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Biography

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Maximian, also called Maximianus in Latin sources, was a fifth-century archbishop of Constantinople whose short tenure came at a turning point in the Christological debates of the late Roman world. Ecclesiastical historians of the following generation, among them Socrates Scholasticus, present him as a native of Rome who had settled in the eastern capital, embraced the monastic life, and been ordained to the priesthood there. He acquired a reputation for austere personal piety rather than for speculative theology, and he is said to have spent his own resources on the building of churches and on the decent burial of martyrs. No reliable source records the year of his birth, the names of his parents, or the course of his education, and the early part of his life remains almost entirely obscure.

The see of Constantinople fell vacant in 431 when the Council of Ephesus deposed Archbishop Nestorius for his teaching on the unity of Christ’s person and his reluctance to call the Virgin Mary Theotokos. Emperor Theodosius II and the clergy of the city looked for a successor whose orthodoxy would be beyond dispute and whose temperament might calm a bitterly divided church. Maximian, already well known in Constantinople as a priest and former monk, was elected and consecrated on 25 October 431. Pope Celestine I of Rome and Cyril of Alexandria both received the news with approval. One of Maximian’s first acts was to restore Cyril’s name to the diptychs of the church of Constantinople, thereby publicly aligning the imperial see with the conciliar decision of Ephesus and with the Alexandrian Christology that the council had endorsed.

During the two years and several months of his episcopate Maximian worked to end the schism that had opened between the supporters of Cyril and the bishops of the civil diocese of Oriens under John of Antioch. He took part in the negotiations that produced the Formula of Reunion of 433, by which Cyril and John were reconciled and a common confession concerning the Incarnation was accepted. Contemporary notices show him as a pastor more concerned with the restoration of communion and with liturgical order than with the composition of original theological treatises. He ordained the learned Proclus, who would later succeed him, and he maintained communion with both Rome and Alexandria at a moment when those relationships were politically and doctrinally sensitive. Ancient writers do not attribute to him a large body of surviving letters or treatises; his importance is institutional and irenic rather than literary.

Maximian died in Constantinople on 12 April 434, after an episcopate of roughly two years and five months, and was succeeded by Proclus. Later Byzantine tradition numbered him among the holy archbishops of the city. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 21 April. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; his cult grew from the local memory of a brief, peaceable, and doctrinally reliable tenure during the aftermath of Ephesus. Precise information about the place of his burial has not been preserved in the extant sources, and he is not associated in the liturgical books with a distinctive list of patronages.

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