THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Pyrrhus, and again a few months later by two patriarchs, Peter of Constantinople and Macedonius of Antioch. Maximus refused to make any concessions, and the next day a synod held by the patriarchs recommended that the penalty of banishment be inflicted on him and his disciple Anastasius. Maximus was sent to the fortress of Bizya in Thrace, where he remained for a year amid great discomfort. In August, 656, Bishop Theodosius of Caesarea and two secular envoys appeared for the purpose of effecting an agreement; but he still firmly declared that nothing would serve but the recall of the Typus and the acceptance of the Lateran synod of 649. On Sept. 8 he was transferred to the monastery of St. Theodore near Reggio, where another attempt to win him failed, after which he was subjected to greater severities by the imperial emissaries, and he was removed first to Salembria and then to Berberis, where Anastasius already was. Here the authentic documents of the Collectio Anastasii end. According to another account, the historical value of which is disputed, he was brought once more to Constantinople and after a formal discussion solemnly anathematized in a synod, together with all upholders of Dyothelitism; then he and his disciples were delivered to the prefect to be scourged and have their tongues cut out and their hands chopped off. Thus mutilated, they were sent to Lazica on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. They arrived on June 8, 662; Maximus was separated from the others and sent to the fortress of Shemarum (modern Shemari), where he died. Yet his heroic constancy was not without effect. Constans II. fell a victim, only a few years later, to the hatred he had aroused partly by these cruel and arbitrary proceedings, and the faith for which Maximus had suffered was solemnly proclaimed by the sixth ecumenical council in 680.
II. His Writings: In spite of their frequent obscurity, due partly to their technical difficulty and partly to their involved style, his works were highly prized, especially in the Greek monasteries, but also by such keen western philosophers as Scotus Erigena, and by pious and learned women like the Empress Irene and her daughter Anna Comnena. Fabricius enumerates fifty-three different writings, of which five are either lost or still unpublished, while forty-four are printed by the French Dominican Combefis and four elsewhere. Combefis undertook a complete edition, but published only two volumes (Paris, 1675); the third was left unfinished at his death.
The exegetical writings of Maximus are not so much continuous expositions as theological and mystical excursuses on selected passages, following the anagogical or allegorical method of the Alexandrian school. The most important work in this class is the Qucestiones ad Thalassium i. Exegetical in locos scriptura difficiles, addressed
Works on to a Roman abbot who has left a
Scripture collection of moral and ascetic sen-
and the tences. It begins with a discussion of
Fathers, the problem of evil, and goes on to
propound sixty-five questions which
Maximus answers, usually taking the text only as a
point of departure for rich dogmatic, ethical, or
mystical trains of thought. Of a similar nature, though briefer and less original, are the Qucestiones et dubia, seventy-nine questions and answers on texts of Scripture and other subjects; Ad Theopemptum scholasticum, on three passages of the New Testament; Expositio in psalmum LIX., an allegorical-mystical exposition; Orationis dominicm brevis expositio, rich in mystical ideas. There are also fragments of other exegetical works (on the Psalms, Isaiah, Canticles, Luke, James) in the Greek catenae. The same kind of treatment is applied by Maximus to patristic texts in his Scholia and Ambigua on Gregory Nazianzen and Dionysius the Areopagite; he attempts less to explain another man's thoughts than to develop mystical or theological ideas of his own suggested by the text. There are three collections of this sort on the two authors named; the third, Ambigua in Gregorium Nazianzenum, was translated into Latin by Erigena about 864, at the instance of Charles the Bald. The unpublished manuscript (at Vienna) Qucestiones sacrce miscellanece is apparently of a similar nature. The dogmatic-polemical works treat of Christological, Trinitarian, and anthropological questions, (a) The first class are of the most importance for the history of dogma. In them he defends the doctrine of the two natures against the idea set forth by Philoxenus and Severus in 2. Dogmatic the sixth century, of a single fused or and combined nature. To this particular
Polemical division belong the Epistola ad Joan- Writings. nem Cubic, de rectis ecclesios decretis et adversus Sever •um hareticum; Oratio brevis seu liber adversus dogmata Severi, written before 634; Epistola dogmatica; De communi et proprio, hoc est de essentia et hypostasi; De duabus Christi naturis; De qualitate, proprio, et differentia; Pro synodo Chalcedonensi ad symbolum additio; Capita de substantia et natura, de hypostasi et persona; De ecclesiastico dogmate quod attinet ad dominicam incarnationem; and Ad moniales qua Alexandria a catholica fide discesserant. Several of these treatises include an attack upon Monothelitism in their opposition to Monophysitism; but a still larger number refer directly to the former, and are among the most valuable documents on the controversy. The most important of these are the following: Acta disputationis cum Pyrrho; Epistola ad Pyrrhum presbyterum et hegumenum, written shortly after 633; Tomus dogmaticus ad Marinum diaconum; Epistola de duabus in Christo voluntatibus; De operationibus et voluntatibus; Ad Marinum Cypri presbyterum responsa, a reply to the charges of Theodore of Byzantium, written after 642; Tomus dogmaticus ad Marinum presbyterum; Ad Marinum presbyterum Cypri, written from Carthage apparently in 645; Defioratio ex epistola scripta ad Petrum Illustrem, a fragment of a letter written after 641; Spiritalis tomus et dogmaticus adversus Herachi Ecthesin, written from Rome between 645 and 648; Hegumenis et monachis ac catholicis populis per Siciliam constitutis, written probably in Sicily after 646; De Christi mysterio; De duabus in Christo naturis; De duabus unius Christi dei nostri voluntatibus; Non posse did unam in Christo voluntatcm; De duplici voluntate domini ad orthodoxos; Ex