The Logos [Greek for the Word of God; the Son of God] bestows adoption on us when He grants us that birth and deification which, transcending nature, comes by grace from above through the Spirit.
The guarding and preservation of this in God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the practice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace.
Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying Himself of His own sublime glory, the Logos of God truly became man.
The Logos…‘made peace through the blood of His Cross…between things on earth and things in heaven” (Col. 1:20), and reduced to impotence the hostile powers that fill the intermediary region between heaven and earth.
He thereby made the festal assembly of earthly and heavenly powers a single gathering for His distribution of divine gifts, with humankind joining joyfully with the powers on high unanimous praise of God’s glory.
Also, after fulfilling the divine purpose undertaken on our behalf, when He was taken up with the body which He had assumed, He united heaven and earth in Himself.
He joined what is sensible with what is intelligible, and revealed creation as a single whole whose extremes are bound together through virtue and through knowledge of their first Cause.
He shows, I think, through what He has accomplished mystically, that the Logos unites what is separated and that alienation from the Logos divides what is united.
[...] The Logos enables us to participate in divine life by making Himself our food, in a manner understood by Himself and by those who have received from Him a ‘noetic’ [i.e. in the mind,; in the heart] perception of this kind.
It is by tasting this food that they become truly aware that the Lord is full of virtue (cf Ps. 34:8).
For He transmutes with divinity those who eat it, bringing about their deification, since He is the bread of life and of power in both name and reality.
He restores human nature to itself. First, He became man and kept His will dispassionate and free from rebellion against nature, so that it did not waver in the slightest from its own natural movement even with regard to those who crucified Him.
On the contrary, it chose death for their sake instead of life, thereby demonstrating the voluntary character of His passion, rooted as it is in His love for humankind.
Maximus the Confessor (580-662): On the Lord’s Prayer, Text (slightly adapted) from G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (trans. and eds.) The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1979).
