Maximus the Confessor

Maximus the Confessor was a seventh-century Christian monk and theologian whose defense of the doctrine that Christ possessed both a divine will and a human will made him one of the central Greek Fathers. Two biographical traditions describe his origins and cannot be fully reconciled. A later Greek hagiographical life presents him as a native of Constantinople, born to a noble family around 580, given a classical and Christian education in the capital, and employed in the imperial secretariat under the emperor Heraclius before he left court to become a monk. An earlier Syriac life, written from a hostile Monothelete standpoint, instead places his birth in the village of Hesfin in the Golan region of Palestine and describes a more obscure family background and an early entry into Palestinian monasticism. Because these accounts conflict, the place and social circumstances of his birth remain uncertain among historians.

By the early seventh century Maximus had taken up the monastic life. Greek sources associate him with the monastery of Philippicus at Chrysopolis on the Bosporus, where he is said to have become abbot, and with other houses in the region of Constantinople and Cyzicus. The Persian occupation of the eastern provinces and the subsequent Arab conquests scattered monastic communities, and Maximus moved westward. He spent a long period in Byzantine North Africa and was closely connected with Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem, in resisting the imperial religious policy of monoenergism and monothelitism. Those teachings, advanced in the 630s and 640s as a means of reconciling Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians, held that Christ had a single energy or a single will. Maximus argued that a complete human nature in the incarnate Word required a genuine human will, distinct from but always in harmony with the divine will, and he developed this dyothelite Christology in letters, disputed questions, and longer treatises.

In 645, at Carthage, Maximus held a public disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed patriarch of Constantinople and a leading exponent of monothelitism. The surviving record of the debate presents Pyrrhus as conceding and then traveling to Rome to make a temporary submission to the pope. Maximus himself went to Rome and became a principal theological adviser to Pope Martin I. The Lateran Council of 649, summoned by Martin, condemned monothelitism and the imperial Typos of Constans II; Maximus’s writings and personal influence were central to that condemnation. Imperial authorities treated the council as a challenge to the emperor’s right to regulate doctrine. Pope Martin was arrested, tried, and exiled. Maximus was likewise seized and taken to Constantinople.

At a trial in 655 Maximus refused to accept the Typos or to remain silent on the question of Christ’s wills. He was exiled to Bizya in Thrace and later confined in other places. Brought back to Constantinople in 662, he was again condemned. His tongue and right hand were amputated—the organs of speech and writing with which he had taught—and he was banished to Lazica on the southeastern Black Sea. He died in exile on 13 August 662 at the fortress of Schemaris. Because he suffered mutilation and exile for the faith but was not immediately put to death, he received the title Confessor rather than Martyr. He never held episcopal or patriarchal office, lived as a monk, and is not recorded as having married or had children.

Maximus left a substantial body of work, including the Ambigua on difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus and Dionysius the Areopagite, the Questions to Thalassius, the Mystagogy, the Chapters on Love, letters, and shorter theological and ascetic writings. These texts join Christology to cosmology and spiritual life: the logoi of created things, the movement of the rational creature toward God, and deification as the goal of human existence, all grounded in the union of two natures and two wills in Christ. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, and he appears in some Anglican calendars. His principal feast is 13 August, the date of his death; Byzantine usage also commemorates him on 21 January.