Category: St Maximos the Confessor

In each of us the energy of the Spirit is made manifest according to the measure of his faith (Romans 12:6). Therefore each of us is the steward of his own grace and, if we think logically, we should never envy another person the enjoyment of his gifts, since the disposition which makes us capable of receiving divine blessings depends on ourselves.

…Hence the person who out of jealousy envies those who practice the virtues is more than misguided, for the choice of believing and acting, and of receiving grace according to the measure of his faith, clearly depends on him and not on anybody else.

~St Maximos the Confessor

 

Complete unawareness of the loss of the virtues marks the downward path to godlessness. For the person who habitually disobeys God, through indulging in the pleasures of the flesh, will deny God himself when the occasion arises. In preferring the life of the flesh to God, he places a higher value on sensual pleasures than on the divine will.

All the achievements of the saints were clearly gifts of grace from God. None of the saints had the least thing other than the goodness granted to him by the Lord God according to the measure of his gratitude and love. And what he acquired he acquired only in so far as he surrendered himself to the Lord who bestowed it.

~St Maximos the Confessor

 

When conceit about one’s virtue is left undisciplined it naturally generates arrogance, and this induces a sense of hostility to God.

The wrath of God is the suspension of gifts of grace — a most salutary experience for every self-inflated intellect that boasts of the blessings bestowed by God as if they were its own achievements.

~St Maximos the Confessor

…peace is truly the complete and undisturbed possession of what is desired.

~St Maximos the Confessor

The wrath of God is the painful sensation we experience when we are being trained by Him. Through this painful experience of unsought sufferings God often abases and humbles an intellect conceited about its knowledge and virtue; for such sufferings make it conscious of itself and its own weakness. When the intellect perceives its own weakness it rejects the vain pretensions of the heart.

~St Maximos the Confessor

If the words of God are uttered merely as verbal expressions, and their message is not rooted in the virtuous way of life of those who utter them, they will not be heard. But if they are uttered through the practice of the commandments, their sound has such power that they dissolve the demons and dispose men eagerly to build their hearts into temples of God through making progress in works of righteousness.

~St Maximos the Confessor

Nothing so much as love brings together those who have been sundered and produces in them an effective union of will and purpose. Love is distinguished by the beauty of recognizing the equal value of all men. Love is born in a man when his soul’s powers–that is, his intelligence, incensive power and desire–are concentrated and unified around the divine. Those who by grace have come to recognize the equal value of all men in God’s sight and who engrave His beauty on their memory, possess an ineradicable longing for divine love, for such love is always imprinting this beauty on their intellect.

~St Maximos the Confessor

The Lord hews out cisterns in the desert, that is to say, in the world and in human nature. He excavates the hearts of those who are worthy, clears them of their material sordidness and arrogance, and makes them deep and wide in order to receive the divine rains of wisdom and knowledge. He does this so that they may water Christ’s flocks, those who need moral instruction because of the immaturity of their souls.

~St Maximos the Confessor

Everyone, then, who through self-restraint does away with sensual pleasure, which is intricate, convoluted and intertwined in many ways with every sensible object, makes the crooked straight. And he who with patience withstands and defeats the harsh implacable bouts of suffering turns the rough places into smooth ways. Thus, when a person has well and truly struggled, has defeated sensual pleasure with desire for virtue, has overcome pain with love for spiritual knowledge, and through both virtue and knowledge has bravely persevered to the end of the divine contest, he will see, according to Scripture, ‘the salvation of God’: and this will be his reward for virtue and for the efforts he has made to attain it (Isaiah 40:4-5).

~St Maximos the Confessor

When through self-control you have straightened the crooked paths of the passions in which you deliberately indulged–that is to say, the impulses of sensual pleasure–and when, by enduring patiently the harsh and painful afflictions produced by trials and temptations suffered against your will, you have made the rough ways smooth and even, then you may expect to see God’s salvation, for you will have become pure in heart. In this state of purity, through the virtues and through holy contemplation, you will at the end of your contest behold God, in accordance with Christ’s words: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8). And because of the sufferings you have endured for the sake of virtue you will receive the gift of dispassion. To those who possess this gift there is nothing which reveals God more fully.

~St Maximos the Confessor

So long as you do not pursue virtue or study Holy Scripture for the sake of glory, or as a cloak for greed (1 Thessalonians 2:5), or from love of flattery and popularity, or for self-display, but do and say and think for the sake of God, then you are walking with spiritual knowledge in the way of truth. If, however, you have in some respects ‘prepared the way for the Lord’, yet have not ‘made His paths straight’, He will not come to dwell within you (Isaiah 40:3 and Mark 1:3).

~St Maximos the Confessor