Mysterium Paschale Quotes

“God is not, in the first place, ‘absolute power’, but ‘absolute love’,”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter

“The beautiful is the radiance which something gives off simply because it is something, because it exists.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter

“Philosophy can speak of the Cross in many tongues; when it is not the ‘Word of the Cross’ (1 Corinthians 1, 18), issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, it knows either too much or too little. Too much: because it makes bold with words and concepts at a point where the Word of God is silent, suffers and dies, in order to reveal what no philosophy can know, except through faith, namely, God’s ever greater Trinitarian love; and in order, also, to vanquish what no philosophy can make an end of, human dying so that the human totality may be restored in God. Too little, because philosophy does not measure that abyss into which the Word sinks down, and, having no inkling of it, closes the hiatus, or deliberately festoons the appalling thing with garlands: The Cross is thick bestrewn with roses: who has joined roses to the Cross?37 in place of Jerome’s ‘naked, to follow the Naked One’. Either philosophy misconceives man, failing, in Gnostic or Platonic guise, to take with full seriousness his earthly existence, settling him elsewhere, in heaven, in the pure realm of spirit, or sacrificing his unique personality to nature or evolution. Or, alternatively, philosophy forms man so exactly in God’s image and likeness that God descends to man’s image and likeness, since man in his suffering and overcoming of suffering shows himself God’s superior. Here God only fulfils himself and manages to satisfy his own desires by divesting himself of his essence and becoming man, in order, as man, ‘divinely’ to suffer and to die. If philosophy is not willing to content itself with, either, speaking abstractly of being, or with thinking, concretely of the earthly and worldly (and no further), then it must at once empty itself in order to ‘know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (I Corinthians 2, 2). Then it may, starting out from this source, go on to ‘impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (ibid., 2, 7). This proclamation, however, rises up over a deeper silence and a darker abyss than pure philosophy can know.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter

“the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the ‘style’ of unconditional love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter

“his view of perceiving God in Christ with the notion of looking at a painting and seeing what the artist has been doing in it.27 In Christian faith, the captivating force (the ‘subjective evidence’) of the artwork which is Christ takes hold of our imaginative powers; we enter into the ‘painterly world’ which this discloses and, entranced by what we see, come to contemplate the glory of sovereign love of God in Christ (the ‘objective evidence’) as manifested in the concrete events of his life, death and resurrection.28 So entering his glory, we become absorbed by it, but this very absorption sends us out into the world in sacrificial love like that of Jesus. This is”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter

“In his person, life, death and resurrection, Jesus Christ is the ‘form of God’. As presented in the New Testament writings, the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the ‘style’ of unconditional love. Love is always beautiful, because it expresses the self-diffusiveness of being, and so is touched by being’s radiance, the pulchrum. But the unconditional, gracious, sacrificial love of Jesus Christ expresses not just the mystery of being—finite being—but the mystery of the Source of being, the transcendent communion of love which we call the Trinity.25 Thus through the Gestalt Christi, the love which God is shines through to the world. This is Balthasar’s basic intuition.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter