All the greatest of Christian mystics put a faith-confessed love towards God and union with God higher than personal salvation. A more externalised Christianity often faults the mystics on this, that for them the centre of gravity of spiritual life lies altogether not in the ways of personal salvation, and that they go the perilous ways of mystical love. The mystic is indeed of altogether different a degree of spiritual life, than is the ascetic. The mystics characteristically might study, reading the “Hymns” of St. Simeon the New Theologian. The Christian mystic also understands salvation, as illumination and transfiguration, the deification of creature, as an overcoming of the isolation of creatureliness, i.e. as separateness from God. The idea of theosis holds sway over the idea of salvation. This is beautifully expressed by St. Simeon the New Theologian: “”I am imbued with His love and beauty, and filled with Divine delight and sweetness. I become a partaker of radiance and glory: my face, as also of my Beloved, doth shine, and all my limbs become bearers of radiance. I thereupon co-become more beautiful than the beauteous, more godly than the gods, I become most powerful of all the powerful, more than the great kings and far more venerable than anything, that might be seen, not only of the earth and that upon the earth, but also of the heavens and all, that is in the heavens.” I quote the greatest mystic of the Orthodox East. It would be possible to produce an innumerable number of fragments from Western mystics, Latin Catholics or German mystics, which substantiate this thought, that at the mystical centre of gravity there never lies the yearning for salvation. The Catholic mystic has overcome the juridicism of Catholic theology, the legalistic understanding betwixt God and man. The dispute of Bossuet with Fenelon was also the dispute of a theologian with a mystic. On the mystical pathway there is always an unconditional displacement oblivious about the self, a disclosure of immeasurable love towards God. But love for God is a creative condition of spirit, in it is the overcoming of every restraint, a liberation, an affirmative revealing of spiritual man. Humility is only a means, it is still negative. Love for God is an end, it is already positive. Love for God is already a creative transfiguration of human nature. But love for God is likewise a love for the spiritual heights, for the Divine in life. Divine eros is spiritual ascent, spiritual growth, a victory of the creative condition of spirit over the condition of restraint, that sprouting of the wings of the soul, that Plato speaks of in the “Phaedrus”. The affirmative content of being is live, creative, transfigurative love. Love is not something particular, a separate side of life, love is the whole of life, the fullness of life. Cognition is likewise a disclosure of love, cognitive love, cognitively an union of the loving with his theme, with being, with God. Creativity of the beautiful is likewise a disclosure of the harmony of love in being. Love is the affirmation of the countenance of the beloved in eternity and in God, i.e. it is the affirmation of being. Love is an ontological first-principle. But love for God is inseparable from love for neighbour, love for God’s creation. Christianity also is a revealing of Divine-human love. It saves me, i.e. not only love for God but also love for man transfigures my nature. Love for those near, for brothers, the acts of love enter upon the path of my salvation, of my transfiguration. On the way of my salvation enters in love for animals and plants, for each thing close by, for stones, for rivers and seas, for hills and fields. By this too I am saved, all the world too is saved, it attains to illumination. Deathly indifference towards man and nature, towards every living thing in the name of self-salvation is an hideous manifestation of religious egoism, it is a desiccation of human nature, it is a readying “in heart of impotent eunuchs”. Christian love ought not to be “glass-transparent love” (an expression of V. V. Rozanov). Abstractly-spiritual love is also “glass-transparent love”. Only love that is spiritually of soul, in which the soul is transfigured in spirit, is a living and Divine-human love. The sometimes encountered monastic-ascetic disdain towards people and the world, a chilling of the heart, and the mortification towards everything alive, is a degeneration of Christianity, an impairment within Christianity. The substitution in place of the commandment of love for God and love for neighbour, given by Christ himself, by a commandment of external humility and obedience, the chilling of any love, is also a degeneration of Christianity, an incapacity to accommodate the truth of Christianity. It is necessary to note, that in particular the idea of cosmic transfiguration and illumination is most near to the Orthodox East. For Western Christianity the juridical idea of justification is more near. And the idea of justification is central for the consciousness of the Catholic and the consciousness of the Protestant. Hence in the West disputes about freedom and grace, about faith and good works, acquire particular significance. Hence the seeking of authority and external criteria of religious truth. Only the mystics rise above the stifling idea of God’s judgement, God’s demand of justification from man, and they understood, that for God is necessary not the justification of man, but rather the love of man, the transfiguration of his nature. This is the central problem of the Christian consciousness. Whether in justification and judgement, in God’s inexorable justice is the essence of Christianity, or whether this essence is in transfiguration and illumination, in God’s infinite love. The juridical understanding of Christianity, producing the present spiritual terror, is a severe method, by which Christianity parented the nations, that were full of bloody instincts, cruelty and barbarism. But to this understanding is opposed a more profound understanding of Christianity, as the revelation of love and freedom. Man is called to be a creator and co-participant in the deed of God’s creation. It is God’s call, directed to man, and to which man ought freely to give answer. For God submissive and obedient slaves are altogether not needful, eternally trembling and egoistically concerned with themselves. For God sons are needful, free and creating, loving and daring. Man has terribly distorted the image of God, and has attributed to Him his own perverse and sinful psychology. But it is needful always to remember the truth of apophatic theology. If to God might also be ascribed an emotive life, then it does not follow as consequence to present it in the form of the most vile of human emotions. Spiritual terror indeed and spiritual panic, begetting the juridical understanding of the relationship between God and man, and the placing of justification and salvation at the centre of Christian faith, issues forth from an understanding of an emotive life of God, in everything like to the most vile emotive life in man. But God revealed Himself in the Son, as the Father, as infinite love. And by this is forever surmounted the understanding of God as fierce Lord and vindictively wrathful Master. “God did not send His Son into the world, so as to judge the world, but so that through Him the world might be saved”. “This is the will of the Father Who hath sent Me, so that of all which He hath given to Me, no one should perish, but instead resurrect on the last day”.. [Jn. 3: 13, 6: 39-40]. Man is called to perfection, to the like perfection of the Heavenly Father. The Christian revelation is first of all the good news about the onset of the Kingdom of God, which to seek is commanded us, first of all. The seeking of the Kingdom of God is however not a seeking merely of personal salvation. The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, the universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.

IV.