For Maximus [the Confessor] the Incarnation was the central factor in man's deification: "that the whole people might participate in the whole God, and that in the same way in which soul and body are united, God should become partakable of by the soul, and, that by the soul's intermediary, by the body, in order that the soul might receive an unchanging character and the body immortality; and finally that the whole man should become God, deified by the grace of God becoming man, becoming whole man, soul and body, and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace." Thus Christ is the meeting point of God's reaching out to mankind and of mankind's God-given tendency toward the divine.

— The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787) by Leo Donald Davis (Theology and Life, #21) (Page 271 - 272)