Rowland - Balthasar and Ratzinger on Marian ("Feminine") vs. "Masculine" Church

When he criticized what he called the “masculinization” of the Church Balthasar was in no way criticizing the reservation of the priesthood to men, but rather, the trend toward an excessive bureaucratization of the Church. When Balthasar speaks of a “masculine” church he means a church obsessed with its own governance structures, a church obsessed with committees and meetings and talk-fests. He called this the “photocopying Church.”

Paradoxically, it is precisely the increased bureaucratization of the Church that is a popular project for feminist activists. It is they who are, according to a Balthasarian analysis, seeking to masculinize the Church by setting up new boards and committees and angling to get themselves appointed to such bureaucratic structures. . . .

Balthasar and Ratzinger and other academics in their Communio journal study circles were acutely aware of the situation in Germany with its stark contrasts between the wealthy Church agencies or “Catholic Inc.” and the Church lived and understood as the Body and Bride of Christ. Catholic Inc. runs on secular corporate governance principles, the Body and Bride of Christ runs on a sacramental economy. The former is, in the idiom of both Balthasar and Ratzinger, “masculine,” while the latter is “feminine.”

There is some theological and scriptural backstory to the use of these descriptions. Balthasar suggested that the network of figures surrounding Christ during his life on earth were prototypical of future ecclesial leaders. There is thus the Petrine charism associated with St. Peter and hence with ecclesial governance, the Johannine charism associated with St. John the beloved apostle and hence with the contemplative life of the Church, the Jacobine charism associated with St. James and hence with guarding the tradition and teaching it to new generations uncorrupted, and the Pauline charism associated with St. Paul and hence with prophetic insight and in our own time with ecclesial renewal movements. Only one of these charisms, the Petrine, is focused on ecclesial governance, and only this one is exclusively masculine. There are plenty of contemplative women with the Johannine charism, plenty of scholarly women trying to teach the faith that was handed down from the apostles to new generations, and plenty of women involved in the new ecclesial movements that have mushroomed over the past century. So then, three out of four of these charisms are found equally in men and women.

Further, Balthasar spoke of the Marian charism. Its hallmark is its receptivity to divine will. It is a kind of overarching charism that all members of the Church, male and female, should exhibit. Receptivity to the divine will includes respect for Sacred Scripture, especially the teachings of Christ. With reference to the arguments of those who contend that Christ may have decided not to ordain women simply because the Jewish people of the time had psychological barriers to the acceptance of such a practice, Balthasar commented: “[E]ven though we might always assume that the Sovereign God could have acted differently from the way he actually deigned to act, we nevertheless are by no means licensed to relativize his logic – he being absolute Reason and Logos itself – by imagining other courses of action which he could have taken.”¹ In other words, a high level of humility in the face of revelation is part of the Marian charism along with the gift of the Holy Spirit described as “Fear of the Lord” or reverence and awe before the divine majesty. . . .

When Balthasar talks about masculinizing the Church he therefore means something like a myopic focus on the Petrine charism and on governance structures to the neglect of the other charisms, a church obsessed with institutional maintenance. Thus, in his Elucidations, he wrote:

Since the Council [i.e., Vatican II] the Church has to a large extent put off its mystical characteristics; it has become a Church of permanent conversations, organizations, advisory commissions, congresses, synods, commissions, academies, parties, pressure groups, functions, structures and restructurings, sociological experiments, statistics: that is to say, it is more than ever a male Church, if perhaps one should not say a sexless entity, in which a woman may gain for herself a place to the extent that she is ready herself to become such an entity.²

Balthasar concluded that “the masses run away from such a Church.”

Similarly, in his Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Cardinal Ratzinger declared:

The Church is not some piece of machinery, is not just an institution, is not even one of the usual sociological entities. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a mother. It is living. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most decisive contrast to a purely organisational or bureaucratic concept of the Church. We cannot make the Church: we have to be it. And it is only to the extent that faith moulds our being beyond any question of making that we are the Church, that the Church is in us. It is only in being Marian that we become the Church.³

Ratzinger concluded that: “a Church which is nothing but a manager is nothing at all; she is no longer tradition, and, as an intellect that knows no tradition, she becomes pure nothingness, a monster of nothingness.”⁴

In summary, when Balthasar suggested the Church should be more feminine and less masculine, he did not mean that we needed women priests or more women on governance boards. To misuse his comments in that manner is to show a high-level of ignorance of his ecclesiology.

What we need now is an affirmation of the feminine dimension of the Church. For Balthasar this in some sense would entail a heightened interest in the operation of the Johannine, Pauline, and Jacobine charisms. Instead of a craze for committees and quangos there might be a focus on deep monasticism and consecrated virginity, on family ministry work, on Catholic scholarship and beautiful liturgy, including beautiful liturgical music. There might also be a heightened interest in fostering the sense of sacramentality, a deepening of the faithful’s understanding of the role that each of the sacrament’s play in the economy of our salvation. There would certainly be a heightened interest in the Eucharist.

My favorite quotation from Balthasar appears in his Theology of History. It reveals a lot about what he thinks or who he thinks are the most important members of the Church and they are not necessarily priests. He wrote:

Those who withdraw to the heights to fast and pray in silence are, as Reinhold Schneider made so vividly credible, the pillars bearing the spiritual weight of what happens in history. They share in the uniqueness of Christ, in the freedom of that nobility that is conferred from above, that serene untamed freedom which cannot be caged and put to use. Theirs in the first of all aristocracies, source and justification for all the others, and the last yet remaining to us in an unaristocratic age.⁵

Of all the charisms categorized by Balthasar the Marian is the most important. It takes priority even over the Petrine, because the Petrine itself must be Marian in the sense that it must be receptive to divine revelation. What really matters is receptivity to the divine will. This is what is most noble and thus aristocratic, where aristocratic is understood as an adjective meaning desiring only the highest and most excellent. In contrast, the fixation on structures and committees, and who sits on the committees, and who does the paperwork, is not aristocratic but gauchely petite-bourgeois!

1  Hans Urs von Balthasar, “How Weighty is the argument from ‘Uninterrupted Tradition’ to Justify the Male Priesthood?” in The Church and Women: A Compendium, edited by Helmut Moll (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 154; cf. 153–160.

2  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), 70.

3  Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 20.

4  Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 101.

5  Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 124.

From Tracy Rowland, "Spinning Balthasar" on the What We Need Now substack.

Chapp - The Message of the Gospel is "Come Out of Hell"

The blog post this was taken from was a defense of Hans Urs von Balthasar's teaching on hell, especially in Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved" (1988) against its critics. 

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So why this obsession with a densely populated Hell? The reasoning they employ is not complex and boils down to three assertions.  First, the charge is made that the soft universalism of so many in the modern Church has led to a diminishment in our fervor for evangelization.  Second, it is alleged that a great deal of the laxity one finds among Catholics themselves is also attributable to this alleged universalism.  As one very dear friend of mine who is a devout Catholic . . . put it to me: “if everyone goes to heaven anyway why should I bother to bust my chops to be morally good or to go to Church?” A third charge, more theologically sophisticated than the first two, claims that this soft universalism robs the Gospel of its dramatic, existential seriousness since it presents us with salvation as a fait accompli.  What all of these points have in common is their proposed solution: an evangelical style that once again places the threat of damnation front and center as the linchpin for any effective strategy for conversion.

But are any of these assertions true? Is it really true that the desire to avoid Hell is the primary motivation behind the desire to convert to the faith or to embrace it with more vigor? And is it really true as well that the primary motivation for wanting to bring people to Christ is to make sure that they avoid Hell? My answer might shock you because my answer to those two questions is yes.  But I do not mean by that answer the same thing [some] mean and my answer thus comes with one important caveat:  Heaven and Hell are not “places” where I might end up “in the future after I die” depending on whether or not I checked the right box on the religion survey, but present realities in the here and now.  They are spiritual conditions of the soul which every human being has intimations of and which give us a participatory foretaste of eschatological realities.  Sin is the dis-integrative power of dissipation and entropy, the power which grips us like a vice even as it rips us apart from within.  It alienates and annihilates and is the source of our deepest existential anxieties and creates our deepest miseries in life.  It is the libido dominandi that lives in us all and which creates the despair within us where, try as I might, I cannot escape the furies of my own decrepit soul and the self-inflicted horrors of my incessantly compromised choices.

We can experience a foretaste of Heaven in this life as well in all of the various joys that come our way through our participation in all that is true and good and beautiful.  We naturally desire all of these things and move toward them to the extent that we see them properly, and in their proper hierarchy, and with a sincere hope that they will bring us happiness, which is, as Aquinas noted, what we all most deeply want. But these joys are often lost due to our ignorance of what is truly good and of our disordered desire to sacrifice higher goods to lower goods, which is the very essence of sin and its idolatries which is why only an affirmation of the true God as the highest Good can save us from these counterfeit substitutes.  But the joys of this life also run up against the ultimate barrier: death.  Which is why in this life even our deepest joy will be tainted with the patina of the loss of everything in the final dissolution of all things in death.  It is the blunt and brutal reality of death that hollows out our experience of the good from within our terror—a hollowing out that empties the good of its goodness and leaves us with the haunting suspicion that there is no deeper good at all, but merely passing pleasures. This is why Saint Paul referred to death as Satan’s sting and the greatest generator of sin since the realization of our terminal finality is what robs us of the motivation to seek the higher goods and the greater joys they bring since death seems to call the reality of those higher goods into question.  The higher goods and the deeper happiness are hard to achieve and require a death to the libido dominandi which alone appears “real” to us. Sin thus whispers in our ear, “it is all a sham and there is no God so live within the shallow waters of proximate procurements.”

This is why Christianity burst upon the ancient world with an explosive and liberating force. It was presented as the “euangelion” (good news!) which was a Greek term used by imperial Rome to announce a great victory for the Empire but redeployed by Christians to announce an even greater victory accomplished by one greater than Caesar.  It was presented as a liberation from the oppressive spiritual principalities and powers that capriciously and arbitrarily ruled this world through death and force and coercion.  The message was not “believe this or you will go to Hell” but rather “believe this and you will come out of Hell.”  The greatest evangelist the Church has ever seen, Saint Paul, rarely spoke of the eternal torments of Hell that awaited those who rejected his message of the crucified and risen Christ. Such talk is foreign to his manner of approach. Instead he preached the risen Christ as the conqueror of death and sin and thus as the great liberator from our chains of bondage to the regime of decay. What he preached was that the Hell in which they were living was not their truest destiny and that the higher spiritual goods were now eminently attainable in the new Kingdom of life and grace.  In other words, Paul preached a message that emphasized that the new Christian ordo was an ordo of eschatological rupture with the worldly world and the breaking in to this world of a supernatural light that had the power to transform everything from within as it healed the broken bonds of our fractured and despairing souls. . . .

My point in all of this is that it is precisely this experience of integrative liberation that should be the prime mover of our evangelizing, as it was with St. Paul.  In my 25 years of teaching theology, in both high school and university, I never once walked into a classroom thinking to myself, “these kids are sinners in the hands of an angry God and are in danger of suffering eternal torments in Hell and so I must save them from God’s just wrath.”  Rather, I said to myself, “I am in possession of a great treasure, the truest Beauty, and the most liberating narrative the world has ever known or will know, and I want to release these students from their bondage to the honey laced arsenic of our culture and to show them the only path to the deepest happiness.” And, to toot my own horn, I was damn good at it.  And I don’t mention this to build myself up but to point out that this message still works, as it did in the days of St. Paul . . .

It is both instructive and ironic, is it not, that one of the greatest evangelists of our time, Bishop Robert Barron, is also a man who shares the real hope that all will someday be saved, and who teaches what the Church teaches with regard to the possibility of salvation outside of the visible confines of the Church.  This gives the lie to the notion that one will not be properly motivated to evangelize unless one first believes in some version of the massa damnata.  [H]is success invalidates their thesis that a Church that does not step forward with its eternal damnation foot first is a Church of relativists and indifferentists.  Likewise with Balthasar whose views on Hell do not seem to have robbed him of his fervor and who spent his entire life explicating the Gospel in profound ways.  One would think, in other words, that if [the other] thesis is true—namely, that only a message that most will be eternally damned will motivate us to evangelize—that Barron would close up shop over at Word on Fire and Balthasar would never have written a word . . .

As I said, I too believe that we must appeal to a message of liberation from the bondage of the Hell that is within us all, but that is far different from a message of a not so latent “insiders versus outsiders” logic where the insiders have the proper union card and the outsiders don’t.  Of course, I am not denying that the Church provides us with all the means of salvation and that, therefore, faithful inclusion in her life does afford us great treasures of grace.  Because it does.  But don’t tell me that there isn’t a strong element of a very superficial understanding of what it means to be “saved” and “unsaved” in [that] thinking. There is a strong forensic tone to it all and a strong tone deafness to the movement of the Holy Spirit outside of the visible structures of the Church. The Church is necessary for salvation insofar as she is the conduit of those graces of the Spirit. But the vocation of the Christian is not to draw neat lines in the sand between the saved and the unsaved, but to offer up their prayers, supplications, penances, and sufferings in solidarity with those still awaiting liberation from bondage.

The fact of the matter is that [Balthasar's critics] get something very wrong. Namely, that the indifferentism and lukewarm laxity that afflicts the modern Church has been primarily caused by a loss of belief in the reality of eternal damnation for most. In reality, the laxity in the modern Church has not arisen from a lack of faith in the eternal horrors of Hell.  Rather, the laxity comes from a lack of faith in the existential reality of Heaven. In fact, it comes more specifically from a generalized lack of faith in the eschatological power of supernatural realities in the first place.  Because if people really and truly believed in the reality of our liberation from bondage and the joys of Heaven, and truly understood what these realities mean, then the very real possibility of eternal loss would be powerful and palpable.  Furthermore, if people had a deeper grasp in faith of what such liberation means then the question of why I should strive to be morally good even if all end up in Heaven someday answers itself.  We seek moral goodness because it is liberative and integrative.  It opens us to beauty and a holistic happiness. And the more we are on that path the more we begin to realize that Heaven isn’t a Disney World in the sky, or an undifferentiated “reward” for having been a “good person,” but is rather a nested hierarchy of souls that have differing capacities for love, and thus beatitude, depending on what one has done in this life. Jesus says that in his Father’s Kingdom there are “many mansions.”  I think this is what he meant.  Finally, none of this will come without purgation, in this life or the next.  And that purgation will be painful and difficult.  Even among those Catholics who feel confident of their ultimate salvation there is still a rigorous desire to do penances now, to lead a life of holiness now, precisely in order to avoid such purgations later.  Therefore, I do not need to believe that anyone is in Hell in order to desire the highest and most luxuriant of Heavenly mansions and to avoid the fiery cauldron of purgatory.

What all of this points toward is that our style of evangelizing needs to focus first and foremost on the true, the good, and the beautiful. It needs to build on our natural desire for happiness and our natural desire for the higher spiritual goods of life.  It needs to build on the natural thirst for Transcendence that all people feel.  And then it needs to show how Christ is the fulfillment of our deepest and most inchoate and hidden desires.  It needs to show how we do not even know what it is we should desire and that Christ points the way.  It needs to show that Christ has overcome the tribulations of this world and is the only person who holds the key to unlocking our chains.  It needs to foreground the positive aspects of the Gospel message as our liberation from the bondage of sin and death in the eschatological present.  Only then can it speak of the real possibility of an eternal loss because only then will people truly appreciate what is at stake.

From Universalism, Balthasar, the Massa Damnata, and the Question of Evangelization by Larry Chapp

Balthasar - Water and wine: all human activity/inactivity taken up and transformed, offered to the Lord

The wedding of Cana: Mary has to show our poverty to the Lord—“They have run out of the wine of love.” She orders us to fill the stone jars with the clear water of pure readiness, and the Lord transforms the water of nature into the wine of grace. Not one little glass of wine results from ten jars of water, but all of the water of human life—all man’s activity and inactivity, all his sleeping, eating, loving, and dying—everything is taken up into the transformation, and in the end we have the privilege of serving this wine—our best wine, saved up for last—to the Lord.

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

Balthasar - Christ not afraid of suffering because "from all eternity he is absolute dependency"

The courage of Christ: to take his stance in the most vulnerable location possible, to place himself between sin and God’s wrath—the very spot where the lightning bolt (and what lightning!) must strike him. But he lacks every trace not only of fear and insecurity but also of bravura. Rather, he is the very embodiment of simple, trusting shelteredness. What can happen to him? Fall out of the Father’s hand he cannot, since he has himself chosen absolute dependency, or, rather, since from all eternity he is absolute dependency.

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

Balthasar - Christ's sufferings both temporal and supra-temporal; He suffers until the end of time

Like everything in his temporal existence, the Lord’s sufferings were at the same time supra-temporal: every moment of his suffering has an “eternal” intensity, and, precisely because of this, it towers far above chronological time. Thus we can in truth say that he suffers until the end of time. The fact that at the same time he can abide in a glory from which all suffering is absent is a contradiction only for our temporal manner of thought. The most contrary currents converge “at the same time” in Christ’s supra-temporality as in an ocean.

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

Balthasar - Christ wholly universal and wholly concrete, is simultaneously in every human situation

Humanly speaking, the Lord is astounding because he displays a purely divine quality—that of being at once wholly universal and wholly concrete—now within the human reality. Thus did he truly become all things to all men, and he simultaneously stands on every level of human experience and is to be found in every human situation, even in those that fully contradict and exclude one another. And yet, in so doing, he does not cease being wholly human. And he gives his holy ones a participation even in this quality. 

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

Balthasar - “Omnitemporality” of Christ - every moment of His human life is eternal

Every moment of Jesus’ life has an eternal meaning: it is taken up into his eternity and represents not only his abiding in his Mother’s womb but also his dying on the Cross and his Resurrection. He is now, simultaneously, everything that he could then be only within temporal succession. This is why Mary, too, eternally remains in the situation of the Pregnant Woman—like the envelopment through which alone Christ operates—and also in the situation of the Woman Giving Birth and of the Mediatrix of Graces. In this form of Christ’s “omnitemporality”, we can see something of our own form of existence in eternity.

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

Balthasar - Jesus' life and sufferings are a direct revelation of the interior life and intentions of God

All external scenes of Jesus’ life and sufferings are to be understood as a direct revelation of the interior life and intentions of God. This is the fundamental meaning of biblical symbolism and allegory, without which the whole gospel remains nothing but superficial moralism. Thus, for instance, Jesus’ silence before Caiaphas, the Ecce Homo episode with Pilate, the figure of the Lord covered with the cloak and flogged, his nailing to the Cross, the piercing of his Heart, his words on the Cross, and so on. All of this is a direct portrayal and exegesis of God (John 1:18), accessible to the senses.

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

Balthasar - All human life illumined by the Sacred Humanity of Christ

“There is no moment, there is no place, there is no circumstance that is not illumined either by the operation or by the suspension of some grace or admirable effect that the humanity of Jesus was intended to bear within itself.”    [quotation from Pierre de Bérulle] 

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

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

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

Balthasar - In Purgatory we will know that we are finally going to overcome our sins

Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering. The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long. The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open. But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it—that ultimate thing in me, that total thing. Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself. . . . .

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

Balthasar - God "builds his temple" in our soul

Oh, the tirelessness of God’s love! Day by day to come personally into my soul, visiting it in human form just as men visit one another, in order—if the soul permits it—to build up his temple there, stone by stone, and not from a distance but with his own hand, as it were.

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