St Maximus the Confessor: A Renaissance of Scholarship

It seems strange to say that a seventh-century Christian monk is in vogue these days. But it’s true, at least in the world of patristics, theology, and philosophy. And for good reason. 

The title of a recent collection of philosophical essays that came out of a 2014 conference in Berlin is indicative: St. Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher. 

Also indicative of Maximus’s vogue is the emergence of other conferences all over the world focused on his work (e.g., Oxford in 2011, Belgrade in 2012, Helsinki in 2013, and most recently Romania in 2019). Two other excellent and wide-ranging publications have resulted thus far from these conferences: Knowing the Purpose of Creation through the Resurrection from Belgrade and A Saint for East and West: Maximus the Confessor’s Contribution to Eastern and Western Christian Theology from Oxford. 

Yet another indicator is Maximus’s reception into the “authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research” in the Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor (2015). Maximus scholar Paul Blowers’ most recent contribution in Oxford’s "Christian Theology in Context" series offers one of the best historical and theological introductions to the Confessor’s life and world: Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (2016). Though much shorter, Fr. Maximos Constas presents, in our humble opinion, the best introduction to the thought of the Confessor in the opening 58 pages to his English translation of On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (2018), described by Constas as “Maximos’s virtuosic theological interpretations of sixty-five difficult passages from the Old and New Testaments.” Drawing from the “interconnected traditions of monastic devotion to the Bible, Origenian hermeneutics, the sophisticated symbolic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the rich spiritual anthropology of Greek Christian asceticism inspired by the Cappadocian Fathers,” as Paul Blowers describes it in his 1991 study of this same work (Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor), the Responses is one of the most important patristic treatises on the interpretation of Scripture.

The Responses is one of the Confessor’s greatest but little recognized works, alongside what is more commonly known as his supreme work: On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Also recently translated by Fr. Maximos Constas (2014), this beautiful two-volume cloth edition, which includes the original Greek with a facing-page English translation, presents the Confessor’s “radical reworking of Origenism” that overcomes “the weaknesses of Origen’s theology from within and preserves its essential truths for the Christian tradition.” Written in the traditional monastic literary genre of “Questions and Answers” and covering topics as diverse as the Trinity, the Logos, the location of the universe, the world, the human person, the bond of matter and spirit, the fall, and divinization, this work contains a series of 71 elucidations of “ambiguous” passages from the Orations of the fourth century Cappadocian, St. Gregory the Theologian (the sole exception is Ambiguum 5 on Pseudo-Dionysios). 

In addition to three other recent translations in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’s Popular Patristics Series – On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings (2003), Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (2015), and On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy: A Theological Vision of the Liturgy by St. Maximus the Confessor (2019) – two other notable English translations have emerged: Questions and Answers (2010), which wrestles with 239 questions on the ascetical life, and The Life of the Virgin (2012), the earliest complete biography of the Virgin Mary which provides a developed account of Mary’s involvement in her Son’s ministry and subsequent leadership of the apostles and the early Church following His Ascension. 

This renaissance of scholarship on St. Maximus can largely be traced back to a work that we would be remiss if we failed to include: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (1941). Von Balthasar suggests that Maximus is surprisingly relevant for today’s intellectual scene because he “is the philosophical and theological thinker who stands between East and West. In his self-effacing serenity, and also in the fearless courage of his truly free spirit, he reveals how, and from which directions, these two come together.” It should thus not be surprising that in the 21st century his works in the English-speaking world have been published by some of the most prominent Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic publishers. 

The encounter between East and West is relatively recent and, as Fr. Maximos Constas has argued, the significance of Orthodox Christianity cannot be understood without knowledge of the Confessor. As a bridge between East and West, we hope you’ll pay a price that pales in comparison to the price paid by St. Maximus. His life came to an end shortly after having his right hand severed and his tongue cut out—hence the title “Confessor”—for his unrelenting defense of Orthodox Christology, which was upheld less than twenty years after his death at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-681.

Other related titles…

• Disputations with Pyrrhus by St. Maximus the Confessor
• Selected Writings by St. Maximus the Confessor; Classics of Western Spirituality series
• The Ascetic Life and The Four Centuries on Charity by St. Maximus the Confessor; Ancient Christian Writers series

• The Mystical Marriage: Spiritual Life according to St. Maximos the Confessor by Archimandrite Aimilianos of Simonopetra and Archimandrite Maximos Constas
• Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the Quaestiones Ad Thalassium by Paul Blowers
• The Analogy of Love: St Maximus the Confessor and The Foundations of Ethics by Demetrios Harper
• A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity
• by Nikolaos Loudovikos
• Maximus the Confessor by Andrew Louth; The Early Church Fathers series
• Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship by Aidan Nichols
• On the Road to Being: St Maximus the Confessor’s Sy-nodical Ontology by Dionysios Skliris
• Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor by Lars Thunberg
• Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor by Lars Thunberg