Who Was St. Maximus the Confessor? The Monk Who Defended Christ's Human Will

In 662, or perhaps late 661, an old monk was brought before a church council in Constantinople. He had already spent seven years in exile. This time he was flogged, his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off, and he was sent to Lazica on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He died there on 13 August 662. The Church remembers him as St Maximus the Confessor.

He had refused to agree that Jesus Christ has only one will, a divine one. Maximus insisted that Christ, truly God and truly man, has a divine will and a human will, and that the human will freely follows the divine. Within twenty years of his death the Third Council of Constantinople (680 to 681), the Sixth Ecumenical Council, taught exactly that.

To many readers this sounds like a quarrel over words. This article explains why the Church thought a human will in Christ mattered for our salvation, and it tells Maximus' story honestly, separating what the documents show from what later tradition adds.

In brief

Maximus (c. 580 to 662) was a monk and theologian who became the leading opponent of monoenergism (one "activity" in Christ) and monothelitism (one will in Christ), doctrines promoted by the imperial government to reunite Christians divided since the Council of Chalcedon (451). Building on St Gregory the Theologian's principle that what Christ has not assumed he has not healed, Maximus argued that a Christ without a human will could not heal the human will, where our turning from God began. After Pope Martin I's Lateran Synod of 649 he was arrested, tried in 655, exiled, condemned again around 662, mutilated and banished to Lazica, where he died. The Sixth Ecumenical Council vindicated his teaching without naming him. His later life is well documented by near-contemporary records of his trials and exile. His early life is disputed: the Greek Life, which makes him a Constantinopolitan aristocrat, is no earlier than the late tenth century, while a hostile seventh-century Syriac Life makes him a Palestinian.

Thesis: The documentary record firmly supports the heart of the Church's memory of St Maximus, that he suffered for confessing Christ's human will, and his reasoning shows that the dispute concerned the reality of our salvation, even though much of his traditional early biography rests on late and uncertain sources.

The question: why did one will or two matter?

The Council of Chalcedon confessed one Christ "in two natures", divine and human, united in one person without confusion or separation (see our guide to what Chalcedon actually defined). Many Christians in Egypt and Syria rejected that language, fearing it divided Christ, and for nearly two centuries emperors looked for a formula both sides could accept.

In the 620s and 630s the emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople backed one: Christ has two natures but one activity. Pauline Allen describes monoenergism as a project "with the aim of restoring ecclesiastical unity", since one activity could appeal to Chalcedon's opponents while two natures reassured its defenders.¹ A union on these terms was proclaimed in Alexandria in 633. When talk of "activities" caused trouble, the argument shifted to the will. The Ekthesis, an imperial edict drafted by Sergius and traditionally dated 638 (one recent study argues for 636), forbade talk of one or two activities and confessed one will in Christ. In 648 (or late 647) the Typos, issued in the name of Constans II, simply forbade any mention of one or two activities or wills.²

Behind the politics lay a real question. Christ is one person, the eternal Son: does he will as one subject with one will, or does will belong to a nature, so that the Son, possessing two complete natures, also possesses two wills? Pyrrhus put the monothelite instinct simply: one person who wills implies one will.³ Maximus answered that the capacity to will belongs to a nature, while the way a person uses it is personal. Every human being has a will because he is human, so if the Son truly became human, he took a human will too.

The life, as the documents allow us to tell it

Early years: two very different stories

The traditional account says Maximus was born in Constantinople around 580 into a noble family, served as first secretary to the emperor Heraclius, and left court to become a monk at Chrysopolis across the Bosphorus.⁴ That story comes from the Greek Life of Maximus. A hostile Syriac Life instead makes him a Palestinian, the son of a Samaritan father and a Persian slave woman, who entered the Old Lavra of St Chariton in the Judean desert as a boy. For now, {{debated: where Maximus was born and how he spent his first forty years are genuinely uncertain}}.

What is secure is that he was born in 579 or 580, a date that comes from his own statement at his trial in 655, and that in 617 or 618 he met Anastasius, a monk who became his lifelong disciple.⁵ By 632 his letters place him in North Africa among Greek monks who had fled the Persian invasions, closely associated with Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem and the first prominent opponent of monoenergism.

Africa, Pyrrhus and Rome

Maximus came out openly against the new doctrines around 640. In July 645, at Carthage and in the presence of the exarch Gregory, he debated Pyrrhus, who had been patriarch of Constantinople until his fall in 641. Pyrrhus declared himself persuaded and went to Rome, where he renounced the Ekthesis before Pope Theodore I, though he later returned to monothelitism. Maximus followed him to Rome in 645 or 646.⁶

In October 649 Pope Martin I convened a synod at the Lateran which condemned the Ekthesis and the Typos and anathematized three patriarchs of Constantinople. Following R. Riedinger, scholars have argued that its Acts, though presented as Latin minutes, were composed in Greek beforehand, probably by Maximus and his circle.⁷ Maximus' name appears among the monks who signed a petition in the Acts, though we cannot be certain he attended. The synod met without imperial approval, and Constantinople treated it as defiance.

Arrest, trials and exile

In June 653 Pope Martin was arrested in Rome and taken to Constantinople. He was tried on a charge of conspiring with a rebel governor, condemned to death, and then exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, where he died in 655 (one source gives 656). The Orthodox Church honors him as St Martin the Confessor. Maximus and his disciple were arrested about the same time.⁸

The record of Maximus' first trial in 655 survives. Allen and Neil call these proceedings "show trials", designed to blame the dyothelites for the empire's military disasters.⁹ Maximus was accused of betraying Egypt, Alexandria and Africa to the Arabs, of complicity with a rebellion in Africa, and of opposing the Typos. As Allen and Neil summarize his reply, he argued that the Typos "deprives the creator God of a natural will and activity by silencing all talk of one or two wills or operations, for the sake of arranging peace". He denied that the emperor could define doctrine and said he held no teaching of his own, only the common faith of the Church. He was exiled to Bizya in Thrace.¹⁰

The government kept trying to win him over. In April 658 the patriarch's envoys told him that all five patriarchates, Rome included, were now in communion on a compromise formula, and that he must join them or face death. He refused.¹¹

Around 662 he was condemned again, with his disciple and Anastasius the Apocrisiarius, a former papal representative. {{strong: The near-contemporary sources agree that Maximus was flogged, had his tongue and right hand cut off, and was exiled to Lazica, where he died at a fortress called Schemaris on 13 August 662}}.¹² His disciple died a few weeks earlier. Where Schemaris lay is still debated.¹³

Vindication

The emperor Constantine IV summoned a council to Constantinople, which met from 7 November 680 to 16 September 681.¹⁴ Pope Agatho sent legates and a long letter defending two wills. The council condemned Sergius, Pyrrhus and the other leaders of monothelitism, and also "Honorius who was some time Pope of Old Rome", because his letter to Sergius had confirmed their teaching.¹⁵ Its definition reads:

"we likewise declare that in him are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of the holy Fathers. And these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will."¹⁶

The council never mentioned Maximus or Martin, probably, Allen and Neil suggest, to spare the government embarrassment. {{very-strong: The doctrine for which Maximus suffered became the defined teaching of the Sixth Ecumenical Council within twenty years of his death}}.¹⁷ (On this council's place among the seven, see The Seven Ecumenical Councils: What They Actually Decided.)

What can we actually verify?

(a) Contemporary and near-contemporary evidence

• Maximus' own writings. About fifty letters and many theological works survive. A few carry dates, among them a letter from Carthage in 632 and the Dispute with Pyrrhus, dated July 645.¹⁸
• The exile documents. Seven Greek and Latin texts, edited and translated by Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, cover 653 to 669. The Record of the Trial is "an eyewitness account" of the 655 trial by an unknown author; the record of the 656 debate was written within a year; Maximus' letter to his disciple is dated 19 April 658; the Apocrisiarius' letter dates from just before 666 and Theodore Spudaeus' Commemoration from 668 or 669. Allen judges that they give "a much surer historical footing than do any of the Lives or epitomes".¹⁹ They come from Maximus' friends and are not neutral, but they are close in time, specific and largely consistent.
• Conciliar Acts of the Lateran Synod and the Sixth Council record the doctrines and the condemnations.
• The Syriac Life. This hostile account claims to be written by George (or Gregory) of Resh'aina, a cleric of Patriarch Sophronius, and survives in a late seventh-century manuscript. Its title sets the tone: "The history concerning the wicked Maximus of Palestine who blasphemed against his creator, and whose tongue was cut out."²⁰

(b) Later hagiographical tradition

The Greek Life exists in three recensions. Allen summarizes the current view: "the earliest possible date for the Life in its present forms is the late tenth century". W. Lackner argued persuasively that its account of Maximus' early years was borrowed from a Life of St Theodore the Studite, a ninth-century saint, and the court office it gives Maximus seems to have come into being later.²¹ So {{strong: the familiar picture of Maximus as a Constantinopolitan aristocrat and imperial secretary rests on a source written some three hundred years after his death that partly reused another saint's biography}}.

Should the hostile Syriac Life be trusted instead? Marek Jankowiak and Phil Booth build their chronology on it, calling it "a crucial, and often strikingly accurate, source for the origins and life of Maximus, despite its polemical purpose and content".²² In its favor: Maximus' philosophy fits Alexandria better than Constantinople, his engagement with Origenism fits Palestinian monasticism, and a Palestinian background explains his bond with Sophronius. Against it: it is openly hostile, it skips some forty years of his life, and it makes his ties to senior officials harder to explain. Peter Van Deun and others have been skeptical of it, and Jean-Claude Larchet's earlier work read Maximus' life largely through the Greek tradition.²³ Allen concludes that reconciling the two "poses a serious methodological problem". We do not know where Maximus was born.

(c) Reported miracles

The Apocrisiarius' letter and the Commemoration report miracles at Maximus' tomb, evidence of a local cult within a few years of his death.²⁴ The Church's traditional life adds that three lamps appeared over his grave and burned miraculously, and that many were healed there.²⁵ These are early testimonies to how the faithful honored him. Historical method can neither confirm nor rule them out, so we present them as the Church's memory, not as independently documented events.

Feast days

The Orthodox Church commemorates St Maximus on 21 January and the translation of his relics on 13 August. The Orthodox Church in America notes that 13 August is also the leave-taking of the Transfiguration, which may explain why his main feast is kept in January.²⁶

The Orthodox position: what Maximus taught

The dogma is the Sixth Council's definition: two natural wills and operations in Christ, not opposed, the human following the divine. Maximus' theology, including his account of the "gnomic" will and of deification, is honored as the classic patristic explanation of that dogma, though details of it remain matters of interpretation.

What is not assumed is not healed

Maximus' central argument came from St Gregory the Theologian, who wrote against Apollinarius, who denied that Christ had a human mind: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."²⁷ Maximus applied this to the will. In the Dispute with Pyrrhus he argued: "If Adam ate willingly, then the will is the first thing in us that became subject to passion." If the Word did not take a human will, then "I am not saved, since whatever is not assumed is not saved."²⁸

Put plainly, our deepest sickness lies in what we want and choose, and a Saviour without a human will would leave it untouched. In Maximus' phrase, Christ "in his two natures, wills and operates our salvation".²⁹ He added an argument from the Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit have one will, so will belongs to nature, not person; otherwise there would be three divine wills.³⁰

Natural will and gnomic will

Maximus distinguished the natural will, the God-given capacity to desire life and the good, from the gnomic will, the way we will in our present condition: uncertain, deliberating, liable to error. Ian McFarland explains that these are not two wills; the gnomic will is a mode in which our one natural will operates.³¹ Christ has a fully human natural will, but because his person is the divine Word he does not will by hesitant deliberation; his human will is deified, united with God without ceasing to be human. Maximus leaned on Gregory's line that "His Human Will cannot be opposed to God, seeing it is altogether taken into God", though he lifted it from another context.³² The council echoed this: "his human will, although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved".³³

Gethsemane as Maximus read it

The prayer in the garden was the battleground of the controversy: "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will" (Matthew 26:39, NKJV). The monothelites feared that two wills meant two opposed wills; the Ekthesis warned against confessing "two wills at variance with one another".³⁴

Maximus read the scene differently. The shrinking from death is real and human, and it is not sin, for "nothing that is natural can be opposed to God in any way".³⁵ Then, he says, Christ "straightaway ... set alongside the powerful impulse to flee death the supreme agreement and unity of his human will with the will common to him and the Father", and prayed "Let not my will but yours be done".³⁶ Gethsemane shows a truly human will, feeling the weight of death, freely saying yes to the Father, and that human yes heals Adam's human no. Christ "humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:8, NKJV), and obedience is the act of a will. Catholics share this reading; in a 2008 audience on Maximus, Pope Benedict XVI said, "this is the drama of Gethsemane: not my will but yours."³⁷

Theosis and the wider legacy

Maximus has been called the doctor of deification, the subject of a major study by Larchet.³⁸ In Larchet's summary of a formula Maximus uses many times, "a human being becomes god by grace inasmuch as God has become human".³⁹ The deification of Christ's humanity, including his human will, is the ground of ours. We are united to God by grace, never becoming God by nature, our nature healed and kept, as Christ's human will was deified and remained human. Grace comes first, and the restored human will is invited to cooperate. This is why the will controversy sits at the center of Orthodox spirituality (see What Is Theosis?).

His Ambigua, on difficult passages in St Gregory the Theologian and Dionysius the Areopagite, contain his great reflections on creation and the Incarnation, now in a critical text and English translation by Fr Maximos (Nicholas) Constas.⁴⁰ The Mystagogy interprets the Church's liturgy, and the Four Hundred Chapters on Love gathers sayings on the ascetic life. Place him among the other Fathers in our Church Fathers guide, and follow these doctrines in Doctrine Over Time.

The strongest objections

1. "Maximus proves the papacy" (a Catholic reading)

The objection. Maximus spent years in Rome, worked closely with Popes Theodore and Martin, and wrote strongly about the Roman Church. Around 645 he wrote that Pyrrhus must satisfy "the most blessed pope of the most sacred church of the Romans".⁴¹ Another excerpt, written in Rome after 649, celebrates Rome's preeminence, shown in its unwavering orthodox confession and guaranteed by Christ's promise to St Peter. At the Sixth Council, Pope Agatho's letter set out Rome's faith as the standard. On this reading Maximus already held something like the later Catholic view of papal primacy.

A response. These texts are probably genuine. Some scholars have doubted them because of their strong language, but Jankowiak and Booth note that such praise of Rome "forms part of a wider pattern" in Maximus and his circle.⁴² But he praised Rome for its orthodox confession while it resisted monothelitism, and when Rome changed course he did not follow. Pope Vitalian, elected in 657, did not condemn the Typos and entered communion with Constantinople; in 658 Maximus was told Rome was in communion with the other patriarchates. Allen and Neil suggest that, in dyothelite eyes, Rome may have ceased to represent the "true catholic and apostolic church" as early as Eugenius' pontificate (654).⁴³ Maximus stayed in exile rather than enter that communion. The council that vindicated him condemned a pope, Honorius, and Pope Leo II confirmed it, though Leo stressed Honorius' failure to uphold the apostolic teaching, and Catholic theologians note that Honorius' letters defined nothing for the whole Church. Maximus himself had defended Honorius against the charge of heresy.⁴⁴ Edward Siecienski concludes that Maximus challenges both a Roman view of complete universal jurisdiction and an Orthodox view of a mere "primacy of honour".⁴⁵ That is fair: Orthodox readers should not pretend Maximus was indifferent to Rome. (See also Did the Early Church Believe in Papal Supremacy?)

2. "One incarnate nature, one will" (the Oriental Orthodox view)

The objection. The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara Orthodox churches, which did not accept Chalcedon, keep St Cyril's language of "one nature of the incarnate Logos". Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria drew the conclusion: "Naturally, as long as we consider that this Nature is One, the Will and the Act must also each be one." He adds that sin is a conflict between man's will and God's, and Christ had no sin.⁴⁶ Speaking of two wills, on this view, risks dividing Christ.

A response. Maximus and the Sixth Council agree that Christ's wills never conflict. The question is whether Christ's humanity has its own natural power of willing, which the divine person makes his own. In 1990 at Chambésy the official Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox commission agreed that the Word united to himself "created human nature, which He assumed at the Incarnation and made His own, with its natural will and energy", that the natures with their wills are "distinguished in thought alone", and that "He Who wills and acts is always the one Hypostasis of the Logos incarnate".⁴⁷ That statement has not been fully received; in 1997 the Russian Orthodox Church's Bishops' Council, for example, called for its Christological formulations to be clarified.⁴⁸ Even so, it suggests that much of the old conflict lay in terms, while the Orthodox hold that the language of two natural wills protects what both families want to keep: a real, healed human will in Christ. (Our traditions explorer shows how these churches are related.)

3. "Isn't this just semantics?" (a modern objection)

The objection. Both sides, some suspect, meant much the same thing. Allen notes the argument, made by Richard Price and Phil Booth, that the difference between one and two activities "was more terminological than real". Price goes further, arguing that the monothelites did not deny Christ a human will but declined to count it as a second will, and so should not be branded as departing from orthodoxy.⁴⁹ Why mutilate an old man over vocabulary?

A response. The imperial formulas were political compromises. Cyril Hovorun notes that each side at times used the other's language, yet the real difference was "not so much the language, but the attribution of activities and wills". Maximus attached will to the natures; his opponents attached it to the single willing subject.⁵⁰ If will belongs to the person, the incarnate Son has only the divine will, and the obedience of Gethsemane is not a human act. Banning the question, as the Typos did, did not answer it; Maximus argued that silence about Christ's natural will amounted to denying it. The words carried a reality: whether our human freedom has been taken up, healed and joined to God in Christ.

What we can say confidently

• Monoenergism and monothelitism were imperial formulas of church union, expressed in the union of 633, the Ekthesis and the Typos.
• Maximus debated Pyrrhus at Carthage in July 645 and was closely involved in the Lateran Synod of October 649.
• He was born in 579 or 580, tried in 655, exiled, condemned again around 662, mutilated, and died in Lazica on 13 August 662, all attested by near-contemporary documents.
• The Sixth Ecumenical Council (680 to 681) defined two natural wills and operations in Christ, not opposed, and condemned Pope Honorius among others.
• Maximus' central argument, that what is not assumed is not healed, comes from St Gregory the Theologian.
• The Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 21 January and the translation of his relics on 13 August.

What remains disputed

• Where Maximus was born, how he spent his first forty years, and whether he ever served at court.
• The date of the Ekthesis (638 or 636) and of the second trial (661 or 662).
• How much of the Lateran Acts Maximus wrote, and whether he attended.
• Where Schemaris and his grave lie.
• How his statements about Rome bear on modern Catholic-Orthodox discussion of primacy.
• Whether the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox differ in substance on Christ's wills, or mainly in terms.

Conclusion

We may never know whether Maximus grew up in a Constantinopolitan palace or a Palestinian monastery. The record does show a monk who would not let the Church's confession of Christ be traded for political peace, and who paid with exile, his tongue and his right hand. At his trial he said the teaching was not his own but the common faith of the Church, and within twenty years the Church agreed.

For Orthodox Christians his confession is a comfort: nothing in us is left outside Christ's reach. The Son of God took a human will, felt the fear of death, and freely said to the Father, "not as I will, but as You will". In that human yes our own divided wills are offered healing and union with God. Through the prayers of St Maximus the Confessor, may we learn to say it with him.

Notes

1. Pauline Allen, "Life and Times of Maximus the Confessor," in Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4. ↑
2. Allen, "Life and Times," 4-6 (the Plerophoria of 3 June 633; the traditional date of 638 for the Ekthesis and Marek Jankowiak's argument for 636; the Typos forbidding "any mention of either one or two activities or wills"). Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), introduction §4, give 638 for the Ekthesis and 647/8 for the Typos. ↑
3. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4, citing Dispute with Pyrrhus (PG 91.289A). ↑
4. Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Maximus the Confessor," Lives of the Saints, 21 January (oca.org); Allen, "Life and Times," 13 (the Greek Lives place his "noble origins" in Constantinople). ↑
5. Allen, "Life and Times," 14 (timeline), citing the Record of the Trial in Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, 70-71; Marek Jankowiak and Phil Booth, "A New Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor," in Allen and Neil, eds., Oxford Handbook, 19-83, at 20. ↑
6. Allen, "Life and Times," 6; Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4; Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 21. ↑
7. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §5, summarizing R. Riedinger's studies; Allen, "Life and Times," 6-7. For the Acts in English see Richard Price, trans., with Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt, The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, Translated Texts for Historians 61 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). ↑
8. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7 (death of Martin "either on 16 September 655 or 13 April 656"); Allen, "Life and Times," 8; Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 21 (arrest of Martin in June 653). Feast of St Martin the Confessor on 14 April per the OCA life cited in note 4. ↑
9. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7, following W. Brandes; Allen, "Life and Times," 7. ↑
10. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §§7-8, summarizing Record of the Trial §§1, 2, 9 and the theological sections. ↑
11. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7; Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," entry 74 (Maximus' letter to Anastasius, dated 19 April 658). ↑
12. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7 (mutilation attested in the Dispute at Bizya §17, the Commemoration §4 and the letter of Anastasius §1; death at Schemaris on 13 August 662); Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 21 ("Condemned at a general council in 661 or 662, he was flogged, mutilated and exiled to Lazica"). ↑
13. Allen, "Life and Times," 15 and n. 9, citing the differing proposals of A. Vinogradov (2013) and J.-C. Larchet (2013). ↑
14. Thomas Shahan, "Third Council of Constantinople," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908), newadvent.org. ↑
15. Third Council of Constantinople, Session XIII, trans. Henry Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1900), newadvent.org. ↑
16. Third Council of Constantinople, Definition of Faith, trans. Percival, NPNF2 14. ↑
17. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §9; Allen, "Life and Times," 7. ↑
18. Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 21-22; Allen, "Life and Times," 9. ↑
19. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §6; Allen, "Life and Times," 11-12 (quotation at 12). ↑
20. Sebastian P. Brock, "An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor," Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973): 299-346, at 301, as quoted in Allen, "Life and Times," 13. ↑
21. Allen, "Life and Times," 11 and 13, citing W. Lackner's article on the sources and date of the Greek Life in Analecta Bollandiana 85 (1967), B. Roosen in Byzantion 80 (2010), and Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen, eds. and trans., The Life of Maximus the Confessor: Recension 3, Early Christian Studies 6 (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2003). ↑
22. Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 19. ↑
23. Allen, "Life and Times," 13-14; Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," 19 (on Sherwood and Larchet depending on the Greek hagiographic corpus); Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). ↑
24. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7 (citing the letter of Anastasius §5 and the Commemoration §9). ↑
25. OCA, "Venerable Maximus the Confessor" (note 4). ↑
26. OCA, "Venerable Maximus the Confessor," 21 January; OCA, "Translation of the relics of Saint Maximus the Confessor," Lives of the Saints, 13 August (oca.org). ↑
27. Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101 (to Cledonius), trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894), newadvent.org. ↑
28. Maximus, Dispute with Pyrrhus, PG 91.325A, as translated in Cyril Hovorun, "Maximus, a Cautious Neo-Chalcedonian," in Allen and Neil, eds., Oxford Handbook, 106-24, at 119. ↑
29. Maximus, Dispute with Pyrrhus, PG 91.320C, as rendered in Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4. ↑
30. Ian A. McFarland, "The Theology of the Will," in Allen and Neil, eds., Oxford Handbook, 516-32, at 518 (citing Opuscula 3 and 20). Pope Agatho's letter, read at the Sixth Council, uses the same argument (NPNF2 14). ↑
31. McFarland, "Theology of the Will," 521-22, 525-26. ↑
32. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.12, trans. Browne and Swallow, NPNF2 7, newadvent.org. Maximus cites it in Opusculum 7; Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4, note (following Louth) that he takes it out of its context, where Gregory was answering the Eunomians on the wills of the Father and the Son. ↑
33. Third Council of Constantinople, Definition of Faith, trans. Percival, NPNF2 14. ↑
34. The Ekthesis, trans. Pauline Allen, as quoted in Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4. ↑
35. Maximus, Opusculum 3, trans. Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 194, as quoted in McFarland, "Theology of the Will," 527. ↑
36. Maximus, Opusculum 16, PG 91.197A, as translated in McFarland, "Theology of the Will," 527. ↑
37. Benedict XVI, General Audience on St Maximus the Confessor, 25 June 2008, vatican.va. ↑
38. Jean-Claude Larchet, La divinisation de l'homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur, Cogitatio fidei 194 (Paris: Cerf, 1996). ↑
39. Jean-Claude Larchet, "The Mode of Deification," in Allen and Neil, eds., Oxford Handbook, 341-59, at 344. ↑
40. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, ed. and trans. Nicholas Constas, 2 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28-29 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). ↑
41. Maximus, Opusculum 12 (PG 91.144C), as translated in Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," entry 66. ↑
42. Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," entries 66 and 73 (Opuscula 12 and 11), citing Booth, Crisis of Empire, 269-76. ↑
43. Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §7. ↑
44. Third Council of Constantinople, Session XIII and Definition, NPNF2 14; Shahan, "Third Council of Constantinople" (on Leo II's confirmation in 683, his stress on Honorius' "neglect" to set forth the teaching of the Apostolic See, and J. Chapman's view that Honorius' letters were not ex cathedra). On Maximus' defence of Honorius: Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, introduction §4 (citing Dispute with Pyrrhus, PG 91.328C-332A); Jankowiak and Booth, "New Date-List," entry 66. ↑
45. A. Edward Siecienski, "Maximus the Confessor and Ecumenism," in Allen and Neil, eds., Oxford Handbook, 548-63 (as summarized in the chapter abstract). ↑
46. Pope Shenouda III, The Nature of Christ, ch. 20, "The One Will and the One Act," English text at st-takla.org. ↑
47. Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, "Second Agreed Statement" with Recommendations to the Churches, Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Chambésy, 23-28 September 1990, §§3-5, text at dss-syriacpatriarchate.org. ↑
48. Report of the second meeting of the Joint Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Moscow, 4-6 September 2001, text at syriacorthodoxresources.org. ↑
49. Allen, "Life and Times," 4, citing Richard Price, "Monotheletism: A Heresy or a Form of Words?" Studia Patristica 48 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010): 221-32, and Booth, Crisis of Empire, 218. Price's wider conclusion is summarized from the abstract of his article. ↑
50. Hovorun, "Maximus, a Cautious Neo-Chalcedonian," 119. ↑

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. and trans. Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (Greek and Latin texts from their edition in Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia, CCSG 39, Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.)
• Brock, Sebastian P. "An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor." Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973): 299-346.
• Neil, Bronwen, and Pauline Allen, eds. and trans. The Life of Maximus the Confessor: Recension 3. Early Christian Studies 6. Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2003.
• Maximos the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Edited and translated by Nicholas Constas. 2 vols. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28-29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Price, Richard, trans., with Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt. The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649. Translated Texts for Historians 61. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
• Third Council of Constantinople (680-681). Acts (extracts) and Definition of Faith. Translated by Henry Percival. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1900. Revised edition at newadvent.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101 (to Cledonius) and Oration 30. Translated by Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 7. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Venerable Maximus the Confessor" (21 January) and "Translation of the relics of Saint Maximus the Confessor" (13 August). Lives of the Saints, oca.org.
• Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Larchet, Jean-Claude. La divinisation de l'homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur. Cogitatio fidei 194. Paris: Cerf, 1996.
• Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. "Second Agreed Statement" with Recommendations to the Churches. Chambésy, Switzerland, 23-28 September 1990.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Chapters cited: Pauline Allen, "Life and Times of Maximus the Confessor," 3-18; Marek Jankowiak and Phil Booth, "A New Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor," 19-83; Cyril Hovorun, "Maximus, a Cautious Neo-Chalcedonian," 106-24; Jean-Claude Larchet, "The Mode of Deification," 341-59; Ian A. McFarland, "The Theology of the Will," 516-32; A. Edward Siecienski, "Maximus the Confessor and Ecumenism," 548-63.
• Booth, Phil. Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
• Price, Richard. "Monotheletism: A Heresy or a Form of Words?" In Studia Patristica 48, edited by J. Baun, A. Cameron, M. Edwards and M. Vinzent, 221-32. Leuven: Peeters, 2010.

Sources from the traditions discussed (Catholic and Oriental Orthodox)

• Benedict XVI. General Audience on St Maximus the Confessor, 25 June 2008. vatican.va.
• Shahan, Thomas. "Third Council of Constantinople." In The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. newadvent.org.
• Shenouda III, Pope of Alexandria. The Nature of Christ. Chapter 20, "The One Will and the One Act." English text at st-takla.org.
• Joint Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Report of the second meeting, Moscow, 4-6 September 2001. syriacorthodoxresources.org.