Monotheletism: A Heresy or a Form of Words?

Monotheletism: A Heresy or a Form of Words?¹

Richard M. Price

‘Energies’ (operations, activities) and ‘wills’ in God the Word incarnate – should we as ‘dyenergists’ and ‘dyotheletes’ talk of two, or as ‘monenergists’ and ‘monotheletes’ talk of one? After the Council of Chalcedon (451) with its insistence on ‘two natures’ in Christ, it was more natural to talk of two energies – since everything that exists has ‘energy’ in the sense of having effects – and indeed of two wills, since, as we shall see, ‘will’ was used in a loose sense that did not distinguish it clearly from ‘energy’. Yet the terms ‘one energy’ and ‘one will’ could serve the purpose of filling out the notion of the ‘one person’ of Christ, since the term ‘person’ was exceedingly vague in late antique usage. The Antiochene theologians Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, in quest of a clearer way to express Christ’s unity, were happy to talk of ‘one energy’ and ‘one will’ in Christ, despite the Antiochene emphasis on the completeness and freedom of Christ’s manhood. This, by the way, is a clear and important indication that these expressions did not necessarily imply docking Christ’s humanity of energy and will.

The Chalcedonian theologians showed awareness of the dangers of both forms of expression: ‘two energies/wills’ could sound like a Nestorian division of Christ, while ‘one energy/will’ could read like a surrender to the one-nature (miaphysite) Christology of the anti-Chalcedonians. In the seventh century, however, the emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople adopted first monenergism and then monotheletism, in the hope of winning back the miaphysites into communion with the imperial, Chalcedonian Church. Opponents of this policy accused it of being a revival of Apollinarianism – monotheletism being understood as a denial of the presence in Christ of a human faculty of will. Was this accurate? Or were the monenergists and monotheletes perfectly conventional in their understanding of Christ’s make-up and operation, in such a way that ‘one energy’ and ‘one will’ meant no more than the perfect and total cooperation of energies and wills in Christ?

Two recent books, both by Eastern Orthodox scholars, argue that monenergism and monotheletism were indeed Apollinarian,² but much western scholarship has been sceptical.³ The question is hard to resolve, since we do not have enough monenergist and monothelete writing – perhaps there never was very much – and since one’s answer to the question will depend on whether one assumes that the great critics of monenergism and monotheletism (such as Sophronius of Jerusalem and Maximus the Confessor) must have known what they were talking about, or whether on the contrary one considers it more likely that the champions of monenergism and monotheletism were perfectly conventional in their understanding of Christ, despite the rules they tried to impose in the matter of terminology. This paper adopts the latter position; but I am not so sanguine as to imagine that I shall convince the other side. I am reminded of a remark made by the nineteenth-century English wit Sydney Smith on a visit to Edinburgh: he saw two women leaning out of their respective windows across a narrow alley to shout at each other, and commented, ‘Those two women will never agree: they are arguing from different premises.’

¹ References, unless otherwise stated, are to volumes in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, Series 2, vol. 1, 2.1 or 2.2 (Berlin, 1984-92).

² Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ (Oxford, 2004), esp. ch. 2; Cyril Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century (Leiden, 2008).

³ Of this a magisterial example is M. Jugie in: Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique 10.2 (Paris, 1929), 2310-1.

I

Let us begin by taking a quick look at the ‘monenergism’ promoted in the earlier part of his reign by the emperor Heraclius (610-41). What did it amount to?

Take the much-disputed sentence in the Tome of Pope Leo: ‘Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est’ (‘Each form [= nature] performs what is proper to itself in communion with the other’).⁴ All this does is to apply to Christology the metaphysical (or rather, commonsense) principle that every physical entity has effects.⁵ But the passage that follows in the Tome on the distinction between the divine and human operations in Christ collapses with the statement that, while it is human to hunger or thirst, it is divine to walk on water. But obviously only bodies can walk on water; as Maximus the Confessor rightly stated: ‘He shows through this crossing [of the water] that the natural energy of his own flesh is inseparable from the power of his divinity’ (PG 91, 1049B-C). Leo was to correct his apparent separation of the inseparable in Ep. 124.5: the flesh does not act without the Word nor the Word without the flesh. This became a standard assertion: in the words of St Maximus: ‘He did not do divine things divinely, since he was not only God; nor did he do human things in a human way, since he was not mere man’ (PG 91, 593A). Pope Martin in the Acts of 649 likewise denies two separate operations: ‘He did not perform the divine acts divinely and the human humanly’ but ‘the divine ones humanly and the human ones divinely’; the miracles were performed through the flesh, and he accepted the sufferings ‘according to his omnipotent power’ (1, pp. 148-50). What is the difference between this and the one ‘theandric’ (divine-human) operation taught by the monenergists? Compare the monothelete Macarius of Antioch at the Third Council of Constantinople (680/1): ‘We believe that the miracles and the sufferings are of the same [person] and that, in a word, the whole divine and human operation proceeds from one and the same Christ our God, for he did not perform the divine things divinely and the human ones humanly, but after becoming man God the Word exhibits a new theandric operation’ (2.1, p. 222, 17-21).

Or did the monenergists deprive the human nature of its proper operation by treating it as an utterly passive instrument manipulated at every stage, like a lever, by the divine operation? This may seem implied by the following statement from the monothelete Ecthesis: ‘At no time did his rationally ensouled flesh perform its natural movement separately and as a result of its own impulse contrary to the will of God the Word united to it hypostatically, but whenever and of whatever kind and to whatever extent God the Word wished’ (1, p. 160, 26-9). But the advocates of orthodox dyenergism said exactly the same. To cite the dyenergist champion Sophronius of Jerusalem: ‘He did not undergo them [thirst, passion, and the rest] involuntarily or under compulsion, even if he acted with human movements.., but did so when the same [God the Word] had willed to suffer, do, and operate humanly.., and not when the physical and fleshly movements wished to be physically stirred into operation’ (2.1, p. 450.10-16). Or take Anastasius of Sinai: we experience the passions (emotions and bodily drives) out of necessity, but ‘Christ, being the God and master and maker of nature, guided the things of nature when he wanted and as he wanted.’⁶ Or Pope Martin: ‘He allowed the entirely blameless passions to move in him according to his will’ (1, p. 360, 6-7). Or St Maximus: Christ experienced hunger and thirst and the like differently from us, since he underwent them not out of natural necessity but voluntarily (PG 91, 297D).⁷

In all, the difference between monenergism and dyenergism seems to have been a matter of terminology rather than of substance.

⁴ ACO II 2 (Berlin, 1932), 28, 12-3.

⁵ See Anastasius of Antioch at 1, p. 435, §74, 12-3, ‘It is plain that every nature or essence has its own energy.’

⁶ Anastasius, Sermo 1, VI 3.58-65 (CChr.SG 12, 111).

⁷ All these passages should surely be taken to assert not that the human nature entirely lacked spontaneity, but that it only yielded to hunger, distress and the like when the divine will permitted it, while at all other times the divine will kept the weakness of the flesh in check. See Gregory of Nyssa: ‘[The Word] when he so wished gave the [human] nature the opportunity to exercise its own operation’ (PG 44, 1237A), and Cyril of Alexandria: ‘He submitted himself to the infirmities of mankind’ (Homily on Luke 146).

II

The Ecthesis issued by the emperor Heraclius in 638 abandoned monenergism in favour of ‘monotheletism’. What did this mean? St Maximus accused the monotheletes of not knowing what they believed (PG 91, 329C – 332A).

That at least some monothelete statements were no more than a verbal variant on orthodoxy can scarcely be denied. For example, the monothelete Themistius states that, even though Athanasius said that at the time of the passion Christ displayed two volitions (qelsmata), he would not acknowledge two wills (qelsseiˇ) in Christ, but rather one that is ‘moved in part humanly and in part divinely’ (2.1, p. 506, 21-4). The use of the expression ‘one will’ to mean simply harmony of will was a common usage. Take, for example, the following argument attributed to Pyrrhus in the Disputation with Pyrrhus: if will pertains to nature, as Maximus claimed, then the saints, who have one will with God, will be of the same essence with him (PG 91, 292B). Mark how here the phrase ‘having one will with God’ is understood (by a monothelete!) to mean much the same whether applied to Christ or the saints. Note also the statement by Pope Honorius: ‘We acknowledge one will of our Lord Jesus Christ, since clearly there was assumed by the Godhead our nature, not the sin in it but the nature created before sin’ (2.2, p. 550, 16-18). This likens the ‘one will’ in Christ to Adam’s state of grace before the Fall. This is akin to Stephen the Monothelete’s insistence at Constantinople III that before the Fall Adam had a divine will (2.1, p. 244, 14). His meaning was manifestly not that Adam lacked a human will – for if so, how could he have fallen? –, but that before the Fall his will was in accord with the will of God. This is to be borne in mind when we meet monothelete texts that assert, as in Theodore of Pharan, that Christ ‘had only one will and that divine’ (1. p. 122, 3-4); such a statement does not necessarily deny to Christ a human faculty of will.

Likewise at Constantinople III Macarius of Antioch asserted that the Godhead underwent the sufferings of the flesh (since the flesh was not separated from him) ‘with one, sole divine will, since there was not in him another will or one resisting his divine and powerful will’ (2.1, p. 224, 7-11). He went on to affirm: ‘I will not affirm two natural wills or two natural operations in the case of the fleshly dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ, not even if I am chopped up limb by limb and cast into the sea’ (2.1, p. 232, 11-3). But he did not mean literally that Christ had no human operation: he affirmed at the same session that Christ did divine things humanly as well as human things divinely (216, 26), and he referred to Christ’s ‘divine and human operation’ (222, 18), and to ‘the suffering of the flesh that was not separated from the Godhead’ (224, 6). So there is surely no need to take his denial of a natural human will in Christ any more literally. His monotheletism is akin to the familiar miaphysitism of those who insisted on one nature in Christ, while not denying that he had assumed flesh. And note finally a statement by the monothelete Bishop Theodosius: ‘We too confess that both the natures and the operations are different, that is, divine and human, and that his Godhead is endowed with will (qeletikRn) and his manhood endowed with will, for his soul was not without a will. But we do not say two, lest we make him strive against himself.’⁸

What, then, were the monotheletes denying? It is very striking that they invariably treat ‘two wills in Christ’ as necessarily implying two opposed wills, as in the passage just quoted. But the notion of a human will that consistently obeys the divine will was, and is, commonplace in Christianity; it is ubiquitous in hagiography. Why, then, did the monotheletes consistently understand the assertion of two wills in Christ to imply a conflict of wills?

One of the key monothelete texts is the Letter of Sergius of Constantinople to Pope Honorius. After saying that the expression ‘one operation’ threatens the profession of two natures in Christ, he proceeds to say that talk of ‘two operations’ likewise shocks many, ‘for it implies the assertion of two wills opposed to each other, with God the Word willing to accomplish the saving passion, while his manhood resists and opposes his will, whereby two [agents] are introduced, willing opposite things, which is impious. For it is impossible for there to exist in one and the same subject two contrary wills at the same time and in the same respect’ (2.2, pp. 542,12-17). The distinguished Maximus scholarF.-M. Léthel interprets Sergius as erring through confusion of thought – confusing the faculty of will with the object of will. If an agent simply chose one thing, one would talk of a single volition; talk of two volitions (with respect to one object at one and the same time) necessarily implies two contrary volitions.⁹ As a result, Sergius makes the error of supposing that two wills in Christ must involve contrariety. And since contrariety must be denied (as excluded by the hypostatic union), the monothelete solution, according to Léthel, was to deny that Christ possessed a human faculty of will.¹⁰

For Léthel this is primarily a matter of logic and metaphysics. I would suggest, however, that the stress on the contrariety of two wills arose in the first place not from logic but from a reading of Scripture – from the references in the Gospels to a distinct human will in Christ. ‘I will: be clean’ to the leper at Matth. 8:3, and similar passages, get us nowhere: as Léthel himself notes (p. 35), every statement of agreement between Christ’s will and that of the Father was read as relating to the Trinitarian unity of will, and so the accord of Christ’s human will with that of the Godhead became invisible. It is undeniable that a distinct human will is being referred to only when there is reference to a created will differing from the divine will, as we find in just two or three passages. One, often discussed in the seventh century, comes in the Fourth Gospel: ‘I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me’ (John 6:38). But above all there is our Lord’s prayer at Gethsemane: ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup pass from me; but not as I will, but as You will’ (Matth. 26:39), of which the Lucan version is: ‘Father, if You so will, take this cup away from me; but let not my will but Yours be done’ (Luke 22:42).

A particularly revealing text is one to be found in the Acts of the Lateran Council of 649 – the ‘Second Florilegium on the natural wills of Christ’ (1, pp. 274-97). In one excerpt (§2) Ambrose proves the difference between divine and human will by contrasting the human aversion to death to the divine will to undergo death in the passion of Christ. In another (§15) there is attributed to Athanasius: ‘When he says, “Father, if it is possible, may this cup pass; but let not my will be done but yours. The spirit is eager but the flesh is weak,” he here reveals two wills, one human, which is of the flesh, and the other divine, which is of God. For the human will, through the weakness of the flesh, rejects the passion, while the divine is eager for it.’¹¹ The florilegium contains similar statements by Chrysostom, Theophilus, Cyril, and Severian of Gabbala. To quote the last of these (§34): ‘At the end of his life he said, “now my soul is troubled and sorrowful unto death” – [he said “my soul” and] not “my Godhead”, for the divine is impassible and without fear or sorrow … In this way he displays two wills, one divine and the other human.’ In these texts it is Gethsemane itself that takes pride of place, as the supreme instance where Christ revealed that he had a human will by allowing it to oppose the divine will.

But did this not involve picturing Christ as a double monster, pursuing two contrary goals at the same time? The answer given was that the contrariety was only temporary, since Christ tamed the human will and overcame its resistance. The florilegium quotes from a sermon by Athanasius (§19): ‘It was necessary to change the will of his flesh and to subject it to the divine will’, and it also quotes Cyril’s Thesaurus on the human will being ‘taught’ by the divine will to accept the passion (§36). But was not the idea of even a temporary rebellion of the human will shocking to pious ears? The answer given was that aversion to dying is simply a natural physical reaction, without moral significance. This was stated in two passages from John Chrysostom included in the same florilegium: (§27) ‘The will of the flesh not to die is not reprehensible, but simply in accordance with nature,’ and (§28) ‘Just as hunger and sleep are not faults, neither is desire for the present life. Christ had a body free of sins but not separated from natural drives.’ Note that ‘will’ is here being used in a broad sense that includes any instinctive attraction or aversion. Compare the passage from Sophronius of Jerusalem that I quoted above: Christ experienced the passions when the Godhead wished and not when the physical and fleshly movements wished (≠qelon) to be physically stirred into operation’ (2.1, p. 450, 10-16). Compare the statement of Augustine’s in the same florilegium (§9): we call all feelings of attraction or aversion ‘volitions’ (qelsmata, ‘voluntates’ in Augustine’s Latin).¹² We find the same loose usage in Maximus the Confessor, as where he cites Jesus’ quailing before the passion as proof that he did indeed have a human will (PG 91, 80C). Consider too a passage in the Disputation with Pyrrhus where he cites from Mark the verse ‘He did not want to be recognized but was unable to remain hid’ (7:24) and observes that this implies limited power and therefore a human volition (PG 91, 321C-D). Here mere preference or velleity is treated as an operation of the will.¹³

Sergius of Constantinople avoided a clash of wills between the Godhead and the manhood by insisting that what we find at Gethsemane is not a contrary human volition but a ‘will’ in the weaker sense of simply a natural movement of the flesh, a mere reflex action, that the divine will was able to contain and deflect. Léthel (p. 45) criticizes him for reducing the refusal to a mere ‘inframoral, natural movement of the flesh’, as the miaphysites did. But, as we have seen, the mainstream, orthodox tradition, represented by the dyothelete florilegium used at the Lateran Council of 649, interpreted Gethsemane in precisely the same way; there was nothing unusual or partisan in Sergius’ understanding of Gethsemane. The difference between him and the ‘orthodox’ is merely a terminological one – his insistence that, despite Our Lord’s own words, he had but a single ‘will’.

Did Sergius deny that Christ had a human will at all? In view of the tradition, in the Church and in the very words of the gospel account of Gethsemane, that used ‘will’ to include reflex and instinctive movements, feelings such as hunger or aversion or distress, and also mere preferences and inclinations, this option was not open to him. Even the miaphysite champion Severus of Antioch admitted ‘two wills’ in Christ at Gethsemane.¹⁴ Historians of Christian doctrine have been much too ready to credit the monotheletes with the denial to Christ of a human faculty of will. There are certainly apparent denials of this kind, but we should be very hesitant before taking them literally. Take, for instance, the declarations of Constantine of Apamea at Constantinople III: he insists that Christ had but one will (qeljma), and that this one will was identical to that of God the Father and the Holy Spirit, but then adds unhesitatingly that Christ had a natural human will (qeljma, qeljsiˇ) meaning a desire for such things as food, drink and sleep (2.2, pp. 696,19-698,15). What, rather, Sergius denied is that Christ’s human ‘will’ ever operated separately from the divine will and in opposition to it: certainly the divine will and the instinctive impulse of the flesh differed at Gethsemane, but this was not to be described in terms of ‘two wills’ at loggerheads with each other. Instead, as Sergius put it, ‘The Lord’s rationally ensouled flesh never performed its physical movement separately and of its own impulse (orms) in opposition to the will of the Word of God hypostatically united to it, but whenever and however and to whatever extent God the Word himself willed it’ (2.2, p. 542, 18-21).¹⁵

⁸ Disputatio Bizyae cum Theodoro, in: Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia, CChr.SG 39 (Turnhout and Leuven, 1999), 109, 387-92.

⁹ François-Marie Léthel, Théologie de l’agonie du Christ (Paris, 1979), 41-4. See Pyrrhus in St Maximus’ Disputation with Pyrrhus: ‘It is impossible for two wills to coexist in one person without contrariety’ (PG 91, 292A). See the monothelete statement: ‘Equality of volition by all means indicates one will, just as equality of nature indicates one nature’ in: Sebastian Brock, Two sets of monothelete questions to the Maximianists: Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 17 (1986), 119-40, esp. 133.

¹⁰ F.-M. Léthel, Théologie (1979), 28 and 44-5.

¹¹ Note that Athanasius was specially cited by Pope Martin in 649 as authoritative on the two wills in Christ (1, 342, 21-2).

¹² Consequently, let us note, there was no real distinction between ‘energy/operation’ and ‘will’.

¹³ St Maximus in polemical contexts had little choice but to employ the loose use of ‘will’ of his contemporaries, but for his own awareness of the need to make distinctions between such terms as fusikon qeljma, bouljsiˇ, proairesiˇ and the like see Opuscula Theologica 1 (PG 91, 9ff.).

¹⁴ See the passages cited in Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 2.2 (London, 1995), 167.

¹⁵ He gives the same account verbatim in the Ecthesis when explaining what is meant by denying two contrary wills and asserting one will in Christ (1, p. 160).

III

In all, in the tradition and on both sides of the seventh-century debate, the role of the human will was constantly reduced to an instinctive, knee-jerk reaction of the flesh, which was merely a part of the natural human energy or operation. But there was an alternative – to interpret the opposition to the divine will as real, even culpable, but to attribute it to Christ only by appropriation, as in St Paul’s statement: ‘He made him to be sin who knew no sin’ (2Cor. 5:21).¹⁶

In Maximus the Confessor’s Disputation with Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus is made to refer to ‘men of Byzantium’ who attribute a human will to Christ not according to nature but by ‘appropriation’, meaning, as the text explains, not ‘essential appropriation’, that is, actual possession (through taking on new qualities and experiences) but rather a mere relation, by which ‘we appropriate and cherish out of friendship what belongs to others, without performing or suffering it ourselves’ (PG 91, 304A). In this sense Christ took on ignorance, abandonment, and even rebellion against the divine will, not personally but in one might call sympathetic solidarity. One extant monothelete text (the First Aporia of Deacon Theodore of Constantinople, PG 91, 216B-C) expresses precisely this view, likening the ascription to Christ of a human will to the ascription to him of ignorance (which, after the condemnation of the Agnoetae in the sixth century, was never taken literally). Since the natural object of appropriation is an experience rather than a faculty, by ‘human will’ in these texts is probably meant yet again the human ‘will’ at Gethsemane. This is explicit in Pope Honorius’ First Letter to Sergius of Constantinople: ‘There was not in the Saviour “another law in the members” or a differing or contrary will … Even if it was written: “I came to do not my will but the will of the one who sent me”, and: “Not as I will, but you will, Father” and the like, these are indicative not of a differing will but of the assumed dispensation of the manhood. For they were uttered on account of ourselves, to whom he gave an example.., so that each of us should learn to prefer in all things not his own will but rather that of the Lord’ (2.2, p. 552, 12-19). To explain the agony in the garden by appropriation in this sense was traditional. Take Athanasius, who talked of Christ’s speaking of his abandonment and of his ‘supposed’ fear of death: he shied away from attributing to Christ a personal experience of fear and God-forsakenness.¹⁷ This minimizing of Christ’s share in human weakness was not just an Alexandrian aberration: it is also to be found in John Chrysostom, who in one of his sermons on Matthew explains that the words ‘Not as I will but as you will’ were uttered to teach people to follow God, even if nature is reluctant, while the words asking for the cup to pass were uttered by Christ to prove the reality of his manhood. Likewise he interprets ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ as a general statement about mankind’s need for God’s help and not as referring to Jesus’ own experience.¹⁸

The monothelete Deacon Theodore, in the passage cited above, claims that treating the human will as Christ’s by appropriation is to be found in Gregory Nazianzen’s First Theological Oration on Christ (that is, Oratio 29). This is inaccurate, but he could have cited the following oration (30. 12), where Gregory writes that he understood ‘If it is possible, may this cup pass from me; but not as I will’ to refer not to any ignorance as to what was possible nor to any conflict of will in Christ, but to the limited knowledge and refractory will of ‘humanity in our condition’ (toO kaqˆ ™m￠ˇ).

¹⁶ See F.-M. Léthel, Théologie (1979), 50-2.

¹⁷ See Marcel Richard, Saint Athanase et la psychologie du Christ selon les Ariens: Mélanges de Science Religieuse 4 (1947) 5-54, esp. 34-5.

¹⁸ John Chrysostom, Hom. in Matth. 83 (PG 58, 746-7). See M.E. Lawrenz, The Christology of John Chrysostom: SP 22 (1989) 148-53, esp. 150: ‘Chrysostom does not describe full human volition as a characteristic of the human functions of Christ … Unlike later Antiochene Christology, however, Chrysostom’s Christology does not envision the convergence of the will of the Son and the Father as the moral accomplishment of the humanity of the Son.’

IV

Notably absent in the debate so far is any recognition of the role of the rational will in Christ, of the emphasis in the Letter to the Hebrews (5:8) on his learning obedience through what he suffered.

Was the role of the rational will in accepting the passion appreciated by the orthodox? The answer, broadly, is No – until Maximus the Confessor, writing in the mid-seventh century. Consider Chrysostom, Hom. 7 on the incomprehensible, against the Anomoeans, where he argues that ‘Not as I will but as You will’ proves that Christ had two wills and that he truly assumed a human nature, its reality exhibited by its fear of death. He continues: ‘At one moment he leaves the flesh on its own and deprives it of his own operation, in order to reveal its weakness and prove its nature, and at another moment he hides it, so that you may learn that he was not a mere man’ (PG 48, 766). All that manhood contributes is weakness.

Or take Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus (PG 75, 397A): the flesh, terrified at the thought of death, ‘was taught not to feel this’ as the Logos ‘taught the manhood no longer to have its own thoughts but to seek the will of God’. This is better than Chrysostom’s treatment. Still, the whole emphasis is on the soul’s need of healing; there is no appreciation of its positive role, and no suggestion of human merit. And from the time of the Nestorian controversy Cyril reverted to the Athanasian concentration on the will of the Godhead and its condescension in allowing the flesh to experience its natural weakness, while the soul goes unmentioned.¹⁹

For an example of the failure of much of the seventh-century debate to focus on the role of Christ’s rational will, take Ps.-Irenaeus, Treatise on the Faith to Deacon Demetrius:²⁰ this text singles out as the monothelete error not a neglect or denial of the role of Christ’s rational will but simply a treatment of Christ’s sufferings (distress, fear, anguish, hunger, weariness) as unreal. Here a distinction between orthodoxy and monotheletism is achieved only by misrepresenting the latter, for of course the monotheletes did not deny to Christ the blameless drives and impulses of the flesh.

What of the great dyothelete Council of Constantinople of 680/1? We read in its definition of the faith: ‘We proclaim two natural wills, which are not contrary (perish the thought!), as the impious heretics have asserted, but rather [we proclaim] his human will that follows and does not oppose or resist but is instead subject to his divine and omnipotent will, for “it was necessary for the will of the flesh to be moved but to be subjected to the divine will” according to the all-wise Athanasius’ (2.2, p. 774, 22-6). I used to suppose that this meant that Christ’s rational will followed the divine will, but it is clear from passages I have cited above that the reference is merely to instinctive human reactions such as aversion to death. This is made crystal clear in the edict of the emperor Constantine IV, confirming the decrees of the council, which describes Christ’s soul as ‘voluntarily laying hold of all the blameless passions, like our own, whenever the Word allowed it to seek and wish its own,’ and continues:

Accordingly it desired and longed for physical nourishment, according to reason, and was grieved and distressed; for when the Saviour came to the passion of the cross according to free will, he began to be distressed and afraid … He then prayed that the cup should pass, for as man he deprecated death.., while as God he was eager for the passion … Our father Athanasius bears witness to this in the sermon on the Trinity and the Incarnation, when he says, ‘[The words] “Father, if is possible, let this cup pass from me, but let not my will be done but yours” reveal two wills, the human one, which is of the flesh, and the divine; the human one, because of the weakness of the flesh, deprecates the passion, while the divine will is eager for it’ (2.2, pp. 842,11-844,2).

The emperor proceeds to cite Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 30 on the obedience of the human will to the divine will – this is the passage I discussed above where St Gregory explains the resistance of the flesh as mere appropriation. In all, Constantinople III achieved no advance over the monothelete interpretation of Gethsemane.²¹

Did the monotheletes likewise fail to appreciate a human assent to the passion in Christ? There is an intriguing passage in the letter of the monothelete patriarch Paul of Constantinople to Pope Theodore I (1, pp. 196-204), that offers the following interpretation of ‘Not my will but yours be done’. This, he says, means that Christ did not possess or exercise a will contrary to the divine will (this closely follows Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 30. 12). The correct teaching, he continues, is that Christ passionlessly appropriated ‘our human nature in its not choosing to be separated from the present life’ and that we must not suppose ‘that the flesh of God the Word, ensouled as it was by a mind, was averse to the passion that saved the world or differed in mind from the Father and the Word that indwelt it’ (1, p. 202, 10-14). This seems to hint at an acceptance of the passion by the rational soul, but it is hesitant and undeveloped.

It is to St Maximus that we must turn for a realization that at Gethsemane it was the human will that, voluntarily and of its own impulse, accepted the passion. Christ’s words ‘Not my will but Yours be done’ refer to a natural aversion to death but constitute an acceptance of the cross by the human, rational will.²² This the monotheletes missed, but so did the tradition that preceded them, and so did Constantinople III. This surely means that the debate over energies and wills in the seventh century was to a large extent an unreal one; monotheletes and most dyotheletes shared the same traditional view (and surely a defective one) of the operation of Christ’s manhood. What was novel in monotheletism was simply elevating the language of ‘one will’ in Christ (a traditional expression of a perfect harmony of will) into a requirement of orthodoxy; the motive for this was doubtless to win back the miaphysites, a motive that one can call ‘political’ or, more generously, ‘ecumenical’. The worst one can justly say of monotheletism is that it encouraged (though it did not always involve) a reduction of the agony in the garden to mere appropriation, and that it reinforced the failure in orthodoxy (apart from St Maximus) to recognize the role of the rational will in Christ. In all, it embodied what was most defective in orthodoxy, but it belonged to the same current. It was not unorthodox.

To conclude, the traditional picture – affirmed by the dyotheletes in the seventh century and repeated constantly ever since – is that there was, from the time of Chalcedon, an instinctive though inarticulate sense that Christ has two wills, which the monotheletes challenged by inventing a new variety of Apollinarianism that denied him a human faculty of will; this was condemned, and orthodoxy re-established. The true picture, however, is that both the tradition inherited from the fourth century and the post-Nestorian consensus agreed on a view of Christ that did not deny him a rational will but gave it nothing to do and rarely referred to it. Whether there was talk of ‘one will’ or ‘two wills’ made no difference – until Maximus the Confessor came up with a new interpretation of Gethsemane and thereby of the operation of will(s) in Christ. His solution was not adopted at Constantinople III, but subsequently found its way into the orthodox tradition.²³ Such representation of real development as simply the preservation of traditional doctrine against heretical innovation has, of course, been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of Christianity. Because it actually facilitates innovation, we may allow it to theologians – but not, surely, to historians.

¹⁹ E.g. Cyril, Hom. on Luke 146, transl. R. P. Smith (Studion, 1983), 582f.; and Quod unus sit Christus (772D), in: Deux dialogues christologiques, SC 97 (Paris, 1964), 494.

²⁰ Published by Marcel Richard in Polychronion, Festschrift F. Dölger (Heidelberg, 1966), 431-40; reprinted in id., Opera Minora III, §65. See esp. 436-8.

²¹ The Lateran Council of 649 did better: Pope Martin in his final speech, just before the approval of the canons, stressed the obedience of the human nature to the passion – attributed, be it noted, not to the human nature as a distinct subject but to the incarnate Word acting ‘humanly’ (1, pp. 360-5). But of course the modern view is that the Acts of 649 were largely composed (before the council even met!) by Maximus himself and other Greek monks; see Rudolf Riedinger, Die Lateransynode von 649 und Maximos der Bekenner, in: F. Heinzer and C. Schönborn (eds.), Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg, 2-5 Septembre 1980 (Fribourg, 1982), 111-21.

²² See F.-M. Léthel, Théologie (1979), 92-9.

²³ John of Damascus in his treatment of Christ’s wills in On the orthodox faith combines an admirably lucid summary of St Maximus’ position with echoes of the more traditional position, e.g.: ‘He wills not only those things which he willed naturally as God (for it is no part of Godhead to will to eat and drink and the like), but also those things that support human nature, and this not through opposition in choice (gnEmj) but through the individuality of the natures. For he willed naturally in this way when his divine volition willed it and permitted the flesh to suffer and do what was proper to it’ (Expositio fidei, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, Berlin 1973, 139, 50-4).