- Christian love as the fundamental principle of morality.
- Her characteristic features.
We have seen that those moral systems that do not take the Gospel teaching of Christian love as their foundation prove untenable. Christian morality, however, is entirely based on the law of love; this love is both its foundation and its summit.
What is this Christian love? Certainly, in its full development, it is the most sublime, powerful, and vibrant of all human emotions. It represents the experience of a special spiritual and moral closeness, a powerful inner attraction between one person and another. The heart of a loving person is open to the one they love, as if ready to receive and draw them to themselves. In its love, it both embraces the other and gives itself to the other. "Our heart is enlarged toward you, Corinthians; you are not straitened among us," wrote the Apostle Paul to his beloved spiritual children. "By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" ( John 13:39 ), said the Apostle Jesus Christ himself to his apostles (and through them, to all of us Christians).
Christian love is a unique feeling, bringing a person closer to God, Who Himself is Love , in the words of His beloved apostle ( 1 John 4:8 ). In the realm of earthly feelings, there is no higher feeling than the feeling of maternal love, ready for self-sacrifice. And the entire history of God's relationship with man is a continuous history of the self-sacrifice of heavenly love. The Heavenly Father leads the sinner, His enemy and traitor, by the hand, to salvation, and does not spare His only begotten Son for his salvation. The Son of God, descending from heaven, becomes incarnate, suffers, and dies in order to grant the sinner, through His resurrection, the blessed eternity he lost through his betrayal. And before His suffering, He gives His faithful a kind of testament—a commandment, an ideal: "As I have loved you, so you also—that you love one another..."
This is the ideal of selfless Christian love. It embraces everyone—not only friends, but also enemies. The Lord says directly in the Gospel: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” ( Luke 6:32–33 ) With this, the Lord warns us against the egotistical, self-serving nature of non-Christian, pagan love. In such egotistical love, the main thing is our own “I,” our self-satisfaction from this feeling. But to us Christians, the Lord commanded something different: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who despitefully use you and persecute you.” – Thus, a Christian loves other people not for their kind or accommodating attitude towards himself, but so-called for themselves, they are dear to him in themselves, and his love seeks their salvation, even if they are hostile to him.
But perhaps no other passage in Holy Scripture reveals the essence and qualities of Christian love as well as chapter 13 of Apostle Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians. It is not without reason that commentators on Holy Scripture call this chapter a hymn to Christian love. In it, the apostle compares Christian love with various spiritual gifts and virtues, and, having called this love the most excellent way (at the end of the preceding chapter, 12), he explains with compelling persuasiveness how much it surpasses all other human gifts and experiences.
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love," says the apostle, "I am become sounding brass and a clanging cymbal" (i.e., like inanimate objects that only affect a person's external hearing, not their heart). And all the highest virtues—prophecy, knowledge of all mysteries, miraculous faith, and even the feats of self-denial and martyrdom—are nothing without love, and only from it do they acquire their value.
"Love suffers long, is kind, does not envy, does not boast, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely" – it makes a person patient, meek, humble, and benevolent in everything. "Love does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices with the truth..." This is the all-conquering power, the power of humble love that destroys the selfishness and malice that nest in the human heart. And this true love always seeks truth and justice, and not lies and servility. And finally – "Love bears all things, believes all things, always hopes, endures all things. Love never fails..." Yes, that's right – never. Nothing can break it – neither trials, nor torments, nor grief, nor hardships, nor disappointments. And into another, better world, it will go with the Christian, and it will be revealed in its fullest form precisely there—when not only the gifts of prophecy and tongues disappear, but also faith and hope cease. Faith will be replaced there by face-to-face vision, and hope will become fulfilled; love alone will reign forever and ever. And that is why the same apostle says: "Love is the fulfilling of the law" ( Rom. 13:10 ).
Source: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Filaret_Voznesenskij/konspekt-po-nravstvennomu-bogosloviyu/#0_21