Mikael Rose

“When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-world which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“In Christ's Resurrection something began by which man's life ever since, and today and for all the future, received that incomprehensible exaltation that the language of theology calls Grace and New Life. And therefore in the Christian celebration of Easter quite particularly an affirmation of the whole of existence is experienced and celebrated. No more rightful, more comprehensive and fundamental affirmation can be conceived.
The gift of having been created, the promise of perfect bliss, the communication of divine vitality through Incarnation and Resurrection—all these are things, we might say, which determine human life every hour of every day, if the Christians are right.”
― Josef Pieper, In Tune With The World: A Theory of Festivity

“In this same contemporary world of ours there remains the indestructible (for otherwise human nature itself would have to be destroyed) gift innate in all men which impels them now and again to escape from the restricted sphere where they labor for their necessities and provide for their security—to escape not by mere forgetting, but by undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality. Now, as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrance to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man's destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life. Now, as always, the philosophical mind will react with awe to the mystery of being revealed in a grain of matter or a human face.”
― Josef Pieper, In Tune With The World: A Theory of Festivity

“But for man's primal sin and fall from the condition of grace there would have been no need for God's saving work. Both sacred history in particular and history itself as experienced by men arise from this primal tragedy. This is the source of the 'river of human history,' the series calamitatis, the res humana which flows like a river...History in the full sense, as the troubled past of the human race, is the consequence of a world plunged into the ambivalence of time; time as the vehicle of sin and tragedy as well as the medium of redemption. History in general, the troubled careers of men, societies and their institutions, as well as sacred history, the unfolding of God's plan for healing man's fallen condition, both arise from this primordial strain in the human situation. Temporality itself is involved in being created; but temporality falls short of historicity. Historicity is the mark of a world in which there is nihil solidum, nihil stabile. Man therefore creates a historical situation for himself in the very same act in which he provides God with an opportunity to exercise within human history his saving work.”
― R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine