The life of St Maximus the Confessor
Rather than retell here the ordeal of his final exile already remembered elsewhere, this day is better kept through the substance of what he spent that ordeal defending: across some ninety works, Maximus built a theology of Christ possessing two complete wills, human and divine, working in harmony rather than one absorbed into the other, a position the imperial church of his own day had outlawed under the name of monotheletism. His major writings, the Ambigua, wrestling with difficult passages in earlier Fathers, and the Mystagogia, an extended meditation on the meaning of the Liturgy, remained standard reading in Eastern monasteries for centuries after his death, alongside a dialogue on the spiritual life composed as a conversation between an abbot and a young monk. Condemned in his own lifetime as a heretic for the very teaching he had spent decades defending, Maximus did not live to see his vindication: nineteen years after his death, the Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in 680 and 681, formally declared that Christ possessed both a human will and a divine will, exactly as Maximus had taught. What the empire had called heresy while he lived, the whole Church confirmed as its own faith once he was gone.
