The Third Council of Constantinople

The seventh century imperial church had a political problem it was trying to solve with a doctrinal formula. Egypt, Syria and Armenia had rejected Chalcedon two centuries earlier and were now largely outside imperial control; the emperors wanted them back, and successive attempts were made to find a statement about Christ that both sides could sign.

Monothelitism was the last of these attempts. It conceded the two natures Chalcedon had defined and proposed that there is nonetheless only one will in Christ, so that the unity everyone wanted to affirm could be located in the will rather than in the nature. It had real theological support and imperial backing, and for a time it looked like it might work.

The council rejected it, and the reason it gave is worth stating because it is not obvious. A will belongs to a nature, not to a person: willing is something a human being does as a human being. A Christ with only one will is therefore a Christ who is not fully human in the way that matters most, since the human capacity to choose has been absorbed. The Gethsemane scene, in which Christ prays that the cup pass from him and then wills otherwise, was read as showing two wills in operation and one of them freely conforming to the other.

Two natural wills and two natural operations were defined, and monothelitism was condemned by name along with those who had taught it. Nothing further about the person of Christ has been defined by a council both East and West receive.

Among the men the council anathematised by name was Honorius I, bishop of Rome. He had written to Sergius of Constantinople in terms the council read as endorsing one will in Christ, and it condemned him with the others who had taught the doctrine. His successors confirmed the council and did not object to that clause.

For about twelve hundred years this was an awkward historical detail. In 1869 it became an argument. The First Vatican Council was debating whether to define papal infallibility, and the minority opposing the definition produced Honorius as the case that settled it: here was a pope who had taught error on a matter of faith, and an ecumenical council which had said so, and a line of popes who had agreed.

The reply given then, and still given, distinguishes between a pope speaking privately and a pope defining doctrine for the whole church. Honorius wrote a letter to one bishop, carelessly and in haste, without intending to settle anything; the infallibility defined in 1870 attaches only to a solemn definition made deliberately for the universal church, which this was not. The definition was drafted with that distinction built into it.

Whether that is a principled distinction or a boundary drawn around the evidence is a question people still answer according to what they already think about the doctrine. What is not in dispute is the record: an ecumenical council condemned a bishop of Rome by name, and the church has had to say something about it ever since.