“‘Our brother is our life,’ the Staretz often said.

Through Christ’s love all men become an inseparable part of our own individual, eternal existence. The Staretz began to understand the commandment, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ as something more than an ethical imperative. In the word as he saw an indication, not of a required degree of love but of an ontological community of being.

‘The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son… because he is the Son of man.’ This Son of man, Great Judge of the world, will say at the Last Judgment that ‘one of the least of these’ is His very Self. In other words, He assimilates every man’s existence and includes it in His own personal existence. The Son of man has taken into Himself all mankind — He has accepted the ‘whole Adam’ and suffered for him. St Paul said that we, too, ought to think and feel like Christ — having ‘the same mind which was in Christ’.”