Love part VII

Follows Love part VI

It is not the case that love of one's brother is the content of the Truth as the Tolstoyans and suchlike religious nihilists affirm. It is not the case that this love of one's brother exhausts everything. Absolutely not. Love of one's brother is a revelation to another, a passage to another, the inflow into another of that entering into Divine life which in the God-communing subject is perceived by this subject as knowledge of the Truth. The metaphysical nature of love lies in the supralogical overcoming of the naked self-identity "I = I" and in the going out of oneself. And this happens when the power of God's love flows out into another person and tears apart in him the bonds of finite human selfhood. Owing to this going out of itself, I becomes in another, in not-I, this not-I. I becomes consubstantial with the brother, consubstantial (homoousios) and not only like-substantial (homoiousios). And it is this like-substantiality that constitutes moralism, i.e., a vain, inwardly insane attempt at a human, extra-Divine love.
St. Pavel (Florensky)