Saint Maximus the Confessor (579-662)

The theologian of Christ's human will

Most of the great Christological debates of previous centuries had concerned the natures of Christ: one person, truly God and truly man (Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451). Maximus carries this mystery through to its most concrete consequence: if Christ is truly man, He has a human will; otherwise His humanity is mutilated. With unrivalled logical rigour, he shows that willing belongs to nature, not to the person alone: two complete natures imply two wills. This insight, paid for with his life, became dogma at the Third Council of Constantinople. Without Maximus, the Church's faith in the real humanity of the Saviour would never have received its decisive formulation.

The martyr of Christological truth

Maximus was no armchair theologian. When the emperor imposed silence by decree — forbidding all talk of "one" or "two" wills — Maximus refused that silence as a betrayal of the truth. He was tried twice, deported, and finally mutilated: his tongue that confessed and his right hand that wrote were cut off, to extinguish his voice. He died in exile of his wounds and exhaustion, aged over eighty. The Church does not call him a martyr in the strict sense — he was not executed — but a confessor: one who bore witness to the faith in his very flesh, short of the immediate shedding of blood. Few lives proclaim so forcefully that doctrinal truth is no game of ideas.

The thinker of the cosmos as liturgy

Beyond controversy, Maximus left one of the vastest spiritual syntheses of Christian antiquity. For him, all creation came forth from God to return to Him; every being carries within it a logos, a divine reason, and the whole universe is called to become an immense liturgy in which Christ recapitulates all things. The great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar fittingly entitled his study of Maximus Cosmic Liturgy^[2][3]. This vision — in which charity, the deification of man and the transfiguration of the world converge — makes Maximus a spiritual master, and not merely a controversialist.

The two traditions about his birth

Two ancient accounts dispute Maximus's origins. The Greek tradition — his Byzantine Life, followed by the Catholic Encyclopedia — has him born in Constantinople around 580, into a noble and pious family^[4]. An older Syriac Life, written however by a monothelite adversary and therefore hostile, says he was born in Palestine, in the village of Hesfin^[5]. Benedict XVI, cautiously, retains the Palestinian hypothesis and an education marked by the reading of Scripture^[6]. The historian must acknowledge a genuine uncertainty here: both traditions have their defenders. What is certain is that Maximus received a careful education, philosophical and theological, which made him one of the most penetrating minds of his century.

First secretary to the Emperor Heraclius

Whatever his homeland, Maximus first appears in the world, and at the summit of the State. The Greek tradition reports that he was first secretary (prōtoasēkrḗtis) to the Emperor Heraclius, "who prized him much"^[7]. That says how trusted he was: he handled the Empire's affairs at the closest remove from the throne. Like John Damascene a century later, Maximus belongs to that line of saints who first served a temporal power before leaving everything for God — proof that intelligence and public responsibility are no obstacle to holiness, but can be its springboard.

Renunciation: monk at Chrysopolis

Around 613-614, at the height of honours, Maximus renounced his office and the world to become a monk. He entered the monastery of Chrysopolis (present-day Scutari/Üsküdar), on the Asian shore facing Constantinople^[8]. This was no failure, no disgrace: it was the choice to love God with an undivided heart. The man who advised the emperor embraced a monk's obedience and silence. His holiness and learning soon saw him elected hegumen (abbot) of the community^[9]. But history would not leave him in peace: the Persian invasion, then the doctrinal crisis, were about to tear him from his cell.

Monastic exile: from Cyzicus to Carthage

Fleeing the advance of the Persians, then of the Arabs, Maximus left the region of Constantinople for Cyzicus, Crete, Cyprus, and finally North Africa, where he settled near Carthage^[10]. There he met the man who would orient his whole struggle: Sophronius, the Palestinian ascetic soon to become Patriarch of Jerusalem, one of the first to denounce the doctrinal novelties coming from Constantinople. Under Sophronius's influence, Maximus grasped what was at stake in the nascent quarrel and became the theologian of the orthodox resistance. Geographical exile made him a free man, beyond the emperor's immediate reach — just as the land of Islam would later protect John Damascene.

What is monothelitism?

Monothelitism (from the Greek mónos, single, and thélēma, will) is the doctrine that there is in Christ only one will, the divine one. Born of a political compromise, it aimed to rally the Monophysite Christians — those who acknowledged only one nature in Christ — to the Empire by conceding, failing one nature, a single will and a single operation (energy). The intention was unitive; the result was a mutilation of Christ's humanity. For a human nature without a human will is no true human nature: it is an empty shell. Maximus's whole genius would lie in demonstrating this^[11].

Monoenergism, Ekthesis and Typos

The crisis advanced in stages, each marked by an imperial document. The following table gives the sequence:

The Ekthesis of 638 and above all the Typos of 648 do not merely impose an error: they forbid the truth. For Maximus, this decreed silence is graver still than the error, for it amounts to saying that the confession of the faith does not matter. It is against this blackmail of silence that he will commit his whole struggle.

The Disputation with Pyrrhus (645)

The most famous episode of Maximus's struggle is his public disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed former Patriarch of Constantinople exiled in Africa, a defender of monothelitism. The debate took place in July 645, at Carthage, before the governor Gregory and an assembly of notables^[14]. There Maximus deployed, with relentless clarity, the full argument for the two wills. At the end of the exchange, Pyrrhus yielded publicly to his reasoning, abjured monothelitism and left for Rome to be reconciled with the pope^[15]. The record of this contest, the Disputatio cum Pyrrho^[16], remains one of the tightest Christological texts in all of patristics.

The Lateran Council (649) and Pope Martin I

Buoyed by these victories, Maximus made his way to Rome, where he became the theological soul of a great act of the Western Church. In 649, Pope Martin I convened at the Lateran a council which solemnly condemned monoenergism, monothelitism, the Ekthesis and the Typos, and proclaimed the two wills and two operations of Christ^[17]. Maximus was its principal doctrinal architect. But defying the emperor in this way has a price: Constans II had Pope Martin I arrested and deported to Cherson, in the Crimea, where he died of ill-treatment on 16 September 655 — he is one of the last martyr popes^[18]. Maximus knows he will be next.

"Not a real man, but an amputated man"

Maximus's reasoning starts from a simple principle: will belongs to nature, not to the person. To will is proper to a nature endowed with reason. If Christ therefore has two complete natures — divine and human — He necessarily has two wills: the divine will which He shares from all eternity with the Father, and a true human will, like ours in all things but sin. To deny this human will is to deny the very humanity of the Saviour: we would be left not with a real man but, in the image Benedict XVI draws from Maximus, with an amputated man, deprived of what makes man^[19]. And "what is not assumed is not saved": if Christ did not take on our will, it is our will that is not redeemed.

The "yes" of Christ against the "no" of Adam

Maximus's doctrine is no subtlety: it is the heart of salvation. The drama of sin, ever since Adam, is that of a human will saying no to God, believing it finds freedom in refusal. Christ comes to reverse this drama by making a human will — His own — utter a perfect yes, even to Gethsemane: "not my will, but thine" (Lk 22:42). There, Maximus comments, the human will of Jesus does not deny itself: it accords itself freely with the divine will. True freedom is not the power to refuse God, but the capacity to unite oneself to Him in love^[20]. Salvation thus passes through a healed human will, relearning to will what God wills.

"It cannot be said that Christ has a single will!" — Saint Maximus the Confessor^[21]

It is this confession, and the refusal to keep it silent, that will lead him to the tribunal. Maximus could have lived quietly by submitting to the imperial Typos, which demanded only silence. He preferred truth to silence, and mutilation to cowardice.

The Centuries on Charity

Maximus is not only a dialectician: he is a great master of the interior life. His Four Centuries on Charity (Capita de caritate) — four hundred brief spiritual maxims — are one of the summits of monastic literature, read and copied throughout the Byzantine Middle Ages and gathered into the Philokalia — the reference critical edition being that of A. Ceresa-Gastaldo (Rome, 1963)^[22]. In them Maximus teaches that the whole Christian life tends towards charity, which heals the soul of its passions and unites it to God. He gives a luminous definition of it from the outset:

"Charity is a good disposition of the soul which makes it prefer the knowledge of God to all that exists." — Saint Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity, I, 1^[23]

And he at once draws the consequence for our neighbour, for love of God and love of men are inseparable:

"He who loves God cannot but love every man as himself, even though he be grieved by the passions of those who are not yet purified." — Saint Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity, I, 13^[24]

Hatred of a single man suffices, he says, to separate us from God: *"if we detect in our hearts the slightest trace of hatred against any man whatsoever, for any fault whatsoever, we are utterly estranged from the love of God"^[25]. This spirituality of charity, demanding and concrete, makes Maximus a master of all interior life, far beyond the cloisters.

The doctrine of the logoi

At the heart of Maximus's vision lies the doctrine of the logoi (plural of logos, "reason", "word"). Every creature, he teaches, exists according to a logos — a divine idea, an intention of God — which makes it what it is and assigns it its end. All these particular logoi are contained and unified in the one Logos, the Word of God, by whom all things were made. Truly to know a thing is therefore to ascend to its logos, that is, to God's thought concerning it; and the whole universe becomes a book in which the wisdom of the Creator is read. This metaphysics — in which existence is relational and ordered to an end, since all comes from the Word and returns to Him — gives Maximus's thought a cosmic breadth unique among the Fathers^[26].

Deification (theosis) and the gnomic will

The end of man, for Maximus, is deification (theōsis): not that man ceases to be a creature, but that, by grace, he shares in the very life of God and is transfigured in Him. Maximus finely distinguishes logos (the nature of a being) from tropos (its concrete manner of existing): deification does not change our nature, it transforms and elevates its mode of existence by grace. On this path, the obstacle is the gnomic will (gnṓmē) — that hesitant, deliberating will, marked by sin, which weighs pros and cons and risks choosing evil. The ascetic life consists precisely in healing this will, reconciling it with the divine will, until saying "yes" to God becomes, as in Christ, the heart's natural and joyful movement. Remarkably, Maximus attributes no gnomic will to Christ: the Saviour's humanity, sinless, never hesitates between good and evil; it adheres to God from the outset and perfectly^[27].

The Mystagogy: cosmos and Church as liturgy

This vision reaches its summit in the Mystagogy^[28], Maximus's commentary on the liturgy. The Church, he shows, is the image of the world and of man: its sanctuary and nave figure heaven and earth, soul and body, the invisible and the visible — and the liturgy celebrated there is the figure of the great cosmic liturgy by which all creation, recapitulated in Christ, ascends towards God. Man holds a unique place in it: a microcosm summing up in himself every degree of reality, he is also called to be a mediator, gathering the created and the uncreated within himself to offer them to God. This is what Balthasar named Maximus's cosmic liturgy: a contemplation in which Mass, interior life and the destiny of the universe are a single movement of love.

Maximus wrote abundantly, despite a life of exiles and struggles. His work, dense and demanding, spans exegesis, dogmatics, spirituality and liturgy:

In its depth, this work makes Maximus the bridge between the great Greek patristics and later Byzantine theology: it is he whom Saint John Damascene, last of the Greek Fathers, gathers up and transmits a century later. His Questions to Thalassius — sixty-five difficulties of Scripture resolved in a spiritual sense — rank among his most read texts^[29].

The trials at Constantinople

In 653, Emperor Constans II had Maximus arrested at Rome, with his disciples, and brought to Constantinople^[30]. The trial that opened was officially political — he was accused of treason — but its substance was doctrinal: they wanted to force him to accept the Typos. Maximus refused, opposing to his judges that faith is not decreed by the emperor. Ordered to commune with the Patriarchate of Constantinople rallied to error, he answered that neither threats nor solitude would make him yield: even if the whole universe were to commune with the patriarch, he would not. He was exiled a first time to Bizya, in Thrace, then brought back for further pressure.

Tongue and right hand cut off

Faced with his obstinate refusal, power resorted to cruelty. In 662, after one last trial, Maximus — aged over eighty — was condemned to an atrocious and symbolic torment: his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off^[31]. The tongue, because it confessed the two wills; the hand, because it wrote them down. The executioner meant to extinguish at once the saint's speech and his writing, just as the hand of John Damascene was cut off on the caliph's order according to legend, then miraculously restored by the Virgin. It is the admission, by violence itself, that there was nothing to oppose to his arguments. Mutilated, Maximus did not retract.

Exile in Lazica and death

He was then sent to die far from everything, at the other end of the Empire: deported to the land of Lazica (Colchis, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in present-day Georgia), he was confined in the fortress of Schemaris. Worn out by ill-treatment, age and exile, Saint Maximus the Confessor died on 13 August 662^[32]. He passed away defeated in the eyes of the world — condemned, mutilated, anathematised by power — but faithful to the end to the truth he had confessed. What history did next would vindicate him spectacularly.

Barely eighteen years after his death, the Church fully vindicated Maximus. Convened by Emperor Constantine IV, the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), the Sixth Ecumenical Council, solemnly condemned monothelitism and monoenergism and defined as dogma that Christ possesses two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, without division or confusion — the human will freely following the divine will, never opposing it^[44]. That is, word for word, the doctrine for which Maximus had been mutilated and had died in exile. The monk condemned by the Empire thus became the compass of an ecumenical council. Rarely has one man's fidelity to the truth, against an entire machinery of State, been vindicated with such clarity.

Confessor of the faith

The Church gave Maximus the title of Confessor (Homologētḗs): not a martyr in the sense of one who dies at once under the sword, but a witness who confessed the faith under persecution and torture, until dying of its effects. With his disciple Anastasius and Pope Martin I, he forms the trio of great confessors of the monothelite crisis. His surname says the essential of his holiness: a heroic fidelity to revealed truth, paid for with his flesh.

The liturgical feast

The cult of Saint Maximus is ancient and shared by East and West, with varying dates^[45]:

In the East, where his doctrine has carried authority ever since Constantinople III, Maximus ranks among the greatest Fathers and theologians. In the West, he is venerated as saint and confessor, and his influence on the theology of freedom and the will remains considerable.

Father of the Church, but no proclaimed Doctor

One clarification is called for, for accuracy's sake. Unlike Saint John Damascene, proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Leo XIII in 1890^[46], Saint Maximus the Confessor has not to this day received the formal title of Doctor of the Church in the Latin Church. He is nonetheless unanimously recognised as one of the major Fathers and one of the greatest theologians in the whole Christian tradition. The absence of the official title in no way diminishes his real authority: his doctrine is inscribed in an ecumenical council, which is more still.

Saint Maximus speaks powerfully to our time. First, he teaches true freedom. In an age that confuses freedom with the power to refuse everything — to refuse God, nature, law, oneself — Maximus recalls that freedom is only full when it says yes to love, as Christ did at Gethsemane. The human will is not made to wander among a thousand choices: it is made to unite itself, freely and joyfully, to the Good.

Second, he restores to body and cosmos their dignity. Against all contempt for the sensible, his doctrine of the logoi and of the cosmic liturgy shows that matter, the world, the work of man are called to enter into the praise of God. Nothing is profane for one who can read the Creator's thought in things.

Finally, his life is a lesson in courage. Maximus could have kept silent: in the end, only silence was asked of him. He refused that silence because he knew that the truth about Christ engages the salvation of men. Mutilated, exiled, condemned, he died apparently vanquished — and the whole Church ended by confessing his faith. Few saints proclaim so forcefully that truth always triumphs over force in the end.

"We adore one Son together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as He was in the beginning before all time, as He is now and ever shall be, for all ages and for the time after time. Amen!" — Saint Maximus the Confessor^[47]

• The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) — the Sixth Ecumenical Council which defined Christ's two wills and vindicated Maximus.
• The Council of Ephesus (431) — the Christological milestone which long prepared Maximus's struggle for Christ's humanity.
• How can the Incarnation be simply explained? — the mystery of the Word made flesh, foundation of all Maximus's doctrine.
• Saint John Damascene (675-749) — the last of the Greek Fathers, who gathers up and transmits Maximus's legacy.
• Saint Leo the Great (390-461) — the pope of the Christological Tome, another great artisan of the faith in Christ's two natures.
• The Doctors of the Church through history — the category of the great masters of the faith, of whom Maximus is, in fact if not in title, one of the summits.