Maximus the Confessor

Dates

around 580 - 662 — Died on 13 August 662 in exile in Lazica. His early life is told in competing Greek and Syriac accounts that disagree substantially.

Region

Constantinople, North Africa, Rome, exile in Lazica

Language of composition

Greek

Commemoration

21 January, and 13 August (Orthodox Church in America and other Orthodox jurisdictions) — Julian-calendar jurisdictions observe these dates thirteen days later on the civil calendar.

Life

Maximus was, on the Greek account, a Constantinopolitan aristocrat and imperial secretary who became a monk; a Syriac account, written by an opponent, gives a very different origin in Palestine. Historians disagree on which to prefer, and this page does not choose.

He left for North Africa ahead of the Persian and then Arab advance, and became the leading opponent of the monothelite formulas the emperors were promoting. He supported the Lateran Synod of 649 at Rome, which condemned them.

He was arrested, tried, and — on the account that has come down to us — had his tongue and right hand cut off, to stop him speaking and writing. He died in exile in 662. The Sixth Ecumenical Council confessed his position in 681.

Works

Generally accepted as authentic

• Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius — Not archived here.
• Four Hundred Chapters on Love — Not archived here.
• The Mystagogy — A commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Not archived here.
• Opuscula on the two wills — Not archived here.

Theological and spiritual contribution

Maximus's decisive argument is that will belongs to nature, not to person. If Christ has two natures, he has two natural wills; a Christ with only a divine will would have an incomplete humanity, and an incomplete humanity would leave human willing unhealed. The argument follows directly from Gregory the Theologian's principle that what is not assumed is not healed.

He also distinguished between the natural will — the created drive toward the good — and the deliberative will that chooses between options under uncertainty. Christ has the first; the second, as we exercise it, belongs to fallen willing.

Beyond Christology, his synthesis of cosmology, asceticism and liturgy is one of the great achievements of Byzantine theology, and the Mystagogy shaped how the Orthodox tradition reads the Divine Liturgy.

Controversy and reception

Maximus was condemned by the Church's own institutional authorities of the day and vindicated by a later council. That sequence is worth sitting with: it shows that the Church's reception of the truth is not the same as the judgement of whoever currently holds power, and that the interval between them can consume a life.