Justified True Belief

(●) The monk who insisted that Jesus has a human will as well as a divine one, and lost his tongue and his right hand for saying so. + In the middle of the seventh century the Roman Empire in the East was losing everything at once. The Persians had taken Jerusalem, the Arabs were taking Syria and Egypt, and an exhausted government in Constantinople wanted its Christians to stop arguing about Christ. So it offered a formula that sounded generous and cost almost nothing: however you count the natures in Jesus, say that he had one will. Nearly everyone agreed. One elderly monk, with no bishopric and no army and no office of any kind, would not, and by the end his judges could tell him, without much exaggeration, that every other churchman in the East had signed. His reason was not stubbornness about words. If Jesus has no human will, Maximus argued, then there is a piece missing from his humanity, and the missing piece is exactly the piece of us that goes wrong. A will that never wanted anything but what God wanted would have no need of rescue. What is broken in us is the wanting, and if the Son of God did not take that up, then he did not take us up. He said it for more than twenty years, in Africa and in Rome, and the government eventually cut out his tongue and cut off the hand he wrote with and sent him to die on the far shore of the Black Sea. Here is the fact that a reader will remember: within twenty years of his death, a council of the whole church made his teaching the faith of Christendom, defining it in language his arguments had shaped, and never once mentioned his name.

(●) c. 580 AD: Born somewhere in the eastern empire, and the two accounts of his childhood do not agree. + The year is the one solid thing, and it comes from his own mouth. The record of his trial in 655 gives his age there as seventy-five, which puts his birth around 580. Where he was born is another matter, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. The Greek Life of Maximus was written some three hundred years later by a monk of the Stoudios monastery named Michael Exaboulites, and it gives the familiar story: noble parents in Constantinople, an excellent education, high office at court. That would explain a great deal about him. But scholars comparing the text noticed that Michael had built his opening chapters by copying the life of an eighth-century abbot and taking out the names, which means he had no independent information at all about the early years. A rival account turned up in the British Museum in the 1970s, when Sebastian Brock published a Syriac Life written by a contemporary named George of Resh’aina. It is a hostile document, written by an opponent, and it says that Maximus was born in the village of Hesfin east of the Sea of Galilee, the illegitimate son of a Samaritan father and a Persian slave girl, christened Moschion, and raised in a Palestinian monastery. Its concrete detail is hard to invent, and it would neatly explain his lifelong closeness to the Palestinian monk Sophronius. What it does not explain is how a provincial monk came by the court career the Greek Life gives him, or where he acquired the enormous learning his books display. The two stories have never been reconciled, and a careful reader keeps both on the table.

(●) c. 610 to 625 AD: He left a career at the imperial court for a monastery across the water. + In October 610 a fleet from Carthage sailed into Constantinople and deposed the usurper Phocas, and a new emperor, Heraclius, was crowned. A change of regime meant a change of staff, and it is around this point that the Greek Life puts Maximus at the head of the imperial chancery as protoasekretis: the man who ran the emperor’s correspondence and saw every document that mattered. It was one of the most powerful desks in the empire, and it would have belonged to a man of about thirty. Some scholars doubt a title that is hard to attest so early, but the letters he wrote later to chamberlains and generals read like a man who had once worked beside them. He left it. The Greek Life gives two reasons, and only one of them is plausible: he wanted a quiet life of prayer. He became a monk at Chrysopolis, the town directly across the Bosphorus from the capital, modern Üsküdar, close enough that he could see from his monastery the city he had walked out of. By 618 he had a disciple of his own, a monk named Anastasius, who stayed with him for the next forty-four years and was mutilated beside him at the end. Around 624 or 625 the two of them moved on to the monastery of St George at Cyzicus, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, where Maximus fell into long conversations with the local bishop, a man named John. Those conversations became the largest book he ever wrote.

(●) 626 AD: The Persians and the Avars reached the walls, and he spent the rest of his life as a refugee, writing almost everything he wrote in exile. + In the summer of 626 a Persian army on the Asian shore and an Avar and Slav army on the European shore closed on Constantinople together. The city held, and the deliverance was celebrated for centuries afterward in the hymn Greek Christians still sing standing. The countryside did not hold. Cyzicus lay directly in the path of the Persian raiding, and Maximus and his brothers went south by sea. He seems to have spent time in Cyprus and Crete, and by about 630 he was in North Africa, at a monastery near Carthage called the Eucratas, founded by Sophronius, a learned monk from Damascus whom Maximus called his father and abbot. He was there for roughly fifteen years, and it was the most productive stretch of his life. The two books of Difficulties, which are his answers to knotty sentences in the older fathers, the sixty-five Questions to Thalassius, written for an abbot who had sent him a list of hard passages of Scripture, the commentary on the liturgy, and most of the letters all belong to those years, and every one of them was written in exile, far from the capital he would not see again except as a prisoner. He had left Constantinople an important man. He arrived in Africa a foreign monk with a reputation for answering hard questions, and the questions kept coming.

(●) 633 to 638 AD: An imperial peace formula gave Christ one will, and almost the whole church accepted it. + The problem the government was trying to solve was two centuries old. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had confessed one Christ “in two natures”, divine and human, and large parts of Egypt, Syria and Armenia had never accepted the wording, believing it split Christ in half. Heraclius needed those provinces loyal, and his patriarch, Sergius of Constantinople, had a plan. Grant the two natures, and add that in Christ they worked through a single activity, a single energeia. One acting subject, one operation. Both sides could sign it. In 633 the patriarch of Alexandria, Cyrus, whom Heraclius had installed two years before, celebrated a reunion with the Egyptian dissenters on exactly those terms, and read the agreement aloud from the pulpit. Sophronius happened to be in Alexandria. He read the nine articles, judged them heresy, failed to stop the ceremony, and sailed to Constantinople to protest in person. Sergius, who respected the old man, issued a ruling called the Psephos, the Greek word for a decision, forbidding anyone to speak of one activity or two, and wrote to Pope Honorius in Rome explaining the settlement. Honorius wrote back warmly, and added a phrase of his own that went further than anyone had gone: he confessed “the one will of our Lord Jesus Christ”. That sentence, from the bishop of Rome, became the doctrine. In 638 Heraclius published it as imperial law in an edict called the Ekthesis, which is Greek for a setting out, a statement of the faith the empire would hold. And Maximus was slow, which is worth saying plainly, because the story is usually told as though he saw it all from the beginning. He accepted the Psephos at first, reading it as a quiet cancellation of the Alexandrian agreement, and years later he was still trying to shield Honorius from the charge of heresy. It was not until about 640 that he attacked the one-will doctrine in public. What had changed was not the argument, which his earlier books already imply at every turn, but his willingness to be the man who said it out loud. He was, after all, only a monk, not even an abbot, and the names on the other side of the question were Sergius, patriarch of the imperial city, and Honorius, the bishop of Rome.

(●) 645 AD: He debated a deposed patriarch in front of the governor of Africa, and the patriarch changed his mind, though not for long. + Pyrrhus had succeeded Sergius as patriarch of Constantinople in 638, having helped draft the Ekthesis himself, and he had backed the wrong side in the palace struggle that followed Heraclius’ death. Deposed and out of favour, he made his way to Carthage, where the exarch Gregory governed. An exarch was the emperor’s viceroy in a far province, holding the armies and the courts in one hand, and Africa was his. Living in a monastery in the same city was an old correspondent of Pyrrhus’: he and Maximus had exchanged letters more than a decade earlier about the Psephos. In July 645 the two men debated in public, with the exarch presiding. It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. A former patriarch of the capital and a monk with no office sat down in front of the government and argued theology in the open, on the record, for as long as it took. The record survives, and it is not a shouting match: it is two trained minds working through what a nature is, what a person is, and which of the two does the willing. Pyrrhus lost, and did the rare thing of saying so. He travelled to Rome, was received into orthodox communion by Pope Theodore, and for a season the tide seemed to have turned. It had not. When Gregory was killed in 647 defending Africa against the Arabs, Pyrrhus went to Ravenna and made his peace with the one-will party again, hoping for his throne back. Pope Theodore excommunicated him, signing the decree, one account says, with a pen dipped in the eucharistic chalice. Maximus had won the argument and lost the man.

(●) 649 AD: At a council in Rome he supplied the theology that condemned the emperor’s doctrine. + In 648 the young emperor Constans II tried to end the noise by decree. His Typos forbade anyone, on any side, to speak of one will or two, one activity or two, and ordered the disputed texts taken down from church walls. It was silence imposed by law, and to Maximus silence at that point was a lie. Pope Martin I, elected in 649 without waiting for imperial confirmation, called a council in the Lateran basilica in October of that year. A hundred and five bishops came, mostly Italian and African, along with Stephen of Dora, who had come from Palestine as Sophronius’ envoy, and a Greek monk with no rank at all who did much of the thinking. The council reaffirmed Chalcedon and drew the conclusion the emperors had spent twenty years avoiding: two natures means two natural wills and two natural activities. It condemned the Ekthesis and the Typos by name, and anathematized the men who had built the doctrine, Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, and the patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus and Paul. To anathematize a man is to declare formally that what he taught is not the faith and that he stands outside the church’s communion, and it is the heaviest sentence a council can pass on a person. It carefully did not condemn either emperor. That distinction saved nobody. A church council in Italy had just declared the emperor’s law heretical, and the palace read it as what it was, a revolt.

(●) 653 to 662 AD: Arrested, tried twice, mutilated, and sent to die at the far edge of the empire. + In 653 the exarch of Italy arrested Pope Martin, sick in his bed, and shipped him to Constantinople, where he was tried for treason, deposed, degraded and exiled to Cherson in the Crimea. He died there on 16 September 655, cold and hungry and largely forgotten, the last pope the church counts as a martyr. Maximus was arrested in Rome in the same operation, with his disciple Anastasius and a Roman envoy of the same name, and brought to the capital. At his first trial in 655 the charges were political before they were theological: that he had encouraged the exarch Gregory’s rebellion, that his obstinacy had cost the empire Egypt and Africa. Then came the real question. Would he accept the Typos, and enter communion with the patriarch, as by now every other bishop in the East had done? His answer was that emperors are not ordained to define doctrine, and that if the whole world communicated with the patriarch, he would not. He was sent to Bizya in Thrace, and later to Perberis, while envoys came out to reason with him and wear him down. They failed, and in 662 he was brought back for a second trial, condemned, and handed to the prefect. His tongue was cut out at the root and his right hand cut off, the tongue that had argued and the hand that had written, and he and his companions were paraded through the quarters of the city and sent into exile. He was carried to Lazica, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in modern Georgia, and died in a fortress there on 13 August 662, about eighty-two years old. There was no protest from Rome and none from anywhere else. Anastasius had died in the same exile three weeks earlier, so not even his disciple was there. The monks of a monastery nearby buried him, and that was all the church had to say for him at the time.

What He Taught

(T1) A Christ with no human will is not a human being, and could not have saved one. + Maximus asks you to notice something about your own speech. Being able to speak belongs to being human: it comes with the nature, and every healthy human being has it whether or not anyone is talking at the moment. But how you speak, what you actually choose to say on a Tuesday afternoon, belongs to you in particular. Two different things, and they live at two different levels. Willing, he says, works exactly the same way. The capacity to want, to be drawn toward what is good for you, is part of what a rational nature is: he defines it, borrowing a phrase from earlier teachers, as “the power that longs for what is natural”. The particular choices are made by somebody, by a person. So the question the empire was asking had been asked at the wrong level. When the government said “one will in Christ, because one person”, Maximus answered that will is not counted by persons at all. It is counted by natures. Two natures, therefore two natural wills, and no arithmetic about persons can change it. Now the consequence, which is the whole reason he cared. Christian theology had long held a rule stated most sharply by Gregory of Nazianzus: what has not been assumed is not healed. Whatever part of humanity the Son of God did not take up in the incarnation is a part he did not rescue. And the human will is not a spare part. It is the very place where our trouble lives, the wanting that goes after the wrong things. A Saviour who took a human body and a human mind but no human will would have left untouched the one thing most in need of touching. That is why an argument about a technical term was, for Maximus, an argument about whether anyone is saved.

(Q) "For if he was truly, as man, lacking a natural will, he would not truly have become perfect man. And if he did not truly become perfect man, he did not become man at all." + Source: Maximus, Opusculum 3 (PG 91:52A), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. Two bits of shorthand travel with almost every citation of Maximus. An opusculum is a small work, and the opuscula are the twenty-seven short treatises and dogmatic letters printed under that name, most of them from this controversy. PG is Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, the great nineteenth-century printing of the Greek fathers, and scholars still give its volume and column the way a lawyer gives a case report. The argument is a chain, and Maximus is showing where it snaps. A nature is not a collection of optional features: take one away and you no longer have a diminished example of the thing, you have something else. He is answering Severus of Antioch, the sixth-century theologian whose followers held that the incarnate Word had a single will (T1).

(T2) In Gethsemane a human will shrank from death and then said yes, and that is the salvation of the world. + Every side in this quarrel had to explain the same scene, and everybody knew it. On the night before he died, Jesus knelt in an olive grove and prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). Luke has him say it more starkly still: “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). The one-will party read this as the divine Son speaking in a human way, a kind of teaching device, since on their account there was only one will there and it was God’s. Maximus thought that reading emptied the garden. Two wills are visible in the sentence, he said, and you can hear both: the one that recoils from death, which is human and healthy and no sin at all, since shrinking from death is what a living body does; and the one it yields to. What happens in the grove is not God arguing with himself. It is a human will, the same kind you have, freely handing itself over. He is careful about one further distinction, and it repays a moment. Maximus separates the natural will, the built-in longing for what is good, from what he calls the gnomic will, from the Greek gnome, meaning an opinion or a settled inclination. Gnomic willing is our way of willing: we do not see the good clearly, so we weigh options, hesitate, and decide, and that whole anxious procedure is a symptom of not knowing. Christ has a human natural will, fully. He does not have a gnomic will, because he never wonders what the good is. He is not less free than we are. He is free the way we would be if we could see straight.

(Q) "Not mine, but your will be done, by this giving himself as a type and example of setting aside our own will by the perfect fulfilment of the divine, even if because of this we find ourselves face to face with death." + Source: Maximus, Opusculum 7 (PG 91:80A), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. Written in the early 640s, when refusing the imperial doctrine had already become dangerous. Maximus is arguing that unless the human will in the garden is real, the words are a performance and the pattern for the rest of us collapses. The last clause is not rhetoric: he wrote it knowing where his own argument was likely to lead (T2).

(T3) Evil is not a thing God made; it is the distance between what we want and what he wants. + Ask where evil came from and you can give a very old answer: there are two powers, a good one and a bad one, and the world is their battlefield. Maximus had no room for it. Everything that exists was made by one God and made good, so evil cannot be a substance, a stuff, an ingredient. It has to be something that happens to a good thing. His account is precise, and it grows straight out of his teaching on the will (T1, T2). Our natural will was made pointing at God, the way a compass needle is made pointing north. What has gone wrong is not the needle but the choosing: our gnomic will, the deliberating inclination that is our way of wanting things, has come to want differently from God. Evil is that gap and nothing else. It has no independent existence, no factory, no country of its own. It is a relation gone crooked. Two things follow that a reader can feel. The first is that evil is genuinely nothing, in the sense that when the gap closes there is nothing left of it, which is why Maximus can be so hopeful about a healed creation. The second is less comfortable: on this account the root of sin is not the body, and not ignorance in the abstract, but self-love, which he calls the mother of the passions. The passions, in his vocabulary and in the vocabulary of the monks generally, are not feelings as such. They are the appetites that have taken the reins: the anger that decides for you before you have decided anything, the craving you obey without noticing that you have obeyed it. Self-love is the one root that pride and everything after it grows from. Pride, envy, resentment and greed are not separate diseases. They are the same disease looking in different directions.

(Q) "For evil consists in nothing else than this difference of our gnomic will from the divine will." + Source: Maximus, Opusculum 3 (PG 91:48C), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. The sentence comes early in the treatise on the two wills, and it explains why the whole distinction mattered to him. The fathers refused to speak of two gnomic wills in Christ, he says, precisely because a difference between gnomic wills is what sin is. To put one inside Christ would be to put the disease inside the physician (T3).

(T4) The human being was made last on purpose, to be the joint that holds creation together. + Think of a keystone, the wedge-shaped block at the top of a stone arch. It is put in last, it is smaller than the stones around it, and every other stone in the arch is holding its position because that one block is in place. Maximus thought a human being was that block. He sets it out as a series of splits running through everything that exists: created and uncreated, spiritual and physical, heaven and earth, paradise and the inhabited world, male and female. These are not evils. They are the joints of a world made varied and good. But a divided thing needs something to hold it together, and the human being is the one creature that stands on both sides of every line: mind and body, spirit and dust, at home in the visible world and made for the invisible. He calls the human person “a kind of natural bond”, and says we were introduced last among the creatures for exactly that job, to gather the whole spread of things and carry it up to God. We did not do it. We used the power of uniting to divide instead, and the arch that was to be held together fell in on itself. So, Maximus says, God did the human job himself. The incarnation, the cross, the empty tomb, the ascension into heaven are read in his hands as one continuous act of joining: God takes flesh and heaven and earth are stitched, he rises and death and life are stitched, he ascends in a body of our own kind and the visible and the invisible are stitched. Paul’s word for it is the one Maximus reaches for, God’s plan “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). This is what later readers meant when they called his theology a cosmic liturgy. It is very large, and it never floats free of the manger.

(Q) "For this reason the human person was introduced last among beings, as a kind of natural bond mediating between the universal poles through their proper parts, and leading into unity in itself those things that are naturally set apart from one another by a great interval." + Source: Maximus, Difficulty 41 (PG 91:1305C), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. The Difficulties are his commentaries on hard sentences in the sermons of Gregory of Nazianzus, and this one is prompted by a line from the sermon Gregory preached on the feast of lights, the sixth of January: “and natures are instituted afresh, and God becomes man”. Maximus takes “afresh” seriously, and the whole essay is his answer to what exactly got remade (T4).

(T5) Love is the point of everything, and the only proof of it is how you treat the person in front of you. + His most widely read book is not a treatise. It is four hundred short paragraphs called the Centuries on Love, written for monks who wanted to know how to live, and its subject is not the metaphysics of God but bad temper, resentment, and the way we quietly prefer ourselves. Around 626 he wrote a long letter on the same theme to a courtier in Constantinople named John, an official of the imperial bedchamber, and that letter is one of the best things he ever produced. The argument runs like this. Faith tells you God is there. Hope holds on to the good that is promised. Love does something neither of them can do: it hands over the thing itself, now, and gives the other two their rest. And because love is the last word, it is also the test of everything earlier. There is no such thing, he insists, as one love owed to God and a different love owed to people. It is one love, and you cannot have it toward the invisible God while withholding it from the visible brother, which is simply what the apostle John had already said (1 John 4:20). The practical shape of this is worth stating plainly, because it is where his theology touches a Tuesday. If self-love is the root of every vice (T3), then the cure is not chiefly effort but attention turned outward: making another person’s misfortune your own, refusing to keep score, wanting for your neighbour what you want for yourself. Maximus, who had every reason to hate the men who eventually maimed him, wrote that anger and resentment and hypocrisy all get pulled up together when self-love goes, because none of them has any other root.

(Q) "For the activity and clear proof of perfect love towards God is a genuine disposition of voluntary goodwill towards one’s neighbour." + Source: Maximus, Letter 2, to John the Cubicularius (PG 91:404A), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. Written, on the usual dating, from the monastery at Cyzicus shortly before he fled the Persian advance, and addressed to a layman at court rather than to a monk. A cubicularius was a chamberlain, one of the palace officials who attended the emperor personally, so the man reading this was surrounded by rivals (T5).

(Q) "For the wisdom and sagacity of God the Father is the Lord Jesus Christ, who holds together the universals of beings by the power of wisdom, and embraces their complementary parts by the sagacity of understanding, since by nature he is the fashioner and provider of all, and through himself draws into one what is divided, and abolishes war between beings, and binds everything into peaceful friendship and undivided harmony." + Source: Maximus, Difficulty 41 (PG 91:1313B), Andrew Louth translation, 1996. The sentence gathers his whole system into one breath, and it is the answer to why he would not sign the emperor’s peace. A Christ who holds the universe together is not a formula to be trimmed for the sake of provincial loyalty. Maximus is leaning on Paul, who says the same thing about the same person: “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Nineteen years after his death a council of the whole church adopted his teaching and never said his name. + The Third Council of Constantinople met from 680 to 681 and is counted the sixth ecumenical council, the sixth gathering the whole church receives as binding. A new emperor, Constantine IV, had inherited a doctrine that had bought him nothing: the provinces it was meant to hold had been lost to the Arabs anyway. The council reversed nearly fifty years of imperial policy and defined the faith in the words a mutilated monk had died for, that in Christ “are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly”, and that the human will “follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will” (Percival’s translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). That last clause is Gethsemane, exactly as Maximus had read it (T2). The council also did something the papacy has had to live with since: it anathematized Pope Honorius by name, along with Sergius, Cyrus and Pyrrhus, for the sentence he had written in 634. And it never mentioned Maximus. He had been condemned by an imperial court as a traitor, not merely as a heretic, and rehabilitating him would have meant putting the government itself in the dock. So the church took the theology and left the man in the ground in Lazica. Georgian Christians, who had him, kept his memory when nobody else was keeping it; the Greek churches came to commemorate him on 21 January and 13 August, and the Roman martyrology on 13 August. The vindication was total and it was silent, which is a fair description of what he had asked for.

(†) One Irish translator carried him into the Latin West, and medieval theology took a different shape for it. + Maximus wrote in Greek, and by the ninth century that alone was enough to keep a man out of Western Europe. What broke the barrier was a scholar at the court of Charles the Bald named John Scotus Eriugena, an Irishman with the rare gift of actual Greek. Commissioned by the king, he translated the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and then, between about 862 and 866, the earlier Difficulties and the Questions to Thalassius. Reading Maximus rearranged him. Eriugena’s own great work, the Periphyseon, written in those same years, is built on the divisions of being and the return of all things to God that he had found in Difficulty 41 (T4). Through him a strain of Greek theology entered the medieval West that had no other way in. There was a quieter channel too. John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century, put together the summary of Greek theology that the Latin schoolmen actually used, and his chapters on the two wills of Christ are built straight out of Maximus’ opuscula, argument by argument. When Thomas Aquinas argues in the Summa that Christ has a human will as well as a divine one, he is standing at the end of a line that runs back through the Damascene and the sixth council to a monk in a Carthaginian monastery.

(†) The East never let go of him, and the modern West found him again in the twentieth century. + In Greek and Slavic Christianity Maximus was never lost. Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts of the fourteenth century, the monks of stillness, who sat with one short prayer repeated until it had gone down into them, were arguing that a person really can be united to God without ever becoming God, and they drew on his account of deification, which is the name for that union. In 1782 Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios, the former bishop of Corinth, published the Philokalia at Venice, an anthology of spiritual writing that became the prayer book of the Orthodox world, and the Centuries on Love sit near its heart. The West had to be reintroduced. In 1941 the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar published a study of Maximus he called Kosmische Liturgie, cosmic liturgy, and the phrase stuck to him. Polycarp Sherwood dated the works, Lars Thunberg mapped the anthropology, Andrew Louth and others put the major texts into English for the first time, and the last thirty years have produced a whole scholarly literature where there had been almost none. It is an odd fate for a writer whose own Byzantine readers found him hard going. The emperor’s daughter Anna Comnena leaves a small scene from home about it. She had watched her mother reading Maximus at the table, and asked how she could rise to such heights over breakfast, when the man made an ordinary reader’s head swim. The empress answered that she did not touch the books without a tremor either, and still could not tear herself away from them. What the recovery has mostly turned up is that the theology and the death are one thing. He is called Confessor because the word means a witness who suffered without being killed outright, and a man who lost his tongue over the question of whether Christ could say no has demonstrated something about wills that an argument alone cannot.

(†) Where his own record is open to challenge: what he made of male and female. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger, and on Maximus it is short, which is itself worth saying: most of what he is charged with is what other people later did with his vocabulary, and that is their account to settle, not his. One thing, though, is his own. In Difficulty 41 the last of the divisions running through creation is the division of humanity into male and female, and Maximus treats it differently from the others. Following Gregory of Nyssa, he writes that this difference “clearly depends in no way on the primordial reason behind the divine purpose concerning human generation”, suggests that God foreknew the fall and provided sexual generation because of it, and holds that the saint on the way to God shakes the difference off and becomes “simply a human person”, no longer called male or female. His warrant is Paul: “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). - The text says the opposite about the origin. Genesis puts male and female inside the original good creation, not inside the remedy for a fall: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27), and what God then surveys he calls very good (Genesis 1:31). - Jesus grounds marriage in exactly that verse. Asked about divorce, he goes back to the beginning, “he who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4), and builds the permanence of marriage on it. A difference introduced as damage control could not carry that weight. - Galatians 3:28 is about standing, not about substance. Paul is saying who may be baptized and who is an heir, in a letter about whether Gentiles must become Jews. He is not announcing that the distinctions dissolve, since he keeps using them in practical instruction in the same letters. - The mistake is narrower than it looks. Maximus is not a man who despised bodies. He fought his whole life for the reality of Christ’s flesh and his human willing, and his own logic ought to have made him the last person to treat a created difference as a wound. The passage is compressed, and his readers still argue about how much of the difference he meant to deny, since a few lines earlier he has male and female standing among the good joints of a made world. The lapse is inherited from Gregory of Nyssa rather than invented, and it is the exception in him rather than the rule. That is the ledger. A theologian who got the hardest question of his century right, at the cost of his tongue and his hand, also carried an idea he should have tested against Genesis and did not.