The Life
Maximus was born around 580 in Constantinople into a noble Christian family. He received an excellent classical education and entered imperial service as first secretary (asekretis) to Emperor Heraclius. Around 614 he abandoned the imperial court for the monastic life at Chrysopolis Monastery across the Bosphorus, where he was eventually elected abbot. The Monothelite heresy, which taught that the Incarnate Christ has only one will (the divine), spread rapidly across the East with imperial backing. Maximus traveled to Africa and Rome, defeated Pyrrhus the deposed Monothelite Patriarch of Constantinople in a public debate at Carthage in 645, and inspired Pope Saint Martin to convene the Lateran Council of 649 which condemned the heresy. He was arrested by Emperor Constans II in 654, tried multiple times, and in 662 had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off for refusing to commune with the Monothelite Patriarch. He was exiled to Lazica in Georgia where he reposed August 13, 662. The Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated him in 680–681.
Maximus was born around 580 in Constantinople to a noble Christian family. His name in Greek means “greatest,” and his manner of life proved worthy of it. He received an excellent education — grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, the Holy Scriptures, the classical authors of antiquity. When he entered government service, he became first secretary (asekretis) and chief counselor to Emperor Heraclius (611–641). The position of asekretis was one of the most senior positions in the imperial bureaucracy — the emperor’s personal secretary, with direct access to the imperial court and responsibility for the correspondence and state documents of the empire. Maximus was loved and respected by the senate and was widely considered one of the most competent and trustworthy figures in the imperial administration.
Saint Maximus soon realized that the emperor and many at the imperial court had been corrupted by the Monothelite heresy, which was beginning to spread rapidly through the East. He resigned his duties at court around 613 or 614 and went to the Chrysopolis Monastery at Skutari on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus from Constantinople, where he received monastic tonsure. Because of his humility and wisdom, he soon won the love of the brethren and was chosen igumen of the monastery after a few years. He spent the next several decades in monastic discipline, forming himself in the contemplative and ascetical tradition of Eastern Christian monasticism. The Christological precision of his later theology was rooted in the deep prayer and ascetical formation of his decades at Chrysopolis.
When Saint Maximus saw the turmoil the heresy was causing in the East, he left his monastery and sought refuge in the West, where Monothelitism had been completely rejected. He visited the bishops of Africa to strengthen them in Orthodoxy. He spent six years in Alexandria. In 645 he engaged in a public theological debate at Carthage with Pyrrhus, the deposed Monothelite Patriarch of Constantinople. Maximus’s arguments in defense of the apostolic Christology of the two wills were so powerful that Pyrrhus publicly renounced his Monothelite teaching. Maximus then traveled to Rome and inspired Pope Saint Martin to hold a council in 649 — the famous Lateran Council — which solemnly condemned both Monoenergism and Monothelitism. One hundred and fifty Western bishops and thirty-seven representatives from the Orthodox East attended.
u201CIf even the whole universe should begin to commune with him, I will not.u201D When the Emperor Constans II received the decisions of the Lateran Council, he ordered the arrest of both Pope Martin and Saint Maximus. The order was fulfilled in 654. Maximus was accused of treason and locked up in prison. He was tried multiple times by the imperial authorities, who pressured him to accept the imperial Typos and to commune with the Monothelite Patriarch. The famous exchange was preserved in the records of his trials. When his interrogators told him that all the Eastern Patriarchs and even the Roman legates had communed with the Monothelite Patriarch and that he alone was refusing, Saint Maximus answered: u201CIf even the whole universe should begin to commune with the Patriarch, I will not commune with him. For I know from the writings of the holy Apostle Paul that the Holy Spirit will give over to anathema even the angels, if they should begin to preach any other gospel, introducing anything new.u201D
When Saint Maximus refused all imperial pressure to abandon the apostolic Faith, the imperial authorities resorted to brutal physical violence in 662. Saint Maximus and two of his disciples were subjected to the cruelest torments. Each one’s tongue was cut out so they could no longer preach the apostolic Faith. Each one’s right hand was cut off so they could no longer write the apostolic Faith. Then they were exiled to Schemarum in Lazica (modern Tsageri in Georgia), enduring many sufferings on the journey. The severed members of the Confessor were paraded through Constantinople hung around his neck as a public warning to all who might be tempted to defy the imperial Monothelite policy. Despite the physical mutilation, Saint Maximus continued to confess the apostolic Faith by signs to his disciples until his repose.
Saint Maximus’s theological labors were vindicated nineteen years after his repose. The Sixth Ecumenical Council, convened at Constantinople in 680–681 under the Emperor Constantine IV, condemned Monothelitism and Monoenergism. The Council affirmed the apostolic teaching that Maximus had defended at the cost of his tongue, his right hand, and his life: that the Incarnate Christ has two wills (one divine, one human) and two energies (one divine, one human), the two acting always in concert through the one Person of the Lord, the human will being not opposed to the divine will but freely consenting to it in Christological obedience to the will of the Father. The apostolic Christology that Maximus had almost alone defended in his lifetime became the universally-confessed Faith of the Christian Church.
The apostolic foundation of Saint Maximus’s entire Christology of the two wills is the prayer of the Lord in Gethsemane. “Not my will, but thine, be done” — the words distinguish two wills within the one Person of the Incarnate Lord: the human will (“my will”) that shrinks from the suffering of the Cross, and the divine will (“thine”) of the Father to which the human will consents in obedience. The Monothelite teaching cannot account for these words. If Christ has only one will, the distinction between “my will” and “thine” becomes incomprehensible. The dyothelite teaching that Maximus defended makes the prayer of Gethsemane intelligible as the moment when the human will of Christ freely chose obedience to the divine will of the Father.
Saint Maximus reposed in exile at Schemarum in Lazica (modern Tsageri in Georgia) on August 13, 662. He was about eighty-two years old. He had spent the last decades of his life in exile and imprisonment for the apostolic Faith he had defended at every cost. He had been almost the solitary defender of the apostolic Christology of the two wills against the almost-universal imperial Monothelite policy of his age. He had been silenced and mutilated for his refusal to compromise. He died at peace in the mountains of Lazica, attended by his faithful disciples, confident that the apostolic Faith he had defended would eventually be vindicated by the providence of God. His relics were buried at his grave in Lazica; they were rediscovered in 2010 and were authenticated in 2015. His severed right hand has been preserved at the Monastery of Saint Paul on Mount Athos since the twelfth century.
Maximus gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the early Eastern dramatization that the apostolic Faith is preserved by those willing to defend it at every cost. He defended the apostolic teaching of Christ’s two wills against the almost-universal imperial Monothelite policy of his age. He defeated Pyrrhus at Carthage and inspired the Lateran Council of 649. He refused all imperial pressure to commune with the Monothelite Patriarch. He had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off in 662 and was exiled to Lazica where he died. The Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated his theology nineteen years after his death. We may not be theologians by profession. But we are all called to confess the apostolic Faith faithfully, even when this means standing alone against the dominant opinion of our age.