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

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

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

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

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

Only by presupposing God's prior and inconceivable forgiveness can the limitations of human good will be transcended, and only thus can the danger of human pride be avoided.

— 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.

— 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.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

What deserves to be called mysticism—not in the vague sense of the history and philosophy of religion, but rather in the Catholic-ecclesial sense—occurs when God's Word is heard, not only with exegetical and theological understanding, but with the whole heart, the whole being, when one is steadfast before the self-disclosure of the heart of God despite fire and night.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

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

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