Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP) · Earl Fontainelle

Esoteric Orthodoxy in East Rome: Jonathan Greig on Maximus the Confessor

December 7, 2025·1 hr 13 min·30 clips

The interview opens with Maximus as a figure who is widely respected and still controversial. Jonathan Gregg and Earl Fontenelle place him in the long argument over Christology, where the dispute over one nature and two natures had already been active for more than a century before monothelitism enters the scene. His life is not treated like a footnote. The conversation keeps returning to the mix of theological authority, monastic life, and resistance to imperial and patriarchal pressure in Constantinople that made him important. The episode then pauses for origin stories. Gregg explains why it is hard to reduce Maximus to a simple Constantinopolitan biography and why a Palestinian or broader Near Eastern monastic setting can make more sense of the way he appears in the sources. That shift matters. It moves the frame away from a neat career narrative and toward a more mobile, contested life shaped by monasteries, disputes, and eastern imperial politics. The show also slows down for the monothelite question itself. Gregg gives the compact explanation the discussion needs: the doctrine tries to compromise between the Chalcedonian position and the monophysite position by proposing a concrete middle ground about Christ's will, not just about his nature. Once that is on the table, the conversation opens outward again. The host asks how much of Maximus's thought can be traced to later late antique Platonism outside the more familiar patristic names, and Gregg is willing to follow that line into commentaries on Aristotle, Proclus, and the broader intellectual world of late antiquity. What the episode stresses most is caution. Rather than pretending the evidence is cleaner than it is, it keeps making room for messy chronology, uncertain geography, and the possibility that Maximus sits inside a wider current of thought that is partly visible and partly only glimpsed through later reception. The closing movement gestures toward transmission, continuity, and an apophatic current within exoteric orthodoxy, leaving the listener with a sense of unfinished scholarly work rather than a closed system.

As heard by us

A careful guide to Maximus, where doctrinal dispute becomes intellectual history.

Maximus the Confessor is treated here as a real figure in a messy political and theological world, not as a neat saintly icon. The strongest material links his monastic life, the monothelite controversy, and the tension between imperial power and church authority, which gives…

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Why you'd press play

If you want Maximus explained through theology, empire, and philosophy in one thread.

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