"When he reaches the point of having life, movement, and being in Christ, he has put far from him the monstrous origin of inequalities and he no longer carries within himself the contrary dispositions of these passions, as I was saying, after the manner of the male female opposition. In this way reason is not enslaved by them, having remained aloof from their unstable fluctuations. In it the holiness of the divine image has been naturally included to persuade the soul to transform itself by its free will to the likeness of God and to belong to the great kingdom which subsists substantially with God, the Father of all. It becomes a radiant abode of the Holy Spirit and receives, if one can say it, the full power of knowing the divine nature insofar as this is possible. By this power there is discarded the origin of what is inferior, to be replaced by that of what is superior, while the soul like God keeps inviolable in itself by the grace of its calling the realization of the gifts which it has received. By this power, Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother who, to speak briefly, does not bear the marks of nature subject to corruption and generation in the relationship of male and female."
+ St Maximos the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father, in "Maximos the Confessor Selected Writings" (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 109.
