Venerable
Venerable Maximus the Confessor
ок. 580 — 662
Venerable Maximus the Confessor — a leading Byzantine theologian, first secretary of Emperor Heraclius, who became a monk and defended the Orthodox doctrine of Christ's two wills against Monothelitism, for which his tongue and right hand were cut off, and who died in exile.
Venerable Maximus was born in Constantinople around 580 into a noble family and received an excellent education in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, and theology. He served as first secretary to Emperor Heraclius (611–641), but then left his court career for monasticism, being tonsured at the Chrysopolis monastery, where he soon became abbot.
Around 633 he relocated to Alexandria, and thereafter traveled widely as a missionary-theologian through Crete, Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome. He became the chief opponent of Monothelitism (the doctrine of a single will in Christ), publicly disputing Patriarch Pyrrhus of Constantinople in Carthage in 645, and played a key role in the Lateran Council of 649 in Rome, which condemned Monothelitism.
Arrested in 653 for defying imperial church policy, he was tried, and in 662, by imperial order, was mutilated — his tongue was cut out and his right hand severed — to prevent him from further preaching or writing in defense of Orthodox dyothelitism. That same year he died in exile at a remote fortress in Lazica (the Caucasus, modern Georgia). His theological legacy (Christology, ascetics, the Ambigua commentaries) was later fully vindicated: at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680-681), the doctrine of the two wills in Christ was affirmed as Orthodox, and his writings were also cited in defense of icon veneration at the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
His feast is kept on January 21/February 3 (repose) and August 13/26 (translation of relics to Constantinople).