Maximus

Maximus, known in later tradition as Maximus the Confessor, was a seventh-century Byzantine monk and theologian whose resistance to the imperial religious policy of Monothelitism made him one of the central ecclesiastical figures of his century. The facts of his early life are not securely established. A Greek hagiographical life portrays him as a Constantinopolitan aristocrat who served as an imperial secretary before becoming a monk. A Syriac life, written from a hostile Monothelite standpoint, instead places his origins in Palestine and gives him a humble and mixed parentage. Modern historians treat both narratives with caution and do not regard a precise birth year or birthplace as verified. What can be said with confidence is that by the mid-seventh century he was a monk of unusual learning, formed in the Greek patristic and ascetical tradition, and already the author of speculative, liturgical, and spiritual works.

His public role was shaped by the Christological dispute over the operations and wills of Christ. After Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople advanced Monenergism and then Monothelitism as reunion formulas with non-Chalcedonian churches, Maximus became a principal advocate of dyothelitism: the teaching that the incarnate Word possesses both a divine will and a fully human will. He held that a complete human nature in Christ must include a human faculty of willing, without which the Incarnation and the salvation of humanity would be incomplete. He spent years in North Africa and in Italy, supported Pope Martin I, and stood behind the Lateran Council of 649, which condemned Monothelitism. Writings associated with this period include the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, the Mystagogy, letters and short treatises, and the record of his Dispute with Pyrrhus. In them he developed a theology of the Incarnation, of the logoi of created things, and of the deification of the human person.

Imperial authority treated his refusal to accept a silence on the question of one will or two as a political as well as a doctrinal offence. He was arrested, taken to Constantinople, and tried. After a first exile he was tried again, condemned, and mutilated: his tongue and right hand were cut off so that he could no longer speak or write in defence of his teaching, which is why later tradition called him the Confessor. He was then banished to the fortress of Schemarum in Lazica, in the western Caucasus. He died there on 13 August 662. The Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), the sixth ecumenical council, subsequently defined two wills and two operations in Christ in terms consistent with his doctrine and condemned the leading Monothelite patriarchs, thereby vindicating his position after his death.

Maximus was never bishop, patriarch, or pope. He lived as a monk in the Byzantine monastic tradition and is not recorded as belonging to any named Western religious order, nor as having a spouse or children. He is venerated as a saint in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. His chief feast is 13 August, the date of his death; Byzantine calendars also commemorate him on 21 January. Because he belongs to the age before the later medieval processes of beatification and canonization, no individual pontiff can be named as having beatified or canonized him; his cult rests on liturgical veneration and on the conciliar confirmation of his teaching. He is not associated with a well-documented list of specific patronages. His writings remained fundamental for later Byzantine theology and, from the modern period onward, have been intensively studied in both East and West as a high point of Greek patristic thought.