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Maximus the Confessor

Maximus the Confessor opposed the imperial doctrine of one will in Christ, was tried, mutilated and exiled, and was vindicated after his death. The most ambitious of the Greek Fathers.

In 662, in Constantinople, an elderly monk was convicted of treason, had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off, and was exiled to a fortress in Lazica on the eastern Black Sea, where he died within months. The charge was political; the offence was that he would not sign a formula about the will of Christ.

Nineteen years later a general council of the church adopted his position, and the emperor who had condemned him was dead. Maximus is called the Confessor because he suffered for the faith without being executed for it, and he is generally reckoned the most philosophically ambitious of the Greek Fathers.

Life

The standard Greek account makes him a Constantinopolitan aristocrat, born about 580, who served as head of the imperial chancery under Heraclius before becoming a monk around 614. A hostile Syriac biography, discovered in the twentieth century, makes him a Palestinian of illegitimate birth, educated in a monastery near Jerusalem. Neither can be verified; the Syriac source’s hostility is obvious, but so is the Greek tradition’s interest in a distinguished origin.

What is certain is that he was a monk in Asia Minor, fled the Persian invasion around 626, spent years in North Africa — then a Byzantine province with a substantial Greek monastic population — and became the leading intellectual opponent of imperial religious policy.

The Doctrine at Issue

The Heraclian emperors were trying to reunite the Chalcedonian and Miaphysite churches, whose separation is described in the Christological controversies. Two compromise formulas were floated: Monoenergism, that Christ had a single divine-human activity, and then Monothelitism, that he had two natures but one will.

Maximus’s objection was precise. A will belongs to a nature, not to a person; it is part of what it is to be human to have a human will. If Christ has no human will, he has no complete human nature, and the old rule applies — what is not assumed is not healed. Further, the drama of the Gospel requires it: when Christ prays in Gethsemane that the cup should pass from him and then submits, there are two wills in the sentence, and a single-will Christology makes the prayer theatre.

His positive account is subtler than a simple count of wills. He distinguishes the natural will — the innate movement of a nature toward its own good — from the gnomic will, the deliberative choosing between options that characterises fallen humanity and involves ignorance and hesitation. Christ has a human natural will, perfectly and always in accord with the divine; he does not have a gnomic will, because he is not ignorant or divided. The human will in Christ is not overridden but healed and made fully itself.

The Lateran Council and the Trial

In 645 Maximus publicly debated the deposed Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus in Carthage and won — Pyrrhus recanted, temporarily. In 649 Maximus was the intellectual force behind the Lateran Council in Rome, at which Pope Martin I condemned Monothelitism and the imperial edict, the Typos, that had forbidden discussion of the question.

The emperor Constans II treated this as rebellion, which in a formal sense it was: an imperial edict had been publicly repudiated. Martin was arrested in Rome, brought to Constantinople, tried, humiliated, and exiled to Cherson, where he died in 655.

Maximus was arrested in 653 and tried in 655. The records of his interrogations survive, and they are among the most vivid documents of the period. The prosecution concentrated on political charges — that he had encouraged the exarch of Africa to revolt, that he had opposed the recovery of Egypt — and repeatedly pressed him simply to accept the Typos and enter communion, without conceding doctrine.

His answer, when told that the whole church had accepted the formula, has been quoted ever since: that if the whole universe were in communion with the patriarch and he alone were not, he would not be in communion. Asked whether he condemned everyone who accepted the Typos, he refused to judge, and simply said he would rather die than have a bad conscience about the faith.

He was exiled, recalled, tried again in 662, mutilated with his disciple Anastasius, and sent to Lazica. He died on 13 August 662.

Vindication

The Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting in Constantinople in 680–681, condemned Monothelitism and affirmed two wills and two energies in Christ — Maximus’s position, in Maximus’s terms, without naming him.

He was quickly venerated as a saint in both east and west. The council’s decision closed the Christological controversies as far as the Chalcedonian churches were concerned, and it is the last of the seven ecumenical councils to deal with the person of Christ.

The Wider Theology

Maximus is not only a controversialist. His major works — the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, the Centuries on Love, the Mystagogy — attempt a synthesis of the whole Greek Christian inheritance.

Cosmology. All things exist through their logoi, their divine principles, which are the modes in which the one Logos wills each thing to be. Creation is therefore a kind of speech, and to know a thing truly is to know its logos in God.

The human vocation. Humanity stands at the junction of the divisions that structure reality — created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, male and female — and its task is to mediate and reconcile them. Adam failed; Christ accomplishes it.

Deification. The end of the human being is theosis, participation in God — not absorption, since the distinction between creature and creator remains, but real participation. This is the thread running from Athanasius through Maximus to Palamas.

The liturgy. The Mystagogy reads the church building and the eucharistic service as an image of the cosmos and of the soul’s ascent, following Pseudo-Dionysius but with more attention to the actual rite. It shaped the Byzantine understanding of what is happening in the Divine Liturgy.

Reputation

Maximus was neglected for a long time, partly because his Greek is genuinely difficult — dense, allusive, elliptical, written for readers who already knew the tradition.

The twentieth century rediscovered him. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s study of 1941, followed by the work of Lars Thunberg, Polycarp Sherwood and others, established him as a figure of the first rank, and he is now probably the most actively studied of the Greek Fathers. Several of his major works appeared in complete English translation only in the last two decades.

The interest is not antiquarian. Maximus is read now because his account of nature, will and personhood bears directly on modern arguments about freedom and human identity, and because his cosmology — every thing existing as a word spoken by God — has proved unexpectedly usable.

The Trial Records

The documents from Maximus’s interrogations survive, and they are among the most immediate texts to come out of the Byzantine seventh century — closer to a transcript of a political trial than anything else from the period.

Three pieces make up the dossier: the Record of the Trial (Relatio motionis), covering the proceedings of 655; the Dispute at Bizya, an account of a later attempt to persuade him in exile; and letters from his disciple Anastasius.

What they show is a prosecution that kept trying to make the case political and a defendant who kept making it theological.

The charges as brought: that he had encouraged the exarch Gregory of Africa to revolt; that he had prophesied the empire’s defeat; that his hostility to the Typos had caused the loss of Egypt. Maximus answered each factually, denied the first, and then insisted on returning to the question of the will in Christ.

The most-quoted exchange comes when he is told that all the patriarchates have accepted the imperial formula and asked whether he alone will be saved. He replies that the three young men in the furnace did not condemn anyone when they refused to worship the golden image, and that he does not judge those who have communicated — he simply cannot do it himself.

Told that he must accept the Typos or be condemned, he answered that he could not deny a truth he had confessed. He was sentenced, mutilated, and exiled, and he died within months.

The Cosmic Vision

The logoi doctrine is the most distinctive thing in Maximus and is worth setting out properly.

Every created thing exists because God wills it to exist in a particular way. That divine intention for each thing — the reason and principle of its being — Maximus calls its logos. The logoi of all things are not separate from God; they are contained in the one divine Logos, the Word through whom all things were made.

Three consequences follow.

Creation is a kind of speech. To exist is to be spoken; to know a thing truly is to perceive its logos, and therefore to encounter the Word.

Sin is a failure of movement. Each thing has a logos of being and a direction toward well-being and eternal being. Sin is a creature moving against its own logos — not a violation of an arbitrary rule but a refusal to be what it is.

The human vocation is mediation. Humanity stands at the junction of five divisions — created/uncreated, intelligible/sensible, heaven/earth, paradise/inhabited world, male/female — and was made to hold them together. Adam failed; Christ accomplishes all five, and in doing so restores the cosmos to coherence.

This is a genuinely large synthesis: Evagrian ascetic psychology, Dionysian metaphysics and Chalcedonian Christology brought into one account that runs from the doctrine of God to the discipline of the passions without a break.

Reading Him

Maximus is hard, and being told so in advance saves disappointment.

His Greek is dense and elliptical, he writes for readers who already know the tradition, and his major works are responses to specific questions rather than systematic expositions. The Ambigua is a set of clarifications of difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus; the Questions to Thalassius answers scriptural problems posed by a correspondent.

The recommended entry points are the short works. The Chapters on Love are four hundred aphorisms on the ascetic life, most of them two or three lines, and they can be read a few at a time. The Mystagogy is a compact symbolic reading of the church building and the liturgy. Both are available in cheap translations.

The Ambigua appeared in a complete English translation only in 2014, and several other works have followed since — which is why Maximus scholarship has expanded so sharply in the last decade, and why older general histories of Byzantine thought underrate him.

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