Maximus the Confessor

Maximus was born about 580. One account makes him a well-born Constantinopolitan who served as first secretary to the Emperor Heraclius before leaving the court for a monastery; a rival Syriac account, written by an enemy, makes him a Palestinian. Either way, by his thirties he was a monk, and by his fifties he was the most formidable theological mind in the Greek world. The Persian and then the Arab invasions drove him west — to Crete, to North Africa, finally to Rome. Everywhere he went he argued about one question, and it looked to most people like a technicality. The empire was trying to reunite its fractured churches with a formula: Christ has two natures, yes, but only one will. Emperors backed it. Patriarchs signed it. It would have healed the split with Syria and Egypt just as the Arab armies arrived, and it had the enormous advantage of being politically convenient. Maximus said no, and he explained why in a way nobody could brush aside. A will belongs to a nature, not to a person. If Christ has no human will, then he has no human nature, and the humanity that needed saving was never actually assumed — and what was not assumed was not healed. Gethsemane, he argued, is the proof: a human will saying not my will but thine and freely aligning itself with the Father. Salvation happens there, in a real human choice. In 649 he stood behind Pope Martin I at the Lateran Council in Rome, which condemned the imperial formula outright. The emperor's response was to arrest them both. Martin was dragged to Constantinople, exiled to the Crimea, and died there of exposure and hunger. Maximus was tried for treason in 655, exiled to Thrace, brought back, tried again in 662, and condemned. The sentence was designed to end his influence permanently: his tongue was cut out so he could not speak, and his right hand cut off so he could not write. He was then exiled to Lazica, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, where he died on 13 August 662, roughly eighty-two years old. Nineteen years later the Sixth Ecumenical Council met at Constantinople and ruled exactly as he had — two wills, two natures, one Christ. The church that had mutilated him now taught what he had taught. He left an enormous body of writing: the Ambigua on difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus, the Chapters on Love, the Mystagogy on the meaning of the liturgy, and hundreds of letters. Sources: Maximus the Confessor, The Ascetic Life and Four Centuries on Charity; The Philokalia, vol. II; the acts of the Third Council of Constantinople (681); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.