Maximus the Confessor

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A man stands before a tribunal in Constantinople in the spring of 655, an old monk with no see, no army, and no patron, charged with breaking the peace of the empire over a question about the will of Christ. He is offered communion with the imperial church if he will simply stop arguing. He declines. The court answers him in the only currency left to it: in 662 the tongue that had framed the arguments is cut out and the right hand that had written them is severed, and what remains of him is carried east into exile in Lazica, on the Black Sea frontier of Georgia, where he dies on 13 August. Within twenty years the empire reverses itself. The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) ratifies, almost word for word, the doctrine for which he was mutilated. The monk’s name was Maximus, and the tradition would call him Homologetes, the Confessor — one who held the faith under torture without dying for it.

Maximus the Confessor in an eleventh-century mosaic (c. 1056) at the monastery of Nea Moni on Chios. — Byzantine mosaicist, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Almost everything central to later Greek Christian metaphysics passes through him. He gathered the Trinitarian thought of the Cappadocians, the contemplative discipline of the Egyptian desert, and the negative theology of the Syrian who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, and fused them into a single architecture in which the whole of creation is held together, and brought to its end, in the incarnate Word. He is at once the most systematic of the Greek Fathers and the least systematic in form: he wrote almost nothing in the shape of a treatise, preferring the answered question, the resolved difficulty, the chapter-by-chapter aphorism. The synthesis has to be assembled from the margins of other men’s problems. That it can be assembled at all, and that it stands, is the measure of the mind behind it.

Life: from the imperial chancery to the frontier

The outlines of his life are fixed; the beginning is contested. The Greek Vita makes him a Constantinopolitan of good family who became protoasekretis — first secretary — to the Emperor Heraclius, then withdrew from the court to take the monastic habit at the monastery of Philippicus at Chrysopolis, across the Bosphorus from the capital, and later moved to Cyzicus. A rival, hostile Syriac Vita, recovered and edited by Sebastian Brock in 1973, makes him instead a Palestinian named Moschion, born at Hesfin near the Golan, and a partisan of Origenist monks — a portrait shaped by the polemics of his enemies. The two accounts cannot be reconciled, and the historical-critical reading treats neither as transparent; what is certain is that by the 620s Maximus was a monk, formed in the literature of Greek-speaking asceticism, and that the Persian wars and then the Arab conquests drove him steadily westward — to Crete, to Cyprus, and by the 630s to North Africa, where he settled in the orbit of Carthage and of the abbot Sophronius, soon to be patriarch of Jerusalem.

It was in Africa, and then in Rome, that his life became public and dangerous. The empire, exhausted by war and hemorrhaging its eastern provinces to Islam, was seeking a christological formula that could reconcile the churches divided since Chalcedon (451). The proposal that emerged from the patriarch Sergius and the emperor Heraclius — that Christ, though in two natures, acted by a single divine-human energy and willed by a single will (Monothelitism) — was meant as an instrument of reunion. Maximus came to see it as the unraveling of the Incarnation itself. In July 645, at Carthage, he held a public disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed patriarch of Constantinople; the record of that debate, the Disputatio cum Pyrrho, ends with Pyrrhus persuaded, at least for a season, of the two wills. Four years later Maximus stood behind the Lateran Synod of 649, convened in Rome under Pope Martin I, which condemned the imperial formula and its enforcing edict, the Typos of Constans II, in the most uncompromising terms.

For a monk to organize the Latin and Greek opposition to imperial doctrine was, in the eyes of Constantinople, sedition. Martin was arrested, tried, and exiled to the Crimea, where he died. Maximus was brought to the capital, tried in 655 on charges that mixed theology with treason, and exiled to Thrace; recalled and pressed again, he held his ground, and in 662 came the sentence of mutilation and the final exile to the fortress of Schemaris in Lazica. He was roughly eighty. The cause he had refused to abandon was vindicated by the empire that killed him at the Sixth Ecumenical Council twenty years on — a vindication he did not live to see and would, by the logic of his own theology, not have needed.

The logoi: creation held in the Word

The center of his thought is a doctrine about the relation between the one and the many that turns on a single Greek word: logos. Every created thing, for Maximus, exists because there is in God a logos of it — a divine intention, a willed principle of its being, the answer to the question of what and why it is. These logoi are not creatures; they are the eternal divine “wills” or “predeterminations” (proorismoi, thelēmata) according to which God brings each thing into existence and toward which each thing is meant to move. And they are not scattered. They are gathered, all of them, in the one Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the Word through whom all things were made. The many logoi are the one Logos differentiated outward into creation; the one Logos is the many logoi gathered inward into God. To know a thing truly is to read its logos, and to read its logos is to be carried back to the Word in whom it subsists.

This is the hinge on which his cosmology and his Christology become a single thing. The world is not a machine and not an accident but a vast structure of intelligible principles, each held in the Word, each a “thinner” or “denser” manifestation of the same divine intent — what Maximus develops, drawing the language of the apophatic theology of the Areopagite into a cosmological key, as a creation that is simultaneously a theophany, a self-showing of the God who in his own essence remains unknowable. The structure has an unmistakable kinship with the descent of all things from the One in Neoplatonism — with the procession and return that runs from Plotinus through Proclus and Iamblichus — but Maximus has cut it loose from emanation. The logoi do not flow out of the divine substance as light from a source; they are willed, and what they constitute is a creation distinct from God, made from nothing, gathered to him by love rather than dissolved back into him by nature.

Here the synthesis shows its seams, deliberately. Maximus inherited the framework of the logoi from the speculative asceticism of Evagrius Ponticus, and behind Evagrius from Origen — and he inherited with it a temptation he refused. In the Origenist scheme as it had come down to the sixth-century monks, rational beings pre-existed as a unity of minds (the henad) that fell into bodies and would, at the end of all things, be restored to their original unity (the apokatastasis, the universal restoration). Maximus broke both. In the seventh of the Ambigua — the long discussion that is the heart of his cosmology — he reread the doctrine of pre-existence out of existence: a creature does not pre-exist as a fallen mind but as a logos in God, willed into being, with its fall and its restoration lying ahead of it rather than behind. Motion is not a lapse from a static perfection but the very mode of created being, the way a thing travels from its origin in God toward its rest in God. The Origenist circle — repose, motion, becoming — he reversed into a line: becoming, motion, repose. Creation does not fall and return to where it was; it is made and moves toward where it is meant to be.

Theosis: the human as the workshop of the world

If every creature has its logos in the Word, the human creature has a peculiar office. Maximus calls the human being the syndesmos and the officina of creation — the bond and the workshop in which the divided orders of the cosmos are meant to be drawn together. Standing at the meeting of the intelligible and the sensible, soul and body, the human person is the one creature appointed to mediate the great divisions that structure the world — uncreated and created, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and inhabited world, male and female — and to gather them, through a life rightly ordered, toward their unity in God. Adam was made for this mediation and failed at it; the task fell, intact, to Christ, who accomplished in his own person every reconciliation the first human had refused.

The end of that gathering is theosis — deification, the becoming-god of the creature. The term is older than Maximus; the Cappadocians had used it, and behind them Athanasius had framed the exchange in its sharpest form — that the divine became human so that the human might become divine. Maximus gives it metaphysical rigor. Deification is not the creature’s absorption into the divine essence, which remains forever beyond participation; it is the saturation of the whole human person — will, intellect, body — by the divine energies, so that the deified human comes to be by grace everything that God is by nature, except identity of essence. He frames it as a reciprocal movement: God and the human exchange properties, the divine descending into the human in the Incarnation so that the human might ascend into the divine in deification — each becoming, in the famous symmetry, a kind of “type” of the other. The whole architecture of the logoi exists for the sake of this return: the world is the field across which created freedom, healed and rightly used, carries all things back to the Word in whom their principles were always held.

This is also where his liturgical writing belongs. The Mystagogia reads the church building and the eucharistic rite as an icon of this whole cosmic structure — the church as an image of God, of the visible and invisible world, of the human person, of the soul — so that the worshiper moving through the liturgy is moving through a compressed image of the procession and return of all things. It is a theology of the architecture of worship, not a manual of it: the rite means the cosmos, and to enter the rite is to be drawn into the gathering of the many into the one.

The katholikon and buildings of the monastery of Nea Moni, Chios — an example of the Middle Byzantine domed church whose symbolism the Mystagogia reads as an icon of the cosmos. — Maarten Sepp, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The two wills: dyothelitism and the cost of consistency

The doctrine of the will, for which Maximus suffered, is not a separate department of his thought but the same logic pressed onto the person of Christ. If, as Chalcedon held, Christ is one person in two complete natures, divine and human, then — Maximus argued — he must possess everything that belongs to each nature in full. And willing belongs to nature, not to person. A nature without its own will, its own capacity for self-determined movement toward its proper good, is not a complete nature at all. To say that Christ had only one will was therefore to say, against Chalcedon’s own logic, that his humanity was incomplete — a humanity with no human willing, no human freedom, a saved human nature that lacked precisely the faculty most in need of saving.

Against this Maximus drew a distinction that his opponents could not dissolve. The Monothelites argued that two wills must mean two willing subjects in conflict, a Christ at war with himself. Maximus answered by separating the natural will — the inbuilt inclination of a nature toward its own flourishing, which in the human is simply the desire to live and to be whole — from the gnomic will, the deliberative, hesitating, opinion-forming willing that arises only where a nature, ignorant of its own good, must reason its way toward a choice. The gnomic will is the will of the fallen creature feeling for the good in the dark; it is the seat of sin. Christ, whose human nature was united to the Word and never in ignorance of its end, had a complete and integral human natural will, perfectly attuned to the divine will, and therefore no gnomic will at all. The two wills do not war; the human will of Christ wills humanly exactly what the divine will wills, freely and without deliberation, because it is the will of a humanity that is whole. The reading of the agony in Gethsemane follows directly: when Christ prays that the cup pass and then yields, it is the genuine recoil of a real human nature from death, taken up and offered in free conformity to the Father — the human will of Christ, fully human, fully free, choosing the divine will as its own.

This was the doctrine ratified at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681, which defined two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ — not opposed to one another, but with the human will following and freely subject to the divine, never resisting it. Maximus is not named among the council’s authorities — the vindication was substantial, not ceremonial — but the definition is, in its bones, his.

The works

He left no single book that holds the system. What survives is a corpus of occasional pieces, dense and demanding, each provoked by a question put to him. The Ambigua — the Ambigua ad Iohannem and the earlier Ambigua ad Thomam — gather his resolutions of “difficulties” in the texts of Gregory of Nazianzus and the Areopagite, and contain his deepest metaphysics, the logoi doctrine of Ambigua 7 above all. The Quaestiones ad Thalassium, answers to sixty-five exegetical puzzles posed by an African abbot, is his great work of contemplative scriptural interpretation. The Mystagogia is his commentary on the symbolism of the liturgy. The Liber Asceticus, a dialogue between an elder and a young monk, and the Capita de caritate — the four “centuries” of chapters on love — distill his teaching on the purification of the passions and the primacy of charity, the discipline drawn straight from the Egyptian desert and from Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the monastic tradition of the Cappadocians. The Capita theologica et oeconomica compress his contemplative metaphysics into aphorism. The Opuscula theologica et polemica and the Disputatio cum Pyrrho carry the will-controversy; the Epistulae show the abbot, the controversialist, and the spiritual director at once. The reader who wants the whole of Maximus must read across all of it, because he deliberately built the whole into the parts.

Saint Maximos the Confessor in an eleventh-century mosaic in the katholikon of Hosios Loukas, Boeotia, Greece. — Byzantine mosaicist, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Transmission and reach {#research}

The textual history of Maximus is a study in deferred arrival. The Greek editio princeps is the two-volume S. Maximi Confessoris … operum tomus primus [-secundus] of the Dominican François Combefis (Paris, 1675), printed with a facing Latin version; a projected third volume containing the Ambigua was at press when Combefis died in 1679 and never appeared, so that the Ambigua had to wait for Franz Oehler’s Anecdota Graeca I (Halle, 1857), the first printing of the complete Greek Ambigua corpus, with the medieval Latin facing. Combefis and Oehler were folded into the standard reference text, the Patrologia Graeca of Jacques-Paul Migne, volumes 90 and 91 (Paris, 1860-1865), still cited column by column. The Mystagogia had appeared earlier still, in David Hoeschel’s Greek printing at Augsburg in 1599. A genuinely critical edition began only with the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca from 1980, and the first substantial English translations are entirely a post-1955 phenomenon, opening with Polycarp Sherwood’s The Ascetic Life; The Four Centuries on Charity (Ancient Christian Writers 21, 1955) — before which the Anglophone reader met Maximus only through reference works such as the Catholic Encyclopedia article of Dom John Chapman (1911) and the survey in Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, volume IV.

The most consequential transmission, though, ran West in the ninth century and in Latin. The Irishman John Scottus Eriugena, commissioned at the court of Charles the Bald, translated the Ambigua ad Iohannem and the Quaestiones ad Thalassium into Latin around 862-864, alongside his version of the Areopagite — printed centuries later in Migne’s Patrologia Latina volume 122. It was through this Carolingian conduit that the Maximian doctrine of the primordial logoi, of the cosmos as theophany, and of the return of all things passed into the structure of Eriugena’s own Periphyseon, and through it into the Latin metaphysical tradition. Eastward, the logoi and the distinction of essence and energies that Maximus had pressed into service became part of the theological furniture inherited by the hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century; the experiential current of that same Byzantine inheritance runs through Symeon the New Theologian. Westward again, the coincidence of opposites in Nicholas of Cusa draws on the same Dionysian-Maximian apophasis that Eriugena had carried over the Alps. The most thorough Russian study before 1930, Sergei Epifanovich’s Prepodobnyi Maksim Ispovednik i vizantiiskoe bogoslovie (Kiev, 1915), opened the modern critical recovery; the standard English introduction is Andrew Louth’s Maximus the Confessor (1996). The scholia long attributed wholesale to Maximus in the manuscripts of the Areopagite — the apparatus by which he was read as Dionysius’s authoritative interpreter — are now understood to be a stratified deposit, the earliest layer belonging to John of Scythopolis; the figure of Maximus the Dionysian commentator and the historical author have, to that extent, to be told apart.

The whole of it returns to a single conviction, held under interrogation and held under the knife: that the difference between God and the world is not a wound to be healed by collapsing the two, and not a gulf to be left open, but a distance crossed in one direction only — the Word descending into a complete humanity, with a human will entire, so that the logoi scattered through the whole creation might be carried home in the one who contains them. The many were always meant for the one. In the incarnate Logos they arrive.

→ In the library: Parker — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1897, 1899)

→ Related: Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Gregory Of Nyssa · Gregory Of Nazianzus · Basil Of Caesarea · Evagrius Ponticus · Origen · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · Proclus · Iamblichus · Apophatic Theology · Logos · Asceticism · Theurgy · Neochalcedonian Christology · Christian Neoplatonism · Gregory Palamas · Nicholas Of Cusa · Apotheosis · Athanasius