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- Our Venerable Father Maximos the Confessor (662)
- He was born to a noble family in Constantinople in 580. (But,
according to a recently-discovered account, he may have been born in
Palestine.) He showed uncommon piety and depth of theological
understanding from an early age, and wrote some of the Church's most
profound
theological works. He became the chief secretary of the Emperor
Heraclius and his grandson Constans. But when the Monothelite heresy
took hold in the royal court, Maximos could not bear to be surrounded by
this error and left for the Monastery at Chrysopolis, where he later
became abbot. From the monastery, he battled Monothelitism in homilies
and treatises that exercised a considerable influence; so much so that
the Emperor Constans ordered him either to accept Monothelite belief or
keep silence. Maximos refused to do either, and he was arrested. His
tongue was torn out, his right hand cut off, and he was sentenced to
exile. He died of his wounds and torments while still in prison
awaiting deportation, at the age of eighty-two, in the year 662. The Great Horologion
comments that "at that time only he and his few disciples were Orthodox
in the East." Nonetheless, his lonely and costly stand, whose fruit he
did not see in his own lifetime, preserved the Orthodox Faith when
emperors and
patriarchs alike had fallen away.
-
Saint Maximos' right hand is venerated today at the Monastery of St Paul on Mt
Athos.
source: http://www.abbamoses.com
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