Maximus

Maximus, known to later tradition as Maximus the Confessor, was a seventh-century Byzantine monk and theologian whose opposition to Monothelitism made him one of the most influential Greek Fathers of the later patristic age. The principal Greek Life, a tenth-century hagiographical text, describes him as a native of Constantinople, born of a senatorial family about 580, trained in grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, and employed as first secretary in the imperial chancery under Heraclius before he left public life for the monastery. An earlier Syriac biography, written from a non-Chalcedonian standpoint, instead makes him a native of the village of Hesfin in the Golan and the son of a Samaritan father and a Persian slave mother. Because these sources conflict and both are tendentious, his exact birthplace and social origin cannot be established with certainty, though his Greek education and his later career in Constantinopolitan, Anatolian, African, and Roman monastic and ecclesiastical circles are not in doubt.

By the early seventh century Maximus had taken monastic vows, first at the monastery of Philippicus in Chrysopolis on the Asian shore of the Bosporus and later at the monastery of Saint George at Cyzicus. The Persian occupation of Anatolia and the subsequent Arab conquests scattered many Eastern monastic communities. Maximus spent a prolonged period in North Africa, especially in the region of Carthage, where he composed major works and engaged in public dispute with Pyrrhus, the former patriarch of Constantinople. From Africa he went to Rome. His writings from these decades include the Ambigua on difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus and the Dionysian corpus, the Questions to Thalassius, the Mystagogy on the liturgy, centuries on love and on theology, and numerous letters and opuscula. Central to his thought is the claim that in the one person of the incarnate Word there are two natures, two wills, and two operations, divine and human, without confusion or separation, and that created beings are deified by grace without loss of their own integrity.

Imperial religious policy under Heraclius and Constans II sought to reconcile Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians by asserting that Christ had a single will or a single theandric operation. Maximus regarded this Monothelite and Monoenergist formula as a denial of Christ’s full humanity. He supported the African bishops and Pope Martin I. The Lateran Council of 649, held at Rome, condemned Monothelitism in terms that closely reflect Maximus’s theology; whether he drafted the acts remains debated, but his influence on the council is widely accepted. After the emperor had Martin arrested and exiled, imperial agents seized Maximus as well. He was brought to Constantinople, tried in 655, and exiled first to Bizya in Thrace and then to Perberis.

A second trial in 662 ended with a harsher sentence. Because he would not subscribe to the Typos of Constans II, which forbade discussion of one will or two, Maximus was anathematized, flogged, and mutilated: his tongue and his right hand were cut off. He was then sent to the fortress of Schemaris in Lazica, at the eastern end of the Black Sea. There he died on 13 August 662. The Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in 680–681, defined the doctrine of two wills and two operations in Christ and thereby posthumously justified the theological position for which he had suffered, although the council did not mention him by name. He never held episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office; his authority was that of a monk, a spiritual writer, and a confessor of the faith.

Maximus is commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican calendars. The Byzantine rite keeps his principal feast on 21 January and remembers the translation of his relics on 13 August; the Roman Martyrology records him on 13 August. No medieval source assigns him a well-defined list of patronages of places, professions, or causes. His relics were first buried in Lazica; later Georgian and Greek traditions speak of translations, but the early evidence for their subsequent resting places is limited. His extensive corpus continued to shape Byzantine theology, later Palamite spirituality, and, from the twentieth century, Western patristic scholarship.