Vigils Reading

DIVINE LOVE

From “The Four Hundred Chapters of Love” by Maximus the Confessor3

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When through love the mind is ravished by divine knowledge…then,

according to the divine Isaiah, it comes in consternation to a realization of its

own lowliness and says with conviction the words of the prophet: Woe is me for

I am stricken at heart; because being a man having unclean lips, I dwell in the

midst of a people with unclean lips and I have seen with my eyes the King, the

Lord of hosts. The one who loves God cannot help but love also every man as

himself even though he is displeased by the passions of those who are not yet

purified. Thus when he sees their conversion and amendment, he rejoices with

an unbounded and unspeakable joy.

The passionate soul is impure, filled with thoughts of lust and hatred. The

one who sees a trace of hatred in his own heart through any fault at all toward

any man whoever he may be makes himself completely foreign to the love for

God, because love for God in no way admits of hatred for man.

“The one who

loves me,” says the Lord,

“will keep my commandments” and “this is my

commandment, that you love one another.” Therefore the one who does not love

his neighbor is not keeping the commandment, and the one who does not keep

the commandment is not able to love the Lord…

The one who has acquired divine love in himself does not grow weary of

closely following after the Lord his God, as the divine Jeremiah says; rather he

endures nobly every reproachful hardship and outrage without thinking any evil

of anyone. When you are insulted by someone or offended in any matter, then

beware of angry thoughts, lest by distress they sever you from charity and place

you in the region of hatred. Whenever you are suffering intensely from insult or

disgrace, realize that this can be of great benefit to you, for disgrace is God’s way

of driving vainglory out of you.

As the memory of fire does not warm the body, so faith without love does

not bring about the illumination of knowledge in the soul. As the light of the sun

attracts the healthy eye, so does the knowledge of God draw the pure mind to

itself naturally through love… The soul is pure when it has been freed from the

passions and rejoices unceasingly in divine love… For he recalls his former

worldly life and different transgressions and the temptations bedeviling him

from his youth, and how the Lord delivered him from all these things and made

him pass from this life of passion to a divine life. And so with fear he receives

love as well, ever thankful with deep humility to the benefactor and pilot of our

life.

Maximus the Confessor. Selected Writings. Trans. George C. Berthold. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. 36-40.7