“To fear God is first of all to see, on the level of action, consequences in causes, sanction in sin, suffering in error; to love God is first to choose God, that is to say, to prefer what brings one nearer Him over what estranges from Him.”

— Frithjof Schuon

[2005, Stations of Wisdom, World Wisdom, 102, 978-0-94153218-1]
God, Reverential fear and love

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Frithjof Schuon 82

Swiss philosopher 1907–1998

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“No one can love God consciously in his heart unless he has first feared Him with all his heart. Through the action of fear the soul is purified and, as it were, made malleable and so it becomes awakened to the action of love.”

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§ 16
On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination (480 AD)

“We must come to see that God is not so much the cause of moral obligation or the sanction of duty as the very substance of Good. Then what we call the moral proof brings us in one leap to the true God, revealing himself as God of Charity.”

Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) Jesuit theologian and cardinal

Source: Paradoxes of Faith (1987), Ch. II. "Christianity", p. 24

“One cannot love God without fearing him, any more than one can love one's neighbor without respecting him; not to fear God is to prevent Him showing mercy.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2005, Stations of Wisdom, World Wisdom, 102, 978-0-94153218-1]
God, Reverential fear and love

“What if God did not have first to be, since he loved us first, when we were not? And what if, to envisage him, we did not have to wait for him within the horizon of Being, but rather transgress ourselves in risking to love love.”

Jean-Luc Marion (1946) French philosopher

Source: God Without Being (1982), p. 3

“No man loveth God except the man who has first learned that God loves him.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 398.

“If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

“The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency… God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“There are only two loves, whence originate all our wishes and all our actions: the love of God which does all for God and which God rewards and the love of ourselves and of the world, which does not refer to God what should be referred to him and which for that very reason becomes evil.”

Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) French theologian

44th Proposition, as translated by Mary Ilford in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), pp. 118-119

“Love leads to knowledge of the Divine mysteries and those who love abide in God and look to Him only, and He is nearer to them than all else and to them in given a vision of Him unveiled and they see Him with the eye of certainty.”

Abu Talib al-Makki Scholar, mystic

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 86

“Say, He Whom God shall make manifest will surely redeem the rights of those who truly believe in God and in His signs, for they are the ones who merit reward from His presence. Say, it is far from the glory of Him Whom God shall make manifest that anyone should in this wise make mention of His name, if ye ponder the Cause of God in your hearts. Say, He shall vindicate the Cause through the potency of His command and shall bring to naught all perversion of truth by virtue of His behest. Verily God is potent over all things.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

The Kitáb-I-Asmá

“To fear God is first of all to see, on the level of action, consequences in causes, sanction in sin, suffering in error; to love God is first to choose God, that is to say, to prefer what brings one nearer Him over what estranges from Him.”

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Frithjof Schuon 82

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