"Nothing is so fitted for deification…and nearness to God as mercy offered with pleasure and joy to those who stand in need. For if the Word has shown that the person who is in need of having good done to him is God - "inasmuch as you have done it,"(Mt24:40) - then He will much more show that the person, who can do good and does it, is truly God by grace and participation, because he has taken on a proper imitation of the energy (energia)…of His own kindness."
+ St Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy 24 (PG 91 713A-B)
"There is yet another way (of demonstrating the Incarnation), which is not theoretical in nature: namely, the certainty that results from (spiritual) exercise and inner purification. The fathers, who along this path have arrived at the utmost end, have testified that the Christian faith alone is true. The proof of this is their attainment of contact with God to the extent that (divine) traces of him became manifest in them, as well as their constancy in that faith and their devotion to it until they offered themselves up (in martyrdom) without separation from it and in obedience to it."
+ Al-Safı ibn al-Assal, Brief Chapters on the Trinity and the Union, ch. 9 ed. Khalil Samir, SJ, in Patrologia Orientalis 42.3, no. 192 (Brepols: Turnhout/Belgique, 1985). Trans. S. Davis.
