A Byzantine monk was condemned for insisting Christ had two wills
Maximus gave up a powerful post at the court of Emperor Heraclius to become a monk, then spent his last decades defying emperors over a single theological point: whether Jesus had a human will as well as a divine one. He died in exile in 662. Within twenty years, a church council declared him right.
Little is certain about his early life. A hostile biography claimed he was born humbly in Palestine, but many scholars doubt it, noting that such a birthplace was a common slur in the 7th century and that his superb education and rise by about thirty to chief secretary of the emperor point to an aristocratic Constantinople upbringing. He left public life for the monastery of Philippicus at Chrysopolis, across the Bosporus, and became its abbot. When the Persians overran Anatolia he fled to a monastery near Carthage, where Saint Sophronius guided his study of Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius.
The dispute, Monothelitism, was a compromise formula backed by Patriarch Sergius I of Constantinople: Christ had two natures but only one, divine, will. Maximus's own friend Pyrrhus, who later became patriarch, supported it. After Pyrrhus was deposed, the two debated publicly before North African bishops, and Pyrrhus conceded. The Lateran Council of 649, attended by 105 bishops, condemned the doctrine, possibly in texts Maximus drafted. For Maximus the stakes were salvation itself: if Christ had not been fully human, humanity could not be fully joined to God, the goal Eastern Christianity calls theosis.
Emperor Constans II supported the one-will view. In 653 Pope Martin I and Maximus were arrested in Rome; Martin died before reaching the capital. Maximus was tried as a heretic in 658 and again in 662, then mutilated so he could neither speak nor write and sent to a fortress in Lazica, in present-day Georgia, dying near Tsageri on 13 August 662.
The Third Council of Constantinople in 680 to 681 affirmed two wills in Christ and cleared him. Honoured as a saint soon after death, he is one of the last figures recognised as a Church Father by both Orthodox and Catholics, and Benedict XVI called him the great Greek doctor of the Church. His grave was found in 2010 and the relics authenticated in 2015.
Source: Maximus the Confessor
