Trials and Exile

The martyrdom-in-confession of St. Maximus the Confessor, reconstructed from the trial documents preserved and translated in Allen and Neil’s Documents from Exile. Tried first on political charges (655), exiled, examined again at Bizya (656), and finally condemned and mutilated (662), Maximus lost his tongue and his right hand for refusing to be silent, and died in exile in the Caucasus on August 13, 662 — vindicated eighteen years later by the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which all the same never spoke his name.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Documents

What is known of Maximus’ trials comes largely from a remarkable dossier of contemporary documents, compiled by his disciples and circulated to keep the orthodox cause alive. The principal text is the Relatio Motionis (“Record of the Proceedings”), an eyewitness account of the first trial of 655; it is supplemented by the Disputation at Bizya (656), letters of Maximus from exile, and the Letter of Anastasius the Apocrisiarius reporting his master’s death. These were edited, translated, and annotated by Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil in Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford 2002), the standard critical collection. The documents are partisan — written by Maximus’ own party — and must be read as such, but they preserve the texture of the proceedings in unusual detail (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, intro; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Routledge 1996, ch. 1).

The First Trial (655): Politics First

Maximus was brought from Rome to Constantinople and tried in 655. According to the Relatio Motionis, the charges were laid as political before they were theological: he was accused of treason — of having, by his influence, helped lose Egypt and North Africa to the Arabs, and of opposing the emperor. Maximus rejected the accusations as slander (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Relatio Motionis; New World Encyclopedia, “Maximus the Confessor,” used to locate the sequence and cross-checked against Allen and Neil).

The order of the charges is itself significant. By indicting Maximus first as a traitor rather than as a heretic, the prosecution sought to frame his resistance as sedition against the state, not fidelity to the faith — to try a confessor as a criminal. The treason charges were lurid: that he had, while in North Africa, encouraged the exarch’s revolt and prophesied or even welcomed the Arab victories. Maximus denied them flatly as fabrications (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Relatio Motionis; the “aiding the Muslim conquests” charge cross-checked against New World Encyclopedia, “Maximus the Confessor”).

When the interrogation turned to the real issue — his refusal to accept the Typos and to commune with the patriarch of Constantinople — Maximus advanced the principle that would define the case: he denied that the emperor possessed any authority to define dogma, holding that defining the faith belongs to the priesthood and the councils, not to the imperial office. To the demand that he submit to the Typos as the emperor’s command, he answered that an imperial edict cannot determine the doctrine of the Church, for the emperor is a layman and the definition of the faith was never given into lay or imperial hands. This refusal struck directly at the Byzantine ideal of the emperor as the guarantor of religious unity, and it is why a question of two wills became, in the courtroom, a question of treason (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Relatio Motionis; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1).

To his examiners’ pressure that the whole imperial Church had now accepted the formula — that all the patriarchs of the East and the see of Rome itself were, or soon would be, in communion on the basis of the Typos — the tradition preserves his most famous reply: that he would not commune with heresy though the entire world should commune with it. The widely circulated wording, “Even if the whole universe holds communion with the Patriarch, I will not commune with him,” derives from the Greek Life of Maximus (The Life of Our Holy Father St. Maximus the Confessor, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1982) and conveys the substance of the trial record, in which Maximus refuses communion with the see of Constantinople so long as it upholds the Typos; the trial documents in Allen and Neil report the same intransigence in the give-and-take of the Relatio, where Maximus repeatedly declines to be moved by the consensus of bishops or the unanimity of the patriarchates, grounding the faith in truth rather than in numbers (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Relatio Motionis). It is one of the boldest assertions in patristic literature that the faith of the Church can, at a given moment, be held by one man against the visible institution — and it has been read ever since as a charter of the conscience bound to the truth. He was sentenced to exile in Bizya, a town in Thrace.

The Bizya Disputation (656)

The state did not give up on persuasion. In late 656 the emperor sent Theodosius, Bishop of Caesarea in Bithynia, accompanied by two patricians (both named Theodosius and Paul in the record), to Bizya to argue Maximus into submission. The Disputation at Bizya records the exchange: Maximus once again confounded his examiners with patristic authority, refused to accept the Typos, and — by the account of his own party — brought Theodosius himself to acknowledge the orthodox position, though the conversion bore no lasting fruit (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Disputation at Bizya; Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Maximus of Constantinople,” used to locate the date and cross-checked against Allen and Neil). Maximus was moved to harsher confinement, and the matter dragged on while the orthodox refused to bend and the empire refused to relent.

The Second Trial and Mutilation (662)

In 662 Maximus, now in his eighties, was brought back to Constantinople with his two disciples for a final trial before a synod. This time the proceeding was framed as ecclesiastical: he was anathematised and condemned as a heretic for his persistent refusal of the imperial doctrine, the political pretext of 655 now dropped in favour of a frank verdict on the faith. The sentence was savage and pointedly symbolic. His tongue was cut out, so that he could no longer speak the confession he would not retract, and his right hand was cut off, so that he could no longer write the letters by which he had rallied the orthodox across the Mediterranean. The body of the man was made to suffer in the very organs of his witness. So the sources report, and the mutilation is the defining image of his martyrdom — the reason the iconography of Maximus so often shows him with hand and tongue (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, intro and Letter of Anastasius; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1; New World Encyclopedia, “Maximus the Confessor,” cross-checked against Allen and Neil). Tradition holds that even after the mutilation Maximus continued, by a miracle, to speak — an account reported as hagiography, pinned to the Life and the testimony of his disciples rather than offered as documented fact (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, intro).

The Two Anastasii

Two disciples named Anastasius shared Maximus’ ordeal, and the sources are careful to distinguish them. Anastasius the Monk (Maximus’ personal disciple) had accompanied him through both trials and into exile. Anastasius the Apocrisiarius had been a papal representative (apocrisiarius) at Constantinople and a fellow confessor; at the trial of 662 he too was condemned and mutilated — his tongue and right hand cut off like his master’s. Both were exiled with Maximus. It is the second Anastasius whose Letter to Theodosius of Gangra, written before his own death in exile on October 11, 666, is the chief source for the final journey and the death of Maximus (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Letter of Anastasius the Apocrisiarius; the same volume, intro).

Exile to Lazica and Death (August 13, 662)

After the mutilation, Maximus and his companions were exiled to the remote region of Lazica (Colchis, on the Black Sea coast of modern Georgia). Maximus was confined in the fortress of Schemaris (Schemarum). There, broken by age, mutilation, and the rigours of the journey and the climate, he reposed on August 13, 662. The Church keeps his memory on January 21, with a second commemoration on August 13, the day of his death (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, Letter of Anastasius; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1). It is from his suffering and steadfast confession under persecution — confessing the faith without being put to the sword — that he bears the title the Confessor (homologētēs).

Vindication at Constantinople III — and a Silence

Eighteen years after Maximus’ death, the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681) defined exactly what he had confessed: two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ, the human will freely subject to the divine (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The council condemned the monothelite teachers Maximus had opposed — Sergius, Cyrus, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter of Constantinople, and Macarius of Antioch — and, in its thirteenth and sixteenth sessions, anathematised Pope Honorius I by name (Council of Constantinople III, sessions XIII and XVI; see Christology, which treats the Honorius case as a datum against papal infallibility).

Yet the council never mentioned Maximus. His theology was adopted almost word for word; his name was passed over in silence. Scholars read the omission as politically prudent: Maximus had been condemned and executed by a still-recent imperial regime, and a council convened by that dynasty’s heir (Constantine IV) had reason to vindicate the doctrine without rehabilitating the person who had defied the throne to defend it (Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, Oxford 2015, “Life and Times”; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1). The vindication of Maximus was therefore real but oblique: the Church received his teaching as dogma and venerated him as a saint and confessor, while the council that proved him right left his name unspoken — a final irony fitting for a man who had insisted that the truth does not depend on who holds it.

References

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. (Includes the Relatio Motionis, the Disputation at Bizya, and the Letter of Anastasius the Apocrisiarius.)
Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
The Life of Our Holy Father St. Maximus the Confessor. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1982. (Source of the widely circulated “whole universe” saying.)
Council of Constantinople III (680–681). Acts, sessions XIII and XVI; Definition. Trans. NPNF II/14 (ed. Percival).