Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
Hans Urs Von BalthasarRead
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that to achieve understanding and redemption, we must recognize our limitations and strive to return to a higher level of understanding.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar's quote speaks to the philosophical journey of humanity from a state of decline or confusion back to a place of enlightenment and understanding, referred to as the 'intelligible infinite.' It implies that acknowledging our finite existence and its shortcomings is essential in trying to reach a greater understanding or truth, which serves as a path to salvation.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their programs.
But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.
Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.
Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.
My understanding of my faith is that - through a Christian framework - part of what we are called to do is to lay down our own self-interests, after the model of divinity that comes into this world in the form of Christ and lays down his life. And in order to do that, you have to care about something or someone more than yourself.
Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.
Angels are intelligent reflections of light, that original light which has no beginning. They can illuminate. They do not need tongues or ears, for they can communicate without speech, in thought.
It is human to sin, but diabolic to persist in sin.
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