Venerable Maximus the Greek

Education and Travels in the West

Before his monastic life, Maximus received an unusually broad education for an Orthodox monk of his time. After early study with teachers including John Lascaris, he traveled to Italy around 1492–1493 and spent years in its university and humanist centers — Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Milan, Padua, and Venice — studying classical languages, philosophy, and theology.

There he moved among prominent figures of the Italian Renaissance, including the printer Aldus Manutius and the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. For a time he was associated with the Dominican world in Florence and was influenced by the reformer Girolamo Savonarola, before leaving that life to return to Orthodox monasticism on Mount Athos.

Translation Work in Russia

Maximus was brought to Moscow specifically to translate Greek liturgical and patristic texts into Church Slavonic, a language he did not yet know. His first major undertaking was a translation of the Psalter, carried out with Russian collaborators including the scholar Dmitry Gerasimov; he also corrected existing liturgical books and translated commentaries of Saint John Chrysostom on the Gospels.

Because Slavonic was not his native tongue, imprecisions entered some of his translations, and these later became the pretext for accusations against him. He nonetheless became a central figure in Russian intellectual life, and a manuscript associated with him is noted as containing one of the earliest references in Old Russian to the discovery of the New World.

Conflict, Councils, and Imprisonment

Maximus aligned himself with the Non-Possessor movement associated with Nilus of Sorsky, which opposed extensive monastic landholding, and so came into conflict with the Josephite party. His translation errors and his outspoken criticism of abuses made him vulnerable to his opponents.

A council in 1525 accused him of heresy and had him exiled and imprisoned at the Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery. A second council in 1531 renewed the condemnation, banned him from communion, and sent him to the Otroch Monastery in Tver, where he remained for about twenty years. According to the tradition preserved in his life, appeals on his behalf — including efforts attributed to the patriarchs of Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem — failed to secure his release for many years.

Only late in life, around 1551–1553, was he transferred to the Trinity-Saint Sergius Lavra, where the long ban was at last eased and he was able to spend his final years more freely, completing further work on the Psalter.

Relics and Veneration

Maximus died in 1556 at the Trinity-Saint Sergius Lavra in Sergiyev Posad and was buried there. His life records that manifestations of grace were associated with his grave. He was held in particular esteem in later Russian piety, and was formally canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church on June 6, 1988, under Patriarch Pimen I; his feast is kept on January 21.