Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662) is a Father of the Church and arguably the most important Christian theologian of the seventh century. There is scholarly dispute about his place of birth and early life. At the age of thirty and under Heraclius, he allegedly became head of the Imperial Chancellery. However, he abandoned public life to enter the monastery of Philippicus in Chrysopolis. When the Persians invaded Anatolia, he moved to Carthage, where he studied the writings of St. Gregory Nazianzen and Pseudo-Dionysius. There he became involved in the Monothelite controversy, arguing against the Monothelites that, if Jesus had two complete natures, both human and divine, so too must he possess two wills, one human, the other divine. He defended his position in Rome, where it was approved by Pope Martin I at the Lateran Council of 649. In 654, however, Emperor Constans II, a supporter of Monothelism, had both Martin and Maximus arrested. In 655, Maximus was tried in Constantinople, condemned as a heretic, and sent into exile. When he was tried and condemned again in 662, he was not only sent into exile once more but, to prevent him from speaking and writing in defence against the Monothelite heresy, suffered torture and perhaps the amputation of his tongue and right hand.
In this interview, Prof. Bronwen Neil discusses St. Maximus and some of the best books on his life, work, and thought.
Bronwen Neil is Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University, a member of the Macquarie University Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment, and deputy director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre. She is section head for Religious Studies in the Australian Academy of Humanities and a member of the Classics and History sections. Her books include Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile, (co-authored with Pauline Allen) Greek and Latin Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form, and she is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook to Maximus Confessor.
- Maximus the Confessor
by Andrew Louth - The Cappadocians
by Anthony Meredith - Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius
by Bronwen Neil - Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World
by Paul Blowers - Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity
by Phil Booth
Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifyng purchases made using the affliate links in this post.
What would you add to the opening survey of Maximus’s life?
There are two early biographies of Maximus the Confessor and they conflict with one another. Each is written from a very different point of view. There is the Greek version, edited by Pauline Allen and myself, and the Syriac version, which has been edited by Sebastian Brock.
The Syriac version was only discovered in the eighties and so is very new information. It has brought a different lens to Maximus and his relationship with the monk Sophronius. It is highly critical of Maximus. It calls him the son of a whore and a merchant. It charges his teacher, Sophronius, with being a secret Origenist and am evil influence on Maximus. Origen is the third century speculative theologian who was very controversial in his own day.
These two views of Maximus depended on whether you were a fan or opponent of the Council of Chalcedon.
" Maximus offers a way of pursuing deification or theosis, while not opting out of the really difficult task of getting on with your neighbours."
What drew you to study Maximus the Confessor and write on him?
I was drawn to Maximus after reading George Berthold’s anthology of his writings in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.
The first thing I read was the Four Centuries on Love (Capita de cartiate). It took my breath away. I was struck by how Maximus combined Platonism with the doctrine of becoming one with God through contemplation (theosis) and a down-to-earth spirituality about fostering good relationships with those who endeavour to love God and pursue truth. Great theologians have often had disputes with their enemies and strife with members of their own communities. Maximus offers a way of pursuing deification or theosis, while not opting out of the really difficult task of getting on with your neighbours.
Why has interest in Maximus grown so significantly over the last hundred years?
Maximus has always been notoriously hard to read. Little was known about his life until Sebastian Brock uncovered the Syriac Life of Maximus. This stirred some people in Belgium, Russia, Greece, Serbia, America, the UK, and Australia to make the Greek life available. With it, new editions of the major works of Maximus came out, mostly in the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca (i.e. the body of Christian works written in Greek) of patristic writings. Once the critical editions were available, people started to translate them into French, English, Greek, Russian, Romanian and other languages. As translations became available, the interest in Maximus just grew and grew, partly because he refers to so many other Church Fathers in his own works.
You have touched upon how his writings can be difficult. Do you have any advice on how to read him for those who are approaching his works for the first time?
It is best to start with an easier text, such as The Centuries on Love. Once you are hooked, you start to understand his very difficult vocabulary.
When I was in Athens studying modern Greek, I once asked my teacher to give me a side lesson on vocabulary that would help me read Maximus. There was just one word that this Greek teacher had absolutely no idea about. So, she went to her twenty-volume historical dictionary of the Greek language and found the word there. According to the dictionary, it was a hapax legomenon: Maximus was the only writer ever to have used it. That gives you an idea of just how specialised his vocabulary can be at times. Hence, reading his work demands patience and persistence.
It is also important to recognise that he was not a systematic thinker. He was responding to controversies of the day and to the questions that were put to him. His friend, Thalassius, sent him a list of forty questions and Maximus tried to answer them, one by one. So, the resultant book is not your average introduction to the Gospel. It is dealing with the intricacies of the theology of the Incarnation and what that means for us humans. It is dealing with the legacy of Chalcedon and the split within the Church that followed upon that council.
One book that really helped me was On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor by Paul Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken. The book consists mostly of excerpts from the Ad Thalassium, Maximus’s replies to the questions that Thalassius had sent about difficult passages in Scripture and patristic writings. This work gives a whole history of patristic thinking on matters such as the Incarnation because Maximus often goes back to works from the third and fourth centuries.
"Maximus is very useful because he is the highpoint of the Greek tradition. He brought together all the knowledge of the Fathers up to that point."
All the Church Fathers are worth reading for their witness to the faith and tradition of the Church. You have already mentioned some reasons for reading Maximus in particular, such as his insistence on charity. Are there any other reasons why we should read him in particular?Maximus is very useful because he is the highpoint of the Greek tradition. He brought together all the knowledge of the Fathers up to that point. He went over their main struggles and tried to address the problems that had since arisen within theology and the reception of their writings. Hence, he is often called the synthesiser of the Greek tradition. He brings together ideas from Origen, the Cappadocians, Pseudo-Dionysius, and others. He tries to iron out the wrinkles and come up with something that is going to work.
At the same time, he had a strong influence on the Western tradition because he was translated into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena, the Irishman who worked at the court of Charles the Bald in Francia, during the ninth century. John was an astute translator of Maximus. A Roman papal librarian tried to emulate John Scotus by presenting his own translation of some of Maximus's works, including a summary of the Mystagogia, a commentary on the Byzantine liturgy. However, the Roman translations are not as well-known because they are less theologically informed than John’s. Still, Maximus was brought to the West during the ninth century.
Maximus is often associated with the fight against Monoenergism, the doctrine that the God-man has just one rather than two sources of activity, and Monothelitism, the doctrine that Jesus has just one rather than two wills. These were repackaged versions of Monophysitism, the doctrine that Christ has only one nature, the divine, or that his divinity basically absorbs his human nature. Can you explain the theological and political motivations for this ongoing support of Monophysitism, notwithstanding the Council of Chalcedon (451)?
This is not an easy question. Maximus’s main contribution to seventh-century theology was in Christology (logos, i.e. discourse or study about Christ): what we can say about Jesus, his nature, and his will. Monotheletism is the doctrine—as I would call it, though others believe it does not deserve that name—that Christ’s one, divine will somehow subsumed his human natural will and God's will into one package. This doctrine was formulated as a response to the split between Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian churches: Chalcedonian churches were in favour of that council’s doctrine that there were two natures in Christ and its rejection of the one nature formula or Monophysitism. The non-Chalcedonian churches felt that the two nature formula fell short of what Cyril of Alexandria meant when he talked about God becoming Incarnate in the Word. They later split into the so-called Nestorians and those who opposed Nestorius. These were all anti-Chalcedonians.
Gradually, by the seventh-century, it had become clear that the Byzantine Empire would not be able to withstand the Persian and Muslim invaders unless there were some theological solution that unified the Church across the empire. The empire would be stronger internally if the churches could all agree on one creed. The Emperor Constans II and Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, came up with a solution. They stated that there were two natures in Christ, but only one energy and one will. By ‘energy’, they meant an operating force that launches one into action, whereas the will determines what one does when acting.
This was one approach to reconciling the human and divine natures of Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. Chalcedon was a live issue because of its political implications. By splitting the churches, it was weakening the empire weak and exposing it to invasion.
1.
First up, you have chosen Andrew Louth’s introduction to St. Maximus, which contains some of the saint’s writings. What makes this a good introduction?
It contains passages from a range of Maximus's main works in a good translation and, at the beginning, offers a fine introduction to Maximus's life and times. Fr. Louth gives an excellent account of the Neo-Chalcedonianism of Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. It was a of refinement of fifth-century Chalcedonianism (451). Justinian was trying to tweak it so that he could bring the Syriac and the Palestinian churches under the same umbrella as the church in Constantinople, while reconciling himself with the popes in Rome. Fr. Louth sets the scene for the disputes that Maximus, in the middle of the seventh century, was trying to settle in his works and in his outspokenness against the Empire and the Court of Constantinople.
"For Maximus, the earthly liturgy is a reflection of the contemporaneous celestial liturgy. Moreover, the liturgy is crucial because it underpins the cosmic unity or mystery."
The texts selected in Fr. Andrew Louth’s volume come mainly from the Ambigua. What are Maximus’s other main works?
The Ambigua (On Difficulties in the Church Fathers) addresses ambiguous passages from the writings of earlier theologians, mostly Gregory of Nazianzus (also called Gregory the Theologian). The work is addressed to John, a friend of Maximus. It is considered his main work and now there is Fr. Nicholas Constas’s new integral translation with the Greek beside it (vol. 1) (vol. 2). This is very helpful if you know some Greek. Sometimes I feel that you need to understand the Greek to be able to understand the English.
Mostly, the Ambigua deals with passages from Gregory of Nazianzus. In the sixth century, some had been using Gregory to defend Origen, so Maximus wanted to clear up some potential misunderstandings of Gregory the Theologian. Maximus did not want him to be labelled an Origenist. The main focus of this effort is Ambigua 7.
After the Ambigua, the Mystagogia, his commentary on the Byzantine liturgy, is a very important work. It gives a sense of his eschatology. It also explains the importance of understanding the liturgy properly and performing it correctly for the unity of the cosmos. For Maximus, the earthly liturgy is a reflection of the contemporaneous celestial liturgy. Moreover, the liturgy is crucial because it underpins the cosmic unity or mystery. So, for Maximus, the liturgy celebrated every day in churches throughout the empire, whether in Greek or Latin, had to be understood and to be performed properly.
Like earlier preachers, such as St. John Chrysostom, he divides the liturgy into the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and goes through each part. He explains how the catechumens must go outside after the Liturgy of the Word: they cannot participate in the Liturgy of the Eucharist until they are baptised. He explains why the bishop and the clergy are separated from the people in the nave. The whole work is very interesting because the Orthodox liturgy has not changed that much since then. The Mystagogia is still very useful for understanding the current Orthodox liturgies.
Third, there are the Centuries on Love. This is probably my favourite of Maximus’s works.
The Ad Thalassium addresses difficult passages, not of the Cappadocians, but of other authors.
Some of Maximus’s letters are very important for understanding how he thought about the Jews. He was anti-Semitic, like most Christians of his day, and he was opposed to forced baptism of Jews by the emperor. He also writes about Muslims or followers of the Prophet, whom he called wolves of Arabia, and the emperors Heraclius and Constans (he did not write flatteringly about them either). Some of these letters give a real sense of his personality. Unfortunately, a complete English translation is still not available but Jordan Daniel Wood is working on one. There is a complete French translation.
2.
Your second book is neither a study on St. Maximus nor an anthology of his writings. It is an introduction to the three fourth-century Church Fathers known as the Cappadocians: St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus. Some of Maximus’s major works, are largely dedicated to clarifying difficult passages in the writings of St. Gregory of Nazianzus. By recommending this book, are you indicating that we need to know the thought of the Cappadocians to understand Maximus?
Yes, that's right. That is why I have chosen Anthony Meredith's beautifully written book on the Cappadocians.
Their thought is just as dense as that of Maximus. There are differences between the three although they all influenced each other. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa also influenced Evagrius, their disciple. He was accused of Origenism.
The three Cappadocians encapsulate what Origenism had to offer, when one does not accept Origen’s unorthodox beliefs, and how it would be taken up in the monastic movement by Evagrius of Pontus, a highly influential monastic writer. These three thinkers are foundational and had a great impact on Maximus, who befriends them through their works. They are friends that he knows very well.
Anthony Meredith's book deals mostly with spiritual anthropology: the relationships of humans with the Creator and the rest of creation.
Maximus did not just take from the Cappadocians ideas that he agreed with, but also discussed those that he considered not quite right. The idea of universal restoration (apocatastasis) is treated here. It came from Origen and was taken up by Gregory of Nyssa. It was also very important to Maximus, although he did not want to speculate very much about the end days and who would or would not be saved.
Judging by the Ambigua St. Gregory of Nazianzus seems to have influenced Maximus far more than the other Cappadocians.
Yes mainly Gregory of Nazianzus. However, all three Cappadocians appear in Maximus’s works, along with other great fourth-century Church Fathers, such as Cyril of Alexandria.
As I just mentioned, Gregory of Nyssa supported the concept of universal restoration or apocatastasis: the idea that all creation, even the devil, will be brought back into harmony with God. Maximus seem to have thought that if even one soul was left unsaved, then, the economy of divine salvation would have failed. Hence, even the devil and his demons would have to be voluntarily reconciled. So, Gregory of Nyssa, though not spoken of as much as Gregory of Nazianzus, is also very influential on Maximus.
In the Ambigua, Maximus also sets about clarifying some difficult passages in Pseudo-Dionysius. Is the Areopagite another major influence on Maximus?
Yes, he was a strong influence. We do not have very much information about the actual writer. His pseudonym, Dionysius the Areopagite, comes from the Acts of the Apostles. However, this writer was a Neoplatonist who believed that spiritual truths exist in a hierarchy and that one needs to be purified to understand them. He linked this hierarchy of contemplation with nature, its principles, and the contemplation of spiritual realities, not just those of this world, but also those of the next, the hierarchy of heavenly beings in the Church. This idea is similar to that of the cosmic liturgy. There was a hierarchy of contemplation going on. God has ordained a hierarchy of heavenly beings in the Church. Starting with the angels and the saints at the top, it goes down through the different levels of clergy to the ordinary believers.
Pseudo-Dionysius also underlines the difference between the apophatic—what we cannot know or say about God with any certainty—and the cataphatic, namely, the attempt to describe God in human terms by way of analogies. Such analogies which always fall short of the truth. We humans can never fully understand God. We cannot fully know the divine until we are united with God after death.
For Pseudo-Dionysius, it is all very well to make statements about God in theology, but cataphatic statements are limited to affirming certain things of God: God is good, all-powerful, compassionate, merciful, judge, and such like. They always fall short because the human idea of a judge or giver of mercy will never fully encapsulate the truth of God. Apophasis consists in admitting that our idea of God as judge is wrong. Quite simply, God is not a judge as we understand it, nor merciful as we understand it. We cannot fully comprehend how God is either of these things or both at once. The distinction between the apophatic and the cataphatic is an important one. I find it quite profound to recognise the limits of human comprehension of the divine.
3.
Next up, is your own edition of Anastasius Bibliothecarius’s hagiographic writings on Maximus and Pope Martin I. What can the reader learn about Maximus from this book?
The lives of the saints, or hagiography, usually start with formulaic accounts of the saint’s early years. In the Life of Maximus, this part is all made-up. The author did not know the young Maximus but claims that, as a child, he would not play with toys like the other children did but only wanted to read books, mostly theological ones, and that sort of thing. So, we need to take hagiography with a grain of salt. It is a genre, with its own rules and its own rhetoric.
These texts are not just about one saint. They are a commemoration of both Maximus and his friend, Pope Martin I. We are not entirely sure that they met, and their friendship may just have been epistolary rather than face to face. It is not definite that Maximus went to Rome during the Lateran Synod of 649. However, it seems likely that his friends, the two Anastasius, were there.
Both Maximus and Martin were exiled and imprisoned for their opposition to Monothelitism. Maximus was sent to Lazica, which is in modern Georgia; Martin went to the Caucasus or Cherson, on the Crimean peninsula. They were not in contact during their final years. However, the same people were writing about them and celebrating their resistance to the Imperial doctrine of Monothelitism and Monoenergism. Their supporters wrote this commemoration and a record of the trial of Maximus in Constantinople in 655. This purports to be a verbatim record of what happened when Maximus went before the emperor, the patriarch, and other members of the court in Constantinople, before his first exile. He was accused of treason, as was Pope Martin. They were both exiled and died in exile.
Maximus is called a confessor because he confessed his faith right up to his death and was mistreated for it. This account gives us a concrete idea of what it was like to be imprisoned in Constantinople for years.
It also gives us an idea of the supporters of Maximus and Martin. There were three popes among them: John, Theodore, and Martin. There was Anastasius Apocrisarius, a papal messenger from Rome to Constantinople. There was Anastasius the monk. There were the brothers, Theodore and Euprepius, who visited Maximus in his exile. Theodosius of Gangra was another supporter. He collected the letters they wrote during their exile in the Narrationes and several appended documents: the Relatio motionis and the Hypomnestikon among them. These give the historical setting of the trials of Maximus and Martin. They reveal the human cost of opposing the Emperor and being exiled from the empire under armed guard.
Maximus is called a confessor because, at least according to the traditional account, he was tortured after the second trial. He had his tongue and his hand cut off. Historically, is that the case?
That is a moot point. Many believe this to be the case. According to one account, that is what happened. However, it appears to allege that Anastasius Apocrisarius was also there and had his hand amputated, even though he was already in exile somewhere else at the time. Possibly, there was only one Anastasius with Maximus, but, in the telling, the story was extended to both Anastasius.
The idea was that Maximus could no longer speak against the emperor because his tongue had been cut off; no longer write against the emperor, because his hand had been amputated. However, Theodosius of Gangra tells us that Anastasius Apocrisarius attached a reed to the stump of his hand after it had been cut off and was able to write that way. It is difficult to say whether Maximus suffered this punishment. Such a punishment was in use at the time in Byzantium. I believe that the story arose as part of Maximus's commemoration. It was also recounted that lights came on at his tomb every year on 10 August, the date of his death, as if they were bearing witness to his status as a confessor. It is a very evocative legend.
4.
The next book is by a renowned scholar of Maximus, Paul Blowers, and proposes an overview of the saint’s life and thought. For Blowers, one of Maximus’s central teachings is that the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus are meant to save not just man but the entire cosmos, and that this transfiguration of the whole world is accomplished above all in the liturgy. Why have you selected this book?I am a big fan of Paul Blowers's work on Maximus. Following Maximus, Blowers takes the transfiguration of Jesus as a model or paradigm for God’s revelation to humanity through the Incarnation. As he notes, whereas Evagrius and Dionysius focused on how Moses, hidden in a cleft on Mount Sinai, saw God’s back, Maximus, like Origen, takes the Transfiguration of Jesus as the paradigm for divine revelation. The Transfiguration is the paradigmatic theophany. In it, Jesus appeared to several disciples at once, surrounded by brilliant light, and this sight changed their lives forever. It too took place on a mountain.
This act of seeing Jesus as the Christ can help us understand the full implications of divinization for Maximus. As he put it once, God became man, that humans might become gods. That sounds a bit shocking. He did not mean that there is more than one God but that we can be divinised, made like God, and joined in union with him through the contemplation of spiritual truths and realities. For Maximus, accepting Jesus as Lord, along with the truth about his two natures and will, was all part of deification.
Blowers offers one reading of Maximus. Does he identify all of Maximus's main doctoral concerns correctly, or are there some missing from his survey?
No one person could cover them all. As you say, there are different readings. However, he is spot on in his discussion of the texts from Maximus that he uses. He tends to side with those who accept the Syriac life as being the more authentic. However, we need to take both lives, the Greek and the Syriac, into consideration.
Blowers devotes a few pages to the doctrine of universal restoration, the belief that God will bring all of creation into harmony with the Kingdom of heaven. In my view, this is one of the key ideas behind Maximus’s theology of theosis, even if he only mentions it a few times. He expresses reservations about speaking of it out loud, because it tends to be a polarising doctrine. The idea of universal restoration did not sit well with most people.
Maximus identifies five divisions or ruptures in creation that need to be reconciled for the Kingdom of Heaven to come in full: the division between male and female; spirit and matter; that which is perceived by the mind and that which is perceived by the senses (or the spiritual versus the physical); heaven or paradise and the earth or inhabited world; uncreated nature and the universal created nature. Maximus believed that these five things were reconciled by Jesus but would be fully reconciled at the end of time. I would love to read a book on all of that.
5.
In Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity, Phil Booth looks at Maximus and two of his contemporaries, John Moschus and Sophronius of Jerusalem. He considers how they transformed the ecclesiology of the period. They argued that the Eucharist is the unifying pole of the Church and of monastic life. They also insisted that doctrinal exactitude (akribeia) trumps imperially imposed and politically expedient accommodation (oikonomia). Have you recommended this book because, unless we understand the historical context in which Maximus writes, we are likely to miss the thrust of his works?
That is exactly why I like this book so much. Crisis of Empire talks about doctrine and dissent: not just those of Maximus, but also those of his teacher, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Sophronius's disciple, John Moschus. John Moschus was a monk and wrote The Spiritual Meadow, which is also worth reading.
Phil Booth does a good job of bringing out how Maximus was not just arguing pedantically about the finer points of theology, such as the number of wills in Jesus. Maximus really believed that doctrinal exactitude has cosmic implications and that getting doctrine wrong would be catastrophic. For Maximus, governments cannot come along and arbitrarily impose a formula, such as Monothelitism or Monoenergism, without being made aware of the implications this has for our relationship with God through Jesus. It has huge implications for the economy of salvation.
Booth is also good at highlighting the networks that Maximus and the others had. None of them operated as sole actors. They were in conversation with other people and moving around the empire, from Constantinople to Palestine and North Africa. In fact, Sophronius went on a long pilgrimage with his companion John the Monk, from the Holy Mountain, Athos, to Constantinople. William Dalrymple has written a wonderful book, From the Holy Mountain, about their journey and how he followed in their footsteps in today’s world. An interesting look at the terrain and the politics these days, it compares these with what was going in the seventh century for Maximus, John Moschus, and Sophronius. The latter two were just as important as Maximus in their own day and are worth reading alongside his works.
If I have understood Booth correctly, he is getting at how Maximus, Moschus, and Sophronius are opposing Caesaropapism that we associate with Eusebius of Caesarea.
Caesaropapism is a term that is not used anymore to describe how the emperor headed the Church and the empire. It is now recognised that he was doing the bidding of rival Church leaders or factions.
I would probably say that Maximus was not trying to improve on Eusebius. Rather, he understood the spiritual implications of doctrinal accuracy better than Eusebius did. He was concerned that Constantinople should listen to Rome on this question. That Constantinople would be in such disagreement with Rome that it would not even consult the pope before introducing these ideas was a new thing. Pope Honorius was partly responsible for the term ‘one will’. He used that term in a letter to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople. However, it was not his intention to start a whole new heresy. He was just trying to accommodate his fellow bishop in Constantinople. However, the emperor and Sergius got it into their heads that this was something everybody would sign up to. However, they had not counted on Maximus and the other vocal opponents. Unfortunately, the genie was already out of the bottle, and they could not put it back in. So, this event had catastrophic repercussions on the relationship between Rome and Constantinople and led to them breaking communion with each other. That is another reason that Maximus is popular in both the West and the East. The Church is working towards healing the schism and the Patriarch of Constantinople has done very important work towards healing it, but those resistant to unification believe that Maximus was standing up for Rome against Constantinople. That is an oversimplification.
