Sophronius and Maximus

The seventh-century monothelite crisis is the direct sequel to the fifth-century schism: it began as one more imperial attempt to reconcile the non-Chalcedonians, this time by proposing that Christ acts by a single divine-human energy and wills by a single will. St. Sophronius of Jerusalem detected the error at once; St. Maximus the Confessor showed why will and energy belong to nature and not to person, and therefore why the Christ of Chalcedon must have two of each; and the Church defined it at the Sixth Ecumenical Council. This is the deepest patristic answer to the Christology that rejected Chalcedon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why This Is the Sequel

Monothelitism is not a fresh heresy that happened to arise two centuries after Chalcedon. It is the Chalcedonian schism’s own logic, worked out.

Severus of Antioch had taught the one composite activity of the one incarnate Word against Leo’s “each form does what is proper to it” (see Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies). In the 620s and 630s the Emperor Heraclius and the Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, needing the loyalty of the Syrian, Armenian, and Egyptian provinces against Persia and then against the Arab conquests, saw in that formula the material of a union. Their proposal — monoenergism — was that Christ has two natures but acts by a single divine-human energy (mia energeia); when that met resistance, it was recast as monothelitism, a single will (hen thelēma) (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

For a moment it seemed to work: unions on the basis of one energy were concluded in Armenia and, in 633, at Alexandria under the Chalcedonian patriarch Cyrus. The Christological price was not noticed until an old Palestinian monk noticed it.

Sophronius of Jerusalem

St. Sophronius (c. 560–638) was a monk of Palestinian formation, a hymnographer and hagiographer, who was in Alexandria in 633 when the union on the basis of one energy was proclaimed. He protested to Cyrus and then to Sergius, arguing that “one energy” destroys the reality of Christ’s human nature: a nature is known by its natural activity, and a humanity which does not act humanly is not a humanity (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004).

Elected Patriarch of Jerusalem in 634, he issued the customary Synodical Letter to Sergius and to Rome — and made it a full dogmatic exposition of the Chalcedonian faith, confessing the one Christ in two natures, each with its own natural properties and its own natural activity, and rejecting the one-energy formula (Sophronius of Jerusalem, Synodical Letter, 634; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 1989; Bathrellos, 2004). The Sixth Ecumenical Council would later read and approve this letter, so that Sophronius’ private protest became conciliar doctrine.

He is remembered by the Church for two other things that belong to the same courage: he negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar in 638 rather than see the city destroyed, and he died shortly after, having seen the Holy City pass out of Christian hands and the doctrine he had defended still under imperial ban. Heraclius promulgated monothelitism in the Ekthesis of 638; Constans II tried to silence the whole dispute by decree in the Typos of 648.

Maximus: Will and Energy Belong to Nature

The decisive theologian was St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), monk, exile, and the greatest of Byzantine thinkers (see St. Maximus the Confessor).

Maximus argued from the principle the Cappadocians had used against Apollinaris and Eutyches: will (thelēma) and operation (energeia) belong to nature, not to person. To be human is, among other things, to have a human will and a human activity; a nature stripped of its natural will and energy is an abstraction, not a nature. Therefore if Christ truly assumed a complete human nature — as Chalcedon defined — he necessarily has a complete human will and a complete human energy, alongside his divine will and energy. To deny the human will is to deny the completeness of the humanity, and so to fall back into a subtle form of the very error Chalcedon excluded: “what is not assumed is not healed,” and if Christ did not assume a human will, then the human will — the very seat of the fall — is not saved (Maximus, Opuscula theologica et polemica; Disputation with Pyrrhus; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004).

The argument is worth seeing as a whole, because it is the strongest thing the Chalcedonian tradition ever said, and it is aimed precisely at the position that rejected Chalcedon:

1. Whatever belongs to a nature as such must be present wherever that nature is whole.
2. Willing and acting belong to human nature as such — a human being who wills nothing and does nothing is not a human being.
3. Christ’s human nature is whole (Chalcedon: “perfect in manhood… consubstantial with us as touching his manhood”).
4. Therefore Christ has a human will and a human energy.
5. Therefore the confession of one activity or one will in Christ is the confession of an incomplete humanity, whatever its intention.

The force of this against the non-Chalcedonian position is exact. It does not accuse Severus of denying Christ’s humanity; it shows that a Christology which numbers the activities by the person rather than by the nature cannot in the end keep the humanity it sincerely intends to affirm. The one-energy formula was proposed as a bridge to the separated churches; Maximus showed that the bridge ran off the edge.

Two Wills Without Conflict

Maximus’ profound contribution was to show how two wills do not mean two wills at odds. He distinguished the natural will (thelēma physikon) — the natural faculty and inclination of a nature toward its own good, which Christ has entire — from the gnomic will (gnōmē), the mode of deliberation and choice marked, in fallen humanity, by ignorance, hesitation, and the possibility of choosing against God. Christ’s human will is fully natural but not gnomic in that fallen sense: his human willing is perfectly and freely conformed to the divine will, without wavering.

The test case is Gethsemane. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Maximus reads this not as two wills in conflict but as the human will of Christ freely embracing the divine — a genuine human shrinking from death, and a genuine human obedience, both his (Maximus, Opusculum 6, trans. Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Popular Patristics Series 25, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003; Disputation with Pyrrhus; Bathrellos, 2004). This is not a diminution of the union but its whole point: our salvation consists in a human will, in our nature, freely choosing God — which is what Adam did not do.

The Lateran Synod, the Trial, and the Council

Maximus paid for this witness. With Pope Martin I, who condemned monothelitism at the Lateran Synod of 649, he was arrested by Constans II, tried at Constantinople, and — refusing to be silent, and refusing communion with a see that held the Typos — exiled and mutilated, his tongue and right hand cut off. He died in exile in Lazica on 13 August 662 (Price with Booth and Cubitt, The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990; see St. Maximus the Confessor).

He was vindicated eighteen years later. The Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681) defined:

“We proclaim equally two natural wills or volitions in him and two natural principles of action (energies) which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion… and his human will follows, not as resisting or reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and all-powerful will… For just as his flesh is called and is the flesh of God the Word, so too the natural will of his flesh is called and is the very own will of God the Word.”
(Council of Constantinople III, Exposition of Faith, 681; trans. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1; cf. Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14)

The four negatives in that sentence are Chalcedon’s four adverbs, transposed from nature to will and energy. The Sixth Council is Chalcedon completed: as there are two natures without confusion or division, so there are two natural wills and two natural energies without confusion or division, the human freely and perfectly obedient to the divine. The council’s other business — the condemnation of the monothelite patriarchs and of Pope Honorius — belongs to the councils collection and is treated at Constantinople III and Monothelitism.

What This Means for the Schism

Three consequences follow, and they govern everything in Sections 08 and 09.

The bridge collapsed. The last serious imperial attempt to reconcile the separated churches by christological formula produced a heresy, cost the Church a confessor’s blood, and required a further Ecumenical Council to repair. After 681 no Byzantine government tried again.

The dogmatic gap widened. The Orthodox Church now confesses four councils the separated churches do not receive, and the doctrine of the two natural wills and two natural energies is among the things they did not receive. This is why the difference cannot be described as concerning Chalcedon alone: whatever one concludes about physis in 451, the questions of 681 remain, and they are questions about what is actual in Christ, not about vocabulary.

And the Chalcedonian tradition acquired its decisive argument. Maximus’ demonstration that will and energy follow nature is the reason the Church’s confession of “two natures” is not a scholastic refinement but the guarantee that a real human being loved God perfectly in our flesh, and that our willing can therefore be healed. The Definition of 451 is what makes that sayable; the definition of 681 is what makes it explicit.

See Also

• St. John of Damascus and the Summing Up — the synthesis that follows
• In Two Natures — the Definition these Fathers were defending
• The Tome of Leo — “each form does what is proper to it,” raised to dogma at the Sixth Council
• Severus, Jacob Baradaeus, and the Parallel Hierarchies — the doctrine of the one composite activity
• St. Maximus the Confessor — his life, trial, and wider theology
• Constantinople III and Monothelitism — the Sixth Council in the conciliar framework

References

• Sophronius of Jerusalem. Synodical Letter (634), read and approved at the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
• Maximus the Confessor. Opuscula theologica et polemica; Disputation with Pyrrhus (Disputatio cum Pyrrho); Opusculum 6, trans. Paul Blowers and Robert Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Popular Patristics Series 25 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003).
• Council of Constantinople III (680–681). Exposition of Faith. In Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1; Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
• Price, Richard, with Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt. The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014; and The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 680–681, Liverpool, 2014.
• Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989; Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975.
• Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.
• Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.