Quotes from St. Symeon the New Theologian:
You, on your part, must see and test that which we say. If we have views different from those of the apostles and of the holy God-inspired fathers, if we speak contrary to what they said, if we fail to repeat what the Holy Gospels say about God, then let me be anathema from the Lord God Jesus Christ. Let it fall on me if we do not enkindle in everyone that life-giving energy and gift which is in these [writings] (yet lamentably extinguished, as far as men are able, by foolish reasonings) and fail to point to the light that already is shining, as we establish and assert all things from the Holy Scriptures themselves and clearly demonstrate.
... God who has made heaven and earth is the One who, without being emptied, emptied Himself from the Father's bosom (Jn. 1:18) and came down on earth from the infinite height of Godhead and His unutterable glory and became an insignificant and poor man for the sake of you, who are clay and ashes and dust. Are you not, then, willing to come down from your imaginary high throne and be humbled before your brother? ... If you disdain becoming like {Christ}, do you not know that you are making yourself greater and more glorious than Him?
However great your zeal and many the efforts of your asceticism, they are all in vain and without useful result unless they attain to love in a broken spirit.
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There are many who harm those who hear them by saying that nobody can be like {the fathers of the church}, or in his deeds attain to what our great fathers achieved, or be found worthy of the spiritual gifts that were granted them. Their unbelief compels me, unwilling as I am, to say the things I never wanted to say, and so to proclaim publicly the reality of God's love for man in order to reprove the slothfulness and carelessness of those who make those claims. + + +
... God who has made heaven and earth is the One who, without being emptied, emptied Himself from the Father's bosom (Jn. 1:18) and came down on earth from the infinite height of Godhead and His unutterable glory and became an insignificant and poor man for the sake of you, who are clay and ashes and dust. Are you not, then, willing to come down from your imaginary high throne and be humbled before your brother? ... If you disdain becoming like {Christ}, do you not know that you are making yourself greater and more glorious than Him?
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However great your zeal and many the efforts of your asceticism, they are all in vain and without useful result unless they attain to love in a broken spirit.
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