blow. For he strikes love and is thus himself struck by love. And by letting itself be struck, love proves what had to be proven: that it is indeed love.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World “The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminate the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar “firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God’s language. Prayer is dialogue, not man’s monologue before God.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “The word of God can require something of me today that it did not require yesterday; this means that, if I am to hear this challenge, I must be fundamentally open and listening.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, small services rendered in the spirit of warmth and love which lightens every burden. The sun’s brightness can from time to time (and perhaps often) be hidden in mist and cloud, but that is no reason for laying aside one’s daily work. Contemplation is work, and it goes on working even when the person praying derives no apparent satisfaction from it. Contemplation is a conversation in which I am at pains not to be boring, not to say and think the same thing every day; I use my imagination and creativity to offer God at least something of myself.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “Why do I still remain in the Church? Because, despite the high degree of idiocy we have displayed, the Church has miraculously managed to survive. Indeed, the greater the violence used against her the more radiant her inviolability; the more the Church is humiliated so much more clearly is she seen to occupy her proper place. Jesus and his apostle Paul often speak of the “lowest place.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar “God is not, in the first place, ‘absolute power’, but ‘absolute love’,” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale “Prayer is something more than an exterior act performed out of a sense of duty, an act in which we tell God various things he already knows; a kind of daily attendance in the presence of the Sovereign who awaits, morning and evening, the submission of his subjects. Even though Christians find, to their pain and sorrow, that their prayer never rises above this level, they know well enough that it should be something more. Somewhere, here, there, is a hidden treasure, if only I could find it and dig it up—a seed that has the power to grow into a mighty tree bearing abundant flowers and fruits, if only I had the will to plant and cultivate it.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “The point of prayer, is not to learn some new way of speaking, a task as arduous as memorizing French irregular verbs. No, prayer is first an act in which we learn, in his words, that our halting utterance to God is but an answer to God’s speech to us.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer “Beauty is the disinterested one. It is that aspect of reality without which the ancient world refused to understand itself. But ‘beauty’ has now become a mere word; while beauty herself has finally now bid farewell, imperceptibly and yet unmistakably, to our brave new world of commercial interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar, “In the face of the Cross, love is sobered to its very marrow before God’s agape, which clothes itself in the language of the body; and, in the face of this intoxicating language of flesh and blood that gives itself by being poured out, love is lifted above itself and elevated into the eternal, in order there, as creaturely eros, to be the tent and dwelling-place of the divine love!” -Hans Urs von Balthasar “If theological aesthetics is about anything it is about beauty, and if beauty is about anything in particular it is particularly about love, a love which Christ, the archetype of all forms, embodies and expresses perfectly and against which all created forms are to be measured and to find their ultimate telos.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar ”Jesus’s love that bears our brokenness as his own, moving though still deeper darknesses, and bearing it to the end. At the center of the Christian faith is one who is not alien to tragedy, a savior not complacent in the face of suffering. Christ is neither blind to the pains of the world nor passive aggressive in the face of despair. On the contrary, the cross is a portrayal of passion, not passivity. Christ willingly carried defeat, thirst, and emptiness through the end of the darkness to the ends of himself and the ends of the world. For those who labor in circumstances that attest to the human condition of brokenness, this divine act makes sense of the struggle, brings meaning to our suffering, and makes further accessible the peace of the crucified one Paul described: “[T]hrough him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things by making peace through the blood of his cross.” -Hans Urs von Balthasar |
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