Maximus (d. 662)
Notable Greek theologian and author. He was an intrepid defender of the dyothelete position (‘two wills’ in the incarnate Christ), in defiance of Heraclius and his successors who upheld a monothelete christology; he was finally condemned to mutilation and exile under Constans II, but was posthumously rehabilated at the Council of Constantinople in 680–1. Monotheletes were evidently strong in Syria and Palestine, where literature against the dyotheletes (‘the heresy of Maximus’) was produced; relics of this survive in Syriac, notably a short work by Shemʿun of Qenneshre, preserved in two Chronicles (Michael Rabo, XI.9, and the Chronicle of 1234; parallel FT in Guillaumont); this claims to be based on ‘books of the Maronites’, one of which is an early (hostile) biography, which remarkably states that Maximus originated from Palestine and not Constantinople (as the Greek tradition claimed; the evidence is weighed up by Boudignon).
Sources
- CPG 7688–7721.
- C. Boudignon, ‘Maxime le Confesseur était-il Constantinopolitain?’, in Philomathestatos. Studies in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Texts presented to J. Noret, ed. B. Janssens et al. (OLA 137; 2004), 11–43.
- S. P. Brock, ‘An early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor’, AB 91 (1973), 299–346. (repr. in Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity [1984], ch. XII)
- A. Guillaumont, Les ‘Kephalaia Gnostica’ d’Évagre le Pontique (1962), 176–82.