Byzantine Gospel Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship by Fr Aidan Nichols
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Preface ix 1. Background, Life, Work 1 2. Vittorio Croce on Maximus' Theological Method 24 3. Pierre Piret on the Trinity and Christology in Maximus' Thought 64 4. Michel van Esbroeck on Maximus' Mariology 111 5. Lars Thunberg and Alain Riou on World and Church in Maximus 120 6. Lars Thunberg on Maximus' Doctrine of Man 158 7. Juan-Miguel Garrigues on Maximian Soteriology 196 Conclusion 216 Appendix:The Rediscovery of Maximus:A Brief History of Maximian Scholarship 221 Bibliography 253 Index of Names 261 Preface
Blackfriars
Chapter 1:Background, Life, Work
Why does Hussey attach so much weight to the seventh century? In the first place, the rise of Mohammed and the victories of lslam in the south and east contracted the boundaries of Christendom in a dramatic way while also bringing a fresh religious challenge. Secondly, the arrival of the Slavs on the border of Byzantium, and their acceptance of Christianity, brought a compensating 'enlargement and enrichment' to the Christian family. [2] Thirdly, the falling of those great cultural and theological centres of early Christianity Antioch and Alexandria under the Muslim yoke gave a new prominence to the see of Rome, which, with its venerated tombs of the martyr-apostles Peter and Paul was the apostolic see par excellence- as well as to the claims of Constantinople to share in the prerogatives of the 'elder Rome' as Nea Rôma, 'New Rome', Rome redivivus. Fortunately, as Hussey points out, the emperors of Byzantium in this period were of sufficient calibre to rise to the principal demands which a new situation thus placed upon them, above all in the administrative reform of their polity, its institutional reinvigoration. Drawing on traditions both Christian and Roman-imperial, the early Byzantine state
had a capacity to induce respect and even awe which matched the formidable problems - military, administrative
and economic - that faced it in this period. As
But there was, as the same author points out, a 'price to be paid': open criticism of the manner in which the emperor's guidance of the oikoumenê functioned, notably in its most delicate aspect - the religious, was a dangerous proceeding. Not the least of the problems which faced the Byzantine ruling elites at the start
of the seventh century was the continuing crisis over theological doctrine, endemic since the earliest years of
the Christian empire but present in an especially acute form since the Council of Chalcedon, 451, 'unreceived' as this was by the numerous die-hard
Cyrillians, or yet more extreme christological 'high Churchmen': the devotees of the Monophysite movement in Syria, Egypt and Constantinople itself. The
effort to find some doctrinal instrument which would reconcile the Monophysites to Chalcedon, or at any rate would
bring them back into the fold of the imperial Church without alienating Chalcedon's own fervent supporters, not
least in the West, dominated the ecclesiastical policy of the Eastern emperors from the time of Zeno's Henotikon
or 'Proposal for Unity' of 482.
None of the imperial interventions proved lastingly successful - not even the most ambitious of them, the General
Council held under the auspices of Justinian at Constantinople in 553 and subsequently reckoned the Fifth Ecumenical
Council of the Church. Though it condemned certain expressions ofthe (Antiochene) two nature Christology, and emphasised
the hypostatic or personal identity which bound together the humanity of Christ with the eternal being of God the
Word, the Monophysites remained dissatisfied and the separate organisation of their churches gathered momentum.
Meanwhile, a related issue, new to the explicit agenda of doctrinal discussion, at once added fuel to the flames
and also held out some hope, though this would prove deceptive, of ecclesiastical reconciliation.
The chronic problem of the Monophysites was compounded at this juncture by military threat from the Sassanid kingdom of Persia whose forces at one point reached the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. Aware of the close link between Chalcedonian faithfulness and loyalty to the empire, the Persians cannily persecuted Chalcedonians, favoured their Monophysite (and Nestorian) opponents. It was this conjuncture which led the emperor Heraclius, supported by the Constantinopolitan patriarch Sergius, to adopt a policy of conciliating the Monophysites through a doctrinal instrument of concord: the affirmation, as a reconciling article, of a single activity, energeia, in the person of the Word Incarnate. There thus opened a new chapter in the story of the Monophysite crisis. The new situation formed the essential public context of St Maximus' life and work. It will be, then, the subject of the rest of this brief account of the Confessor's Byzantine background. The collaboration of emperor and patriarch is certainly a good example of the Byzantine
notion of symphonia between
empire and Church, translated into action. Their co-operation seemed indeed providential. To contemporaries Heraclius
was the saviour of the empire. The death of Justinian in 565 had been followed by a period of in creasing internal
tension coupled with external threat. The steps taken by Justinian's successor, Maurice, to protect the outlying
territories - for example by organising the remaining Western provinces into exarchates, one based at Ravenna,
the other at Carthage, proved ineffective. In 602, in the course of the failing military effort against the Slays
and Avars, who had crossed the Danube and were both occupying and devastating the Balkan peninsula, the semi-barbarian
Phocas came to power and inaugurated a reign of terror which only embittered groups within - for instance the Monophysites
whom he repressed severely, and emboldened groups without
During the opening years of his patriarchate Sergius was engaged in assessing the strength of support for this policy, and made approaches to bishops in Egypt and Armenia to this end. The formula he hit on first was that of the single energeia, 'operation' or 'activity', of Christ. From information provided by Maximus the Confessor we learn of four letters by Sergius in which he initiated the exposition of the single energeia teaching. The first was addressed to the leader of a small Monophysite body at Alexandria, George Aras, whom Sergius commissioned to find patristic texts relevant to the unique activity of Christ - the context being negotiations taking place at Alexandria with the Monophysite patriarchs of Egypt, Athanasius Gammala, and of Syria, Anastasius Apozygares, under the aegis of the imperial prefect Nicetas. Sergius' second letter was destined for Theodore, bishop of Pharan, near Mount Sinai. By this point, Sergius had come into possession of a most valuable document - the libellus, 'little book', sent, so it was claimed, to pope Vigilius by a predecessor of Sergius, Menas of Constantinople, in which the patriarch mentioned not only Christ's single activity but also his single will. Theodore replied with enthusiastic approbation. (Maximus would report that the defenders of Monoenergism admitted that the articulation oftheir doctrine came largely from Theodore of Pharan.) Sergius' third letter was despatched to the leader of the Cypriot Monophysites, Paul the One-Eyed. Later, Heraclius would send Paul, whom he encountered during his Armenian campaigns, back to his island, with a decree addressed to the archbishop of Cyprus, Arcadius, forbidding all talk of two activities in Christ after the Union. The fourth letter had as its recipient Cyrus, bishop of Phasis, in Lazica. Cyrus did not understand how Heraclius' instructions to archbishop Arcadius were compatible with the Tome of Leo, which had clearly stated that 'each nature does what is proper to it, in communion with the other'; Sergius hoped to send him some more satisfactory explanations. [9] Although Severus of Antioch had explicitly taught Monoenergism, in the course of his rejection of Chalcedon, the notion of reconciling Monoenergism with Chalcedon's Diphysitism was the brain-child of Sergius and Heraclius. It seems likely that the first real theologian of Monoenergism was not so much Sergius as Theodore of Pharan, that Chalcedonian whom Sergius had successfully won over to the new policy. Theodore's doctrine is known only from eleven extracts from writings ascribed to him, ançl discussed both at the Lateran Synod of 649 and the Third Council of Constantinople itself, in 681. In these extracts all of Christ's actions are seen as emanating exclusively from the Word. Though Christ knew the 'natural movements' of his humanity, their exercise, like their cessation, depended on the Word's activity alone. Will is also mentioned, as being single and divine. [10] Hence the names whereby in the history of doctrine these eirenic christological excursions became known: not only Monoenergism but also Monothelitism, the teaching on the single will. Theodore was not foolish: as W. Elert pointed out, prima facie, the literary image of Christ presented by the Gospels appeared to be taken with greater seriousness as a christological norm were the Church to affirm one single activity in Christ. [11] Nor, as the Redemptorist F. X. Murphy and the Benedictine Polycarp Sherwood, in their study of the antecedents of Constantinople III, candidly admit, were Heraclius' doctrinal interventions simply political in motivation. The enduring resistance of such Churchmen as Macanus and Stephen ofAntioch, and Constantine ofApamea, to the final victory of Dyothelitism, as well as the survival of its Monothelite alternative in pockets of Syria and Palestine, suggest that the doctrine eventually dubbed heretical represented an 'original religious position'. [12]
When Cyrus arrived in his city, and, conveniently, his Coptic rival fled, he took the opportunity to publish a 'Pact of Union' to be accepted by all. The Pact condemned any denial that the incarnate Son 'worked both the divine and human by a single theandric activity' - a phrase drawn in part, it would seem, from the recently published writings of the anonymous master who wrote under the name of Denys the Areopagite. [13] Read out from the ambo of the patriarchal church in Alexandria, the Pact was accepted by both parties, and the union sealed with the Eucharist. So Cyrus reported joyfully to Sergius and Heraclius. As luck would have it there arrived in Alexandria at this moment, en route from Carthage to Palestine, the monk Sophronius, whom Maximus had got to know and revere as a master in north Africa, and who would become, eventually, patriarch ofJerusalem. Though a Damascene, Sophronius had become a monk (along with the noted spiritual writer John Moschus) at the monastery of Theodosius, near Jerusalem. Driven out by the advance of the Persians they had fled first to Antioch, then to Egypt, and in 614 to Rome. On Moschus' death in 619, Sophronius returned to the East to bury his friend. He appears to have found things not to his liking, since Maximus' letters indicate that he was shortly back in the West, at Carthage. A second Eastern journey of return brought him to Alexandria, where he was known as the friend of the sainted patriarchJohn the Almsgiver. [14] Learning of the Pact of Union, Sophronius lost no time in denouncing its doctrinal contents to Sergius. Sergius hesitated. To avoid a controversy he temporised and, along with his permanent synod, issued a decree that henceforth neither one activity nor two should be taught, though all the actions of Christ, divine and human, should be ascribed, in conformity to the witness of the Fathers, to the single agent who was our Lord and true God. [15] This text, the Psêphos, committed the church of Constantinople to a christological 'solution' which, as events would show, could gain the lasting support neither of the Latin West nor of many in the Byzantine East. Constantinople's 'Determination' put the emphasis, as one would expect of a Cyrilline Chalcedonianism, on the unitary agency of the Godman in the work of salvation. But it went further. While discountenancing the term 'one activity' as tending to eliminate the distinction of natures, it also frowned upon the phrase 'two activities' as seeming to introduce two opposed wills within the personhood of the Saviour. This option it rejected as impious, affirming instead its opposite: namely, that the Lord's flesh, as animated by his intelligence, did nothing of its own initiative but only when God the Word willed it, and as he willed it. [16]
The Greek version of Honorius' reply survives. It praises Sergius for suppressing vain 'quarrels of words', and uses, commendingly, what would soon be marked out as an heretical expression: 'the single will of the Lord Jesus Christ' [19] But in the context of the pope's references to the Letter to the Romans, with its 'law of the Spirit' and 'law of the members', it seems likely that Honorius was thinking of the moral or spiritual unity of Christ's willing. [20] Though the subsequent arrival of Sophronius' synodal letters reminded Honorius more forcibly of his Leonine inheritance, they do not seem to have modified his basic approval for Sergius' strategy. Meanwhile in 638, shortly before Sophronius' death, a senior bishop of his patriarchate,
Stephen of Dora, with his approval, took an oath at the shrine of Golgotha to journey to Rome, there to secure
the canonical annullment of the new heresy. At the same time, the Arab advances had taken the heart from Heraclius.
Sergius responded by writing, and gaining Heraclius' signature for, an Ekthesisor
'Exposition' of the faith, incorporating the Pséphos
but including also an explicit confession of the Lord's single will.
[21] Affixed to the doors of Hagia
Sophia it was twice synodically approved, once before Sergius' own death in December, and once with the election
of his successor Pyrrhus, who issued an encyclical letter requiring Honorius was already dead, His short-lived successor, Severinus, despatched his apocrisaries to Constantinople but they felt unable to give any assurance about the pope's possible support for the Ekthesis, news of which they brought back with them to the West. Pope John IV, a curial official consecrated in December 640, had, by the time of Heraclius' death in February 641, condemned the Ekthesis synodically and written to the new emperor, Constantine III, at once complaining of Pyrrhus' letter on the 'Exposition', giving an orthodox interpretation of Honorius' notorious slip, and asking the emperor to withdraw all copies of the offending edict. Constantine was probably orthodox, and docile, but his death in May and the ensuring dynastic struggle prevented any coherent imperial action until the accession of Heraclius' grandson, Constans II, in September. Meanwhile Pyrrhus defended Monoenergism zealously, but Constans replaced him with the patriarch Paul, while at Rome John IV himself died, and was succeeded by a Palestinian Greek, pope Theodore. In 645 or 646, as we shall see in the next section, Maximus arrived in Rome, bringing with him the deposed patriarch Pyrrhus, now temporarily returned to orthodoxy - until shortly the exarch of Ravenna, Plato, persuaded him otherwise. So the main figures of the Lateran synod of 649 were in place. [22]
Though the Lateran synod was only a council of the Roman province, its essential inspiration, and theological structure, came from the Greek East. [24] Not only were its Acta in Greek as well as Latin; the Latin is hardly more than a translation of the Greek. With the exception of some materials from North Africa, its patristic documentation was entirely Greek. The explanation must be sought in the role at the synod of Greek (and other Oriental) monks, resident at Rome (as elsewhere in the West) , [25] and, above all, of the personal contribution of Maximus - who, however, appears only once under his own name, among the last of the signatories of the formal complaint against the Byzantine authorities. Called by E. Caspar a 'battle-synod', Kampfsynode, [26] its effect was to encourager les autres- the orthodox groupings in the East Roman world. Pope Martin made great efforts to disseminate its decisions: by letter to Sigebert, king of the Franks, and to bishops in the new mission lands of the Low Countries; by envoy to Africa and Palestine; and, most perilous proceeding, to the imperial court-where the papal brief ascribed the Typos calamity exclusively to the patriarch Paul. [27] Murphy and Sherwood wrote finely of it:
For Constans could admit no threat to his policy. On 17th June 653 he had Martin arrested, by the hand of the exarch of Ravenna, in the Lateran basilica itself. Tried in Constantinople in December on the charge of high treason (all discussion of religion being non-admissible), he was exiled to the Chersonese, in the Crimea, where he died on 16th September 655. He thus outlived Paul, who expired before Christmas 653, and Pyrrhus, who was restored to his patriarchal seat but died likewise in June 654. After the formal condemnation of Martin, however, the emperor sought no further formal act of adhesion by the Papacy to the Typos. Nonetheless in May 655, as we shall discover, the trial of the chief theological instigator of the Lateran synod, Maximus, and of his disciple, Anastasius, at last began. The broader context to Maximus' life is, then, what Haldon has termed an argument
of the State with 'the articulate and literate opposition', centred as that was on the Italian and African clergy, and notably those close to pope
Martin, St Maximus, and the organisers of the Lateran synod. [29] As the trial accounts make clear, it amounted to a public debate about the sources of authority
within the Empire - a foretaste of the more widespread and embittered, yet fundamentally similar debate of the
Iconoclast crisis a few generations later. Yet, as this historian points out, the icons, and the saints themselves,
had already begun to appear, in Maximus' own period, more desirable ways of access to the holy, more reliable mediations
of God in Christ, than the 'Christ-loving' emperor. [30] In this perspective
it is, he thinks, significant that the most telling charge the Confessor's own enemies brought against him was
not his opposition to the imperial court, but rather the slur-credited, apparently, among the soldiery- that he
had spoken slightingly of Mary of Nazareth, the Queen of heaven. We shall return to that motif in the course of
this study. On this version: Maximus was born, in c. 580, to a Constantinopolitan family. From the extent of his familiarity not only with Scripture and such Christian theologians as Origen and the Cappadocians but also with philosophical writers, and notably Aristotle, Plato, lamblichus and Proclus, he would appear to have enjoyed the kind of broad humanist education for which the great city was renowned. While still relatively young, he became 'protosecretary' at the court of the emperor Heraclius, who began to reign in 610 - though the date and significance of Maximus' appointment are still disputed. [33] From the continued part he played in official society after his entry into monastic life it has been suggested that his family belonged to an inner circle which provided the Byzantine capital with its intellectual and bureaucratic cadres.
Probably in 626, when not only the Persians but also the Avars and Slays were converging upon Constantinople and its environs, Maximus (together with many other Greeks) departed into exile. It is conjectured, on the basis of slightish evidence, that he spent periods in Crete and Cyprus. [38] He arrived in North Africa, home to numerous Byzantines since the reconquest under Justinian, in about 628. At Carthage, he probably occupied the monastery called 'Euchratas' which had as its abbot the erstwhile companion of John Moschus, Sophronius, who in 633 would become the first Chalcedonian to combat the rise of the Monoenergist teaching. This encounter was crucial for Maximus' awareness of the fresh challenge to orthodoxy: new, yet in many respects comparable with the 'moderate' Monophysitism of Severus of Antioch. Though at first feeling the pain of exile very acutely, as letters to the bishop of Cyzicus testify, [39] Maximus came to regard his exile as a permanent state of affairs - though this is it was not to be, thanks to his developing rOle in the empire-wide dispute about both Monothelitism and Monoenergism which henceforth constituted the sole axis of his literary work. There can be little doubt that Maximus made his mark in Africa, enjoying good relations with the imperial governors Peter the Illustrious and George. [40] Yet such friendships had their perils. The wealth of the province of Africa made it is a possible launching-pad for a coupd'état (as with the two Heraclii), while Maximus' very success in winning the support of the African church for his criticisms of the empire's religious policy (testified by the councils condemning Monothelitism which met locally after 646) testified to its ripeness for religious revolt. It cannot entirely be ruled out that Peter, strategos of Numidia, and George, prefect ofAfrica, had it in mind to make use of Maximus' name and prestige in their own politickings vis-à-vis the Byzantine state. [41]
The second signal event was, of course, the Lateran synod of 649 at which, as we have seen, Maximus was extraordinarily influential even though not necessarily physically present at its sessions. [44] While Maximus' rôle at the synod must be ascribed to the quality of his own teaching and personality, he may also have profited from the prestige enjoyed by Greek exiles in the West. The emperor, Constans, reacted sharply to the Lateran synod's anathematisation of both Monothelitism and Monoenergism. But owing to the sympathy for pope and synod of the Byzantine exarch in Italy neither the pope nor Maximus were actually arrested until 653. [45] The trial of Maximus was delayed until the spring of 655, and ended inconclusively, as the imperial authorities were unable to prove either main charge against him. These were, that he had conspired treasonably against the emperor, and that his refusal to communicate with the church of Constantinople was both an ecclesiastical and a civil delict. [46] Sent into temporary exile at Bizia in Thrace, an attempt to convince him of the error of his ways, made by a court bishop, Theodosius, failed abjectly, but has left an important record in the Disputatio byzica. [47] Summoned to the capital, he was tempted to surrender to the will of the emperor but finally refused, and was sent back to Thrace, this time to another location, Perberis, for six years. In 662 an overtly Monothelite council at Constantinople anathematised him in his presence, and that of his disciples. Condemned to mutilation, his tongue, by which he had confessed the two wills and energies of the Redeemer, and his right hand, with which he had refused to sign a compromise statement of doctrine, were cut off. He was exiled to Lazica on the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea, where he died on 13th August 662- a date which is kept liturgically in his honour in both Eastern and Western traditions. [48] As the Swedish Maximian scholar Lars Thunberg put it:
The American historian of doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan, commented:
The doctrine for which he died may seem narrow or technical; the occasion of his martyrdom not especially momentous. Yet the doyen of historians of Byzantine theology,John Meyendorffy could write:
From the same 'monastic' period come several works of an ascetic-spiritual kind, works with which, until this century, Maximus' reputation was mainly bound up. Notable here are the Liber asceticus or 'Ascetic Discourse', and the Capitula caritatis Centuriae de Caritate, the 'Chapters' or 'Centuries' on charity-so called because what Maximus has to say is arranged in one hundred points at a time. The first of these, the Ascetic Discourse, [56] takes the classic literary form of the dialogue; the second is a collection of apophthegms, or pithy sayings, originally a Stoic genre but launched on its Christian history by Evagrius of Pontus - to whose ideas on holy living these 'Chapters' are also indebted for their content. [57] Even more striking in its debt to that earlier master with an over-clouded reputation is another work, somewhat later, in the same genre - the Capitula gnostica or 'Gnostic Centuries',whose alternative title gives a better idea of their content. [58] The Capitula theologica et economica, 'The Chapters on the Theology and Economy', are not, of course, an early expression of the 'social Gospel' but a series of reflections on God in himself ('Theology') and in his self-disclosure for man's salvation ('Economy'). Both works exhibit Maximus' habit of drawing into a greater synthesis the contributions of his predecessors - having eliminated from the work of the former any elements which were ambiguous or even erroneous.
We have already seen how Maximus' respect for the writings of Denys the Areopagite
led him to refer to that unknown figure as 'holy father Denys', placing him, in the title of the Book of Ambiguities, on the same level as St Gregory Nazianzen, in the Greek church 'Gregory the Theologian'. Maximus' enthusiasm for the corpus Dionysiacum led him, at roughly the same
epoch as the production of his biblical commentaries, to write the Mystagogia - an exercise in liturgical exegesis, a commentary on the rites of the Eucharistic liturgy
in its architectural setting. This would remain not only one of the most crafted of his works (which are, in general,
lacking in literary workmanship), but one of the most popular in later Byzantine readership. [65]
2. lbid., p. 10. 3. J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century. The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge 1990), p. 23. 4. lbid., p. 13. 5. F. X. Murphy. C. Ss. R.. - P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III (Paris 1973), pp. 136-137. 6. lbid., p. 138. 7. lbid., p. 139-140. 8. The whole story has never been better told than by W. H. C. Frend in his The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge 1972). 9. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R., - P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III (Paris 10. Ibid., pp. 143-145. The texts are given in Mansi XI, 568B-569E and 572A. For an attempted reconstruction ofTheodore's fuller identity, thoughtand significance. see W. Elert, Der Ausgang der altkirchlichen Christologie (Berlin 1957). 11. Ibid., pp. 11,224. 12. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R., P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III op. cit., p. 136.
14. On Sophronius and his teaching, see C. von Schônborn, Sophrone de Jérusalem. Vie monastique et Confession dogmatique (Paris 1972). 15. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R.,-P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople
II et III op. cit., pp. 151-152. 17. L. Bréhier- R. Aigrain. 'La nouvelle crise religieuse.Juifs. monoénergisme, Islam, 632-639', in idem., Grégoire le Grand, les Etats barbares et la conquête arabe, 590-757 (= A. Fliche et V. Martin [eds.], Histoire de l'Eglise depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours, 5, Paris 1938). 18. Mansi XI, 481E. 19. lbid., 540B; see P. Galtier, 'La première lettre du pape Honorius', Gregorianum 29 (1948), pp. 42-61, and G. Kreuzer, Die Honoriusfrage im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart 1975), pp. 17-57, for studies. 20. F. X. MurphyC. Ss. R. -P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III op. cit., pp. 161-162. 21. Manxi XI, 993E-996C. 22. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R. -P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III op. cit., p. 166. 23. Mansi X, 1029C-1032D. 24. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R. - P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II ci Constantinople IlL op. cit., pp. 178-179. 25. J. M. Sansterre, Les moines grecs et orientaux à Rome aux époques byzantine et carolingienne; milieu du VIe. siècle -fin du IXe.siècle (Brussels 1983). 26. E. Casper, 'Die Lateransynode von 649', Zeitschrift für Kirchengesrhichte 51 (1932), p. 123. 27. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R. -P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople
II et III op. cit., p. 182. 29. J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, op. cit., pp. 365-366. 30. For the title, see 0. Kresten, 'Justinianos I, der "Christusliebende Kaiser", Römische Historische Mitteilungen 21(1979), pp 83-109; and for the image of the emperor, H. Hunger (ed), Dos byzantinische Herrscherbild (Darmstadt 1975). On the role of the emperor in East Roman Christendom, see A. Nichols, O.P., Rome and the Eastern Churches. A Study in Schism (Edinburgh 1992), pp. 133-151. 31.R Devréesse, 'La vie de saint Maxime le Confesseur et ses récensions', Analecta Bollandiana 46 (1928), pp. 5-49. 32. S. P. Brock, 'An Early Life of Maximus the Confessor', ibid. 91(1972), pp. 299- 33. W. Lackner, 'Der Amtstitel Maximos des Bekenners', Jahrbuch der Oesterreichischen Byzantinistik 20 (1971), pp. 64-65. 34.In his Acta, his signature to the Lateran council and his inscription to most of his works, he appears as simply 'monk' V. Grumel, 'Notes d'histoire et de chronologie sur la vie de Saint Maxime le Confesseur', Echos d 'Orient 26 (1927), p. 32. 35. Epistle 2 (PG 91, 392-408). 36. PG 90, 72D-73A. 37. L. Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator. The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund 1965), p.4. 38. P. Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List
of the Works of Maximus the Confessor (Rouse 1952), p.5. 40. P. Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., pp. 49-52. 41. V. Croce, Tradizione e ricerca. Il metodo teologico di san Massimo il Confessore (Milan 1974), p. 11. 42. Disputatio cum Pyrro (PG 91, 287A-354B). 43. F. X. Murphy, C. Ss. R. -P. Sherwood, O.S.B., Constantinople II et III op. cit., pp. 1 66-167. At any rate, Maximus was in Rome by 646, according to the testimony of the Relatio motionis inter Maximum et principes. 44. P. Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, op. cit., p. 20. 45. M. W. Peitz, 'Martin I und Maximus Confessor', Historisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft 38 (1917), pp. 225ff. 46. The trial is described in the Relatio motionis (PG 90, 109C.-129C). 47. PG 90, 136D-172B. 48. J.-M. Garrigues, 'Le martyre de saint Maxime le Confesseur', Revue Thomiste 49. L. Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator. The Theological Anthropology of Moximus the Confessor, op. cit., p. 7. 50. J. Pelikan, 'Introduction', in C. C. Berthold (ed), Maximus the Confessor. Selected Writings (New York 1985), p. 5. 51. J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology. Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York 19792), p. 5. 52. V. Croce, Tradizione e ricerca. Il metodo teologico di san Massimo il Confessore, op. cit., p.8. The 'grand chamberlain' was the senior official in the direct service of the Byzantine emperor, the administrator of his household: J. M. Hussey (ed), The Cambridge Medieval History, IV The Byzantine Empire (Cambridge 1967), II. p. 21. 53. In question here is Ambiguo 6-71 (PG 91, 1061-1417); Ambigua 1-5 come from a somewhat later date, around 634. 54. E.g. 'one sole energy of God and of the saints', in Ambigua 7 (PG 91, 1076CD) 55. E. Jeauneau (ed), Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Johannem, iuxta Johannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretiationem (= Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, 18; Turnhout 1988). 56. PG 90, 912-956. 57. lbid., 960-1080. 58. lbid., 1084-1173. 59. Ibid., 856-872. 60. Ibid., 872-909. 61. Ibid., 244-785; C. Laga - C. Steel (eds.), Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium 1, Quoestiones I-LV (= Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, 7, Turnhour 1980); idem., II, Quaestiones LXI-LXV (= ibid., 22, Turnhout 1990). 62. PG90, 1393-1400. 63. Ibid., 785-856; J. H. Declerk (ed.), Maximi Confessoris Quoestiones et dubia (= Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, 10, Turn hout 1982). 64. Cf. G. Bardy, 'La littérature patristique des 'Quaestiones et responsiones' sur l'Ecriture sainte', Revue Biblique 4l (1933), pp. 205-212; 332-339. 65. PG 91, 657-717; C. C. Sotiropoulos, Hê
Myslagôgia tou hagiou Maximou tou Homologêtou: eisagôgê - keimenon - kritikon hypomnêma
(Athens 1978). For the difficult problem of the authorship of the fragmentary
Scholia on the Dionysian
corpus, ascribed to Maximus, see M. L. Gatti, Massimo il Confessore.
Saggio di bibliografia generale ragionata e contributi per una riconstruzione scientifica del suo pensiero metafisico
e religioso (Milan 1987), pp. 83-86. 67. V. Croce, Tradizione e ricerca, op., p. 12.
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