mind; it was this alone: You have nothing to choose; you are called. You will not serve; another will use you. You have no plans to make; you are only a small little tile in a mosaic that has long been ready. I needed only to "leave everything and follow," without making plans, without wishes or ideas: I needed only to stand there and wait and see what I would be used for—and so it happened.He understood this experience as having been mediated by the figure of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Von Balthasar would later write of Loyola, "I did not choose him; he set me ablaze like a bolt of lightning." On November 18, 1929, von Balthasar entered the Society of Jesus in south Germany, not long after the death of his mother. At that time, Jesuit work and ministry was prohibited in Switzerland by constitutional law. After two years as a Jesuit novice, he studied philosophy at Pullach, near Munich, where he came into contact with Erich Przywara, who formed him in Scholasticism and whose work on the analogia entis impacted him, though he would later express some hesitation about certain aspects of his thought. In 1932, von Balthasar moved to Fourvière, the Jesuit school in Lyon, France, for four years of theological study. Here he encountered fellow Jesuits Henri Bouillard, Jean Daniélou, Gaston Fessard, and Henri de Lubac, figures later associated with the nouvelle théologie. De Lubac kindled the young student's interest in the Church Fathers, especially Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. In Lyon, von Balthasar also encountered the work of French writers Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, and Paul Claudel. Von Balthasar was ordained a priest on 26 July 1936. As a motto on his ordination card, he used the phrase "Benedixit, fregit, deditque" ("He blessed it, broke it, and gave"), taken from the words of the institution of the Eucharist in the Gospel of Luke. After finishing his theological studies in 1937, he was sent to Munich to work at the journal Stimmen der Zeit, where he remained until 1939. He completed his tertianship with Father Albert Steger in 1940. When given the choice between a professorship at the Gregorian University in Rome and a role as student chaplain in Basel, Switzerland, he chose the chaplaincy, preferring pastoral work to academia. Moving to Basel in 1940, von Balthasar edited the Europaische Reihe literary