Four Hundred Chapters on Love (Popular Patristics Series v22)

In the Four Hundred Chapters on Love, Saint Maximus the Confessor presents a sustained treatment of how to foster the virtue he perceived to be the center of the Christian life. The ultimate aim of the Four Hundred Chapters on Love is to cultivate love for neighbor, but also the love for God that must orient all other human affections and desires. This work is one of the greatest achievements of the Byzantine monastic tradition and is one of the foremost of the ascetical writings of that tradition, meant to instill in the reader the habits necessary so that, as St. Paul would say, the same mind is in you as was in Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5). Maximus uses the well-known monastic genre of “chapters” to deliver short, digestible maxims that nevertheless remain unsurpassed in their profundity and insight into human psychology.