St Maximus the Confessor

Biography

Born about 580, Maximus served briefly as imperial secretary before becoming a monk, first near Constantinople and then, as the Persian and Arab wars drove him west, in North Africa and Rome. His learning was immense and his writings, the Ambigua, the Mystagogy, the Chapters on Love, and the Disputation with Pyrrhus, became the deepest Christological synthesis between the fifth century and St John of Damascus.

When the court imposed one will in Christ through the Ekthesis and later the Typos, Maximus became the doctrine's most formidable opponent. With Pope Martin I he stood behind the Lateran Synod of 649. Arrested and brought to Constantinople, he was tried repeatedly, exiled, brought back, and tried again; in the end his tongue was cut out and his right hand severed, that he might neither speak nor write the confession. He died in exile in Lazica in 662, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated his teaching in 680 to 681.

The controversy

• Monoenergism and Monothelitism: the doctrine of one energy, then one will, in the incarnate Christ, promoted by imperial edict and accepted for a time by the sees of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and, under Honorius, Rome.

Position taken

• That the one Christ, being perfect God and perfect man, has two natural wills and two natural energies without division or confusion, the human will freely following the divine.
• That communion is conditioned by orthodoxy of faith, so that he could not commune with the sees while they held the error, though he stood, for a time, almost alone; yet he founded no rival church, and awaited the Church's judgment, which came.