"St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit"
About this Quote
Balthasar is smuggling an audacious compliment to pagan thought inside a firm Christian claim of ownership. When he invokes St. Paul addressing “the philosophers,” he’s not staging a culture-war takedown of Athens; he’s drafting Athens into a salvation-history plotline. The line turns the ancient question “What is the good life?” into something closer to “Who are we for?” If God creates humans in order to seek the Divine, then the human mind’s highest restlessness is not a bug or a tragic illusion but a theological clue.
The subtext is a polemic against modern habits of sealing philosophy into a self-sufficient, secular box. “Pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit” isn’t just a description of Plato or Aristotle; it’s a diagnosis of human reason under pressure. Push reason hard enough, Balthasar suggests, and it starts asking after ultimacy: being, goodness, the source behind the sources. That’s where “summit” does its work. It concedes that philosophy can roam widely, even brilliantly, but claims its peak is a threshold it cannot explain without reaching beyond itself.
Context matters: Balthasar writes as a 20th-century Catholic thinker wary of both arid neo-scholastic system-building and modern disenchantment. He’s retrieving the Pauline move from Acts 17: affirm what’s true in the Greeks (“unknown god,” the hunger for transcendence) while insisting that the hunger has an address. The intent is neither to flatter philosophy nor to cancel it, but to frame it as a genuine, noble search whose highest questions are already, implicitly, prayers.
The subtext is a polemic against modern habits of sealing philosophy into a self-sufficient, secular box. “Pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit” isn’t just a description of Plato or Aristotle; it’s a diagnosis of human reason under pressure. Push reason hard enough, Balthasar suggests, and it starts asking after ultimacy: being, goodness, the source behind the sources. That’s where “summit” does its work. It concedes that philosophy can roam widely, even brilliantly, but claims its peak is a threshold it cannot explain without reaching beyond itself.
Context matters: Balthasar writes as a 20th-century Catholic thinker wary of both arid neo-scholastic system-building and modern disenchantment. He’s retrieving the Pauline move from Acts 17: affirm what’s true in the Greeks (“unknown god,” the hunger for transcendence) while insisting that the hunger has an address. The intent is neither to flatter philosophy nor to cancel it, but to frame it as a genuine, noble search whose highest questions are already, implicitly, prayers.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Hans
Add to List
