Venerable Maximus the Confessor

Maximus was born c. 580, in Constantinople according to his Greek Life (a Syriac account places his birth in Palestine). He served as first secretary to Emperor Heraclius but left the court to become a monk at Chrysopolis across the Bosporus. He became the chief opponent of Monothelitism, the teaching, then backed by the emperors, that Christ had only one will. In 645 he debated the former patriarch Pyrrhus in Carthage, and in 649 he helped prepare the Lateran Synod in Rome.

In 653 he was arrested and brought to Constantinople for trial. Refusing to accept the imperial doctrine, he was exiled again and again; in 662 his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off. He was sent to Lazica, in today's western Georgia, and died there on 13 August 662, aged over eighty. His views were upheld by the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680–681.