29 - Maximus the Confessor, Opusculum 3

Summary

Opusculum 3 is another work that stems from Maximus’s involvement in the monoenergist and monothelite controversies. It is a fragment of a lost treatise that Maximus wrote On the Activities and the Wills, to Thalassius. Thalassius is most likely the theologian known as “Thalassius the Libyan,” who composed works of ascetic theology, including the Centuries on Theology, now included in the Philokalia. He was a leader of monks in Carthage during the reign of Heraclius (610–641). Maximus wrote several of his most important works in response to Thalassius, including his massive Questions on Sacred Scripture (ca. 633), in which he expounds on sixty-five difficult passages in scripture that Thalassius had identified. Maximus wrote On Activities and Wills in the early 640s, once he had fully entered the monothelite controversy. Only a few fragments of this treatise survive: chapter 50 (as Opusculum 2), chapter 51 (the present Opusculum 3), and some quotations in the florilegium known as Opusculum 26b.