Life & Mortality Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Von Balthasar isn’t interested in soothing anyone’s anxiety about mortality; he’s trying to widen the frame until it becomes unbearable. “Not only life and death” swats away the modern habit of treating death as the ultimate horizon, a medical or philosophical endpoint to manage. He drags the question into a courtroom that can’t be escaped: existence “before God,” with judgment as the ambient condition of being alive, not a postscript.

The line’s force comes from its refusal of moral exceptionalism. “All of us” collapses the comforting categories we use to sort people into the decent and the damned. It’s not a targeted rebuke but a universal indictment, aimed as much at the pious as the secular. The subtext is anti-therapeutic: you don’t get to narrate your way out of guilt with self-esteem language or sociological excuses. Sin, here, isn’t merely a list of bad actions; it’s a diagnosis of the human posture - curved inward, unable to justify itself on its own terms.

Context matters. Von Balthasar writes in the shadow of 20th-century catastrophe and a postwar Christian crisis: what does judgment mean after industrialized evil, and what does grace mean if it’s reduced to benevolent vibes? This sentence reasserts the scandalous Christian premise that the stakes are absolute and the verdict, left to ourselves, is bleak. Its intent is not despair for its own sake but to clear the ground so mercy can register as something more than affirmation: rescue, not compliment.