Saint Maximus the Confessor

Saint Maximus the Confessor was a monk and abbot, one of the great Fathers of the Eastern Church. He defended the truth that Christ, true God and true man, also has a true human will, and he paid for it with mutilation and exile. The Church commemorates him on August 13, the day of his death.

Accounts of his early life differ. According to the Greek Life, he was born around 580 in Constantinople into a distinguished family, received a thorough education, and served as first secretary to Emperor Heraclius before leaving the court to become a monk at Chrysopolis, across the Bosporus. Benedict XVI, in a catechesis of 2008, said on the other hand that Maximus was born in Palestine and came to know monastic life as a boy. The Roman Martyrology calls him abbot of the monastery at Chrysopolis.

Because of invasions, Maximus took refuge in North Africa. There he distinguished himself by his courage in defending the faith against Monothelitism, the view, supported by the emperors, that Christ has only one will, the divine will. Maximus taught that a man without a will would not be a true man, and he pointed to the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane: “not my will but yours be done.” In 645 in Carthage, in a public disputation, he convinced Pyrrhus, a former patriarch of Constantinople, who for a time renounced his errors.

He then went to Rome. In 649 he took an active part in the synod at the Lateran convened by Pope Saint Martin I. The synod professed that Christ has two wills, divine and human. Emperor Constans II answered with force: the pope was imprisoned, and soon Maximus, too, was arrested and taken to Constantinople. Charged with high treason, he was exiled to Thrace after his first trial.

In 662, when he was over eighty, he stood trial again, together with two disciples, both named Anastasius. He did not renounce his faith and was condemned as a heretic: his tongue and his right hand were cut off. He was exiled to Lazica in Colchis, on the Black Sea. He died there on August 13, 662, in the fortress of Schemar on the river Hippis, worn out by his sufferings.

He left several dozen works, among them the Mystagogy, which explains the symbolism of the liturgy, the Ambigua on difficult passages in Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the Chapters on Love, and the record of his disputation with Pyrrhus. Benedict XVI recalled his teaching that true freedom is not opposition to God but the “yes” spoken to his will, after the example of Christ. Christian tradition gave him the title of Confessor for the courage with which he bore witness to the integrity of faith in Christ.

The truth of the two wills of Christ that he defended was defined by the Third Council of Constantinople in 681. Maximus is venerated as a saint in the East and in the West, without a formal canonization, which was not yet known in his time.