St. Maximos the Confessor passed away on this day in 662 For the Eastern Roman Empire, the political consequences of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which took place in Chalcedon in 451, were much more tangible than after the great split of 1054. The overwhelming majority of Egyptian Christians rejected the council in Chalcedon. Therefore restoration of religious unity preoccupied such great emperors as Justinian (482–565) and Heraklios (r. 610–641). In 627, Heraklios once and for all defeated the sworn enemy of the Romans: the Persians. However, in less than ten years, he had to deal with the new and more powerful enemy. Around 622, Muhammad united the residents of the Arabic peninsula into one Islamic nation (Ummah Wāhidah), and in his so-called conquest hadith (a saying), Muhammad predicted, “Verily, you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful army will that army be, and what a wonderful commander will that conqueror be.” As early as August of 636, the Romans suffered a devastating defeat at the River Yarmouk in Syria from a people they previously had considered primitive camel herders. Following the battle, the province of Syria with Damascus was surrendered to the Rashidun Caliphate. And in a few years, Byzantine Armenia fell, and then Egypt and Palestine. The population often welcomed Islamic rule, expecting alleviation from taxation for Constantinople and an end to the imposition of Imperial Orthodoxy. In November 636, St. Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, negotiated the city’s surrender directly with Caliph Umar. Thus, the world in which the great teacher of the Orthodox Church, monk Maximos (c. 580–662), lived, was very different from the recently homogeneous world of the Roman Empire. Similarly as in today’s world, Orthodox in this new environment had to foster an identity based on partaking in the same theology rather than sharing the same imperial identity. St. Maximos received his monastic formation in the Judean desert along with St. John Moschos and St. Sophronios of Jerusalem. All of them opposed imperial attempts leading to reconciliation with the Monophysites through the promotion of the doctrines of Monoenergism and Monothelitism (finally condemned at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 680–681). The newly elected St. Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome, became an ally of St. Maximos against Monothelitism, the teaching that Christ, the God-man, had only a single volition. In 649, both teachings were condemned at the Lateran Council in Rome. In 653, the Byzantine exarch Theodore Kalliops, who was based in Ravenna (central Italy), “kidnapped” Pope Martin from Rome. St. Martin was brutally tried in Constantinople and exiled to the Byzantine ‘Siberia’: Crimea. Next, the Empire accused St. Maximos of collaborating with the Muslim invaders and refuting the Typos (Heraklios’ 648 edict on Monothelitism). The tongues of St. Maximos and his disciple Anastasios were removed and their right arm was cut off so they could not continue persuasively disseminating their sound doctrine. Then, they were exiled to Lazica, in modern-day Abkhazia. Anastasios died in July of 662, and St. Maximos on August 13/26 of the same year. I had never studied St. Maximos, and the three hours of research I did for this post gave me a lot of food for thought. A takeaway is that, for St. Maximos and his associates, the struggle for the purity of Christian doctrine and refusal to commune with the Monotheletist patriarchates (which meant all but Rome) naturally expressed the purity of their highly focused Christian life. St. Maximos was open to dialogue with his opponents and would sometimes win them over. These qualities are, perhaps, something to consider for those who refer to St. Maximos as their point of reference in debating various aspects of Orthodox tradition. Sources: Venning, T., Harris, J. eds. A Chronology of the Byzantine Empire. London: Palgrave MacMillan. 2006. I am grateful to Fr. Demetrios Harper for referring me to this source: Booth, Phil, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Transformation of the Classical Heritage Book 52). University of California Press, 2013. |
