Maximus the Confessor

Maximus was born around 580; according to his Greek biography he came from Constantinople and served at the imperial court before becoming a monk around 614, though another early account places his birth in Palestine. When the Persians advanced on the capital he took refuge, with other monks, in North Africa, where he spent many years near Carthage.

He became the leading opponent of monothelitism, the imperially favoured teaching that Christ had only one will. At the Lateran Synod of 649, in Rome, he and Pope Martin I won the condemnation of the doctrine. Both were arrested on the emperor’s orders. Maximus was tried at Constantinople, and after years of exile and a second trial, his tongue and right hand were cut off in 662, so that he could no longer speak or write his teaching. He died in exile in the Caucasus that year. His position was vindicated at the council of 680–681.

His works include the Ambigua, on difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus and Dionysius; the Questions to Thalassius; the Mystagogy, on the liturgy; and the Chapters on Love, much of which entered the Philokalia.