The Third Council of Constantinople (681): Why the Church Confesses Two Wills in Christ

On the night He was betrayed, Jesus withdrew to a garden, fell on His face and prayed: "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke 22:42).¹ Here is the Son of God, who with the Father wills all things, speaking of "my will" and "thine." Does Christ have one will or two? The Sixth Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 680 and 681, answered that He has two, a divine and a human, and that they never conflict.

That may sound like a quarrel over words. It cost a pope his freedom and a monk his life, and it settled whether the Son of God became man completely. This article tells how the dispute began, what the council defined and how the Fathers read Gethsemane. For the monk at the center, see Who Was St Maximus the Confessor?; for the pope the council condemned, Pope Honorius; for the councils as a whole, What the Seven Ecumenical Councils Decided and Why Orthodoxy.

In brief

The Council of Chalcedon (451) confessed one Christ in two natures. Two centuries later the question returned in a new form: if Christ is one person, does He have one will or two? Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople and the emperors favored "one will," hoping to reunite those who rejected Chalcedon. Sophronius of Jerusalem and St Maximus the Confessor answered that will belongs to nature, so that the Son who took a whole human nature took a human will as well. The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) agreed and defined "two natural wills and two natural operations," not opposed to each other.

Thesis: Christ has a divine will and a human will, one Person willing in both. His human will is real, free and fully deified, never resisting the divine will, and what He did not assume in us He did not heal.

The prayer in the garden

The Gospels record the prayer three times. Matthew has "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" and, a second time, "thy will be done" (Matthew 26:39, 42). Mark has "Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt" (Mark 14:36). Elsewhere the Lord says, "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me" (John 6:38), and Hebrews says that "in the days of his flesh" He offered "prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" and "though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered" (Hebrews 5:7-8).

Read plainly, these texts show a real human will that shrinks from death and a real submission to the Father. They also show someone who has "a will" of His own to speak of. If Christ had only one will, which will is shrinking and which is submitting? Either the prayer was a performance, or it was an inner division in the Savior. The Church could accept neither. She taught that the Son has two wills because He has two natures, and that the human will does not stand against the divine.

How the dispute began

The history below follows John Chapman's Catholic Encyclopedia article on Monothelitism.² About 622 the emperor Heraclius, in the course of a war, used the expression "one operation" of Christ in argument with a Monophysite. Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, whom the emperor trusted, took up the phrase as a bridge to those who rejected Chalcedon. Cyrus, made bishop of Alexandria in 631, reunited many Egyptian Monophysites on a formula that spoke of "one theandric operation." The monk Sophronius, soon to be patriarch of Jerusalem, objected. Sergius then suggested dropping both "one operation" and "two operations," and wrote to Pope Honorius.

The principle behind Sergius's caution was not foolish. He warned that to say "two operations" was to risk "two contrary wills, as though when the Word of God wished to fulfil His saving Passion, His humanity resisted and contradicted His will."² That is Gethsemane misread as a quarrel between God and man. The way out of the trap, as Sophronius and Maximus saw, was not to deny the human will but to say it is never opposed to the divine.

The emperor then tried to impose silence. An "Exposition," the Ecthesis, composed by Sergius and issued in the last months of 638 under Heraclius, forbade speaking of one or two operations and asserted one will. The Type of Constans II (between 648 and 649) withdrew the Ecthesis and forbade every one of the four expressions, one or two wills and one or two operations. Chapman's verdict on it is blunt: "By this cruel law heresy is to be blameless and orthodoxy forbidden."² At the Lateran in October 649 Pope Martin I held a synod of 105 bishops that condemned both documents. Constans had him seized and taken to Constantinople; he died in the Crimea in 655. Maximus died in 662 of ill-treatment (the details are in his own article).

The council of 680-681

The emperor Constantine IV (Pogonatus) summoned a council. It opened on 7 November 680 in a domed hall of the imperial palace, the Trullus, and its eighteen sessions ran to 16 September 681.³ The sources differ on the details. Thomas Shahan's Catholic Encyclopedia article gives 100 bishops at the start and 174 later, and says the papal legates presided; Chapman has the emperor presiding with the legates on his left, "in the place of honour."² The Orthodox Church in America gives 171 fathers in one place and 170 in another.⁴ At the first session the papal legates told the emperor that novelties had been introduced by the patriarchs of Constantinople "during the past forty-six years, more or less," and that these had taught "that there was but one will in the dispensation of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ."⁵

The council spent much of its time reading the Fathers. The letter of Pope Agatho and a Roman synod was read, and George, patriarch of Constantinople, said he had "scrutinized the works of the holy and approved Fathers" kept in his patriarchate, found that the testimonies in the Roman letters agreed with them, and submitted. Macarius, patriarch of Antioch, would not: "I do not say that there are two wills or two operations in the dispensation of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, but one will and one theandric operation." He was deposed and anathematized.

In the final session the council issued its Definition. After repeating the faith of the first five councils it declared: "we likewise declare that in him are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of the holy fathers." It then explained how the two wills relate: "And these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will." And it said what the human will is not: "his human will, although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved."⁵ Its confession ends: "Wherefore we confess two wills and two operations, concurring most fitly in him for the salvation of the human race." In its address to the emperor the council gives its reason: "we dare not say that either of the natures which are in Christ in his incarnation is without a will and operation: lest in taking away the proprieties of those natures, we likewise take away the natures of which they are the proprieties."

The Orthodox Church commemorates the Fathers of the Sixth Council on 23 January, and with the first six councils in July.⁴ Fr Thomas Hopko summarizes the decision this way: the council "decreed that just as Christ is really fully divine and fully human, the perfect union of Divinity and Humanity in one Person, so also He must have both a real human activity and will and a real divine activity and will."⁶

Gethsemane as the Fathers read it

St Gregory the Theologian

The Definition quotes St Gregory of Nazianzus, in its own rendering, as saying that the Savior's will "is not contrary to God but altogether deified." In the English translation of his Fourth Theological Oration the sentence reads that "His Human Will cannot be opposed to God, seeing it is altogether taken into God." Gregory's own argument there was aimed at the Eunomians: he insists that the Son has no "special will of His own, besides that of the Father," for "as We have one Godhead, so We have one Will."⁷ That is the one divine will the Son shares with the Father, not a denial of Christ's human will. Maximus drew the council's conclusion: "Thus he possesses a human will, according to this divine teacher, only it was not opposed to God." His translator Andrew Louth notes that Gregory himself had the Eunomians in view, not this question.⁸

St John of Damascus

St John of Damascus sums up the Fathers on the point: "So, then, He had by nature, both as God and as man, the power of will. But His human will was obedient and subordinate to His divine will, not being guided by its own inclination, but willing those things which the divine will willed." On the prayer: "It was as man, then, that He wished the cup to pass from Him: but these are the words of natural timidity. Nevertheless ... not My will, that is to say, not in so far as I am of a different essence from You, but Your will be done, that is to say, My will and Your will, in so far as I am of the same essence as Thou. Now these are the words of a brave heart."⁹

St Maximus the Confessor

Maximus had to answer a reading that split the prayer. Ian McFarland describes it: for the Monothelites the plea to have the cup pass is a sign of human weakness that "must be overcome by the divine logos," to whom they assign "Not what I will, but what you will."¹⁰ In his letter to Marinus (Opuscule 7) Maximus answers that the plea proves a real human will: "to this his natural will bears witness in his plea to be spared from death." The submission belongs to the same human will, for "the human will is wholly deified, in its agreement with the divine will itself, since it is eternally moved and shaped by it," as Christ shows "in his saying as a human being, Not mine, but your will be done." To give the plea to the Godhead would be absurd: "But what kind of a God is this who is naturally afraid of the death of the flesh, and because of this begs the cup to be taken away ...?" Following St Cyril, Maximus says Christ willed as man that the cup pass "so that he might take away all shrinking from death from our nature, and steel and arouse it to a brave assault against it."⁸ Nor is the fear of death a defect. St John of Damascus calls natural fear "the force whereby we cling to being with shrinking," one of "the natural and innocent passions" that "are not under the dominion of sin."⁹ Christ's human nature, in McFarland's phrase, is not "reduced to the role of an automaton"; it is the Monothelites, Maximus argued, who undermined His freedom by having the Logos move His humanity directly.¹⁰

These Fathers rely on a distinction. Will as a natural power belongs to every rational nature: "everything that is rational by nature, certainly also possesses a will by nature," Maximus writes, so the Son who took a rational soul took a human will. What they deny in Christ is the "gnomic" will, the way we will when, unsure which apparent good is truly good, we weigh and choose. Christ's human will, Maximus says, "is not at all deliberative, but properly natural," which is how Louth renders the Greek word for gnomic.⁸ St John of Damascus agrees: "we cannot, if we wish to be accurate, speak of Christ as having judgment (γνώμη) and preference."⁹

Sinless and unable to sin

This is the Orthodox answer to those who say Gethsemane shows Jesus tempted as we are, wondering whether to obey. Hebrews says He was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). His temptations were real, but His human will never leaned toward sin. St John of Damascus says that the Lord "by nature made whatever is good His own and whatever is bad foreign to Him," and that His human will was "not being guided by its own inclination"; the council says it follows "not as resisting and reluctant."⁹ The Church therefore confesses the Lord sinless and unable to sin, not a man who could have sinned and chose not to. His shrinking from death is natural. His submission is free, the free act of a human will at one with the Father's.

Why it matters

The Fathers did not value the point for its own sake. St Gregory the Theologian wrote against Apollinarius, who denied Christ a human mind: "If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."¹¹ The same logic applies to the will. If the human will needed healing, and the Son did not take a human will, it is not healed. The council's own language says it: Christ's human will is "deified," not "suppressed." That is the meaning of theosis, God sharing His life with us without abolishing our nature. And the work of Christ includes obedience: "he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:8). Obedience requires someone who obeys.

The pope in the Acts

One paragraph on Honorius belongs here, because the council named him. In the thirteenth session the fathers examined the letters of Sergius and of Honorius and found them "quite foreign to the apostolic dogmas." They defined that Honorius was to be "expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized," "because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines."⁵ Pope Leo II confirmed the council in 683 and, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "expressed himself even more harshly than the council towards the memory of Honorius." Roman Catholic scholars still read the condemnation in different ways: the same article lists three, including that he was condemned because he did not declare "authoritatively the Petrine tradition."³ Whatever his intentions, an ecumenical council judged a bishop of Rome by the faith of the Fathers and Rome confirmed it. The full account, and what it means for papal claims, is in Pope Honorius and is not repeated here.

The strongest objections

"This was politics, not theology." Politics was involved: the emperors wanted unity with those who rejected Chalcedon, and Sergius was "a politician who evidently knew little theology," in Chapman's judgment. But the Ecthesis and Type show where politics led: a ban on speaking of the wills at all. Sophronius and Maximus refused silence because what they were defending was not a formula but a Savior.

"Two wills means two persons." The council says the opposite. Pope Agatho's letter, which it received, says: "we do not assert that they are contrary or opposed one to the other ... nor as though separated ... in two persons or subsistences." One Person wills in each nature, "indivisibly and inconfusedly," in the Definition's words. The Lord's own sayings are of one subject: "I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself" (John 10:17-18), spoken by the one who also prayed in the garden.

"It was a Roman victory." Agatho's letter did shape the Definition, and Roman writers have made much of it. The council's own Acts show a more complicated picture: the fathers tested the letter against the Fathers, deposed an Eastern patriarch who dissented, and condemned a pope. The Orthodox Church receives the council because it confessed the faith received from the apostles, not because of any one see's authority; the article on how the Church knows which councils are ecumenical explains how.

"The matter was settled for good." It was not settled at once. Philippicus Bardanes seized the throne in 711, restored the condemned names to the diptychs and, in the Catholic Encyclopedia's words, "burned the acts (but privately, in the palace)." He fell on 4 June 713, and "this was the last of Monothelitism."² The faith of the council had to be defended again.

{{very-strong: The Third Council of Constantinople defined that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, undivided and not opposed; the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church both receive it as the Sixth General Council.}}

What we can say confidently

• The council met in Constantinople from 7 November 680 to 16 September 681 and defined "two natural wills and two natural operations" in Christ, "not contrary the one to the other."
• The human will is real, free and deified: "not suppressed, but ... preserved."
• The Gethsemane prayer is the prayer of the one incarnate Son: the shrinking from death shows a natural human will, and that will submits freely and without sin.
• The Ecthesis and the Type tried to settle the question by silence, and Pope Martin I and St Maximus suffered for refusing.
• The council anathematized Sergius, Cyrus, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter, Theodore of Pharan, Macarius and Honorius, and Pope Leo II confirmed the condemnation.

What remains disputed

• The number of bishops (100 at the start and 174 later in Shahan's account; 171, or 170, in the OCA's) and whether the emperor or the papal legates presided.
• How best to describe in English the "gnomic" will that Maximus denied in Christ: Louth renders it "deliberative," while McFarland warns that deliberation also belongs to the natural will.
• How far the Monothelite leaders meant heresy; Chapman judges Sergius more politician than theologian, which does not change the council's judgment of their words.

Conclusion

The prayer in the garden is the place where the Church saw her Lord most plainly as a man like us in everything except sin, and as the Son of God. He feared death and gave Himself to it freely. The Sixth Council protected that picture from two errors, a Savior who only appears to will as a man, and a Savior whose will is torn. To see the faith the councils defended gathered together, continue to Why Orthodoxy.

Notes

1. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (1769 text), checked against the KJV text served by this site's Bible reader (https://honestapologist.com/api/bible/connections/texts?v=kjv); words the KJV prints in italics are given without brackets.
2. John Chapman, "Monothelitism and Monothelites," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1911), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10502a.htm. A Roman Catholic reference work, used for the narrative, the dates and the quotations from Sergius; its judgments are Chapman's.
3. Thomas Shahan, "Third Council of Constantinople," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (1908), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04310a.htm.
4. "Commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council" (commemorated 23 January; "171 holy Fathers"), Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/saints/id/lives/100284; "Fathers of the First Six Councils" ("The 170 Holy Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council"), OCA, https://oca.org/saints/lives/2010/07/18/50-fathers-of-the-first-six-councils.
5. Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), Acts (extracts) and Definition of Faith, trans. Henry R. Percival, NPNF2 vol. 14, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3813.htm. The quotations from Session I, Session VIII, Session XIII, Pope Agatho's letter, the Definition (Session XVIII) and the address to the emperor (Prosphoneticus) are all from this page.
6. Fr Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, "The Symbol of Faith: Incarnation," Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/doctrine-scripture/the-symbol-of-faith/incarnation.
7. St Gregory of Nazianzus, Fourth Theological Oration (Oration 30) 12, NPNF2 vol. 7, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310230.htm. The council's own quotation of Gregory is in the Definition (note 5).
8. St Maximus the Confessor, Opuscule 7 (Dogmatic Tome to Marinus), PG 91:77B, 80D, 81B-D and 84B-C, in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), with Louth's notes 23 and 24 on the Gregory passage and on gnomikon; text online at https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Endryu-Laut/maximus-the-confessor-early-church-fathers/.
9. St John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 3.14 (judgment and preference; good and evil), 3.18 (the two wills; Gethsemane) and 3.23 (fear), trans. S. D. F. Salmond, NPNF2 vol. 9, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33043.htm.
10. Ian A. McFarland, "'Naturally and by grace': Maximus the Confessor on the operation of the will," Scottish Journal of Theology 58.4 (2005): 410-433, doi:10.1017/S0036930605001481 (read in a copy at https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/22naturally-and-by-grace22.pdf). Used for the Monothelite reading of Gethsemane and for McFarland's own analysis.
11. St Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 (to Cledonius against Apollinarius), NPNF2 vol. 7, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a.htm.

Bibliography

Scripture

• The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 text).

Councils, Fathers and Orthodox sources

• Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), Acts and Definition. NPNF2 vol. 14.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations and Letters. NPNF2 vol. 7.
• John of Damascus. An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. NPNF2 vol. 9.
• Maximus the Confessor. Opuscule 7. In Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor. Routledge, 1996.
• Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1. Orthodox Church in America.
• Orthodox Church in America. Lives of the Saints: Fathers of the Sixth Council; Fathers of the First Six Councils.

Scholarship and reference works

• McFarland, Ian A. "'Naturally and by grace': Maximus the Confessor on the operation of the will." Scottish Journal of Theology 58.4 (2005).
• Chapman, John. "Monothelitism and Monothelites." The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 10, 1911.
• Shahan, Thomas. "Third Council of Constantinople." The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 4, 1908.