.jpg%3Fwidth%3D900&w=3840&q=75)
The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Long Middle
Maximus the Confessor
died 662Patristic
He had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off rather than agree that Christ had no human will.
Summary
- Lived died 662.
- Stood in The Long Middle (AD 600–1500).
- Hangs on The Fathers and The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived1 moments · AD 600–1500
- 590–604Gregory the Great, and a mission to EnglandA Roman monk becomes bishop of Rome during plague and famine, feeds the city, writes a handbook on pastoral care that shapes clergy for a thousand years, and in 597 sends Augustine of Canterbury with about forty monks to the Anglo-Saxons. Within a century England is sending missionaries of its own.
In their own words
“(non occ.) But it is worthy of remark, that seven resurrections are related before our Lord's, of which the first was that of the son of the widow of Sarepta, (1 Kings 17) the second of the Shunamite's son, (2 Kings 4) the third which was caused by the remains of Elisha, (2 Kings 13) the fourth which took place at Nain, as is here related, the fifth of the ruler of the Synagogue's daughter, (Mark 5) the sixth of Lazarus, (John 11) the seventh at Christ's passion, for many bodies of the saints arose. (Mat. 27.)”
Catena Aurea by Aquinas · on Luke 7:15
“And the dead man sat up and began to speak! Then Jesus gave him back to his mother.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Maximus the Confessor at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Had his tongue and right hand cut off rather than agree that Christ had no human will.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received. Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Long Middle · 51 on this stretch of wall
Asked why God became man, and answered it so well the question has never gone away since.
Wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery and dated everything from the birth of Christ, which is why we still count years that way.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Preached with such fire that Europe followed him, and wrote 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee.'
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Wrote the most careful theology of the Middle Ages, then saw something of God and called all of it straw.
Wrote Columba's life, and pushed through a law protecting women and children from war.
Charlemagne's teacher, who cleaned up the Bible's Latin text and rebuilt the schools of Europe.