Balthasar - All Christ's actions in His humanity are signs of spiritual realities

We cannot look directly at Christ any more than we can look directly at the sun. He has to be “interpreted”. His works, words, miracles are one and all signs that point to something: they do not signify only themselves. They possess an unbounded depth into which they attract and invite us. But we do not find the truth behind them, at a second, purely spiritual level (as the Fathers often thought: that was the eggshell of their Platonism). Rather (and the Fathers affirmed this as well): the Word became Flesh, the eternal Meaning has become incarnate within the temporal symbol. What is signified must be sought within the sign itself, the “moral” within the history, the God within the Man. No one shall ever leave Christ’s humanity behind as obsolete instrument.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ

Balthasar - Christ radically present in all creation, greatest condescension in the Eucharist

Christ as recapitulation of creation: as new Adam he encompasses everything human, but he also incorporates the animal realm in himself, since he is lamb, scapegoat, sacrificial ox, ram, and lion of Judah. As bread and as vine he incorporates the vegetative. Finally, in the Passion, he became a mere thing and thus reached the very bottom of the world’s structure. This reification is most evidenced in the sacraments and especially in Christ’s quantification in Communion wafers and in his multilocation: Christ as printing matrix, as generic article. Such reification has its cause, not at all in a subsequent desacralization of the holy by the Church, but in an intensely personal decision of the Redeemer and in the strongest possible effects of the redemption itself, whereby the Lord makes himself irrevocably a thing at the disposal of anyone who requests it.

* * * 

Christ’s holy humanity as embracing all that is possible in this world, as plaything and universal instrument of love: abraded by rolling in every gutter and every possible hell, shattered in the abyss of all nights, cast up to the heights of bliss, fragmented as food in a billion places and yet located above space, no longer time-bound as we are and yet not outside of time but always sharing in our own temporal condition and history. . . . In Christ is found the experience of all situations, existentially: the sum total of the world’s reality.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ

Balthasar - Clash between “to be” and “ought to be” shows our limitations, is reconciled in Cross

Nowhere is the creaturely nature of our thought more emphatically evident than in the problem posed by the clash between “to be” and “ought to be”. Here it is clearly shown to us that there are problems we are not intended to solve, no more than Adam should have eaten the apple in paradise. For, on the one hand, we are not permitted to think that everything already is as it should be: no one has the competence to calculate sin into a stable picture of the world and thus usurp for himself the vantage point of the redemption, which God alone occupies. But neither are we entitled to doubt the fact that everything is as it should be, that is, that God’s will is absolutely superior to man’s and that it does prevail against it. The sting of this aporia makes itself keenly felt in a practical way when we must unite an absolute impatience with regard to sin with an absolute calm that trusts in God—a dead-serious desire to have the world be different with an equally dead-serious desire that nothing should be other than God wills it. Once again, the problem must be relocated, transferred into Christ. For him it was unbearable that the world should be as it was, and so he bore the unbearable in obedience to the Father. The real Passion lies at the crossroads of these two things; but there we also encounter the overcoming of the contradiction in the one and only Cross.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ

Lubac - Salvation not only "individual"

The joy of Jesus can be personal. It can belong to a single man and he is saved. He is at peace, he is joyful now and for always, but he is alone. The isolation of this joy does not trouble him; on the contrary: he is the chosen one. In his blessedness he passes through the battlefields with a rose in his hand. . . .  

My joy will not be lasting unless it is the joy of all. I will not pass through the battlefields with a rose in my hand.¹

What Christian has not encountered such an accusation? How many souls have not encountered upon their course this stone of stumbling? . . . 

"How," they ask in particular, "can a religion which apparently is uninterested in our terrestrial future and in human fellowship offer an ideal which can still attract the men of to-day?" . . . 

 "[The Christian] withdraws from the converse of men, exclusively preoccupied with his own salvation, which is a matter between God and himself" [as opposed to] "the modern man who . . . cannot detach himself from other men: fully conscious of the solidarity which unites him with his fellows, which makes him in a sense dependent on them, he knows that he cannot work out his salvation by himself".² 

. . .

In answer to all this we may quote this simple assertion of a believer and a theologian: "Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society."³ This shows the full extent of the misunderstanding. We are accused of being individualists even in spite of ourselves, by the logic of our faith, whereas in reality Catholicism is essentially social. It is social in the deepest sense of the word: not merely in its applications in the field of natural institutions but first and foremost in itself, in the heart of its mystery, in the essence of its dogma. It is social in a sense which should have made the expression "social Catholicism" pleonastic. 

Nevertheless, if such a misunderstanding has arisen and en-trenched itself, if such an accusation is current, is it not our own fault? We can leave on one side what is only too obviously groundless in certain objections, those which are bound up with a purely extrinsic and secular conception of Catholicism or of salvation or based on a complete misunderstanding of Christian detachment. Nor need we insist on the failings, serious though they often are, which may have given rise to these misunderstandings: the selfish piety, the narrow religious outlook, the neglect of ordinary duties in the multiplication of "devotions", the swamping of the spiritual life by the detestable "I", the failure to realize that prayer is essentially the prayer of all for all. These are all deviations to which all believers, being human, are exposed, and which it is easy to criticize. But are they in fact sufficiently recognized as such? Does not neglect of dogma increase the extent of moral failure? And if so many observers, who are not all lacking in acumen or in religious spirit, are so grievously mistaken about the essence of Catholicism, is it not an indication that Catholics should make an effort to understand it better themselves? 

1  Jean Giono, Les vraies richesses, 1936, pp. v and viii.

2 Les affirmations de la conscience moderne, 3rd edn., 1906, pp. 108-9 ; and p. 56: "Our morality is less and less Christian just because it is more and more social". p. 108 : "the Christian, like the Stoic, is sufficient unto himself".

3 E. Masure, conference in Semaine sociale de Nice, 1934, p. 229.

Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (1947; tr. 1958), 13-16

Note: Most footnotes have been omitted, and those included have different numbering than original.

Balthasar - Death necessary for our fulfillment/completion

“The life of man reaches fulfillment through a succession of many deaths.” BASIL

After all is said and done, death still remains the decisive situation of life. From it everything Christian could be derived. Fénelon used to say that the art of asceticism consists in the soul’s dying before the body. Paul’s mortui estis [“you have died”] in the end includes not only continual mortification but also the knowledge that everything that has not yet died possesses a merely preliminary character (this includes my virtue and my whole spiritual life and effort). Death is above all poverty, but also obedience and chastity.

 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Parting

Balthasar - Our actions like a child's, used by God

Before you exert yourself, be aware that before God every exertion is but a game accepted in grace, a game that is not of itself important but that grace draws into the sphere of the important. Allow the tension of your efforts to be enfolded by the relaxed abandonment of a child’s helpless faith.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Parting
 

Balthasar - Be "open toward heaven" rather than "closed toward earth"

 Je dois m’ouvrir du côté du del plutôt que de mefermer du côté de la terre : “I must open myself up on the side of heaven rather than shut myself off on the side of the earth.” CONSUMMATA

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Parting

Balthasar - Our existence is “structured for sacrifice" (finally in death)

Our existence, in its very foundations, is structured for sacrifice. As we grow up we want to become something, to grasp, to climb; but then the curve takes a downward turn. Quietly life takes from our hands everything we have snatched up. In the end we are granted the possibility of dying and, with it, that of performing the highest act of homage before the Eternal One.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Man

Balthasar - God is to us "what the air is to the birds and the sea to the fish" (St Francis de Sales)

“The Godhead, my dear Theotimus, is to us what the air is to the birds and the sea to the fish. One day we will [fly] through this divine element and swim in this sea and rejoice that our powers are not sufficient to embrace the whole space. It will be an ever-new delight for us to see that God—even if giving himself to us without restraint or limitation—still remains an abyss we are not capable of plumbing: we cannot enjoy him in a manner that does justice to the infinity of his perfections, for these shall always transcend our power of comprehension. Incomprehensibility is the essential mark of the beauty we will behold in paradise. This beauty would not be infinite, it would not be God, if we could comprehend it.”   FRANCIS DE SALES

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled God

[Note: In what I think is a typo, the ebook has the word "fry" instead of "fly".]

Balthasar - In the end, God will fill all things

“This is perhaps that final flame, which will fill the whole world and consume it: the appearance of God’s Word in every creature, when nothing but the spiritual Light will shine any more for both the good and the bad. This is the Light which already fills all things secretly, but then it will fill all things openly. This is, I think, the flame that says of itself: ‘I am a consuming fire.’ For he will consume all things when he shall be all in all and alone appear in all things.”   JOHN SCOTUS ERIUGENA

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled God