Quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar

But if Maximus is "a mystic like Dionysius", he is surely "a mystic who is also a metaphysician, an ascetic who has reached, through his familiarity with Aristotelian philosophy, a consistency and precision of thought that one looks for in vain in the works of the Areopagite.

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

The letter kills, it is the Spirit that gives life!" (2 Cor 3:6). You may be sure, reverend sir, that I will never accept some concept from Scripture if I have not really understood its meaning.

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;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity. Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

Maximus envisages a naturally lasting cosmos as the supporting ground for all supernatural divinization.

it 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".

Is gleaned from both "books" together. The "contemplation of nature" and of the structures of meaning 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.

In the union of 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.

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", in the Incarnation of his Son.

The words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an aesthetic unity, held together by the 'style' of unconditional love.

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.