Livre d'Or

Oh, so it's another one of yours, is it? Cool cool.

I can't think of anyone who's gone quite that far in that way since
As praise this feels slightly like liking Tolstoy or Vikram Seth on the grounds of length and complexity alone. Yes, Stapledon is tackling grand themes, but that's not per se a reason to like the book.

the idea that love could be a supreme virtue among creations without that logically requiring love to be a supreme virtue for the Creator
Wow, this is heading towards being too theologically sophisticated for me. Are you thinking along the lines that virtue is still virtue in an uncreated universe? Or? Care to expand this a bit?

I felt with L&FM that the narrative voice tends to take a quasi-theist view (rather than the atheist view that it apparently professes). The Last Men, and other positively portrayed civilizations, seem to be looking for meaning 'out there' in the same way that a theist looks to God for meaning. It's just defining God as something slightly (but actually not really significantly, I felt) different from how conventional Western Christian thought defines God.

a major insight to me at thirteen
At thirteen I was just about coming to the grips with the idea that a theist world view might be worth taking seriously. (My inclination at that point in my life was still towards treating most of religion as rather naïve metaphor.) I don't think I was pondering such abstract stuff as justifying virtue or whether God was a logical necessity. I'm impressed.