Legacy and Reception

How the broken confessor of 662 became the vindicated father of 681 — the Sixth Ecumenical Council that defined the two natural wills of Christ that Maximus had died defending, the council’s strange silence about his name, his glorification and feast days, and the relics traditions; and how a theologian little read for twelve centuries became, in the twentieth, the favorite father of the neo-patristic synthesis and the subject of a still-unfolding scholarly renaissance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This section turns from Maximus’s own works and his trial to his afterlife in the Church and in the academy. Two complementary stories are told.

The first is the story of vindication and veneration. Maximus died in exile on August 13, 662, mutilated and condemned as a heretic, his cause apparently lost. Nineteen years later the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), the Sixth Ecumenical Council, condemned monothelitism and defined in Christ two natural wills, the human will “following, and not resisting or struggling, but rather subject to his divine and all-powerful will” — the very doctrine Maximus had confessed. The council also anathematized those it held responsible for the heresy, including Pope Honorius of Rome, a condemnation that remains a live point in Catholic–Orthodox discussion of papal authority. Curiously, the council never named Maximus; the file on the council’s vindication surveys the scholarship on why, together with his glorification, his two feast days (January 21 and the August 13 translation of relics), the relics traditions centered on Tsageri in Georgia, and the meaning of the title “Confessor.”

The second is the story of modern recovery. After centuries in which Maximus was read mostly through the Philokalia and a handful of specialists, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy (1941; revised 1961) reframed him as a creative synthetic genius; Sherwood fixed the chronology of his works; Thunberg, Louth, Blowers, and Törönen built the modern study of his thought; critical editions (the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca and Constas’s Ambigua) put his Greek in reliable form; and Orthodox theology made him the linchpin of the neo-patristic synthesis. The file on the modern revival traces this arc, including Maximus’s use in contemporary debates over ecology and personhood and the controversy stirred by Jordan Daniel Wood’s recent reading.

Section Contents

• Sixth Council Vindication — Constantinople III (680–681): its course, the dyothelite definition (Tanner’s text), the condemnation of Honorius and its competing readings, the council’s silence about Maximus and the scholarship on it, his glorification, feast days, and the relics.
• Modern Revival — the 20th-century renaissance: Balthasar, Sherwood, Thunberg, the Orthodox retrievals, the critical editions, Maximus in contemporary theology, and the Philokalia’s role.

See Also

• Dyothelite Christology — the doctrine the Sixth Council defined
• The Monothelite Controversy — the dispute the council settled
• Trials and Exile — the confession the council vindicated
• The Two-Vitae Problem — the source question behind his biography and cult
• The Ecumenical Councils — the conciliar tradition in the broader guide
• Father of Orthodoxy — a parallel case of conciliar vindication and modern reception

References

• Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
• von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003.
• Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.