To be sure, initiating the universal
union of all things in Himself, beginning with our own [1309A] division, He
became perfect man, having assumed from us, and for us, and consistent with us,
everything that is ours, lacking nothing, but without sin, for to become
man he had no need of the natural process of connubial intercourse. In this
way, he showed, I think that there was perhaps another mode, foreknown by God,
for the multiplication of human beings, had the first human being kept the
commandment and not cast himself down to the level of irrational
animals by misusing the mode of his proper powers—and so He drove out from
nature the difference and division into male and female, a difference, as I
have said, which He in no way needed in order to become man, and without which
existence would perhaps have been possible. There is no need for this division
to last perpetually, for in Christ Jesus, says the divine [1309B]
apostle, there is neither male nor female.
Then, having sanctified our inhabited
world by the dignity of His death, just as he truly promised to the thief,
saying: Today, you will be with me in paradise. Consequently, since
there was for Him no difference between paradise and our inhabited world, He
appeared on it, and spent time together with His disciples after His
resurrection from the dead, demonstrating that the earth is one and not divided
against itself, for it preserves the principle of its existence free of any
difference caused by division. Then, by His ascension into heaven, it is
obvious that He united heaven and earth, for He entered heaven with His earthly
body, which is of the same nature and consubstantial with ours, [1309C] and
showed that, according to its more universal principle, all sensible nature is
one, and thus He obscured in Himself the property of division that had cut it
in two. Then, in addition to this, having passed with His soul and body, that
is, with the whole of our nature, through all the divine and intelligible orders
of heaven, He united sensible things with intelligible things, displaying in
Himself the fact that the convergence of the entire creation toward unity was
absolutely indivisible and beyond all fracture, in accordance with its most
primal and most universal principle. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John:
Ambiguum 41, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2
vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:111, 113)