Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

In principle this implies something else, something harder to grasp, namely, that his whole suffering—a suffering that goes to the utter limits—follows from and actually expresses his eternal, triune joy.

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.

Theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

For us humans, that will mean that our obedience, which we owe to our Creator and Lord and to all his direct and indirect commands, can be, in Jesus Christ, and even must be, an expression of our love; so that any love of God or other human beings which excludes obedience, or wishes to get beyond it, does not at all deserve the name love.

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.

It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is—not his essence, or what he is.

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.

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

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor's first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures. Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

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.

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.