Love

Brethren, God is Love which heaven lowers to earth; Brethren, man is love which raises earth to heaven.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

Only death

He who does not love God, not only does he not love God but does not love anything that is from God, i.e., neither the beauty of the stars nor the order of the seas and mountains nor the living power that is in animals and plant life. He who does not love God, removes and distances God from nature. What else then is left? Only dead, formless, dark, dust only death. Even that dust is created by God. And that dust, the blasphemer of God must return to God and that, which is left over, he can love. What is there left over? Only that which does not touch God, i.e., death, sin and the devil. He who does not love God he, in essence, loves death, sin and the devil. Every blasphemer of God is a toy of the devil, the fruit of sin and a pawn of death.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovich)

A spiritual climate

… man's cure is found not just in some psychological support and some individualistic practice, but first and foremost in man's journey from isolated individuality towards a personal relationship. This is a journey from self-love to love of both God and man, from self-seeking love to self-denying love. It is precisely for this reason that cure takes place within a particular spiritual climate.
Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos

Love part VIII

Follows Love part VII

Rising above the bounds of its nature, I goes out of temporal-spatial limitedness and enters into Eternity. There the whole process of the interrelations of the lovers is a single act, in which an infinite series of individual moments of love is synthesized. This single, eternal, and infinite act is the consubstantiality of the lovers in God, where I is one and the same as the other I, but also different. Every I is not-I, i.e., Thou, by virtue of the renunciation of oneself for the sake of another. And it is I by virtue of the renunciation of the other I for the sake of the first. Instead of individual, separate, self-assertive I's, we get a dyad, a di-unitary being that has the principle of its unity in God: "finis amoris, ut duo unum fiant" ("the limit of love: two are one"). Furthermore, every I sees in the Divine image of another I its own Divine image as in a mirror.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

On "good works"

If someone were to say that he does good and humane works outside of Christ, you know that those, his works, are spoiled to the core and are corroded, be it from vanity or be it from hidden selfishness. Man, without Christ, is the same as branches without the vine. He Himself told us this. The vine is hidden and unseen, but the branches are seen. Nevertheless, the grapes on the branch and the branch itself depends on the vine. The vine of all-encompassing good grows from the heart of God the Father and is watered by the sweetness of the Holy Spirit.
St. Nikolaj Velimirovic

If there is truth, there is inevitably love. … Love follows from the knowledge of God with the same necessity as light radiates from a lamp or nocturnal fragrance emanates from the open calyx of a flower: "knowledge becomes love he gnosis agape ginetai." Therefore, the mutual love of Christ's disciples is the sign of their learning, their knowledge, their walking in the truth. Love is the characteristic sign by which a disciple of Christ is recognized…

But one cannot make a greater error than to identify the spiritual love of one who knows the Truth with altruistic emotions and the striving for the "good of mankind," a striving that, at best, is grounded in natural sympathy or in abstract ideas. For "love" in this sense, which we call "Judaic," everything begins and ends in empirical works, the value of which is determined by their visible effect. But for spiritual love, or love in the Christian sense, this value is only tinsel. Even moral activity (philanthropy and so on) is, taken in itself, an absolute zero. What is desirable is not the outward appearance, not the "skin," of special activities, but life full of grace, which overflows in every creative act of a person. But "skin" as "skin," the empirical outward appearance as such, can always be falsified. No age dares to deny that there are "false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ," that even "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light" (2 Cor. 11 13-14).
St. Pavel (Florensky)

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)

Love part VI

Follows Love part V

Love of another person is the reflection of true knowledge upon this person, while knowledge is revelation of the Trihypostatic Truth to the heart, i.e., the abiding in the soul of God's love of man: "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12). We thus enter with Him not only into an impersonal, providential-cosmic relationship, but also into a personal father-son communion.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

Love part V

Follows Love part IV

Only one who has come to know the Triune God can love with a true love. If I have not come to know God, have not come to commune with His Being, I do not love. And contrarily, if I love, I commune with God, know Him. But if I do not love, I do not commune with Him and do not know Him. There is a direct relationship between knowledge and love for creatures here. The center from which this knowledge and this love proceed is my abiding in God and God's abiding in me.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

Love part IV

Follows Love part III

Man's knowledge of God is inevitably revealed and manifests itself as active love for creatures, a love that is already given to me in immediate experience. And manifested love for creatures is contemplated objectively as beauty. Whence the pleasure, the rejoicing, the consolation in love during its contemplation. That which makes one rejoice is called beauty; love as an object of contemplation is beauty.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

Love part III

Follows Love part II

Persons who are not yet pure, persons insofar as they are thinglike, fleshly, are capable of falling into the “similarity” of desire. But insofar as they are pure and have detached themselves from “thingness,” they are capable of achieving the “identification” of love.
But what is this thingness of a person? It is the vacuous self-equality of the person, giving to the person the unity of a concept that is self-confined in the combination of its attributes, i.e., the unity of a dead, fixed concept. In other words, it is nothing but the rationalistic “comprehensibility” of a person, i.e., the subordination of a person to the rationalistic law of identity. On the contrary the personal character of a person, this living unity of his self-building activity, the creative transcending of his self-enclosedness, constitutes his nonsubsumability in any concept, his “incomprehensibility,” and therefore his unacceptability for rationalism. It is the victory over the law of identity that raises a person above a lifeless thing and makes him a living center of activity. But it is clear that activity is essentially incomprehensible for rationalism, for activity is creativity, i.e., the addition to the given of that which is not yet given, and thus the overcoming of the law of identity.
St. Pavel (Florensky)

Love part II

Follows Love part I

…love is a substantial act, going from the subject to the object and having support in the object, whereas knowledge and joy are directed toward the subject, and the subject is the point of application of their force. God's love goes over to us, but knowledge and contemplative joy abide in Him. For this reason it is not the Hypostasis of the Father or the Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit (Paraclete = Comforter, Giver of Joy) that became incarnate, but the Son-Word, the hypostatic Divine Love…
St. Pavel (Florensky)

Love part I

…love is a substantial act, going from the subject to the object and having support in the object, whereas knowledge and joy are directed toward the subject, and the subject is the point of application of their force. God's love goes over to us, but knowledge and contemplative joy abide in Him. For this reason it is not the Hypostasis of the Father or the Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit (Paraclete = Comforter, Giver of Joy) that became incarnate, but the Son-Word, the hypostatic Divine Love…
St. Pavel (Florensky)

…love is not an attribute of God…

…For then God's love would depend on conditional being and would thus be accidental…God, or the Truth, not only has love but, above all, "God is love"…That is, love is God's essence, His own nature, and not only His providential relationship, which is proper to Him. In other words, "God is love" (more precisely, He is "Love"), and not only "the Loving One," even if the "perfectly Loving One."
St. Pavel (Florensky)