Daily Inspiration Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

A fall is doing a lot of work here: not just as Christian doctrine, but as a diagnosis of modern consciousness. Von Balthasar frames “the first attempt at a response” like he’s stepping into a long argument already in progress, because he is. Twentieth-century theology is haunted by the question of whether faith can still speak after the shocks of secularization, war, and the collapse of old metaphysical confidence. His opening move is to insist that the crisis isn’t merely moral or political; it’s ontological. Something in reality’s own order has “declined.”

The phrase “sensible finite” versus “intelligible infinite” is classic Balthasar: he refuses to let the material world be self-explanatory, yet he also won’t treat it as disposable. “Sensible” signals the realm of immediacy, perception, the modern bias toward what can be handled and measured. “Intelligible” points to meaning that exceeds sensation, the kind of intelligibility tradition locates in God. The subtext is a critique of any worldview that seals the finite off from transcendence: when the finite is treated as the whole, it becomes thinner, less itself, even if it’s louder.

“Salvation can only be the return” is the provocation. It rejects the modern fantasy of progress-as-redemption and swaps in a dramatic structure: exit, exile, homecoming. The rhetoric is deliberately asymmetrical. You don’t climb from finite to infinite; you’re returned, gathered back into a larger intelligibility. It’s not nostalgia for a medieval map of the universe so much as a demand that the visible world recover depth - that the finite become sensible again precisely by being opened to the infinite.