Dyothelite Christology

St. Maximus the Confessor’s theology of the two natural wills of Christ — the doctrine the Sixth Ecumenical Council would canonise. Will and operation belong to nature, not to person; therefore the Christ of Chalcedon, complete in two natures, wills and acts in two ways, his human will perfectly and freely conformed to the divine. This file sets out the technical vocabulary, the Gethsemane exegesis that is the heart of the case, and the Disputation with Pyrrhus (645) in which the argument was tested in public debate.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Will Belongs to Nature

The whole of Maximus’ dyothelitism rests on a single axiom: will (thelēma) and operation (energeia) are properties of nature, not of hypostasis (person). To will and to act are powers that a thing has by virtue of what it is, not who it is. A human being wills humanly because he has a human nature; God wills divinely because of the divine nature. The will is not a separate “someone” added on top of the person but the natural appetite of a rational nature for its own good (Maximus, Opusculum 3; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, Oxford 2004, ch. 4; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Routledge 1996, ch. 3).

From this axiom the conclusion follows with the force of arithmetic. Chalcedon confessed that the one Christ exists “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (Christology, Chalcedonian Definition). If will belongs to nature, and Christ has two complete natures, then Christ has two natural wills (dyothelitism) and two natural operations (dyoenergism) — a divine will identical with the will of the Father and the Spirit, and a genuine, complete human will. To confess two natures but one will is to confess a nature without its own faculty of willing: that is, an incomplete, mutilated humanity — which is no humanity at all (Maximus, Opuscula 6 and 7; Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, Brill 2008, ch. 4).

This is why monothelitism, for all its Chalcedonian dress, repeated the old error of Apollinaris in a new register. Apollinaris had denied Christ a human mind; the monothelites denied him a human will. Against both, Maximus invoked the soteriological principle of Gregory the Theologian: “what is not assumed is not healed” (Christology; Gregory, Epistle 101). If Christ did not assume a human will, then the human will — the very faculty by which Adam fell — is not saved.

Natural Will Versus Mode of Willing

The monothelite objection was intuitive: surely two wills mean two willers in conflict, a Christ at war with himself. Maximus answered by distinguishing the natural will (thelēma physikon) — the will as a faculty, the simple natural orientation of a rational nature toward its good — from the mode (tropos) in which that faculty is exercised by a given person. Two natural wills no more imply conflict than two pairs of eyes imply that two men must see different things; conflict belongs not to the having of a will but to a disordered use of it (Maximus, Opusculum 3; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, ch. 4).

Crucial here is Maximus’ distinction between natural will and gnomic will (thelēma gnomikon, from gnōmē, “disposition, opinion”). The gnomic will is the mode of willing characteristic of fallen persons: it deliberates under uncertainty, weighs alternatives, and can choose wrongly, precisely because it does not perfectly know or possess the good. Christ, whose human nature is enhypostasised in the divine Logos and so never separated from the good, has a fully natural human will but no gnomic will — he does not deliberate in ignorance or waver between options, because the divine Person who wills humanly in him never gravitates toward anything but the good (Maximus, Disputation with Pyrrhus; Opusculum 1; see Christology, which notes this distinction). Christ’s human will is therefore real but never opposed to the divine; it operates according to nature (kata physin) in a mode of perfect, free, loving harmony with the will of the Father.

Gethsemane: The Proof of the Human Will

The decisive battleground was the agony in the Garden, and especially the words “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Matthew 26:39; Luke 22:42). Both sides knew that everything turned on this verse. The monothelites read it as a rhetorical concession or as proof that Christ’s willing was finally one. Maximus read it as the clearest scriptural evidence of two real wills in genuine, unforced concurrence.

His fullest treatment is Opusculum 6, “On the statement, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’” (datable to c. 640–641). Maximus argues that the shrinking from death — “let this cup pass” — is the spontaneous, natural recoil of a true human will from its own dissolution; for to flee death is natural to human nature, not sinful. And the words “nevertheless not my will, but thine” do not show that Christ lacked a human will, but that his human will, real and intact, freely and lovingly handed itself over to the divine will. The agony is thus not a defect to be explained away but a revelation: it displays the human will of Christ in the very act of its deification — willing humanly, yet willing in perfect accord with God (Maximus, Opusculum 6, trans. Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, PPS 25, SVS Press 2003; cf. Christology, which cites this passage as the verified anchor).

What is at stake soteriologically is immense. In Gethsemane, Maximus held, the human will of the New Adam does what the will of the first Adam failed to do: it freely says “thy will be done.” The reorientation of human willing toward God, accomplished from within human nature by Christ himself, is the very content of salvation. Christ saves the human will by willing humanly and rightly — and so makes possible the deified willing of all who are in him (Maximus, Opusculum 7; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 3).

The Disputation with Pyrrhus (645)

The most famous single event of the controversy was the public Disputation with Pyrrhus (Disputatio cum Pyrrho) held at Carthage in July 645, before the imperial governor and an assembly. Pyrrhus had been Patriarch of Constantinople (638–641) and a champion of the Ekthesis, but had fallen from power and gone into exile in North Africa. There Maximus debated him on the question of one will or two (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1; Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 4).

The course of the debate, as preserved in the Disputation (translated by Joseph P. Farrell, The Disputation with Pyrrhus of our Father among the Saints Maximus the Confessor, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press), follows Maximus’ systematic method. Pyrrhus presses the natural objection that to confess two wills is to confess opposition and strife in Christ. Maximus answers, in Farrell’s rendering, that the wills’ “difference” is not the same as “opposition,” and that strife arises not from nature but from the gnomic, fallen mode of willing — which Christ does not have; opposition belongs to sin, not to nature. He drives the question back to its root: to whom does willing belong — to the nature or to the person? If to the person, then since the Father, Son, and Spirit are three persons there would be three wills in the Trinity, which is absurd; therefore willing belongs to nature, and Christ’s two natures entail two wills (Maximus, Disputation with Pyrrhus, trans. Farrell; summarised in Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, ch. 4).

The outcome was dramatic: Pyrrhus was persuaded and publicly renounced monothelitism, after which he travelled to Rome and was received into communion by the pope. The conversion proved temporary — Pyrrhus later recanted and returned to the imperial position when politically expedient — but the Disputation itself became the classic textbook of dyothelite argument, the place where Maximus’ distinctions were laid out in dialogue form for the whole Church to follow (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1; Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, Oxford 2015, “Life and Times”).

The Logic of Chalcedon Completed

Maximus always insisted that he was inventing nothing. Dyothelitism is simply Chalcedon’s “two natures” carried through to the level of will and operation. The four adverbs of Chalcedon — without confusion, without change, without division, without separation — govern the two wills exactly as they govern the two natures: the wills are neither confused into one composite will (against the monothelites, who in effect changed and confused the human will into the divine) nor divided into two opposed willers (against any imagined Nestorian reading). The “property of each nature being preserved” (Christology, Chalcedonian Definition) must include the will, for the will is precisely a property of the nature.

This is why the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681) could adopt 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; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The council’s language is Maximus’ language; its logic is the logic of Gethsemane. St. John of Damascus would later gather the whole into his Exact Exposition, fixing “two wills, two operations” as settled Orthodox dogma (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.14–15; see Christology).

References

Maximus the Confessor. Disputation with Pyrrhus (Disputatio cum Pyrrho). 645. Translated by Joseph P. Farrell, The Disputation with Pyrrhus of our Father among the Saints Maximus the Confessor. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press.
Maximus the Confessor. Opuscula Theologica et Polemica (esp. Opuscula 1, 3, 6, 7). Opusculum 6 translated by Paul Blowers and Robert Wilken in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Popular Patristics Series 25. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Hovorun, Cyril. Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Council of Constantinople III (680–681). Definition (Exposition of Faith). Trans. NPNF II/14 (ed. Percival).
John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III.14–15.