Confessor in Love

 Maximus the Confessor (580-662) was an Orthodox Christian monk whose tragic destiny was connected to its religious and philosophical positions. But its difficult life was full of love. He speaks clearly about the deifying power of that love.

Nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification.

The all glorious way of love…is truly divine and deifying and leads to God.

Love is a good disposition of the soul by which one prefers nothing to the knowledge of God. It is impossible to reach the habit of this love if one has any attachment to earthly things.

The one who loves God prefers knowledge of Him to all things made by Him and is constantly devoted to it by desire.

All the virtues assist the mind in the pursuit of love, but above all does pure prayer.

As a little sparrow whose foot is tied tries to fly but is pulled to earth by the cord to which it is bound, so does the mind which does not yet possess detachment get pulled down and dragged to earth when it flies to the knowledge of heavenly things.

The mind of the one who is continually with God even his concupiscence (lust) abounds beyond measure into a divine desire and whose entire irascible element is transformed into divine love…to a never-ending divine desire and an unceasing love, completely changing over from earthly things to divine.

Love remains for infinite ages in a supreme and ever abounding union with the One who is supremely infinite [and so] the greatest of these is love.

Love is…in a definition: the inward universal relationship to the first good connected with the universal purpose of our natural kind…there is nothing that can make the human being who loves God ascend any higher. By acquiring love we ascend to God. 

There is nothing greater than love. 

Love.