Against monothelitism: Christ has two wills and two operations, the human freely and always following the divine.
- Where
- Constantinople — Istanbul, Turkey
- Convoked by
- The emperor Constantine IV, who asked Pope Donus for representatives; the request reached his successor Agatho
- Pope
- Agatho, whose letter and Roman synod of 125 bishops the council adopted as its own teaching; his successor Leo II confirmed the acts
- Emperor
- Constantine IV
- Sat
- Opened 7 November 680; concluded September 681
- Sessions
- Eighteen sessions, held in the domed hall — the Trullus — of the imperial palace, which is why the later disciplinary council of 692 is called 'in Trullo'
- Bishops present
- Small at the opening — some forty bishops — rising to about 174 at the close
What it faced
Monothelitism was a peace plan. Emperor Heraclius and the patriarch Sergius, facing an empire that had just lost Syria and Egypt to Persia and was about to lose them to Islam, wanted the Chalcedonians and the miaphysites back together, and proposed a formula both might accept: whatever one says about natures, Christ acted by a single divine-human energy, and willed with a single will.
Sophronius of Jerusalem saw the flaw immediately. A nature without a will is not a nature. If Christ has no human will, his humanity is a costume, and Gethsemane is theatre — 'not my will, but thine be done' becomes a speech with no speaker. What is not assumed is not healed, and the human will is precisely what needs healing, since it is the will that sinned.
Maximus the Confessor spent his life on this argument and paid for it. Condemned at Constantinople in 662, he had his tongue cut out and his right hand struck off — the tongue that confessed two wills and the hand that wrote it — and died in exile in the Caucasus. He was vindicated by this council nineteen years after his death.
What it defined
- ✠That there are in Christ two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, undivided and unconfused.
- ✠That the human will is not opposed to the divine but freely follows and is subject to it — obedience, not suppression.
- ✠That monothelitism is a heresy, and that those who taught it are condemned by name, including Pope Honorius I.
- ✠That the faith of the five preceding councils stands, and the definition of Chalcedon is to be read with the four adverbs unaltered.
In its own words
“…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.”
“…his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will.”
“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.”
“…together with Honorius, who did not, as became his apostolic authority, extinguish in the beginning the flames of a heretical dogma, but by his negligence nourished it.”
Its canons
It issued none at all — the disciplinary canons often credited to the sixth council belong to the Quinisext synod of 692, which met in the same hall and which Rome never received.
- —This council issued no disciplinary canons. The canons often attributed to it belong to the Quinisext Council 'in Trullo' of 692, which met in the same hall and which Rome never received.
- ✕It did not teach that Christ has two persons, or that his wills could conflict. The definition is explicit that the human will always follows the divine — the point is that it really is a human will doing the following.
- ✕It did not condemn Honorius for teaching heresy ex cathedra. He taught nothing solemnly; he wrote private letters to Sergius counselling that the question of one or two wills be left alone, and used the phrase 'one will' in passing. Leo II, confirming the council, named the offence precisely: not that Honorius defined error, but that he failed to smother it and by negligence let it grow.
- ✕It issued no canons at all, so any disciplinary rule cited as 'the sixth council' is almost certainly from the Trullan synod of 692, a different assembly.
What people think it did
An ecumenical council anathematised a pope for heresy, which disproves papal infallibility.
What happened: The council did anathematise Honorius, and Catholic accounts that deny it are wrong to. What it condemned was what he wrote to Sergius in private letters — never a solemn definition binding the Church. Leo II's confirmation, which is what gives the sentence its Catholic force, states the charge as negligence: he 'did not extinguish the flames' but 'by his negligence nourished' them. Vatican I's definition covers only the pope teaching <em>ex cathedra</em>; on any reading, Honorius was not.
What followed
Monothelitism revived briefly under Philippicus in 711 and then died. The definition has stood since, and it carries far more weight in ordinary Christian life than its abstractness suggests: because Christ has a human will, the agony in the garden is real, obedience is something he actually did, and the human 'yes' to God is not a divine act wearing human clothes.
Maximus the Confessor, mutilated and exiled for the doctrine, is honoured as a saint and Doctor by Catholics and Orthodox alike — one of the clearest cases in Church history of a council vindicating a man the Church had already broken.
Honorius's condemnation became the standing objection to papal infallibility, pressed hard at Vatican I in 1870 by bishops who opposed the definition. It did not prevent it. The definition when it came was drawn narrowly enough — the pope speaking ex cathedra, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church — that a pope's private correspondence, however careless, falls outside it.
Follow it further
Sources
- Third Council of Constantinople — the definition (English)
- Catholic Encyclopedia: Third Council of Constantinople
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.