The Sixth Ecumenical Council and the Vindication of St. Maximus

The Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), the Sixth Ecumenical Council, condemned monothelitism and defined in Christ two natural wills and two natural operations — the very faith St. Maximus the Confessor had died defending nineteen years earlier. This file traces the council’s course, quotes its dyothelite definition, treats the condemnation of Pope Honorius with both Catholic and Orthodox readings attributed, examines the council’s strange silence about Maximus and the scholarship on it, and surveys his glorification, feast days, relics, and the meaning of the title “Confessor.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A confessor vindicated after death

Maximus died on August 13, 662, in exile in Lazica (Colchis, in modern western Georgia), having been condemned by a Constantinopolitan tribunal and, according to the dossier of his trial, mutilated — his tongue and right hand cut off so that he could neither speak nor write his confession (Allen and Neil, Documents from Exile, the Relatio Motionis and Dispute at Bizya; the mutilation is reported in the dossier and the Greek Vita). When he died he was a condemned man, his cause apparently extinguished. Nineteen years later the empire that had condemned him reversed itself, and the doctrine for which he had suffered became the defined faith of the whole Church. The vindication is one of the most complete in the history of the councils, and it is the frame within which the Orthodox tradition has always read his life: the confessor whose tongue was cut out was proved right by an Ecumenical Council.

The course of the council

The Third Council of Constantinople opened on November 7, 680, in the domed hall (the trullos) of the imperial palace, summoned by the Emperor Constantine IV, who had abandoned his predecessors’ monothelite policy and sought reconciliation with Rome. It held eighteen sessions and closed on September 16, 681. The Roman legates of Pope Agatho presided in honor alongside the patriarchs; Agatho’s dogmatic letter to the emperor, setting out the two-wills faith, was read and warmly received (the standard narrative is given in the council’s acts; cf. NPNF II/14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, and the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Third Council of Constantinople”).

The decisive turn came over the doctrine of Macarius, patriarch of Antioch, the leading monothelite spokesman at the council. When Macarius refused to confess two wills and two operations and was found to have falsified patristic citations, he was condemned and deposed. A famous episode dramatized the issue: a monk named Polychronius, who claimed he could raise a corpse by laying his monothelite confession upon it, was permitted to try, failed publicly, and was condemned. By its later sessions the council had decisively embraced dyothelitism and proceeded to its definition and to the anathematizing of the heresy’s authors.

The dyothelite definition

The Horos (definition of faith) promulgated at the council’s final sessions affirms two natural wills and two natural operations in Christ, deliberately echoing the Chalcedonian adverbs (“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”) and extending them from the two natures to the two wills. In Tanner’s translation of the Greek text, the council proclaims:

“And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics asserted, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all-powerful will.”

— Definition of the Third Council of Constantinople (681), in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1

The definition continues with the Leonine and Chalcedonian principle that “each form does in communion with the other that which is proper to it: the Word working that which is the Word’s, and the body accomplishing the things that are the body’s” (Tanner, vol. 1). This is precisely the structure of Maximus’s mature Christology: the human will of Christ is real and natural, not absorbed; it wills in full conformity to the divine will, and that conformity is the salvation of the human faculty of choice. The clause “not contrary, but subject” answers the central monothelite anxiety — that two wills must mean two contrary subjects — by locating the unity not in a single will but in the single hypostasis who wills humanly and divinely without conflict (see dyothelite-christology.md and natural-and-gnomic-will.md).

The condemnation of Honorius

The council did not stop at defining the faith; it named and anathematized those it held responsible for the heresy. In its thirteenth session (March 28, 681) it pronounced against the architects and abettors of monothelitism: Theodore of Pharan; the Constantinopolitan patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter; Cyrus of Alexandria; and — most consequentially for later controversy — Pope Honorius I of Rome. The acts read:

“And with these we define that there shall be expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized Honorius who was some time Pope of Old Rome, because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines.”

— Acts of the Third Council of Constantinople, Session XIII (trans. in NPNF II/14)

Honorius (pope 625–638) had written two letters to Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople which, in conceding “one will” language and counseling against pressing the question of operations, were taken by the council to have confirmed the heresy. Pope Leo II, in confirming the council’s decrees, ratified the condemnation of Honorius — though his Latin letter is often read as shifting the charge from formal heresy toward grave negligence: that Honorius, by his silence and imprudence, “permitted the immaculate faith to be stained.”

This case has been read in two ways, and the methodology of this collection requires that both be stated rather than that one be assumed:

The Catholic reading. Roman Catholic apologists, especially after the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I (1870), argue that the case does not touch infallibility, because Honorius’s letters to Sergius were private correspondence, not a solemn ex cathedra definition binding the whole Church; that he was condemned for a failure to teach and to suppress error (negligence) rather than for positively defining heresy; and that Leo II’s confirmation is best read in that sense. On this view Honorius erred personally and pastorally without engaging the charism claimed for the office (representative statements of this position are surveyed in Chapman, The Condemnation of Pope Honorius, 1907, and in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope Honorius I”).
The Orthodox (and critical) reading. Orthodox writers, and many historians, take the plain language of the acts — that Honorius is “anathematized,” not merely censured, and that he is listed among heretics for having “followed” and “confirmed” Sergius’s “impious doctrines” — as showing that an Ecumenical Council judged a pope to have taught error in faith, and did so without any sense that his office shielded him. On this reading the same council that warmly received Agatho’s letter felt free to anathematize Honorius, which tells against the later doctrine that the Roman see cannot err in faith (this is the standard Orthodox use of the case; see e.g. the discussion appended to the council in NPNF II/14 and in modern Orthodox treatments).

The repository takes no side beyond reporting that the condemnation is in the acts, that Leo II confirmed it, and that the two traditions read the same documents differently. What is not in dispute is that the council named Honorius among the condemned.

The silence about Maximus

It is one of the striking facts of the council that it never mentioned Maximus the Confessor by name. The man whose theology the council enshrined — who had been the most formidable defender of the two wills, who had been tried and mutilated for it — is absent from the acts. Nor are his collaborators Pope Martin I (who had presided over the dyothelite Lateran Synod of 649 and died in exile) or the monk-deacons named among his companions invoked by name in the definition.

Scholarship offers several complementary explanations, and they are best held together rather than ranked:

Diplomatic prudence. The council was an instrument of reconciliation between an emperor reversing his dynasty’s policy and a Roman see whose recent popes (Martin) had been deposed and exiled by that same dynasty. To rest the new orthodoxy on Maximus and Martin — figures condemned by imperial tribunals as traitors as much as heretics — would have reopened the wound the emperor wished to close. It was easier to ground the definition in the conciliar tradition (Chalcedon) and in the great sees than in two recently condemned dissidents (so, broadly, Larchet and others).
Juridical convenience. Maximus had been condemned by a standing imperial court, partly on charges framed as political treason. Rehabilitating him explicitly would have required reversing a state verdict, not merely a theological one; the council preferred to define the faith and let the rehabilitation follow implicitly.
The shape of the sources. Phil Booth, Marek Jankowiak, and others, working from the trial dossier and the contradictory Lives, stress how isolated and contested a figure Maximus was even among dyothelites in his own lifetime — a monk, not a bishop, operating partly outside the episcopal structures — so that the council’s bishops naturally framed the victory in conciliar and hierarchical terms rather than around a single ascetic (cf. Booth, Crisis of Empire, 2014; Jankowiak, on the chronology and prosopography of the controversy).

The upshot is the same on every account: the council vindicated Maximus’s doctrine without naming him. The Church’s veneration supplied what the acts omitted, glorifying the confessor whom the council had silently proved right.

Glorification, feast days, and relics

Maximus was venerated as a saint soon after his death, his cult sustained by the dyothelite party and confirmed in fact by the council’s verdict. The Byzantine calendar keeps two commemorations. His principal feast is January 21, on which the Church commemorates “our Venerable Father Maximus the Confessor” (Synaxarion for January 21). A second commemoration on August 13 is observed in the Greek and Byzantine tradition as the translation (transposition) of his relics — August 13 being also the date of his repose in 662, so that the day carries both senses (Synaxarion notes; the August 13 date is given for the relics, and 13 August is also his death date). The synaxarion preserves the hagiographical tradition that after his tongue was cut out he was restored by God and spoke again clearly — a miracle account reported as the tradition attests it, not as documented history.

A living relics tradition centers on Georgia, where Maximus died. Church tradition has long held that his relics rest at the St. Maximus Monastery at the foot of the Muri fortress near Tsageri, in the Lechkhumi region of western Georgia — the area of his final exile, where the fortress of Schemarum (perhaps Muris-Tsikhe) stood. In 2010 a grave was uncovered at Tsageri, and a multi-year investigation by Georgian scholars, archaeologists, anthropologists, and pathologists was announced as confirming the relics’ attribution to St. Maximus; the announcement was made by the local Georgian archbishop and reported in the Orthodox press (OrthoChristian / Pravoslavie.ru, “Georgian archbishop says, investigations prove that the relics of St. Maximus the Confessor are in Georgia,” 2010). The claim is reported here as the tradition and the Georgian Church present it; the relics question is a matter of attested tradition and recent investigation rather than settled critical certainty.

The meaning of “Confessor”

The title Confessor (Greek Homologetes) marks a precise category in the Church’s reckoning of holiness: one who suffered for the faith — confessing Christ under persecution, torture, or exile — but who did not die by direct execution as a martyr. Maximus was scourged, tried repeatedly, mutilated, and exiled to the edge of the empire, and he died of the hardships of that exile; because his death was not a formal execution, the Church honors him not as a martyr but as a confessor (the meaning is standard; cf. the synaxaria and the general usage of the title). The name is more than a technicality: it expresses exactly what the Sixth Council vindicated. Maximus’s witness was not chiefly a death but a refusal — the refusal, even mutilated and alone, to confess a single will in Christ. The council made his refusal the faith of the Church.

References

Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Definition of the Third Council of Constantinople, 681.)
The Seven Ecumenical Councils (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 14), ed. Schaff and Wace. The acts and excursus on the Sixth Council, including the condemnation of Honorius (Session XIII). ccel.org.
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.
Chapman, John. The Condemnation of Pope Honorius. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1907. (Catholic reading.)
Catholic Encyclopedia, “Third Council of Constantinople” and “Pope Honorius I.” New York: Robert Appleton, 1910. newadvent.org. (Used to locate the acts and the Catholic position; the conciliar text is cited from Tanner and NPNF.)
Booth, Phil. Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Larchet, Jean-Claude. Maxime le Confesseur, médiateur entre l’Orient et l’Occident. Paris: Cerf, 1998. (On the council’s silence about Maximus.)
Synaxarion of St. Maximus the Confessor (January 21; relics translation August 13); and OrthoChristian / Pravoslavie.ru, “Georgian archbishop says, investigations prove that the relics of St. Maximus the Confessor are in Georgia,” 2010. Used to locate the feast dates and the Georgian relics tradition; treated as hagiographical and traditional attestation per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5.