Confessor Maximian

The title Confessor Maximian cannot be matched with certainty to a single historical person in the principal martyrologies, synaxaria, and ecclesiastical histories. In early Christian usage a confessor was someone who endured judicial suffering—prison, exile, confiscation, or torture—for a public confession of faith, yet did not die under that suffering as a martyr. The Latin name Maximianus (Greek Maximianos) was common in the later Roman Empire, and several bishops, monks, and legendary youths bearing it were later remembered as saints or confessors. Standard reference works do not isolate one biography under the exact heading Confessor Maximian, and no stable encyclopedia article or authority file is attached to that form of the name. For that reason the dates, places, family circumstances, and patronages of a biographical record cannot be filled from verified evidence without conflating distinct people.

Among churchmen of this name, the Maximianus who occupied the see of Constantinople from late 431 until 434 is the best documented in contemporary narrative sources. Socrates Scholasticus and later chroniclers present him as a Roman by origin and a presbyter of Constantinople already known for a quiet, charitable life when the emperor Theodosius II and the bishops assembled after the Council of Ephesus chose him to replace the deposed Nestorius. He was consecrated on 25 October 431. His short patriarchate was devoted to restoring communion with the Oriental bishops and to supporting the Christological definition of Ephesus rather than to original theological writing. He died on 12 April 434 and was succeeded by Proclus. Eastern Orthodox calendars commemorate him, often on 21 April, as a holy hierarch, not under the specific epithet Confessor.

A different Maximianus was bishop of Ravenna in the sixth century, a deacon of Pola promoted under Justinian I and remembered for the furnishing of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare in Classe; his surviving ivory cathedra is a major monument of early Byzantine art. He is a historical bishop of the Ravennate church, not a confessor in the persecutory sense. Still another Maximian appears in the various recensions of the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a group of young Christians said to have taken refuge in a cave during the Decian persecution of the mid-third century and to have been miraculously preserved in sleep until the fifth century. The legend, already circulating in the sixth century, treats the sleepers as confessors or martyrs, but it is hagiographical romance rather than recoverable biography, and the list of names is unstable from one recension to another.

North African sources of the age of Augustine supply yet another Maximianus who can reasonably be called a confessor. The Catholic bishop of Bagai in Numidia was attacked by Donatist opponents, thrown from a height, beaten, and left for dead; Augustine of Hippo repeatedly cited his injuries when arguing for imperial measures against the Donatist church. That Maximianus survived, travelled to Italy, and obtained a hearing at the court of Honorius in the first decade of the fifth century. He should not be confused with the Donatist deacon Maximianus of Carthage, whose schism from Primian around 393 produced the short-lived Maximianist party inside Donatism. Finally, the celebrated seventh-century monk Maximus the Confessor, mutilated and exiled for resisting Monothelitism, bears a similar but distinct name and must not be used as a source of dates or doctrines for any Maximian. Because these figures lived in different centuries and churches, and because the query supplies no feast day, see, or other disambiguating detail, no single year of birth or death, city, burial place, religious order, or patronage can be verified for Confessor Maximian as such.