St. Maximus the Greek (Mihail Trivolis, Arta, ca. 1470–Maksim Grek, Moscow, 1556): The Insight into His Personal Euchology

Abstract

This text establishes a datum for claims that Maximus the Greek’s life-work was to protect and preserve ancient precepts for a personal devotional “space” against statist and imperial imprimatur. This task was accomplished through both his work as translator and as author of sacred devotional texts and hymns associated with Byzantine hymnography and the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. Notably, it is his inner veneration of the Holy Theotokos that marks the primary sensibility of the defence of this intense, inwardly-focused faith in direct communion with the Divine. Maxim’s defence of the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition was accomplished by the special guidance of the Holy Spirit as his personal internal principle that he used not only in the prayer (hesychastic, ascetical) and in the theological works (hagiographical, liturgical), but also in the philological works (of editing, translating, redacting), and especially in the exegetical texts. Therefore, the strong Byzantine patristic and monastic thought as the basis of his contemplative practice, formed in the years spent at the Holy Mount Athos, were only one of the one of the important sources of his original Orthodox theology. Into detailed consideration are taken especially his prayers. Among them, the most important place is reserved for “The Kanon to the Holy and Divine Spirit Parakletos,” which reflects several possible influences, such as the Akathystos hymn, the Great Kanon, and the individual canon as was St. Constantin’s Kanon to St. Demetrius, all of which confirm the very archaic Byzantine and Slavonic sources that properly could serve Maxim for his Old Church Slavonic linguistic basis. Thus, his prayer is a highly original, monastic and deeply personal work that bears witness to his ascetic (hesychastic) practice. All of this tends to confirm that his grammatical and linguistic view of the Old Church Slavonic language was shaped well before his entrance to Muscovite Russia, and that not only was he unjustly accused of heretical mistakes, and thereby imprisoned, but he was, more importantly, completely misunderstood. Nevertheless, and despite his suffering, Maxim was, until the end of his life, arguing that his use of Slavonic language was guarded and, therefore, sacred.