The Way of Love

For the activity and clear proof of perfect love towards God is a genuine disposition of voluntary goodwill towards one's neighbor. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, says the divine Apostle John, cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). This is the way of truth, as the Word of God calls himself, that leads those who walk in it, pure of all passions, to God the Father. This is the door, through which the one who enters finds himself in the Holy of Holies, and is made worthy to behold the unapproachable beauty of the holy and royal Trinity.

—Maximus the Confessor, "Letter 2: On Love" (626)

Nothing is simpler than love.

Nothing is simpler for man than the act of love, which in this case can indeed dispense with every precaution and care since the self-surrender to the person one adores is at the same time self-surrender to the promise of eternal bliss and, as such, is an act which could never be surpassed by a greater or a better. When one's beloved is none other than God, the ego's experience of losing the ground under its feet as a result of genuine love is none other than the beatific shudder of self-surrender which every believer is basically disposed to experience and which the mystic actually experiences already here on earth.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (1961) 

Seek His Face Evermore

Ut inveniendus quaeratur, occultus est; ut inventus quaeratur, immensus est. Unde alibi dicitur, ‘Quaerite faciem ejus semper’.

—Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 63:1 (419)

He is hidden in order that you might seek him; and in order that you might not cease in your search once you have found him, he is infinite. Thus it is said . . . “Seek his face evermore”.(Psalm 105:4).

—Translation by John Betz, "Beyond the Sublime" (2006)

Making us God

True, this offer no longer seems to arouse much interest in a certain number of people, adepts of a Christianity which claims to want to be not "moderately" but fully "modern", perfectly adapted to a world hostile to all mystical excesses, whether moral or metaphysical...."Would a man with good sense today still want to become God?" What a surprising lack of ambition in this "modern" Christianity!...Let us conclude that "a Christianity which offers man something less than making him God is too modest..." [Quoting Joseph Ratzinger].

—Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (1980)

The Original Image of the Creation

Now our Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity, the essential Image, the essential Harmony, the Righteousness of God, becomes a creature, springs up from beneath the foundations of the Creation in an Human Soul and Body in the midst of its ruines. This Jesus is the Original Image of the Creation, of Man, of every Creature, the Root, the Rule, the Actor of all, who virtually, eminently comprehends all in their distinct Ideal Forms within himself. As so many eternal Beauties in his own eternal Beauty, who bringeth them forth from himself, beareth them in himself, as Flowers in their Garden-beds.

—Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedome of the Will (1675)

Thoroughly Pervaded with His Power

When the soul is drawn into the immediate presence of God and is thoroughly pervaded with His power, it becomes like fire, and in this state of glory takes on the appearance of a new higher spirit, a higher nature. When pure fire penetrates a pure metal with its heat, the metal loses its massiveness and hardness, and at the same time gives forth light and warmth, without forfeiting it own essence. In some such way the substantial fire of the divinity penetrates the soul with a heat it irradiates, owing to which the soul loses, not its own nature, but its natural lowliness and ponderousness and is drawn up to God, to receive light and warmth resembling the divine heat.

—Matthias Scheeben, Nature and Grace (1861)

Mysticism Keeps Men Sane

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic .... If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

The Eros of God

Why is it, however, that theologians sometimes refer to God as Yearning (Eros) and Love (Agape) and sometimes as the yearned-for and the Beloved? On the one hand he causes, produces, and generates what is being referred to, and, on the other hand, he is the thing itself. He is stirred by it and he stirs it. He is moved to it and he moves it. So they call him the beloved and the yearned-for since he is beautiful, good, and, again, they call him yearning and love because he is the power moving and lifting all things up to himself, for in the end what is he if not Beauty and Goodness, the One who of himself reveals himself, the good procession of his own transcendent unity? He is yearning on the move, simple, self-moved, self-acting, preexistent in the Good, flowing out from the Good onto all that is and returning once again to the Good.

–Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Divine Names (510)

They Will Shine Like Lightning

For as the body of the Lord was glorified when he climbed the mount and was transfigured into the divine glory and into infinite light, so also the bodies of the saints are glorified and shine like lightning. Just as the interior glory of Christ covered his body and shone completely, in the same way also in the saints the interior power of Christ in them in the day will be poured out exteriorly upon their bodies. For even now at this time they are in their minds participators of his substance and nature. For it is written: "He that sanctifies and the one who is sanctified are of one" (Heb. 2:11); and: "The glory that you have given me, I have given them" (Jn 17:22). Similarly, as many lamps are lighted from the one, same fire, so also it is necessary that the bodies of the saints, which are members of Christ, become the same which Christ himself is.

—(Pseudo-)Macarius,Homily 15:38 (circa 390)

Justification by Co-crucifixion

The basic claim of this book has been that Pauls soteriology is best described as theosis, or transformation into the image of the kenotic, cruciform God revealed in the faithful and loving cross of Christ, and that Spirit-enabled theosis is the substance of both justification and holiness. Justification is participatory and transformative, accomplished by co-crucifixion with Christ and embodied as holiness. Theosis is effected by the mutual inhabitation of those who are justified and the triune God who justifies them. Relating the thesis of this book to the more generally known and accepted notion of cruciformity in Paul, we have said that cruciformity is really theoformity, or theosis. For the sake of clarity and precision, we may wish to use the phrase cruciform theosis as shorthand for Paul's distinctive version of theosis.

—Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (2009)

I live, yet not I

...wherein the image of the Beloved is outlined in such a manner, and so completely pictured, when there is union of love, that it is true to say that the Beloved lies in the lover and the lover in the Beloved; and such manner of likeness does love make in the transformation of the two that are in love that it may be said that each is in the other and both are one....Thus each lives in the other, and the one is the other, and both are one through the transformation of love. It is this that St. Paul meant when he said: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." For in saying ‘I live, yet not I,’ he meant that, although he lived, his life was not his own, because he was transformed in Christ and his life was divine rather than human.

St. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 12, 7