Confessor Maximus

Maximus the Confessor (Greek: Maximos ho Homologetes), also called Maximus of Constantinople, was a seventh-century monk and theologian and one of the principal Greek Fathers. The traditional Greek Life, a tenth-century hagiographical composition, presents him as a native of Constantinople, born to a noble family near the end of the sixth century and given a thorough education in philosophy, grammar, and rhetoric. A Syriac Life written from a Monothelite standpoint hostile to Maximus instead portrays him as originating in Palestine of more modest parentage; historians still debate the two traditions, though standard reference works have long followed the Constantinopolitan account. In early adulthood he served in the imperial civil service as protoasekretis, or chief imperial secretary, under the emperor Heraclius, then withdrew from court to become a monk. He entered the monastery of Philippicus at Chrysopolis on the Asian shore of the Bosporus and later lived at the monastery of Saint George at Cyzicus, where he began to write on the spiritual life and on the interpretation of earlier Fathers, especially Gregory of Nazianzus and the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite.

Persian and Avar attacks on the empire in the 620s disrupted monastic life in Asia Minor and drove Maximus westward. He spent a substantial period in North Africa, in the region of Carthage, among other Palestinian and Syrian monks, including Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem. There Maximus became the leading theological opponent of Monothelitism, the teaching favored by Heraclius and by Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople that Christ possessed two natures but only one will and one theandric operation. In treatises, letters, and the Disputation with Pyrrhus (the former patriarch of Constantinople), Maximus argued that a complete human nature in Christ must include a genuine human will, without which the Incarnation would be incomplete and human salvation compromised. His dyothelite Christology belonged to a larger vision of creation and deification: every creature is constituted by its logos, the inner principle willed by the Logos, and the human person, by rightly exercising the natural will, is called to synergy with God that culminates in theosis.

In 649 Maximus was in Rome when Pope Martin I convened the Lateran Council, which condemned Monothelitism together with the imperial Ekthesis and Typos. Maximus’s theology underpinned the council’s decisions, although he held no episcopal office and remained a simple monk. Imperial reaction was severe. Martin was arrested and died in exile. Maximus was brought to Constantinople, tried, and, after refusing to subscribe to the Typos of Constans II, was exiled first to Bizya in Thrace and later to Perberis. A further interrogation in 662 ended with the cutting out of his tongue and the amputation of his right hand, punishments meant to stop him from speaking or writing. He was then banished to the fortress of Schemarum in Lazica in the western Caucasus, where he died on 13 August 662. Two disciples, both named Anastasius, shared his sufferings; contemporary accounts of the trials survive in connection with them.

His surviving works—among them the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, the Mystagogia, the Centuries on Love and on Theology, the Commentary on the Our Father, and numerous letters—synthesize Cappadocian trinitarian thought, Dionysian cosmology, and Evagrian asceticism, while rejecting Origenist teachings on the pre-existence of souls and a final apokatastasis that would abolish freedom. He insisted on the full integrity of Christ’s human will and on the eschatological destiny of the whole of creation. Venerated as a saint and confessor in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, he is commemorated on 13 August, the day of his death, and in the Byzantine calendar also on 21 January. He was never bishop, patriarch, or pope; his authority was that of a monastic theologian who suffered for the confession of Chalcedonian Christology. No reliable ancient source attributes to him a wife or children; the monastic vocation he adopted in early adulthood remained the framework of his life.