The only two arguments

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell....A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

—Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (1985)

Novels and the Gravest Concern

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It's hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

—Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (letter dated September 13, 1959)

'Sweet dreams burn me'

"The thief who hung on the cross managed to recover the joy of life and a bold, realizable hope, though he probably had no more than an hour left to live. You still have long years ahead of you, and most likely I will not die as soon as it seems. What if, by a miracle, the present should turn out to be a dream, a terrible nightmare, and we should wake up renewed, pure, strong, proud of our truth? ... Sweet dreams burn me, and I can hardly breathe from excitement. I want terribly to live, I want our life to be holy, high, and solemn, like the heavenly vault. Let us live! The sun does not rise twice a day, and life is not given us twice—hold fast to the remains of your life and save them ..."

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Story of an Unknown Man" (1892) (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 2004)

Go down, beauteous Sun

Works of art can die as a result of being looked at by too many dull eyes, and even the radiance of holiness can, in a way, become blunted when it encounters nothing but hollow indifference. But this remains but an external offense to beauty which may be rectified by purifying the heart and by exhuming what has been buried under the ruins. Hölderlin exclaimed in this vein: "Go down, beauteous Sun. They paid but little heed to thee; they knew thee not, thou holy one... for me thou graciously go'st down and up, O Light! And my eyes surely recognize thee, Splendour!" And even if works of art should die, even if the 'holy Sun' itself should die, how could the highest beauty die if it were true that its form had attained a living immortality?

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, (1967)

The Wonderful Thing about Holiness

The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself. This is not to say one can never be deceived; it’s easy to mistake personal charisma for genuine grace, or to be misled by plausible charlatans—until, that is, one comes across the real thing, at a moment when one is open to it. Then one knows it for what it is: a quality of such lucid and incandescent simplicity and of such moral beauty that one feels simultaneously deeply happy in its presence and ashamed of one’s own failure to have realized it within oneself.

—David Bentley Hart, "The Abbot and Aunt Susie" (December 2010)

Justification by Co-crucifixion

The basic claim of this book has been that Pauls soteriology is best described as theosis, or transformation into the image of the kenotic, cruciform God revealed in the faithful and loving cross of Christ, and that Spirit-enabled theosis is the substance of both justification and holiness. Justification is participatory and transformative, accomplished by co-crucifixion with Christ and embodied as holiness. Theosis is effected by the mutual inhabitation of those who are justified and the triune God who justifies them. Relating the thesis of this book to the more generally known and accepted notion of cruciformity in Paul, we have said that cruciformity is really theoformity, or theosis. For the sake of clarity and precision, we may wish to use the phrase cruciform theosis as shorthand for Paul's distinctive version of theosis.

—Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (2009)