Maximus the Greek

Maximus the Greek, known in the world as Michael Trivolis, was born in Arta in Epirus in the latter part of the fifteenth century to a Greek family of some education and means. As a young man he left the Ottoman-ruled Balkans for Italy, spending many years in the cities of the Renaissance. He studied and worked as a manuscript copyist in Florence, Venice, Padua, and elsewhere, moving among Greek émigré scholars and Italian humanists. He encountered the preaching and reform movement of Girolamo Savonarola in Florence; later writers have suggested that he may have spent a short time in the Dominican community of San Marco before turning away from the Latin Church. In the first decade of the sixteenth century he made his way to Mount Athos and was tonsured a monk at the Monastery of Vatopedi, receiving the name Maximus.

In 1518 the authorities of Mount Athos sent him to Moscow in response to a request from Grand Prince Vasily III for a learned Greek capable of translating and correcting sacred books. Muscovite liturgical and biblical manuscripts of the period contained numerous scribal corruptions, and few Russians could control the original Greek. Maximus collaborated with local interpreters and scribes to produce Slavonic versions of the annotated Psalter, homiletic and canonical texts, and other works. He also wrote original compositions on grammar, on the proper understanding of Scripture, and on moral and theological questions. Because he learned Slavonic as an adult, some of his renderings were awkward or open to misreading, a fact that his enemies later exploited.

Maximus’s independence of mind brought him into conflict with powerful figures in church and state. He inclined toward the Non-possessors, who criticized the accumulation of landed wealth by monasteries, and he spoke against abuses he observed in Muscovite ecclesiastical life. He likewise opposed the grand prince’s divorce and second marriage. Metropolitan Daniel and the Josephite party accused him of heretical translation, of spreading Greek (and therefore, in their view, potentially Latinizing or politically suspect) ideas, and of illicit contacts. Church councils in 1525 and 1531 condemned him. He was confined first at the Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery and afterwards for roughly two decades at the Otroch Monastery in Tver, stripped for long periods of the right to receive Holy Communion and subjected to harsh conditions. Throughout his imprisonment he continued to write: letters of defense, a confession of the Orthodox faith, treatises against Latin doctrines, against astrology and apocrypha, and exhortations to a Christian life.

Toward the end of his life, following petitions from the Athonite monasteries and a shift in official attitude under Metropolitan Macarius, Maximus was moved to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. There his confinement was relaxed and he was restored to sacramental communion. He died at the monastery in 1556. His body of work left a deep mark on Russian theology, philology, and spiritual literature. He was revered as a confessor and wonderworker in subsequent centuries and was formally canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church at its Local Council in 1988. His relics are kept at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, and his principal feast is observed on 21 January.