Maximus of Naples

Maximus of Naples was a fourth-century bishop of the church of Naples in Campania, in southern Italy, during the Arian controversy that divided the Christian Roman Empire. Almost nothing can be established about his birth, family, education, or the circumstances of his election to the episcopate. Surviving notices concentrate on his stand for Nicene orthodoxy and on the exile that followed. He held the see of Naples in the mid-fourth century, in the generation after the Council of Nicaea (325), when imperial policy under Constantius II repeatedly sought to isolate Athanasius of Alexandria and to impose Homoian or Arianizing formulas on the Western episcopate.

When Constantius II pressed Italian bishops to subscribe against Athanasius, Maximus refused. For that confession of the Catholic faith he was deposed and driven into exile. An Arian cleric named Zosimus was installed in his place at Naples; later tradition holds that the Catholic community of the city withheld recognition from the intruder. Maximus remained in banishment until his death. Traditional chronology places that death in 361, the year in which Constantius II died and Julian became sole emperor, after which many exiled Nicene bishops were able to return. Maximus did not live to be restored.

Later Neapolitan episcopal lists and hagiographical tradition treat him as a confessor-bishop rather than a martyr in the strict sense: he is said to have died worn out by the hardships of exile rather than by a formal capital sentence. After the Arian interruption, the Catholic succession at Naples continued with figures such as Saint Severus in the later fourth century. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Maximus on 10 June as bishop of Naples who, for his confession of the faith, was sent into exile by the Arian emperor Constantius and there died. No contemporary vita of any length survives, and the precise place of his death and burial is not securely attested.

Veneration of Maximus remained essentially local to Naples and the Campanian church. He is not widely invoked as patron of particular places, professions, or causes, and his sanctity belongs to the early type recognized by cult and martyrological entry rather than by a later formal papal canonization. Historians know him chiefly as a representative of Nicene resistance among the Italian bishops under Constantius II, and as one of the early recorded bishops in the succession of the church of Naples.