Cosmic Liturgy Quotes

“Syntheses between East and West based simply on a similarity of “spiritualities” or “mystical experiences” could not be achieved even then—how much less so today! So we must judge any program as inadequate that tries simply to let India and Europe encounter each other at the halfway-station of Byzantine hesychasm, in the practice of the Jesus prayer and of certain bodily positions and breathing exercises—all ways in which Eastern Christianity reorientalized itself after the period of the great synthesis.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“the mysterious character of providence, which does not stop at simply steering things “in general”, but precisely pursues the individual, that which is distinguished from everything else, and dwells in the whole confusing particularity of the world.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“the Christian must hold that all created being, whether substance or accident, comes from nothing and therefore stands far below God’s being in dignity;”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“God “has placed in all intellectual beings, as their hidden but primary power, the potentiality of knowing him; ever a generous Lord, he has planted in us lowly men, as part of our nature, the longing and desire for him”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Maximus expressly says that the Incarnation—more precisely, the drama of Cross, grave, and Resurrection—is not only the midpoint of world history but the foundational idea of the world itself.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God’s existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Maximus remained a child of his time, a disciple of his master. But the fact that he was able to develop his own basic insight, in spite of such influences, makes him one of the greatest thinkers in Christian intellectual history.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“seeks it for us, who have need of such illumination. So also the Word became flesh, not for himself, but rather to bring the mystery of the Incarnation to reality for our sakes.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“is gleaned from both “books” together. The “contemplation of nature” (θεωϱία ϕυσιϰή) and of the structures of meaning (λόγοι) hidden within it, structures that are part of every single being, becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Only if one keeps the entire phenomenon of Origen in mind—the fervent “man of the Church” who died a martyr, the great lover of both the letter and the spirit of Holy Scripture, the daring theologian who tried to take everything good and positive that Greece and gnosis had conceived and to put it at the service of Christ’s truth—only then can one understand how Origen can and must always be a source of new and fruitful inspiration for the Church’s reflection.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“the goal God sets for the world is now not simply dissolution in him alone but the fulfillment and preservation also of the created realm, “without confusion (ἀσυγχύτως)”, in the Incarnation of his Son.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“person and existence are forced to draw together, and from the same depths of being—which is more than all intelligible essence—arises the invitation of a personal God to his created child, an event that belongs to another realm altogether than all the in-built natural orientations—however mystical—of intellectual beings.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Nature, then, is incapable of conceiving what lies above nature. As a consequence, no creature can achieve divinization for itself naturally, simply because it cannot grasp God. It belongs wholly to God’s grace to distribute divinization by grace, according to the measure of each being, to enlighten nature with supernatural light and to lift it above its own limitations by the superabundance of glory.45”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“this synthesis of God and the world is a divine idea, which is older and more deeply hidden than all things and for which everything else remains simply an approach, a means of achievement.64”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“this speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“can only be conceived as a shuttling back and forth within the bounds of finitude, while genuine unity withdraws beyond the circle of creation into the realm of the inconceivable. So “every created thing has the divine and ineffable monad, which is God himself, as its origin and its end, because it comes forth from him and ultimately returns to him”,”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“God is not “Being” but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity.98 Yet this “many”, as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“this, too, is a way of reaching out for the divine peace in the universe, a peace that so preserves each thing that it never deviates from being itself . . . and continues to perform its own operation.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Maximus knows and expressly states that “faith is true knowledge (γνῶσις ἀληθής) based on unprovable principles, because it is the testimony to things that lie beyond both theoretical and practical reason.”69”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“he praises the unknowability of the world and the miracles, far exceeding all comprehension, that lie hidden in the unfathomable depths of the least of its parts. Only such a sense of reverence can be the true presupposition for knowing the far more unknowable God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“His being is “absolutely inaccessible, equally so (ϰατὰ τὸ ἴσον) to visible and to invisible creation”.10 The “difference between uncreated and created nature is infinite (ἄπειϱον)”11 and grows ever greater and less controllable”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God’s transcendence and God’s immanence;”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“And when Wisdom, the focal point of this divine involvement in the world, finally shone forth for Christian faith as the personal Word, the human Christ, all doubts about the possibility of a reconciliation between God and the world disappeared.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“They try to reveal revelation to themselves. For the grace of the Holy Spirit never destroys the capabilities of nature. Just the opposite: it makes nature, which has been weakened by unnatural habit, mature and strong enough once again to function in a natural way and leads it upward toward insight into the divine.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“Aristotelianism and the theology of Chalcedon enter here into an unbreakable alliance: they preserve the rights of nature against the rampages of an unchecked supernaturalism.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“the christological formula [of Chalcedon] expands, for Maximus, into a fundamental law of metaphysics. Illuminated by the highest level of theological synthesis—the union of God and the world in Christ”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“The heart of this relationship is that there is one universal presence (παϱουσία) of the cause of all that is, secretly and unrecognizably binding all things together, yet dwelling in each being in a different way; this presence holds the individual parts of the whole together, in itself and in each other, unconfused and inseparable, and allows them, through this very relationship of creative unity, to live more for each other than for themselves.81”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“This paradox of a synthesis that unites creatures by distinguishing them and distinguishes them by uniting them—a paradox that can be found throughout the whole edifice of the universe—takes its origin in the most original relation of all things: their relation to God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor

“the connection between being and person that is expressed in the word hypostasis.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor