1 John brother-love; tassels and blue thread as memory of law

one not loving his brother whom he has seen, how is he able to love the God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from him, that the one loving God love also his brother.’ Therefore both are destroyed together with one another and rise together brightly; for the virtues are as it were near-doored to one another, and like some unbroken pair they ferry the one having practiced best to drive unto one outshining and most complete beauty of piety unto God.

Palladius: You have spoken well. And since the aim is to sweat in these things, come again, and gathering the trusts upon each of the contemplations from the sacred Letters, try to tell me how the pure fulfillment of the love unto the neighbor would become.

Cyril: A most plentiful path then carries us off unto this. For it has been written that ‘Your commandment is very broad.’ Yet the craftsmanship upon each of the things done, I think one would not collect from elsewhere except through the law; for a prophetic word said that it has been given to us unto help. And at any rate raising us unto the continual remembrance of the things having been legislated, the lawgiver says: ‘And you will cast these words into your heart and into your soul, and you will fasten them as a sign upon your hand, and they will be unshaken before your eyes, and you will teach them to your children, to speak them sitting in a way and lying down and rising, and you will write them upon the doorposts of your houses and of your gates, in order that you may be many-dayed, and days of your sons upon the earth which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, just as the days of the heaven upon the earth.’ And what again is the ‘Fasten them upon your hands,’ he made clear in Numbers. For it has been written thus: ‘And the Lord said toward Moses, saying: Speak to the sons of Israel, and you will say toward them, and let them make for themselves fringes upon the wings of their own garments unto their generations; and you will set upon the fringes of the wings a hyacinth-colored cord, and it will be in the fringes, and you will look at them, and you will remember all the Lord’s commandments, and you will do them; and you will not be turned aside behind your understandings, and behind your eyes in which you fornicate behind them, in order that you may remember; and you will do all my commandments, and you will be holy to your God; I am the Lord your God.’ Having commanded beforehand then very well that we write the law down in hearts, then knowing forgetfulness a hard sickness of mind, he commands that the commandments must be marked off as on a tablet upon the doorposts; and indeed also to fasten to the right hand little tablets somehow perhaps pregnant with the law and having the oracle written in, and indeed also that they be hung from the garments themselves, he says is not unprofitable unto benefit—through both fringes and the hyacinth-colored cord.