The Third Council of Constantinople

Does Christ have one will or two? To modern ears it is the most scholastic question the Church ever fought about. In fact it is the most personal. Our wills are the part of us that is sickest — the place where we know the good and choose against it. If the Son of God did not take a human will, then the one thing most in need of healing was left untouched. Two men were tortured and exiled for saying so, and both were dead before the Council vindicated them.

An empire fighting for its life

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The seventh century was catastrophic for the Christian East. A long war with Persia exhausted both empires; then, from the 630s, the armies of the new Islamic caliphate took Syria, Palestine and Egypt within a decade. Jerusalem fell in 638, Alexandria by 642. The provinces the emperors lost were precisely the ones that had rejected Chalcedon, and in the years before the disaster the government in Constantinople was desperate to win them back.

That is the setting for the last of the great Christological heresies. It was not born in a school; it was born in a chancellery, as a formula designed to reconcile.

One energy, then one will

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Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople proposed that whatever one said about natures, all Christ’s activity proceeded from “one theandric energy” — one divine-human operation. Many welcomed it; the formula was ambiguous enough to satisfy both sides. When the ambiguity was exposed, the government retreated to a second position: whatever else, Christ has one will. Emperor Heraclius published this as the Ekthesis in 638; his grandson Constans II, tired of the row, issued the Typos in 648, which forbade anyone to discuss the question at all, on pain of punishment.

A decree ordering Christians to stop asking whether their Saviour had a human will is the sort of peace that only a government could mistake for unity.

Why it was a heresy and not a compromise

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The Fathers had established a principle at Constantinople in 381 and again at Chalcedon: a will belongs to a nature, not to a person. To be human is to have a human will; to be divine is to have the divine will. If Christ has only one will, then either He has only one nature — Eutychianism, condemned at Chalcedon — or He has a human nature with something missing from it, which is Apollinarianism, condemned at Constantinople. St Gregory’s rule applies exactly: what is not assumed is not healed.

And there was a reading of the Gospel at stake. In Gethsemane Christ prays, “Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done.” If there is only one will in Christ, the prayer is a performance. If there are two, we are watching the thing our salvation depends on: a human will, in the face of real horror, freely conforming itself to the will of God — the reverse of Eden, where a human will freely refused.

St Maximus the Confessor

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The man who saw all of this most clearly was a monk who had once been chief secretary to the emperor. St Maximus — later called the Confessor — worked out the distinction on which everything turns. There is the natural will: the built-in orientation of a nature toward its own good and toward God, which is not sinful but is part of what it means to be a creature. And there is what he called the gnomic will: our particular way of willing after the Fall — hesitating, deliberating between good and evil, choosing in ignorance, often choosing wrongly.

Christ, Maximus taught, has a fully human natural will, which is why He can be hungry, recoil from death, and pray in the garden. What He does not have is the gnomic will, the wavering between good and evil, because in Him the human will belongs to the divine Person and is always, from the first instant, moved toward the Father. He is not less free than we are; He is free as we were meant to be — and it is that freedom which He gives back to us.

The cost

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In 649 Pope St Martin I convened a council in the Lateran which condemned the imperial Typos. The emperor’s response was to have the Pope arrested in Rome, carried to Constantinople, tried for treason, paraded through the streets in chains and exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, where he died of hunger and neglect in 655. He is the last Bishop of Rome venerated as a martyr.

Maximus was tried twice. He was old, he held no office, and by then almost every patriarchal throne in the East had endorsed the imperial formula. His interrogators pressed him with exactly that: the whole Church is against you, who are you to stand alone? He answered that even if the whole world communed with them, he would not — because truth is not established by counting bishops. After the second trial his tongue was cut out and his right hand cut off, so that he could neither speak nor write, and he was exiled to the far edge of the empire, where he died on 13 August 662.

The Council

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Twenty years later the political calculation had changed: the provinces the heresy had been designed to win back were permanently lost, and the new emperor, Constantine IV, wanted peace with Rome. In November 680 about 170 bishops assembled in the domed hall of the imperial palace — the Troullos — and sat for eighteen sessions until September 681, reading the documents, tracing quotations back to their sources, and detecting several that had been doctored.

The Council condemned monothelitism and named its authors: the patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, Theodore of Pharan — and Honorius, Pope of Rome, who in a letter to Sergius had unwisely conceded “one will.” It is a point Orthodox Christians should know and state without triumphalism: an Ecumenical Council condemned a pope by name for a doctrinal failure, and his successors accepted the judgement.

The Council then honoured, by name, the memory of the mutilated monk whose analysis it had adopted. Maximus had lost the argument in every visible way — deposed, condemned, silenced, dead in exile — and the Church confesses his theology to this day.

The Council in Trullo

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The Fifth and Sixth Councils had both dealt with doctrine and issued no disciplinary canons. In 692 a further council met in the same domed hall to supply them; because it completes the work of the two previous councils it is called the Quinisext (“Fifth-Sixth”) or the Council in Trullo, and Orthodox canon law reckons its 102 canons with the Sixth Council. Much of the practical order of Orthodox life — the rules on marriage of the clergy, on fasting, on what may be depicted in church — comes from it.

The witness of the Gospels

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The Council’s case rests less on philosophy than on the plain text of the Gospels. Christ says, “I came down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me” — a sentence which requires two wills to be intelligible at all, since one cannot decline to follow one’s own single will. He says in Gethsemane, “not what I will, but what Thou wilt.” He is hungry after the fast and refuses to turn stones into bread. He “would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill Him.” He is troubled, He sweats, He asks the three to stay awake with Him. Take away the human will and every one of these becomes theatre. Keep it, and they are the record of a man — who is God — choosing the Father, freely, in the dark, on our behalf.

The debate at Carthage

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One episode deserves its own paragraph because it shows how the Church argued at her best. In July 645, in Carthage, St Maximus held a public disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed Patriarch of Constantinople and the chief living advocate of one will. The record of it survives. Maximus does not shout; he asks questions. Does the will belong to the person or to the nature? If to the person, then in the Trinity there are three wills, and you have divided God. If to the nature, then Christ, having two natures, has two wills. At the end Pyrrhus publicly acknowledged that he had been wrong and went to Rome to be received back into communion. (He later reverted, which does not lessen the achievement.) The confessor who would be mutilated for the doctrine won the argument fairly, in the open, seventeen years before he died.

After the Council

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The Sixth Council restored communion between Constantinople and Rome and closed the last great Christological controversy of the ancient Church. One community, in the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, remained attached to the earlier formulas for a time; from it descends the Maronite Church, in communion with Rome since the twelfth century. Monothelitism briefly revived under the emperor Philippikos in 711 and disappeared with him. The next great argument would not be about the natures or the wills of Christ at all, but about whether He may be painted — which is the subject of the Seventh Council.

Why it still matters

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This is the council of the spiritual life. Everything Orthodoxy says about repentance, obedience and ascetic struggle assumes that the human will is real, that it is wounded, and that it can be healed without being destroyed. God does not save us by overriding our freedom; He saves us by taking a human will into Himself and bending it, in a garden at night, toward the Father.

Which means that “Thy will be done” is not resignation. It is the prayer of Christ’s own human will, given to us to pray after Him — and every time a Christian says it and means it, the healing that began in Gethsemane reaches a little further into the world.