Diplomacy or Dissidence? The Emperor Heraclius in the Letters of Maximus the Confessor

The relationship between Maximus the Confessor and the Emperor Heraclius and his successors is a complicated one. Maximus is famous for his opposition to the imperially endorsed religious policies of monoenergism and monotheletism. His opposition to these policies led to his active participation in the Lateran Synod of 649 which condemned both positions as heresy and contributed to his politically motivated arrest, exile, and mutilation by the court of Constans II. Despite his opposition, in a letter to Peter the Illustris he is careful not to blame the emperor Heraclius for his role in the Christological controversies, but rather the patriarchs Sergius and Pyrrhus, accusing them of manipulating the emperor’s good will (Opusculum 12, see also Disputatio cum Pyrrho). On the surface this would suggest that Maximus held no fault with the emperor, and placed sole blame on the ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople. However Daniel Sahas (2003) has argued that Maximus levelled biting personal critiques against Heraclius as a tyrant and placed the blame for the Arab invasions on imperial sin in Epistulas 10 and 43. This paper takes a holistic approach to Maximus’s correspondence to see if we can come to some conclusions around Maximus’s opinions of the emperor, and whether he was an ally who only blamed the wayward patriarchs of Constantinople, or a diplomat who used coded language to criticize the emperor while praising him by name.