Natural and Gnomic Will

The distinction between the natural will (thelēma physikon) and the gnomic will (gnōmē) is St. Maximus the Confessor’s decisive contribution to Christology and anthropology: it is what allowed him to confess two wills in Christ without dividing his person, and so to defeat Monothelitism. This file treats the natural will as a created faculty, gnōmē as the deliberative mode of fallen hypostases, why Christ has no gnomic will (and the development in Maximus’s own usage that scholarship has traced), the anthropological payoff that freedom is perfected rather than abolished in deification, and Gethsemane at depth.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Natural Will: A Faculty of Nature

The premise of the whole controversy is that the will belongs to nature, not to the person. Maximus defines the natural will (thelēma physikon) as “a faculty desirous of what is in accordance with nature” (dynamis tou kata physin ontos orektikē) — the foundational capacity of rational desire that belongs to every rational nature as such, the power by which a being inclines toward the good appropriate to it (Maximus, Opuscula theologica et polemica [PG 91]; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5). It is not a deliberative weighing of options; it is the natural, God-given orientation of a nature toward its own fulfillment — for human nature, ultimately toward God.

That the will is natural is the linchpin of Maximus’s case against the Monothelites. In the Disputation with Pyrrhus (645), Pyrrhus argues that two wills in Christ must imply two persons willing. Maximus answers that if will belonged to person rather than nature, then the three persons of the Trinity would have three wills — which is absurd, since the Trinity has one will precisely because it has one nature. Will follows nature; therefore Christ, having two natures, divine and human, has two natural wills, and these are united without confusion in his one person (Maximus, Disputatio cum Pyrrho [PG 91:288–353]; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 4). The human will of Christ is real, complete, and natural — not a rival to the divine will but its created image, freely and perfectly conformed to it.

Gnōmē: The Deliberative Mode of Fallen Willing

Distinct from the natural will is what Maximus calls gnōmē — a term he uses, in its developed sense, for the mode in which a fallen hypostasis exercises its natural will. Gnōmē is “the self-chosen impulse and movement of reasoning toward one thing or another,” a settled disposition or inclination of character formed through judgment and deliberation (Maximus, Opusc. 1; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5). It is not a separate faculty but an act and mode made possible by the natural will — the personal, particular shape that willing takes in a being who must deliberate.

And deliberation, for Maximus, presupposes a defect: it presupposes ignorance and uncertainty about the good. Gnōmē “judges between opposites, inquires about things unknown, and deliberates about that which is unclear” — it is the willing of a creature who does not yet perfectly know or possess the good, and who must therefore feel its way toward it, hesitating, choosing, sometimes erring (Maximus, Opusc. 1; trans. and analysis in Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5). Closely allied is prohairesis, “deliberate choice.” Both belong to the fallen, post-lapsarian condition: they are the marks of a will that, having turned from God, must now grope after the good it once possessed by nature. Gnōmē is thus the seat of the gap between what we are by nature and what we make of ourselves by choice — the place where personal sin becomes possible.

Why Christ Has No Gnomic Will

From this it follows that Christ has no gnomic will. If gnōmē is the deliberative willing of a creature uncertain of the good, then to attribute it to Christ would be to make him “a mere man, deliberating as we do, being ignorant and doubting” — for gnōmē implies the very ignorance and inclination-toward-opposites that sinlessness excludes (Maximus, Opusc. 1 and 16; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5). Christ’s human will is fully natural and fully free, but it is never gnomic: it does not deliberate between good and evil, because in the hypostatic union it is from the first moment perfectly and unwaveringly directed toward the good. The Word who is its subject knows the good with no uncertainty; the human will moves toward it without the hesitation, the inner division, that gnōmē names.

This is the point Bathrellos presses as a matter of scholarly precision: Maximus’s denial of gnōmē to Christ belongs to his mature position and must be read within its polemical context. In his earlier writings Maximus had used gnōmē more loosely, in senses that did not yet carry the strong connotation of fallen, deliberative uncertainty; only later, as the Monothelites seized on terms like gnōmē, prohairesis, and “one will” to describe Christ’s single willing, did Maximus sharpen the vocabulary, fix gnōmē in its negative sense, and on that basis deny it to Christ in order to deny the Monothelites their terms (Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5). The development is real: the mature denial is a refinement, driven by controversy, of an earlier and vaguer usage. Recognizing this guards against the mistake of treating “no gnomic will in Christ” as a flat, lifelong Maximian axiom rather than the hard-won terminus of his thought.

The Anthropological Payoff: Freedom Perfected, Not Abolished

The will distinction yields one of the most important convictions in Orthodox anthropology: in deification freedom is perfected, not abolished. If gnōmē — deliberation, hesitation, the capacity to choose otherwise than the good — is a mark of the fallen condition rather than of freedom as such, then the loss of gnōmē in the deified is not the loss of freedom but its healing. True freedom is not the bare power to choose between good and evil (that power presupposes a will not yet fixed on the good); true freedom is the will’s unimpeded, glad, natural movement toward the God who is its end (Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 5; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). The saints in glory, like Christ, do not deliberate whether to love God; they love him with a freedom so complete that the very possibility of choosing otherwise has fallen away. The natural will, finally and wholly conformed to God, is more free, not less. Deification thus does not crush the human person into the divine; it brings the human will to the perfection of its own created nature — which was always to rest, freely, in God.

Gethsemane at Depth

The test case, for Maximus as for the whole controversy, is Gethsemane: “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). The Monothelites read the prayer as proof of a single will — the human will yielding because it was never really distinct. Maximus reads it as the very revelation of Christ’s two natural wills in their union.

The shrinking from death, he argues, is the genuine movement of Christ’s human natural will — the natural, blameless aversion of human nature to its own dissolution, the same passibility (recoil from death) that belongs to the unfallen capacity of the nature (see The Questions to Thalassius on the blameless passions). It is not sin, not rebellion, not a gnomic hesitation between good and evil; it is the real human will being real. And in the same breath — “nevertheless, not my will, but thine” — that human will is shown freely and perfectly conformed to the divine. Maximus’s formulation is exact: the prayer displays “the determination of the human will… brought into harmony with the divine will… in accordance with the interweaving of the natural logos with the mode (tropos) of the economy” (Maximus, Opusc. 6 and 7 [PG 91]; Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ, 2004, ch. 4). The human will is not overridden but fulfilled: it wills, humanly and freely, what the divine will wills. Gethsemane is therefore not the suppression of Christ’s humanity but its perfection — and the model of every deified will, which comes to say “not mine but thine” not under compulsion but as the consummation of its own freedom.

References

Maximus the Confessor. Opuscula theologica et polemica. PG 91:9–285. (Esp. Opusc. 1, 3, 6, 7, 16.)
Maximus the Confessor. Disputatio cum Pyrrho. PG 91:288–353. Trans. Joseph P. Farrell, Disputation with Pyrrhus. South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press.
Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.