For St. Maximus the Confessor, Christ’s Ascension represents the climactic reversal of the Incarnation itself. The enfleshed Word kenotically descends into human nature so that human nature might ascend into divine glory. As one scholar has recently emphasized for Maximus, “the only thing so scandalous as the Word’s descent into the flesh is the flesh’s ascent into the presence of God.” Hence, the Ascension constitutes not only Christ’s bodily departure from the earth but the enthronement of glorified humanity at the right hand of the Father.

In Ambiguum 42, Maximus insists that Christ ascended with “the body taken from us and consubstantial with us” (τὸ σῶμα τὸ ἐξ ἡμῶν ληφθὲν καὶ ὁμοούσιον ἡνωμένον αὐτῷ καθ’ ὑπόστασιν), which is now “seated together with God the Father” (τῷ Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ … συγκαθέζεται). This bodily enthronement firmly grounds the entire Christian hope that humanity itself may be “taken up into the heavens” (ἀναληφθῆναι εἰς οὐρανούς). The Ascension is thus fundamentally participatory. Because Christ’s humanity is hypostatically united to the Logos, humanity itself is carried into divine majesty.

This participatory logic reaches its fullest mystical heights in Ambiguum 60, where Maximus declares that the one who ascends from contemplation of Christ’s earthly mission to the eternal glory of the Word “has truly ascended into the heavens together with God the Word” (κατ’ ἀλήθειαν οὗτος συνανῆλθεν εἰς οὐρανοὺς τῷ … Θεῷ καὶ Λόγῳ). The believer thereby becomes “God to the same extent that he [God] became man” (γενόμενος τοσοῦτον Θεὸς ὅσον ἐκεῖνος ἄνθρωπος).

Maximus’s theology of the Ascension therefore extends beyond the historical event in Jerusalem into the sacramental and contemplative life of the Church. Participation in the divine mysteries allows the faithful already to share in Christ’s heavenly glorification, while mystical contemplation elevates the soul beyond the sensible economy into the eternal glory of the Logos.

However, it is of the utmost importance to remember that this ascent remains fundamentally graced rather than autonomous. In Ambiguum 20, Maximus describes the soul’s final elevation as an “assumption” (ἀνάληψις), “the passive experience of the one being assumed,” because God himself remains the active agent of deification. Consequently, the Ascension becomes both the archetypal expression and perpetual mode of humanity’s return to God. The Ascension of the God-man establishes the possibility of eternal creaturely participation in divine life characterized not by static completion, but by ceaseless movement into the inexhaustible fullness of divine glory.