Maximus the Confessor

(c. 580–662)

   Mystic, Theologian and Saint.

   As a young man, Maximus served as secretary to the Byzantine Emperor. However, in c. 615, he became a monk at the monastery of Chrysopolis. In 626, when the Persians invaded, he fled to North Africa. There he combated the Monothelite heresy and in 645 he worsted the exiled Patriarch of Constantinople in a debate on the subject. In 649, the Monothelites were condemned at the Lateran Council. Maximus refused to accept the ‘Typos’ of the Emperor Constans II. This was an edict forbidding the assertion of either Monothelite or orthodox Diothelite beliefs. In consequence, Maximus was tried in Constantinople and exiled to Thrace. Later he was summoned again and his tongue and right hand were cut off. Many of his theological works survive, including Quaestiones ad Thalassum and expositions on the works of Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius. He was also the author of mystical volumes such as Mystagogia, a spiritual understanding of the liturgy.

   L. Thurnberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (1965);

   A. Louth, Maximus the Confessor (1995).