The Monothelite Controversy

The seventh-century empire, fractured by the Christological schism and reeling from the Persian and then the Arab wars, attempted to reunite Chalcedonians and Miaphysites by a formula of compromise: first one “energy” (monoenergism), then one “will” (monothelitism) in the incarnate Christ. This file traces that imperial unity project from the Pact of Union (633) through the Ekthesis (638) and the Typos (648), and the emergence of St. Maximus the Confessor as the theological leader of the resistance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Imperial Problem

By the early seventh century the Chalcedonian definition of 451 had failed, politically, to hold the Eastern provinces together. Egypt, much of Syria, and Armenia were dominated by Miaphysite Christians who rejected Chalcedon’s “two natures” in favour of St. Cyril of Alexandria’s “one incarnate nature of God the Word.” For an emperor these were not abstractions: they were the populations of the empire’s richest grain-producing and most strategically exposed lands. Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641), having recovered the East from the Persians around 628, urgently needed religious reconciliation to bind the reconquered provinces — and then, after 634, to face the sudden and catastrophic Arab conquests that would strip away Syria, Palestine, and Egypt within a decade (Allen and Neil, The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, “Life and Times,” Oxford 2015; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Routledge 1996, ch. 1).

The strategy of Heraclius and his patriarch, Sergius I of Constantinople (610–638), was to leave the contested word physis (“nature”) alone and to seek union at the level of energeia (“activity, operation”): if Chalcedonians and Miaphysites could confess that the one Christ acts by a single, “theandric” (divine-human) energy, the deeper dispute over natures might be defused. This is monoenergism (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century, Brill 2008, ch. 1).

The Pact of Union (633)

The strategy seemed to work in Egypt. Heraclius appointed Cyrus, formerly bishop of Phasis, as Chalcedonian Patriarch of Alexandria in 631, charging him to reconcile the Miaphysites. In June 633 a synod at Alexandria proclaimed a reunion with a large body of Egyptian Miaphysites (the Theodosians) on the basis of nine articles known as the Pact of Union (the Plerophoria or Satisfactio). The seventh article confessed that the one Christ “works the divine and the human by one theandric energy” — a phrase borrowed, fatefully, from the Corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 2; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1). For a moment, monoenergism appeared to be the formula that Chalcedon had never managed to be.

Sophronius’ Protest and the Psephos

The reconciliation was challenged at once. The aged Palestinian monk Sophronius — soon to become Patriarch of Jerusalem (634) — was in Alexandria and implored Cyrus to withdraw the “one energy” language, convinced that it denied something intrinsic to Christ’s true and complete humanity: if the human nature has no operation of its own, it is no real nature (Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook, “Life and Times”; OCA, The Orthodox Faith III, “Monoenergism / Monothelitism,” used to locate the sequence and cross-checked against Hovorun).

Sophronius carried his protest to Sergius in Constantinople. Sergius, sensing the danger, issued in 633 a directive known as the Psephos (“Decision”), which forbade speaking of either “one energy” or “two energies,” on the grounds that neither expression was found in the Fathers and that the controversy was disturbing the peace. The Psephos was a tactical retreat, but it left a vacuum — and into that vacuum Sergius proposed a deeper formula: rather than dispute the number of energies, let the parties agree that there is in Christ but one will (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 2; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1).

The Letters of Honorius

Around 634 Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius I of Rome (625–638) setting out the difficulty and suggesting that, since two contrary wills cannot be supposed in one and the same Christ, it would be safer to confess “one will.” Honorius replied agreeing, and in doing so used the phrase that would haunt Rome for centuries: he confessed “one will” (unam voluntatem) in our Lord Jesus Christ (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 2; Price, The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, Liverpool 2014, introduction).

The interpretation of Honorius’ letters is contested and must be handled factually. [Disputed: Constantinople III (681) read the letters as genuinely monothelite and anathematised Honorius by name; Richard Price judges the letters to confess one will in a real sense, while the Catholic apologetic tradition, following Pope John IV’s Apologia, holds that Honorius meant only that there was no opposition of a sinful “law of the flesh” in Christ’s human willing, not that Christ lacked a human will as such (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope Honorius I,” used to locate the John IV defence).] What is not in dispute is that a Roman pope had put his name to the words “one will,” and that this fact would be cited against papal infallibility for the rest of Church history.

The Ekthesis (638)

When Sophronius, now Patriarch of Jerusalem, published a synodical letter (634) carefully defending two natural operations, the pressure for an authoritative imperial settlement grew. In 638 Heraclius promulgated the Ekthesis (“Exposition”), a document drafted by Sergius and posted in the narthex of Hagia Sophia. It forbade the language of “one energy” or “two energies” (as the Psephos had) but went further and positively confessed one will (hen thelēma) in Christ — the empire’s first official endorsement of monothelitism. Two synods at Constantinople, in 638 and 639, ratified it (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 3; Ecthesis, located via standard reference and cross-checked against Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1).

Both Sergius and Sophronius died around 638; the controversy now passed to a younger generation, and to a more disciplined opponent.

The Typos (648)

The Ekthesis failed to bring peace. In the West it was repudiated, and in the East monothelitism continued to divide rather than unite. Heraclius’ grandson Constans II (r. 641–668), advised by Patriarch Paul II, changed tactics. In 648 he issued the Typos (“Type”), which revoked the Ekthesis and imposed silence: it forbade all discussion of whether Christ has one will and energy or two, ordered the removal of the Ekthesis from Hagia Sophia, and threatened severe penalties — deposition for clergy, exile and confiscation for officials, corporal punishment for monks and laymen — on anyone who continued the dispute (Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 3; Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro).

The Typos was, on its face, a peace measure. But to Maximus and the orthodox party it was worse than the Ekthesis: it did not merely err about the truth, it forbade the confession of the truth, placing orthodoxy and heresy under the same prohibition. Silence imposed by the state on a matter of salvation was itself a betrayal. It was the Typos, even more than the Ekthesis, that the Lateran Council of 649 would gather to condemn (see The Lateran Council of 649).

Why the Empire Wanted It

The unity projects were not theological caprice; they answered a real and deepening crisis. The Miaphysite provinces had never accepted Chalcedon, and after the Persian wars Heraclius needed their loyalty. Then came the Arab conquests: by 638 Jerusalem had fallen, by 642 Egypt was gone, and the empire was fighting for survival. A divided Church in the surviving territories was a luxury the state could not afford; a single Christological formula promised, at least on paper, to heal the rupture and consolidate what remained (Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook, “Life and Times”; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1). The tragedy of monothelitism is that the provinces it was designed to retain were lost to Islam before the formula could ever reconcile them, leaving an imperial doctrine with no constituency except the will of the emperor.

The Emergence of Maximus

Into this contest stepped Maximus the Confessor, a monk of high learning and former imperial official, who had left Constantinople and spent the controversy’s crucial years in North Africa and then Rome. He was not a bishop and held no see; his authority was wholly theological and moral. From the late 630s he produced a series of Opuscula (the polemical-theological short works) dismantling monoenergism and monothelitism with rigorous precision, distinguishing nature from hypostasis and will from the mode of willing (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1; Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, ch. 4).

The decisive public moment came in 645, when Maximus debated the deposed and exiled ex-patriarch Pyrrhus at Carthage and brought him, at least temporarily, to renounce monothelitism (see Dyothelite Christology). From there Maximus moved to Rome, where he became the architect of the conciliar condemnation of the heresy. By the mid-640s he was, in fact though not in office, the head of the orthodox resistance to the imperial Church — a position that would cost him his tongue, his hand, and his life (see Trials and Exile).

References

Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (See esp. the chapter on Maximus’ life and times.)
Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. and trans. Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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.
Price, Richard, with Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt. The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649. Translated Texts for Historians. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
Orthodox Church in America. The Orthodox Faith, Volume III, “Monoenergism / Monothelitism.” (Used to locate the sequence of events; primary chronology cross-checked against Hovorun and Louth.)