Dragoste.

I have a lot of things to write about, especially about a magnificent weekend in Iaşi, but I don’t have time tonight.  I need to catch up on sleep.  However, I just finished my homework for Eastern Orthodoxy—our reading was on the “positive praxis” of all the theology our textbook (The Spirituality of the Christian East by Tomaš Špidlík) has thus far entailed.  And some of the quotes struck with me poignantly—I wrote them in my journal—so I wanted to share them here, too.  Enjoy.  Chew.

“The perfection of the Christian life resides in charity [love].”  (Thomas Aquinas)

“We were created to love, because we are ‘children of love’.”  (the Epistle of Barnabas)

“Apart from the love of God, neither knowledge, nor the understanding of mysteries, nor faith nor prophecy avails anything—without love all are hollow and vain.”  (Irenaeus)

“God’s love cannot be ‘a desire for His own perfection,’ the Platonic eros.  Divine agape is a super-abundance.  The Father in heaven does not seek a more that would fill Him; on the contrary, He wants to open His own treasures.”

“Love of God is not something that is taught; it is within us as a basic desire, a predisposition, a seed…. All progress in love thereby creates life…. Love is the ‘queen of virtues.’  We are not impelled to it automatically, but it is of our free choice, which is the foundation of every virtue.”  (Basil)

“To love God for God’s sake also means to choose the entire work of God, to love all of creation and the marvelous order that reigns in it, that is, to observe the commandments, especially the second, which consists in loving one’s neighbor.  It is impossible, Maximus the Confessor says, really to love God without loving our neighbor, or really to love our neighbor without loving God.  And it is this inseparable union of the two loves which makes it possible for us to love with an agape that expects no reward, with a love that goes out to the another: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food…. Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?  I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me’ (Matthew 25:35-40).  Therefore, ‘The task of love is to behave towards every person bearing God’s image, almost as it does towards the Prototype'.”