The life of St Maximos the Greek
When Grand Prince Vasili III of Moscow asked the monastery for a translator, Maximos was sent, though he did not yet know Church Slavonic; he learned it and spent years correcting and translating liturgical and patristic texts for the Russian Church.
His labors brought him into danger rather than honor. He was accused at church councils in 1525 and 1531 of mistranslation, of sorcery, and of disparaging Russian saints, and under the pressure of these trials he admitted to errors in translation and, by several accounts, to drinking more wine than became a monk. He was kept imprisoned for roughly twenty-six years, a good part of it in irons, before being allowed at last to live out his days at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. He reposed there in 1556, still under a cloud that only later generations lifted, recognizing in him a scholar who had given his life to the Church that had wronged him.
