Mikael Rose

“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

“But when the human being had once been made, and necessity required the healing, not for the things that were not, but for the things that had come to be, it followed that the healer and Savior had to come among those who had already been created, to heal what existed. He became a human being for this, and used his body as a human instrument. For if it was not right to happen in this way, how should the Word appear, when he wished to use an instrument? Or whence was he to take it, if not from those who already existed and had need of his divinity through one like [themselves]? For it was not non-existent things that needed salvation, so that a command alone would have sufficed, but the human being, already in existence, who was corrupted and perishing. Whence it was reasonable and good that the Word should use a human instrument and unfold himself to all things.”
― Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“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

“At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men...Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel