Maximus

Maximus, commonly known as Maximus the Confessor (Greek: Maximos ho Homologetes), was a seventh-century Christian monk, theologian, and ecclesiastical writer of the Eastern Roman Empire. He is among the most influential Greek Fathers of the later patristic age, remembered above all for his defense of the doctrine that Christ possesses two natural wills, divine and human, against the imperial policy of monothelitism. Precise details of his birth remain uncertain. A Greek hagiographical Life presents him as a native of Constantinople from a senatorial family who received a thorough classical and theological education and served as protoasekretis, or chief imperial secretary, under the emperor Heraclius before withdrawing from court to the monastic life around the mid-610s. A later Syriac account, composed in a hostile Miaphysite milieu, instead places his origin in Palestine and ascribes to him a more modest background. Modern historians have not reached a consensus between these traditions. What is clear is that by the second decade of the seventh century he had become a monk, first at the monastery of Philippicus at Chrysopolis on the Bosporus and subsequently at the monastery of Saint George at Cyzicus in Asia Minor. He was never ordained bishop and remained a monk throughout the controversies that followed.

The Persian occupation of much of the eastern provinces and the subsequent instability of the 620s drove Maximus westward. He spent a prolonged period in North Africa, especially in the region of Carthage, where he composed a large part of his surviving corpus and entered the Christological controversies that would define his later career. In alliance with Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem, he opposed the formulas of monoenergism and monothelitism promoted from Constantinople as a means of reconciling Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian Christians. His writings from this African period include the Ambigua, which interpret difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus and Dionysius the Areopagite; the Questions to Thalassius; the Mystagogy on the church's liturgy; chapters on love and on theology; and numerous letters and short treatises on the will and energy of Christ. In 645 he held a public disputation at Carthage with Pyrrhus, the deposed patriarch of Constantinople, after which Pyrrhus temporarily recanted monothelitism. Maximus then proceeded to Rome, where he found a sympathetic hearing for the dyothelite position.

At Rome he became a principal theological adviser to Pope Martin I. The Lateran Synod of 649, convened by Martin, condemned monothelitism together with the imperial Ekthesis of Heraclius and the Typos of Constans II; Maximus's influence on the synod's acts and florilegia is widely recognized by historians. Imperial authorities treated the synod as an act of political as well as doctrinal rebellion. Martin was arrested, taken to Constantinople, and died in exile in the Crimea. Maximus himself was seized, brought to the capital, and tried in 655. Refusing to enter communion with the official church so long as the Typos remained in force, he was exiled to Bizya in Thrace. A further interrogation in 662 ended with a harsher condemnation: his tongue and right hand were amputated in order to prevent further speech and writing, and he was banished to the fortress of Schemaris in Lazica, on the eastern Black Sea coast in the Caucasus. He died there on 13 August 662. The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), counted as the sixth ecumenical council, subsequently defined the doctrine of two natural wills and two natural energies in Christ and thereby vindicated the confession for which Maximus had suffered. His title Confessor reflects that endurance of mutilation and exile.

Maximus's thought is marked by a synthesis of Evagrian ascetic psychology, Cappadocian theology, and the Dionysian corpus, organized around the incarnation as the key to the deification of the human person and the restoration of the cosmos. He developed a sophisticated account of the logoi of created beings, of the distinction between the natural will and the gnomic or deliberative will, and of the liturgical and ascetic path by which the believer is united to God. His works circulated widely in Greek monastic and scholarly circles and, through Latin translations associated with Anastasius Bibliothecarius and others, entered the medieval West; they have remained important for Byzantine theology and have been studied intensively in modern patristic scholarship. Liturgical commemoration falls on 13 August in the Roman Martyrology and on both 21 January and 13 August in the Byzantine calendar. Because he belongs to the era before the later papal canonization process, no individual canonizing pontiff is recorded; his cult rests on the council of 680-681, on monastic tradition, and on the consistent veneration of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. Historical reconstruction of his life depends chiefly on a cluster of seventh-century trial records and letters, on the Greek Life, and on the hostile Syriac biography, and therefore remains subject to scholarly debate on several points of origin and chronology.