Maximos the Confessor (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.48)

The manuscript features red ink for initial letters and marginal markers. The script is a fluid Greek cursive typical of the 16th-17th centuries.

The Only-Begotten is justified; for all of us [are] with us; the Word, according to position, assumed flesh and [its] indifference; [he] had, especially even with man, strictly; the nature of God, love, and the [things] according to nature, the assumptions in a natural union; in which, and only, in rest and truth, assuming the supra-essential, and keeping himself unchanging even before being kept; and the divinity itself having deified the assumption; which is impossible to learn from the order of nature by law, in which at once with the birth of the parts, as where toward and with the gift of mixture according to the same sudden approach, the meeting of all things that are naturally to be believed by position [makes] an equal form, causing the meeting of the parts toward one another to be together and naturally grown, just as it was necessary in the parts; of those which have composition according to the relation of giving nature. For in the case of ensoulment, the soul with its proper energies [has] the natural powers of the existing body, self-powerful, according to nature only, because of itself, the human [nature] to be with the flesh; but the Word of God, and indeed where it has the person of ensoulment, with its own self-ruling energies, the likewise assumed powers of nature; for it is not measured

by nature, the supernatural; nor does it have in existing things the demonstration of its nature; [he] himself, sparing [the effort of proof] according to the assumptions, [gives] the incarnation to us and the forms of the nature encountered, inexpressible yet, for only as [he] not and [as he] leads, and being able to do all things, in the way beyond nature, [he makes] the natural blood-lettings in himself [his] own; this faith I have learned and was taught, both from the prophets [we sang] the high [songs] of the blessed ones of our mystics, the time and the psalm of this theology or also [what] the church of God has established solely; for indeed God appropriately [having founded] the lake of God; through the ineffable, by nothing [diminished], toward our and inexpressible [things] with [his] presence, [he] welcomed life instead of every rank; let us offer this confession to God, pure and blameless and outside of every suspicion of heresy.

β For not by works or justifications of righteousness, nor by abusing and all my [life] to be at once self-chosen according to the laws of God; and these [things] are for us, as it were, according to the measure I write to my lord.