Vigils Reading

THE WORLD’S RESURRECTION

AND ASCENSION

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

◊◊◊

The masters of the contemplation of the ascending Word are the Greeks…

The idea of the “gardener” and the “do not hold me,” as not holding on to the

Word on earth, but letting him ascend, is charmingly and passionately worked

out by them in variations. Augustine joins [to this] the idea of the completion of

the Ascension in one’s heart, as a longing for the home where Christ lives:

As if the Lord, he says, were saying to the apostles: “You do not

want to let me go, just as everyone likes to hold his friend back and

says to him, as it were, stay with us just a little longer, our soul

delights in the sight of you – but it is better that you no longer see

this flesh and are mindful instead of the divine. I am removing

myself from you outwardly, but I am filling you with myself from

within.“

Does Christ, then, enter the heart according to the flesh, with the flesh? In

his divinity he possesses the heart. In his flesh he speaks to the heart by the

sight of him, and he exhorts us, but inside us he takes up his dwelling place, so

that we are converted and vivified inwardly by him and fashioned out of him,

the uncreated model of all creation…

[Thus we can say that] the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ is so united

to his divinity that, while still preserving the essence of the two natures, they

form a single unity. As his divinity transcends all reason, so does his humanity,

which has been raised above all visible and spiritual creatures, above all places

and times, above all description and definition… It has been raised, as it were

above “Being,” [and is now] ungraspable and indiscoverable by all creatures…

This transcendent position makes the Word the basis of all the world’s

resurrection and ascension. His ascension, he says, takes place beyond all the

motions of this transient world and all the influence of the heavenly spheres, for

although he is omnipresent in his divinity, his place is properly that where there

is no change, no suffering, no grief, as there is in the world of time.

We say that this place of eternal joy and eternal peace exists above the

skies, although it cannot be perceived, described, or defined in terms of place.

This place is the center and the inclusive periphery of all spiritual beings, and it

is above everything, because the spiritual power of reason penetrates

everything. Thus, Christ has ascended above every place and every time, since

he is truth itself and does not sit, as it were, at the edge of the cosmos, but in the

center – as he is the center of all spiritual, reasonable beings – as their life.