God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.

The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity.

Wonder — the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge — promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing.

Not longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.

Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more central even than humility: the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led.

Even if a unity of faith is not possible, a unity of love is.

The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.