Category: St Maximos the Confessor

Do not befoul your intellect by clinging to thoughts filled with anger and sensual desire. Otherwise you will lose your capacity for pure prayer and fall victim to the demon of listlessness….

When the intellect associates with evil and sordid thoughts it loses its intimate communion with God….

Do not listen gleefully to gossip at your neighbor’s expense or chatter to a person who likes finding fault. Otherwise you will fall away from divine love and find yourself cut off from eternal life….

‘But I say to you,’ says the Lord, ‘love your enemies…do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you’ (Matthew 5:44). Why did He command this? To free you from hatred, irritation, anger and rancor, and to make you worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. And you cannot attain such love if you do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them ‘to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4).

~St Maximos the Confessor

You should know that you have been greatly benefited when you have suffered deeply because of some insult or indignity: for by means of the indignity self-esteem has been driven out of you….

A man who has been assiduous in acquiring the fruits of love will not cease loving even if he suffers a thousand calamities. Let Stephen, the disciple of Christ, and others like him persuade you of the truth of this (Acts 7:60). Our Lord Himself prayed for His murderers and asked the Father to forgive them because they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34)….

If love is long-suffering and kind (1 Corinthians 12:4), a man who is contentious and malicious clearly alienates himself from love. And he who is alienated from love is alienated from God, for God is love….

If a man desires something, he makes every effort to attain it. But of all things which are good and desirable the divine is incomparably the best and the most desirable. How assiduous then, we should be in order to attain what is of its very nature good and desirable….

Stop defiling your flesh with shameful deeds and polluting your soul with wicked thoughts; then the peace of God will descend upon you and bring you love.

~St Maximos the Confessor

When you are insulted by someone or humiliated, guard against angry thoughts, lest they arouse a feeling of irritation, and so cut you off from love and place you in the realm of hatred.

Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. We cannot attain lasting possession of such love while we are still attached to anything worldly….

The person who loves God values knowledge of God more than anything created by God, and pursues such knowledge ardently and ceaselessly….

If everything that exists was made by God and for God, and God is superior to the things made by him, he who abandons what is superior and devotes himself to what is inferior shows that he values things made by God more than God Himself….

Since the soul is more noble than the body and God incomparably more noble than the world created by Him, he who values the body more than the soul and the world created by God more that the Creator Himself is simply a worshiper of idols.

~St Maximos the Confessor