In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, Amen. Today we're here to remember and
honor the glorious Saint Maximus the Confessor.
It is always an awful thing. I use the word awful
in its true sense. Awful, awe -inspiring thing
to think about the saints of the church, whether
they be martyrs or confessors or theologians
or pillars of orthodoxy. They always seem to
be just overwhelming. And perhaps... Nothing
is more true in that when dealing with this great
saint, St. Maximus the Confessor. How can we
possibly boil what he means down in a way that
we can grasp him and grasp him in a way that
his teaching will enlighten us truly. There are
some people, that seem to be miracles, that suddenly,
that they encompass everything that there is
about a language or about a tradition or about
a faith. For example, Shakespeare is a miracle.
Dante is a miracle. They represent in themselves
almost the whole, something whole and complete
of their life and culture just pours out of them
in a way that seems beyond the human. And yet
they are here. And I remember what St. Nikolai
Belomirovich said when he was in England for
a Shakespeare festival and he was asked to give
a talk. And he said, I don't know Shakespeare,
but Shakespeare knows me. He said, everywhere
I turn in Shakespeare, He reveals myself. I see
in him. He's a mirror for me. I think we can
say the same for St. Maximus the Confessor. He
is called the Confessor because toward the end
of his life, he defended the Orthodox tradition
against the last of the Christological heresies,
which is named monothelitism, which is the that
there was only one will in Christ. And that's
why he's called the confessor. If we were listening
to the various songs that were sung about St.
Maximus, we heard that he was in prison. And
if we also listen to the Gospel and the Epistle,
both the Gospel and the Epistle, Actually, the
truth that both of them talked about revealed
what happened in St. Maximus' life. And this
is at the end of his life, in which he was hauled
up before the courts and interrogated and, in
a way, put enormous pressure on him to submit.
And it was unusual. It wasn't just happening
in one place. We're talking about the entire
empire. We're talking about the emperor himself,
the patriarch, all the bishops who had already
been subdued, and then there was Maximus, and
he was not even a clergyman. He was not a bishop,
he was not a priest, he was a monk. But he was
a very famous monk because he was the most profound
teacher. He was a teacher of Orthodox. He had
the heart of the Spirit, as the song says. The
illuminator of our faith. And that had been going
on his whole life. And in a way, you could say
that his whole life was geared for this final
moment. But I think that perhaps the theologians
of today and people of today maybe overemphasize
The last events of his life, because they are
so dramatic, having his, I mean, he was exiled
and he was brought back, and he was exiled again
and brought back, and then finally, in front
of the emperor and the patriarch, he was declared
a traitor, a traitor to the empire. Why? Because
he would not submit, he wouldn't just submit
this one little thing, this one thing that just
had to be changed. Because in those days, The
unity of the empire was ensured by the unity
of faith. And there were divisions in faith that
had come about more or less since the third,
fourth, and fifth ecumenical councils. So that
there was a whole section of the empire that
was no longer really in loyalty with the emperor
because they believed that what happened in the
fourth council was a violation. of their faith.
So there were divisions. And the emperor wanted
the church, wanted the empire to be united, and
in order for it to be united, the faith had to
be united. And it seemed to me, the heart of
the problem was this whole idea of Jesus Christ,
God, and man, two natures. That was where the
problem was. Because the monothelite heresy That
really occurred after the Third Council in St.
Cyril. The Fourth Council was 20 years later,
in 451, the Council of Chalcedon was called in
order to kind of correct that so they would all
be one. And the whole idea of that council was
to provide a way in which we could truly understand
the idea of how it is that God and man... the
divine nature and the human nature are in Christ.
Unfortunately, it didn't happen. It didn't occur
that way and there were divisions. So here we
are now in the 600s. Maximus died in 662. With
Islam, it had just started up because the life
of Saint Maximus and the life of Muhammad are
more or less parallel. Maximus was... born in
580, died in 662, and Muhammad was born in 570
and died in 632. So really, there was parallels.
So the empire was being threatened, deeply threatened,
as they found out later. And part of the idea
was to unite this empire. So if you can imagine
yourself being called up before the President
of the United States, Congress, the Supreme Court,
And you're just one individual. And they're all
saying, you know, we think you're a traitor.
But if you just will, if you will just simply
say, you know, our faith is the same. We're saying
it's yours. Everything is wonderful. If you will
just say that there was just one will in Christ.
That will get those people who believe in one
nature. kind of go along with the idea that,
yes, okay, there's two natures, but really one
will. Well, one will is more or less saying one
nature. So, but Maximus didn't do that. He was
exiled. And they brought him back again. And
they brought in false witnesses and so on. He
defeated all the false witnesses. And he simply
refused To bow. And here comes the point. He
refused to bow. Why? Because he was in the truth.
He knew, he knew, not only in his mind, he knew
in his heart, and he knew by divine vision the
truth. And that was more important than anything.
And that's why he suffered the fate of a traitor.
Which is, if you preach against the kingdom,
your tongue is... is torn out. And if you write
against a traitorous thoughts, your hand is cut
off. And that's what happened. And then he lived
just a few months. But you see, that's not the
whole of St. Maximus. The whole of St. Maximus
is that he lived the truth. He is one of these
people, one of these miracles that sort of comes
forth in which all of the entire Orthodox tradition
from the very beginning. All the currents of
thought. He's like the confluence of all the
rivers of our tradition. And they come together
and make one mighty river which then flows down
to the sea. He's that point of confluence in
which the Gospels, St. Paul, the early files
of the church. Saint Athanasius, the Cappadocians,
Saint Basil and Gregory and the other Gregory,
Dionysius the Areopagite, Cyril of Alexandria,
all of their teachings come together in Maximus.
And by the genius of his mind, he encompassed
and embodied and synthesized all that thought
into a whole and a complete He's the father of
the Byzantine Orthodox tradition. And yet, he
was able in the early part of his life as a monk
to write things that were on love, that were
virtually the equivalent of St. Paul. I mean,
one could say that St. Paul's communion to love
in 1 Corinthians 13 is probably the most beautiful
hymn to love ever written. Well, St. Maximus
wrote what's called Letter 2 on love. And if
you put those two together, he wrote that early
in his life, if you put those two together, it's
almost the same thing. It is almost at that same
level of the sheer glory and beauty and understanding
of love. So, all of his thought I mean, how do
we, how do we encompass it? What do we, how do
we really see that? How do we see, how he became
a martyr was, was this total understanding of
the reality of God and man in Christ, the two
natures. It is said that St. Maximus literally
created the, a Chalcedonian logic. which is to
say that from that Council of Chalcedon in 451,
which tried to embody the truth of Christ, the
truth of what the Incarnation, what our faith
really is, in a way that could not be shaken
and would also be preserved. And it did that
by saying, One thing over and over. Over and
over it said one thing. It said Jesus Christ
is one and the same. One and the same. Jesus
Christ is two natures in one and the same person.
And those two natures are not confused, not changed,
not divided, and not separated. And those four,
are called the four Chalcedonian adverbs. Not
confused, unconfused, unchanged, undivided, and
unseparated. And Maximus took that and through
all of his thought pulled that together and through
that he was trying to express the true mystery
of God. and man. So if I could summarize the
teaching of St. Maximus, I would say there are
really three things there. One is the Trinity.
One is this understanding that he had of unity,
the fullness of unity. And there are certain
places in St. Maximus where his teaching rises
to heights of mystical sublimity that if you
just look at, if you just gaze upon what he's
actually saying and you actually realize what
he is saying, it literally blows your mind. And
the third one is what we could call reciprocity.
And by reciprocity, big word, it's translating
the word in Greek, perichoresis, which is an
even bigger word, I suppose. But reciprocity,
was really the heart of his teaching. And the
reciprocity is what God did in the Incarnation
will happen to us in deification. The reciprocity
is the Incarnation is the descent of God and
the whole purpose of that is for the accent of
humanity. denotization, deification. The reciprocity
of God and man was the heart of Maximus' teaching.
That what we know of God is imaged in man. And
we're going to be coming up shortly to the when
we reach Lent and the Sunday of Lent where we
honor the icons and it's called the Triumph of
Orthodoxy. Well, that's for the future. But in
reality, what Maximus was dealing with here was
this understanding of the reality of the divine
image. The divine image in man, whatever the
incarnate Christ reveals is what is for humanity
to attain through grace. And so he was always
aware of... this idea of unity. And he was also
very much aware, and I think this is the beauty
of St. Maximus, in his writings, is that we human
beings, we follow human beings, are constantly
tempted to go to one side or the other about
our faith. We're constantly tempted to maybe
confuse things a little bit. Or we're constantly
tempted to, maybe we want to separate things
so we can understand it. We're constantly tempted
to divide. And we're constantly tempted to change.
So what the fathers of the fourth council did,
they didn't say what it was. They didn't say
what the mystery was. They didn't define the
mystery. They prevented the mystery from being
lost by using negatives, by using negative adverbs.
And Maximus took that, and what his theology
was, what the genius of the Holy Spirit coming
through him did, he took those ideas, he took
that truly to heart, and whatever had to happen,
whatever we said and did about Christ, we had
to keep the divine nature and the human nature
unconfused. That is not... not mixed up into
something. Unconfused. And yet, we have to make
sure that the divine and human nature of Christ
were unchanged. Not to be changed in any way.
Our understanding of the divine nature, our understanding
of the human nature, could not be changed. Not
only was it to be unconfused and unchanged, but
it also had to be undivided. And here we come
to the heart of the mystery. Somehow, the nature
of God and the nature of man, is not only unconfused,
not only unchanged, but undivided. Undivided
in Christ. And finally, that the divine nature
and the human nature in Christ is unseparated.
Not to be separated. Not to be divided. Not to
be changed. Not to be confused. And all of Maximus'
theology is in a way grounded in those four fundamental...
of the fourth council. But through that, the
whole idea, the whole realization was that there
is a mysterious identity in difference between
God and man, between us as human beings, between
us and God, and that the purpose of Adam, the
purpose of human nature, was to unite those things.
The fall prevented that from happening. Christ
then came, as the second Adam, to unite all the
things that the first Adam, us, was supposed
to accomplish. And those things are, and Maximus
wrote about that in one of his things, and I'll
close with this. He said, in Ambigium 41, he
talked about these five unities that Christ united.
And they were the unity of man and woman, number
five, the unity of the inhabited earth and paradise.
Number four, the unity of heaven and earth. Number
three, the unity of the visible and the invisible.
Number two, and finally, the unity of the uncreated
and the created. The unity, not the separation
of the uncreated and the created. The undividedness
of the uncreated, and the created. The unchangeableness
of the uncreated and the created. And the unconfused
of the uncreated and the created. That is the
true legacy of the teaching of St. Maximus the
Confessor. And for this we honor him and give
him praise and give our God praise that he gave
him to us. Amen. Blessing of the Lord is received
upon us through his divine grace.