The Lateran Council of 649

The synod that gave conciliar form to St. Maximus the Confessor’s theology and provoked the empire to strike. Convened in Rome under Pope Martin I, prepared in large part by Maximus and the Greek monks of Rome, the Lateran Council of 649 condemned monoenergism, monothelitism, and the imperial decrees that imposed them. The reprisal was swift: Pope Martin was abducted, tried, and exiled to Cherson, where he died in 655 — the last pope of Rome venerated by the Church as a martyr.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Road to the Council

By the late 640s the orthodox cause had a base. The Typos of Constans II (648) had forbidden all discussion of one will or two (see The Monothelite Controversy), but Rome, far from imperial coercion and home to a substantial colony of Greek-speaking monks who had fled the Arab conquests of Palestine and the East, became the centre of resistance. The seventh-century displacement of Eastern monastics westward amounted to a kind of ecclesiastical “brain drain”: the learning and the controversial expertise of the Greek East washed up in Rome at precisely the moment Rome needed it (Price, The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, Liverpool 2014, intro). Maximus the Confessor had settled there after his Carthage triumph over Pyrrhus (645), and around him gathered the learned Greek monastic community that would supply the council’s intellectual firepower (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Routledge 1996, ch. 1).

The opposition had deep roots in the Palestinian church. Stephen, bishop of Dor, had been sent to Rome years earlier by St. Sophronius of Jerusalem himself, charged on the holy places of Golgotha to resist monothelitism by every means; he became one of the council’s leading voices and a living link between Sophronius’ original protest of 633 and the Roman synod that would vindicate it (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro). Pope Martin, for his part, had earlier served as Rome’s apocrisiarius (resident envoy) at Constantinople and knew the imperial Church from within — he understood exactly what defying it would cost.

The council was first planned under Pope Theodore I, but Theodore died in May 649 before it met. His successor, Pope Martin I (649–655), convened it without waiting for the imperial confirmation of his election that custom required — an act of defiance in itself (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Pope Martin I, located via standard reference and cross-checked against Price).

Maximus’ Role and the Florilegia

Although Maximus, as a monk, did not preside, modern scholarship regards him and his Greek circle as the principal authors of the council’s theological content. The acts of the Lateran survive in both Greek and Latin, and Price’s study argues that the Greek was the original — that is, that the council’s documents were drafted by the Greek monks around Maximus and then translated into Latin for the Roman bishops, an extraordinary inversion of the usual direction (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro).

Central to the preparation was the assembly of florilegia — dossiers of carefully selected patristic quotations, both orthodox testimonies in favour of two wills and operations and heretical passages exposing the monothelite teachers in their own words. Compiling such florilegia was the standard conciliar technique for grounding a definition in the consensus of the Fathers: a definition was persuasive in proportion as it could show itself to be nothing new, merely the gathered voice of the tradition. Maximus was a master of the method, and the third and fourth sessions of the Lateran consisted largely of the reading-out of these patristic and heretical dossiers (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro). The Lateran’s collections were in turn the model for the still larger florilegia deployed at Constantinople III three decades later (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Allen and Neil, The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, Oxford 2015, “Life and Times”).

That the acts were composed in Greek and only then rendered into Latin has a further implication noted by Price: the Lateran was, in a real sense, an Eastern Orthodox council held on Western soil — its theology Greek, its method Greek, its leading minds Greek monastics — even as its authority was Roman and papal. This double character is part of what makes the council so important to the Orthodox East, which sees in it not a Latin intervention but the orthodox faith of the Greek Fathers defended from a Roman refuge when Constantinople had failed it (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro).

The Council and Its Canons

The Lateran Council met in five sessions, from October 5 to October 31, 649, in the basilica of the Lateran (the Church of the Saviour). Pope Martin presided and read an opening address condemning the heresy; the assembled Greek abbots, priests, and monks — thirty-six of them, Maximus reportedly among the signatories — presented their own tract against monothelitism (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Lateran Council of 649, located via standard reference and cross-checked against Price).

The council issued twenty canons anathematising the monothelite and monoenergist teaching. It condemned the doctrine of one will and one operation; it named the heresy’s chief authors — Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul of Constantinople; and, crucially, it condemned by name the imperial documents themselves, the Ekthesis of Heraclius and the Typos of Constans II, as instruments of heresy. The eighteenth canon set out the positive confession of two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ as the faith of the Fathers (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, translation of the canons; Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom, Brill 2008, ch. 3). To condemn a reigning emperor’s edict in his own empire was an open challenge to the imperial Church.

The Imperial Reaction

Constans II treated the council as treason. His first attempt to arrest Pope Martin, through the exarch Olympius, miscarried — Olympius defected rather than execute the order. But in 653 the new exarch Theodore Calliopas seized the pope in the Lateran itself and shipped him to Constantinople. The journey was a deliberate ordeal: Martin, gravely ill and suffering from disease, was carried across the sea and held in custody for months. He was then tried not for doctrine but on a trumped-up charge of treason — of having conspired with the empire’s enemies, the very accusation that would later be levelled at Maximus. He was publicly stripped and humiliated, dragged through the city in chains, condemned, and exiled to Cherson in the Crimea, then a destitute frontier outpost where bread itself was scarce. There he died of privation and ill-treatment on (by the usual reckoning) September 16, 655 (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro; Pope Martin I, cross-checked against Price; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 1).

In a final indignity, Rome did not wait for Martin’s death to replace him: a new pope, Eugenius I, was consecrated while Martin still lived in exile, so that the confessor-pope died deposed in fact if not canonically. Martin is the last Bishop of Rome to be venerated by the Church — East and West alike — as a martyr, and his letters from Cherson, lamenting his abandonment, are among the most poignant documents of the age. His fate and Maximus’ are inseparable: the same imperial policy that exiled the pope to the Crimea would mutilate the monk and exile him to the Caucasus (see Trials and Exile).

The Curious Status of the Council

The Lateran Council of 649 occupies an anomalous place in the canonical tradition. It was a Western, Roman synod, attended overwhelmingly by Italian bishops with a Greek monastic contingent; it was never convened or ratified by an emperor; and it has never been numbered among the Ecumenical Councils by either the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church. Yet its doctrine was entirely vindicated thirty years later, when Constantinople III (680–681) defined two wills and two operations in language continuous with the Lateran’s and condemned the same heretics (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

The discrepancy is instructive for Orthodox ecclesiology. A council’s doctrinal truth and its ecumenical rank are distinct questions. The Lateran defined the right faith but lacked the marks — imperial convocation, representation of the whole episcopate, and above all reception by the whole Church as ecumenical — that the tradition requires before numbering a council among the seven (on the principle of reception, see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The Lateran is therefore best described as a local synod whose teaching was doctrinally received through the Sixth Ecumenical Council that later embodied it — orthodox in content, sub-ecumenical in standing (Price, Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, intro).

References

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.
Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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.
Council of Constantinople III (680–681). Definition. Trans. NPNF II/14 (ed. Percival).