Two Wills in Christ, Against Monothelitism

Monothelitism and the Church

Trying to restore the unity of faith the Monophysite controversies had disturbed, Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople (610-638), together with Bishops Theodore of Pharan and Cyrus of Phasis, proposed the formula that Christ has “one will and one operation.” Though not meant to deny the duality of natures Chalcedon had defined, this phrase in fact revived Monophysitism under a new name, and was promptly denounced by the Palestinian monk Sophronius, who became Bishop of Jerusalem in 634. Its adherents were called Monothelites, or Monergists.

Owing to the imprudent and dilatory conduct of Pope Honorius — deceived by a cleverly worded letter from Sergius — the new heresy grew to formidable proportions in the East. Honorius overemphasized the moral unity of the two wills (their freedom from contradiction) at the expense of their physical duality, but he was not himself a Monothelite at heart, nor did he issue an ex-cathedra decision on the question.¹ The considerations for this reading run as follows: Honorius, though he argues from the Hypostatic Union as his premise just as Sergius did, never draws Sergius’s further inference of one will or one operation from it; his one approving use of the phrase “one will” is, in context, plainly moral rather than physical — meaning that the will of Christ’s sinless human nature agrees with His divine will, not that Christ possesses only one faculty of willing; and his second letter to Sergius explicitly condemns, as novel and divisive, both the doctrine of a single will and of a double one, aligning himself instead with Leo the Great’s teaching that the two natures work each according to its own sphere, without division and without confusion.²

Among the first to condemn Monothelitism as a revival of Monophysitism was St. Sophronius, already mentioned, and St. Maximus Confessor stood as another prominent defender of orthodoxy.³ The Church officially defined the Catholic truth under Pope Martin I at the Lateran Council of 649, which solemnly condemned both the Ecthesis, a Monothelite profession issued by Emperor Heraclius (638), and the Typus, a similar edict from his grandson Constantius II (648).⁴ Pope Agatho settled the matter definitively with his “Epistle to the Emperors” (A.D. 680), read at the Sixth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (680-681) and hailed by the assembled Fathers as the very voice of St. Peter. The Council supplemented the Creed of Chalcedon accordingly: “We confess, according to the teaching of the holy Fathers, two natural wills [in Christ] and two natural operations, without division, without change, without separation, without confusion.”

The Teaching of Revelation

Scripture and the Fathers both clearly teach the existence of two wills and two operations in Jesus Christ.

The Scriptural Argument

Pope Agatho himself developed the Scriptural case exhaustively in his dogmatic letter to the Emperors. Among the texts he cites: “My Father … not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39), and “Not my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42). The opposition these verses draw between Christ’s will and His Father’s cannot refer to His divine will, which is numerically one and really identical with the Father’s — it must refer to His human will. The same relation appears in John 5:30: “I seek not my own will, but the will of him that sent me.” Agatho draws a further argument from the Scriptural texts emphasizing Christ’s obedience to His Father⁵ — since obedience, properly speaking, can only be exercised by a will genuinely distinct from the one it obeys, and only a human will could obey the divine will in this sense.

The Patristic Argument

Agatho was able to marshal abundant Patristic support for the doctrine of two wills and two operations.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem draws the distinction sharply, applying it to both nature and operation at once: “Christ was double: man according to what was visible, and God according to what was in no way seen; as man He truly ate as we eat, and as God He fed five thousand with five loaves; as man He truly died, and as God He raised Lazarus from the dead; as man He truly slept in the boat, and as God He walked on the sea.”⁶ In the West, Pope Leo the Great’s Epistula Dogmatica ad Flavianum, aimed at Monophysitism, cuts the ground from under Monothelitism in advance: “For just as God is not changed by His compassion, so man is not consumed by his dignity. Each form acts, in communion with the other, according to what is proper to it — the Word performing what belongs to the Word, and the flesh carrying out what belongs to the flesh.”⁷

Beyond simply recording the two-wills doctrine as revealed truth, the Fathers also showed it agreeable to reason. First, they invoke the metaphysical axiom that, since nature is the principle of operation, a nature cannot be separated from its own proper operation. “No nature is without operation,” says St. John Damascene.⁸ St. Cyril adds: “Beings whose operation and power are identical must be of the same species.”⁹ Second, they invoke the epistemological principle that the intellect grasps the essence of things through their sensible manifestations — we come to know a nature by first observing its operations. Applying this to the case at hand shows Monothelitism to be Monophysitism in another guise: as Pope Agatho puts it, “It is impossible to conceive of a nature that does not exercise the operation proper to itself.”¹⁰ St. Sophronius makes the same point: “As we perceive the nature of a thing in no other way than by its operation, a difference of essence manifests itself by a difference in operation.”¹¹ Agatho presses the point as a dilemma: if Christ’s operation were truly one, it would have to be either eternal or temporal, divine or human — but it cannot simply be the Father’s own operation (since the Father has no human nature), nor can it be merely human (since then the divine and human natures in Christ would share no common ground of operation at all). Since Christ performed some things that are proper to man alone, His human operation cannot simply be identical with the Father’s; and since He performed some things according to His Divinity that the Father likewise performs, and other things according to His humanity that belong to man alone, He must possess two really distinct operations.¹²

A further axiom the Fathers turned against Monothelitism: “The number of wills does not follow the number of persons, but of natures.” Pope Agatho, quoting St. Maximus: “Since three Persons are said to exist in the Holy Trinity, it would be necessary, [on the Monothelite principle,] to say there are also three personal wills and three personal operations — which is absurd… But since, as the truth of the Christian faith holds, a natural will corresponds to a natural essence, then wherever the Trinity is said to have one nature, one natural will and one natural operation must correspondingly be understood. And wherever we confess two natures — divine and human — in the one Person of Christ, as two natures of one and the same [Person], so too we regularly confess two natural wills and two operations of His.”¹³ In short: operation follows nature, not person, so there is no need to multiply persons to match operations, or operations to match persons.

Answering an Objection

Sergius tried to persuade Pope Honorius that two wills would necessarily conflict with one another. But this only follows if “duality” is confused with “contrariety” — if it were, Christ could have only one will. Sergius’s own language was ambiguous enough to be read as meaning only that Christ’s human will always remained subject to, and cooperated with, the divine will — which is exactly the orthodox position. The Sixth General Council accordingly defined: “two natural wills, not contrary to one another — far from it, as the impious heretics have asserted — but with His human will following, and neither resisting nor struggling against, but rather subject to, His divine and omnipotent will.”

Nor does the doctrine of two wills in Christ (“Duothelitism”) conflict with the philosophical principle that actions belong to their subjects (“actions belong to supposita”). Though two wills operate in Christ, both belong to one and the same Person — the Divine Logos — who, as the one principium quod (subject who acts), possesses a twofold principium quo (the two distinct principles by which He acts), exercising two specifically different kinds of operation through them. Hence the theological axiom: “two operations, but one who operates.”¹⁴

Notes