Monothelitism

The Story

By the seventh century, the Roman Empire was in crisis. The Persians had sacked Jerusalem in 614 and carried off the True Cross. Arab armies were gathering on the horizon. Emperor Heraclius needed to unify his fractured empire, and that meant healing the rift between Chalcedonian Christians (who confessed two natures in Christ) and the Monophysites of Egypt and Syria (who confessed one). His patriarch, Sergius of Constantinople, proposed an elegant compromise: perhaps everyone could agree that Christ, whatever you said about his natures, had only one will and one energy (activity). Two natures, sure — but one operating system. This was monothelitism.

For a brief, politically intoxicating moment, it seemed to work. In 633, Sergius negotiated a union with Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, and with the Armenian church. Pope Honorius I of Rome, in a letter to Sergius, appeared to endorse the formula, writing that he confessed “one will” in Christ. The empire had its theological ceasefire. Then a monk named Maximus started asking uncomfortable questions.

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662) was one of the most formidable theological minds of the patristic era. He argued that the will is a property of nature, not of person. Since Christ has two natures (divine and human), he must have two wills. To deny Christ a human will is to deny that he has a complete human nature — and you are right back in Eutychianism by another door. The human will of Christ, Maximus insisted, was not a competing or rebellious will; it freely conformed to the divine will. This is exactly what Gethsemane shows: “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42) presupposes two wills, or the prayer makes no sense.

Maximus paid for his theology with his tongue and his right hand, both cut off by imperial authorities in 662. He died shortly after. But his position won posthumously. The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) condemned monothelitism, anathematized Sergius, and — remarkably — anathematized the long-dead Pope Honorius as well, the only pope ever formally condemned as a heretic by an ecumenical council.

What the Council Actually Said

The Third Council of Constantinople (681) declared:

“We proclaim equally two natural wills in him and two natural operations, without division, without change, without separation, without confusion… his human will follows, not as resisting or reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will.”

The council’s condemnation of Honorius reads:

“We have judged it necessary to cast out the impious dogmas of error… and to this end we define that there shall be expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized Honorius, who was pope of Old Rome, because we found in his letter to Sergius that he followed Sergius’s opinion in all things and confirmed his impious doctrines.”

Why You Might Accidentally Believe This

Monothelitism is surprisingly intuitive. If Jesus is God, and God’s will is perfect, why would Jesus need a separate human will? Wouldn’t a human will just be a source of potential conflict or error? Most Christians, if pressed, would probably admit to imagining Jesus as having a single, seamlessly divine decision-making process. The idea that Jesus had genuine human deliberation — that he could in some meaningful sense have chosen otherwise — feels dangerous, as if it threatens his sinlessness or his divinity.

It also shows up in how people read Gethsemane. If Jesus’s prayer “not my will but yours” is understood as mere rhetorical performance — if Jesus already knew he would comply and felt no genuine tension — then the human will has been functionally eliminated even while it is nominally affirmed. That is monothelitism with better PR.

The Strongest Case For This View

Monothelitism was not invented by theological amateurs. Sergius was responding to a real philosophical problem: if Christ has two wills, can they conflict? And if they cannot conflict (because Christ is sinless), then in what meaningful sense are they two? A will that always and necessarily agrees with another will looks, functionally, like one will. The monothelite position had the additional advantage of being politically useful — it offered a genuine path to reuniting Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians at a moment when the empire was existentially threatened. And Pope Honorius’s apparent endorsement meant it had Roman backing, however briefly.

Theologically, monothelites could point to the consistent New Testament testimony that Jesus always did the Father’s will (John 6:38: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me”). If Christ’s human will never deviates from the divine will, the distinction starts to look abstract.

The Strongest Case Against

Maximus the Confessor’s argument remains devastating. If the will belongs to nature rather than person, then a Christ without a human will has an incomplete human nature. And an incomplete human nature means an incomplete incarnation, which means incomplete redemption. The whole point of the incarnation, as the tradition from Irenaeus through Gregory of Nazianzus had insisted, is that God assumed everything human in order to heal everything human. The human will — the faculty of choice, desire, and deliberation — is one of the things most in need of redemption. A Christ who lacks it has not saved it.

Gethsemane is the decisive text. “Not my will, but yours be done” only makes grammatical and theological sense if there are two wills in dialogue. If Christ has only a divine will, then who is speaking to whom? The prayer becomes a monologue disguised as a dialogue — and the agony in the garden becomes theater, not genuine human struggle.

What the New Testament Actually Says

The Gethsemane accounts (Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42) are the most directly relevant texts. Jesus explicitly distinguishes “my will” from “your will,” addressing the Father. This two-will reading is straightforward but not the only possible interpretation — monothelites read “my will” as referring to natural human desire (a shrinking from death) rather than a separate volitional faculty.

Hebrews 5:7-8 adds that Christ “learned obedience through what he suffered” — language that implies genuine human growth and struggle, not a pre-programmed divine response. John 6:38 (“not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me”) cuts both ways: it distinguishes two wills but also subordinates one to the other.

The New Testament authors were not thinking in terms of “faculties” and “natures” and “operations.” They were describing a person who prayed, struggled, obeyed, and suffered. The conciliar language of “two wills” is an attempt to do justice to that portrait without flattening it.

Further Reading

• Eutychianism — The earlier one-nature controversy that set the stage
• Nestorianism — The opposite extreme: dividing Christ’s natures too sharply
• The Nicene Creed, Explained — The creedal tradition monothelitism claimed to uphold