Maximus the Confessor, like Gregory the Great, incorporated the range of human experiences into his conception of charity. For Maximus, as for Gregory, the ideal of a universal charity never compromised the particular suffering of the individual. Each believed that real people are, and should be, the beneficiaries of our ethical obligations. Chapter 6 argues that Maximus explored these ideas in the context of ascetic renewal and christological transformation. His experiences in the monastery taught him that feeling compassion in the light of suffering depends on acknowledging moral differences. It involves the realization that our varied dispositions and opinions, what he called the ‘gnōmē’, shape both our spiritual and existential reality. By embracing moral differentiation Maximus imagines an affective compassion rooted in experience, which he then elevates to the heights of divine contemplation. As he said in The Church’s Mystagogy, we experience and cure human suffering according to our varied dispositions that we may become like God. It is not necessary that we lose sight of our own interests to enter into the suffering of another. Compassion is not an act of pure altruism, but an imitation of the divine capacity to experience the suffering that each person feels individually.