Four Centuries on Love

Four Hundred Chapters on Love — Centuries I & II

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) was a Byzantine monk, theologian, and confessor who suffered exile and mutilation for defending the two wills of Christ against the Emperor's Monothelite compromise. His Four Centuries on Love (Κεφάλαια περὶ ἀγάπης) is his most widely read work — 400 short chapters arranged in four sets of a hundred, drawn from Scripture and the Desert Fathers, on the spiritual life as an ascent through love to the knowledge of God.

First Century — On Love and Its Practice

1. Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. A man cannot attain abiding love of God if he clings to any earthly affection.

2. God is love, says Scripture (1 John 4:8), and he who dwells in love dwells in God. He therefore who dwells in love must be undisturbed and free of passions, for all disturbance and passion arise from love of worldly things, which is the opposite of love of God.

3. He who loves God prefers knowledge of God to all created things and continually seeks it with great desire. If everything in existence is God's creation, then God is better than all His creation. He who forsakes the better and devotes himself to inferior things shows that he values created things more than the Creator. This is madness.

4. Among the passions only love is according to nature; all others arise from the misuse of natural powers. When the soul turns away from God and through the passions becomes fixed on material things, it falls from its proper dignity and brings shame on itself.

5. If everything that exists was made by God and for God and God is better than all that He made, then he who abandons God and devotes himself to inferior things is worse than mad. Yet this is what a man does who loves the flesh more than God. He loves creation rather than the Creator.

11. The person who has genuinely renounced worldly things and sincerely serves his neighbor through love has quickly been freed from every passion and made a partaker of divine love and knowledge.

14. The person who loves God loves his neighbor as well. Such a person cannot hoard money; he distributes it according to each person's need. By his manner of life he demonstrates that his mind is directed toward God, not toward the things of this world.

16. Know that you are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Hold fast to likeness through love. God is love and the image of love is love. He who has achieved perfect love has entered into the likeness of God.

19. The man who has attained perfect love does not regard the man who is passionate and given to evil as an enemy. Rather he hates the passions in him while loving the man himself, and all day long he prays for him.

23. When you begin to withstand your passions, pray for your enemies as you do for yourself. When you begin to overcome your passions, regard your enemies as though they were your friends. But it is impossible to regard as friends those who are mastered by their passions except when you yourself have risen above passion.

25. Just as the remembrance of fire does not warm the body, so faith without love does not produce the light of knowledge in the soul (Jas. 2:17).

31. Do not make your stomach your god or your belly your master. Make reason your master; it will give you a better government than they. When reason governs, the soul is directed toward God; when the belly governs, the soul descends to earth.

35. Among all the virtues, love is the greatest, for it holds together all the others and is the end toward which they are directed. Love is also the fullness of the law (Rom. 13:10).

40. When you pray, watch carefully how you are praying. Are you praying to gain something, or to please God, or to be instructed? The first is merely human, the third is better, but the second alone is perfect — for in it a man seeks nothing for himself but everything for God.

55. When you have put anger and hatred entirely out of your heart, you will find that there is no passion more destructive than hatred of men. For the one who hates his brother is in darkness (1 John 2:11); and he who does not love abides in death (1 John 3:14).

71. The person who loves God values knowledge of God above all created things and is always seeking it. He constantly devotes himself to prayer and the study of Scripture, not to win any human praise but purely to serve God. He flees from the man who would distract him from this.

100. Blessed is the man who has been able to love all men equally. Blessed is the man who is not attached to anything corruptible or transitory. Blessed is the mind which, passing by all created things, constantly rejoices in God's beauty.

Second Century — On Knowledge and the Passions

1. As soon as the mind begins to make progress in love of God, it begins to make progress in theology also. Everything that we know of God comes through love, for love is the knowledge of what is highest in God — His goodness — and God Himself is love (1 John 4:16).

4. The passions of the soul are: love of possessions, vanity, gluttony, the desire for food, lust, and the desire for pleasure. These all arise from attachment to things. The passions of the body are: sleep, idleness, and laziness. These arise from the weakness of the body. A man who is overcoming the passions of the soul has made more progress than one who is merely overcoming those of the body.

6. There are three things which produce love of money: self-indulgence, vainglory, and lack of faith. Lack of faith is more dangerous than the others: the self-indulgent person seeks pleasure; the vainglorious seeks praise; but the faithless person accumulates goods through fear of want, whereas faith in God's providence would remove this fear entirely.

15. Some men refrain from vice out of the weakness of the body, or from the fear of human punishment, or from the desire of human praise. These men do not yet practice pure virtue. He who refrains from vice for the love of God alone, and who practices virtue for God's sake — this man is practicing pure virtue.

26. If you do not wish to suffer evil, do not inflict it. For it is inescapable that a man reaps what he has sown (Gal. 6:7). He who sows in the flesh will reap corruption; he who sows in the Spirit will reap eternal life (Gal. 6:8).

48. The person who has renounced all the material things of this world — possessions, fame, self-indulgence, and so on — has made the exterior man a monk. But the person who has also renounced all the impassioned thoughts of these things is a true monk in the inner man. It is not difficult to make the exterior man a monk, if one wishes. But it is a great effort to make the interior man a monk.

66. Once the mind has been cleansed of all impassioned thoughts, it begins to see clearly the reason behind its thoughts, words and deeds, and the reasons behind God's providence toward creation. Then knowledge fills the mind with reverence and gratitude toward God, who is the giver of all good things.

Four Hundred Chapters on Love — Centuries III & IV

Third Century — On Theology and the Spiritual Life

1. There are five reasons why God permitted the demons to make war on us: so that we may learn to distinguish virtue from vice; so that the virtue we acquire through conflict may be more stable; so that we may not become proud of the grace given us; so that we may hate the demons with a perfect hatred; and so that, having struggled successfully, we may become free from passion.

27. As long as you see clearly that your neighbor is doing evil, be compassionate toward him and help him, but do not in any way join in what he is doing. If you cannot help him, at least do not harm him. The commandment to love your neighbor requires that you not do evil; the higher perfection of love requires that you do good.

35. Know that the Logos of God became flesh (John 1:14) so that He might restore to us through His flesh what we had lost through sin. The flesh that He took on was a flesh like ours, subject to passion, but not to sin. Through His death and resurrection, He purified our nature from its tendency to death and corruption, and He opened to us the way of return to God.

46. Theology has three aspects: the Trinity, creation, and providence. The first belongs to the theology of the divine nature as such; the second, to God as Creator; the third, to God as governor and preserver of what He has made. Of these three, only the first is truly without beginning and without end; the other two had a beginning in God's will and will reach their completion in the consummation of all things.

71. Nothing is so characteristic of God and His saints as concern for the salvation of souls. That is why, above all things, we ought to be zealous in praying and interceding for one another and for all men, even as God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).

97. The end of Christian life is the deification of man. Deification is not the annihilation of human nature but its fulfillment — the human person becoming by grace what God is by nature. This is the final gift of divine love: that the creature who was made in the image of God should by grace come to share in all that God is, except His essence, which remains forever beyond all creatures.

Fourth Century — On the Consummation and Final Things

3. There are five great mysteries that theologians generally speak of: existence, reason, wisdom, divine life, and goodness. But there is one that encompasses all the others: the mystery of the divine will, by which God ordered all things and by which He will complete all things in Himself. For God is all and in all, and this is the end of all created things.

18. He who does not know God cannot love Him. He who does not love Him cannot become like Him. He who is not like Him cannot be deified. And he who is not deified cannot have true knowledge of God. So everything comes down to this: love God by obeying His commandments, and knowledge of Him will be given to you — not all at once, but in the measure of your obedience and love.

47. To put it simply: he who has obtained love has obtained God Himself, for God is love. He who has obtained God has obtained all good things. What, then, could be lacking to the man who possesses God? Absolutely nothing that is truly good. Therefore, seek God with your whole heart, and you will find all things in Him.

100. God, who is beyond all being and all knowing, is the cause of all being and all knowing. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, is the consummation of all things that are and all things that will be. He is the rest of all those who are weary, the peace of all those who are troubled, the life of all those who die, the resurrection of all those who fall. To Him be glory, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.