20b.
Application to the Lord of what was said regarding Melchizedek
For alone, and in a way without any
parallel whatsoever, our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, is by nature and in truth without
father, mother, or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.
He is without mother according to His immaterial, bodiless, and utterly
unknowable birth on high from the Fathers before the ages. He is without father
according to His temporal and bodily birth on earth from His mother, in
whose conception the seed of man did not take precedence. He is without
genealogy because [1144A] the manner of both of His births is wholly
inaccessible and incomprehensible to all. And He has neither beginning of
days nor end of life, insofar as He is without beginning or end, being
absolutely infinite, for He is God by nature. He remains a priest forever,
for His being is immune to death by vice or nature, for He is God and the
source of all natural and virtuous life. And you must think that no one else
can have a share in this grace simply because Scripture speaks of it solely with
respect to the great Melchizedek, for in all human beings God has placed the
same power that leads naturally to salvation, so that anyone who wishes is able
to lay claim to divine grace, and it not prevented, if he so desires, form
becoming a Melchizedek, an Abraham, or a Moses, and from simply transferring
all the saints to himself, [1144B] not by exchanging names or places, but by
imitating their manner and ay of life. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John:
Ambiguum 10, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2
vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:221, 223)
