The Two-Wills Inheritance

What St. Maximus the Confessor argued under torture and what the Sixth Ecumenical Council defined, St. John of Damascus systematized for the textbooks. This file treats his reception of the dyothelite synthesis: the natural/gnomic distinction codified for instruction (Exposition II.22–30, III.14–15), the anti-monothelite chapters, his treatment of Gethsemane, his polemics against the Jacobites and Nestorians in the separate treatises, and why his formulations became the standard reference East and West.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Synthesis Received

By the time John of Damascus wrote (c. 743), the doctrine of Christ’s two wills was no longer a contested thesis but conciliar dogma. St. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) had worked out, in the Opuscula, the Disputation with Pyrrhus, and at the cost of his tongue and right hand, the principle that will and operation belong to nature, not to person — so that Christ, having two complete natures, has two natural wills and two natural operations (see Dyothelite Christology). The Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681) had adopted Maximus’ theology almost verbatim, defining “two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, without change, without partition, without confusion,” and confessing that Christ’s “human will follows, and that not as resisting or reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will” (Constantinople III, Definition; trans. NPNF II/14). John’s task was the one he set himself throughout the Exact Exposition: to gather “the things worked out by the most eminent of teachers” into a compendium (John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, prologue; trans. Chase, FOTC 37). On the two wills he is Maximus distilled into a manual.

Codifying the Natural and Gnomic Will

The conceptual heart of the dyothelite case is Maximus’ distinction between the natural will (thelēma physikon) — the will as a faculty of nature, the simple orientation of a rational nature toward its good — and the deliberative, hesitant gnomic mode of willing (gnōmē) characteristic of fallen persons (see Natural and Gnomic Will). John lays the anthropological groundwork in Book II, where the Exposition turns from cosmology to the human person and treats the appetitive and willing faculty, the voluntary and the involuntary, and free choice across a sequence of chapters (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.22–30, “Concerning passion and energy,” “Concerning the faculty of volition,” “Concerning the voluntary and the involuntary,” “Concerning free-will”; trans. NPNF II/9). There he establishes, before any christological application, that willing (thelēsis) is the natural appetite of a rational nature, distinct from the deliberation (boulēsis) and choice (proairesis) that belong to the mode of a particular person — exactly Maximus’ architecture, now set out as ordered psychology fit for a textbook (Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford 2002, ch. 6).

He then carries the distinction into Christology in Book III. Christ, John teaches, has a complete and natural human will, “for He assumed our nature in its entirety,” but he has no gnomic will: he does not deliberate in ignorance or waver between options, because the human will in him was never separated from the good and was moved from the first in perfect accord with the divine will (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.14, “Concerning the volitions and free-will of our Lord Jesus Christ”; trans. NPNF II/9). “We hold that there are indeed two natural wills … but not in opposition. … His human will followed, not resisting or struggling against, but rather subject to His divine will” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.14; trans. NPNF II/9, summarizing). The dogmatic content is Maximus’; the gain is that John has reduced it to a clear, teachable doctrine of nature, faculty, and mode.

John is careful, here, to clarify one point on which Maximus’ own usage had developed and which scholarship has tracked: the denial of a gnomic will to Christ does not impoverish his humanity but perfects it. Gnōmē and proairesis (deliberative choice) belong to the human condition precisely insofar as it gropes toward a good it does not yet securely possess; their absence in Christ is not a missing human faculty but the mark of a human will that, enhypostatized in the Word, was never alienated from the good and so never had to deliberate its way back to it (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.14; cf. Natural and Gnomic Will, which traces the development in Maximus’ own usage). What Christ has is the natural will in its proper freedom and its native orientation to God — human willing as it was meant to be, and as it will be again in the deified. John thereby preserves the soteriological stakes: it is the human faculty of willing, the very power by which Adam fell, that Christ assumes and heals from within.

The Anti-Monothelite Chapters and Gethsemane

Book III’s chapters on the wills (III.14) and the operations (III.15, “Concerning the energies in our Lord Jesus Christ”) are John’s formal refutation of Monothelitism and Monoenergism. He insists that to confess one will is to confess one nature, the old Monophysite error in a new register, and that a human nature without its own will is no human nature at all — the soteriological argument of Gregory the Theologian that “what is not assumed is not healed” (cf. Christology; Gregory, Epistle 101). On the operations he gives the careful formula that Christ works “in each form in communion with the other”: the one Christ acts divinely and humanly through his two natural energies, without dividing the agent (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.15; trans. NPNF II/9).

The proof-text, as for Maximus, is the agony in the Garden. John treats Gethsemane as the clearest scriptural display of the two wills in unforced concurrence. The shrinking from death — “let this cup pass from me” — is the spontaneous, natural recoil of a real human will from its own dissolution, which is no sin; and “nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be done” (Matthew 26:39; Luke 22:42) shows that human will, real and intact, freely handing itself over to the divine. John reads the agony precisely where Maximus had: not as evidence that Christ’s willing was finally one, but as the revelation of a genuine human will deified in the very act of conforming itself to God (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.18, on the prayers and the natural fear; III.23–24; trans. NPNF II/9; cf. Dyothelite Christology, which sets out Maximus’ Gethsemane exegesis at depth). He distinguishes the natural fear of death — which Christ truly felt — from the unnatural, cowardly fear born of faithless deliberation, which Christ did not have (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.23, “Concerning fear”; trans. NPNF II/9).

Polemics Against the Jacobites and Nestorians

John’s systematic Christology was sharpened in controversy, and beyond the Exposition he wrote separate polemical treatises against the two errors that flank Chalcedon. Against the Monophysites — called Jacobites in Syria, after Jacob Baradaeus — his most important work is the Against the Jacobites (Contra Jacobitas), composed at the request of Peter, Metropolitan of Damascus, to reconcile a Jacobite bishop; it is the longest and most general of his three anti-Monophysite texts (Keith, “John of Damascus: Rewriting the Division of Heresy and Schism,” Vox Patrum 68 [2017]; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 6). Against the opposite error he wrote On the Faith, against the Nestorians (De fide contra Nestorianos) and a Contra Nestorianos in dialogue form, the latter modeled closely on Cyril of Alexandria’s That Christ Is One (Keith, Vox Patrum 68; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 6). A notable feature of these works, which scholarship has stressed, is John’s irenic conviction that orthodox and Monophysite Christians often mean the same thing in different vocabulary — so that much of his polemic is the patient clarification of terms rather than mere condemnation (Keith, Vox Patrum 68). His precision about nature, hypostasis, will, and operation is what allowed him both to refute and to translate.

These polemical treatises are not a separate enterprise from the Exposition but its sharpening. The two errors they target are the two ditches on either side of the Chalcedonian road, and the two-wills doctrine is endangered from both. The Monophysite denial of two natures, carried through, must deny two wills and two operations, collapsing Christ’s human willing into the divine; this is why John, like Maximus before him, sees Monothelitism as Monophysitism’s logical heir, and why the Contra Jacobitas labors over the distinction between nature and hypostasis that the two-wills doctrine presupposes. The Nestorian error, conversely, so divides the natures that it threatens to make the two wills two willers, two subjects at potential cross-purposes; John answers it, as Cyril had, by anchoring both natures and both wills in the single hypostasis of the Word, so that the human will is the Word’s own human will, freely subjecting itself, never a second person’s. The dyothelite confession thus stands exactly between the two: two wills, because two natures, against the Jacobites; one willing person, because one hypostasis, against the Nestorians. John’s terminological care is what holds that narrow line.

Why His Formulations Became the Standard

John of Damascus’s two-wills Christology became the received form of the doctrine for a reason that is more pedagogical than doctrinal. He invented nothing; he ordered everything. Maximus’ own writings, for all their depth, are difficult, occasional, and polemical — opuscula answering particular objections, a transcript of a single public disputation, dense ambigua. They are the work of a thinker in combat. John’s Exposition is the work of a teacher at peace, writing after the victory, free to lay the doctrine out in order: the powers of the soul and the structure of willing first, then the application to Christ, each term defined before it is used. By setting the psychology of willing in Book II and then applying it in Book III with a fixed vocabulary, he produced a presentation that could be taught, memorized, and transmitted — and the Exact Exposition duly became the standard dogmatic manual of the Byzantine Church (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 6). Its reach extended West: translated into Latin by Burgundio of Pisa in the twelfth century, the De Fide Orthodoxa became a textbook for the Scholastics, so that Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas met the two-wills doctrine, the composite hypostasis, and the communicatio idiomatum in John’s formulation (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 6; cf. Perichoresis and the Enhypostaton). This is the “textbook effect”: Maximus won the argument, the Sixth Council fixed the dogma, and John of Damascus wrote the manual through which both East and West would forever read it.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book II (chs. 22–30, on passion, the will, the voluntary, and free-will) and Book III (chs. 14–15 on the wills and operations; chs. 18, 23–24 on the prayers, fear, and Gethsemane). c. 743. Trans. NPNF II/9 (ed. Schaff and Wace); also trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr., Fathers of the Church 37 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958).
  • John of Damascus. Against the Jacobites (Contra Jacobitas); On the Faith, against the Nestorians (De fide contra Nestorianos); Against the Nestorians (Contra Nestorianos).
  • Council of Constantinople III (680–681). Definition. Trans. NPNF II/14 (ed. Percival).
  • Maximus the Confessor. Disputation with Pyrrhus; Opuscula theologica et polemica.
  • Keith, Zachary M. “John of Damascus: Rewriting the Division of Heresy and Schism.” Vox Patrum 68 (2017).
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, esp. ch. 6.
  • Gregory the Theologian. Epistle 101 (To Cledonius).