Third Council of Constantinople

Authority level: Dogma
Evidence type: Historical account
GuideThe definition of two natural wills and operations in the one person of Christ is dogmatic; proceedings, imperial acts, personal condemnations, and later interpretations are historical claims governed by evidence.
Contents

Third Council of Constantinople was the sixth ecumenical council, held from 680 to 681 and confirmed by Pope Leo II. It defined that the one divine person of Jesus Christ possesses two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, without division or confusion, and thereby condemned monoenergism and monothelitism.

The Third Council of Constantinople, counted as the Sixth Ecumenical Council[8] by the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and by certain other Western Churches, met in 680–681 and condemned monoenergism and monothelitism as heretical and defined Jesus Christ as having two energies and two wills (divine and human).[9]

Background to the controversy

The council completed a Christological controversy left unresolved after Chalcedon. Chalcedon had confessed the one Son in two complete natures, divine and human, but imperial theologians later proposed a single operation as a formula capable of reconciling opponents of Chalcedon. Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople and Emperor Heraclius promoted this monoenergist language during the recovery of eastern provinces from Persia. When objections showed that one operation could imply an incomplete humanity, the compromise shifted toward monothelitism, the assertion of one will in Christ.[1]

The issue was not whether Christ is morally divided. Every Catholic confesses one acting subject, the eternal Son, whose humanity is perfectly obedient to the Father. The question was whether the assumed human nature includes the natural faculty of willing and acting. If Christ lacks a human will, he is not fully consubstantial with humanity; what was not assumed would not be healed. If two natural wills are treated as two persons fighting each other, the personal unity of the Incarnation is lost. Orthodox dyothelitism preserves complete humanity and one divine person together.

Heraclius's Ekthesis of 638 imposed one will, while Emperor Constans II's Typos of 648 attempted to silence both sides. Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem, Saint Maximus the Confessor, and Pope Saint Martin I resisted. The Lateran synod of 649, presided over by Martin, condemned both one-operation and one-will formulas. Imperial officials arrested Martin and carried him to Constantinople, where humiliation, trial, and exile preceded his death. Maximus likewise suffered trial, mutilation, and exile rather than surrender Christ's complete human willing.

From attempted compromise to dogmatic necessity

Monoenergism and monothelitism arose as policies of reunion, not as open denials that Christ was man. Their failure shows why doctrinal terms cannot be judged by political usefulness alone. A formula may sound conciliatory while removing an implication of revealed truth. The Church eventually had to say explicitly what Chalcedon's confession entails: nature is the principle of natural willing and operation, while person is the acting subject. Therefore two wills do not create two Christs, and one person does not erase the integrity of either nature.[2]

Convocation and proceedings

After the empire survived the Arab siege of Constantinople, Emperor Constantine IV sought restored communion with Rome. He wrote to Pope Donus proposing a conference; Pope Saint Agatho inherited the project and consulted bishops throughout the West. A Roman synod of 125 bishops in 680 approved a profession rejecting monothelitism. Agatho sent that profession, a synodal letter, and legates to Constantinople, where the emperor summoned the bishops under his jurisdiction and representatives of the eastern patriarchates.

The council opened on 7 November 680 in the domed hall called the Trullus within the imperial palace. Constantine IV presided at the first eleven of eighteen sessions and returned for the final session, but imperial presidency did not supply the council's doctrinal authority. The papal legates held the first place in the conciliar order. Patriarch George of Constantinople participated, while Macarius of Antioch became the leading defender of one will. Alexandria and Jerusalem were represented under the constraints created by Muslim conquest.[3]

The fathers examined patristic florilegia, earlier conciliar definitions, imperial documents, papal letters, and the writings attributed to disputed teachers. They discovered corrupt or misleading citations used to support monothelitism and tested claims against the received faith. Agatho's letter was acclaimed as consonant with the apostolic and conciliar tradition. Macarius refused the dyothelite confession, was deposed, and was replaced. Attendance rose from a few dozen at the opening to more than 160 bishops at later sessions; surviving subscription totals vary according to the document counted.[4]

Rome, emperor, and council

The assembly illustrates the different roles that converged in an early ecumenical council. The emperor convoked and facilitated the meeting, bishops judged doctrine, Roman legates represented the Apostolic See, and papal confirmation completed reception in the Catholic understanding. None of those facts licenses a modern simplification in which emperor, pope, or assembled bishops acted alone. The council grounded its definition in Scripture, the five preceding councils, the Fathers, and communion in the apostolic faith.

The dogmatic definition

The definition repeats the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and receives the five earlier ecumenical councils before addressing the new error. Jesus Christ is perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity and with humanity according to his human nature, one and the same Son acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation. The council then professes two natural volitions or wills and two natural principles of action corresponding to those natures in the one hypostasis of the Word.

The two wills are not contrary. Christ's human will follows and freely submits to his divine and almighty will; it is preserved rather than abolished by its union with the Word. The distinction permits the Gospel to be read without illusion. Christ truly hungers, suffers, obeys, chooses, and offers himself humanly, while the same person acts divinely in forgiving sins, commanding creation, and giving life. Miracles and sufferings belong to the one Son according to the nature from which each operation proceeds.

The agony in Gethsemane gives the doctrine its sharpest scriptural expression: the Son's human aversion to death is real, sinless, and freely placed in obedience to the Father. His words about coming not to do his own will do not reveal a second rebellious subject; they manifest perfect human obedience enacted within the mission of the divine person. Salvation therefore includes the healing of human freedom from within. Christ obeys with the very human faculty that fallen humanity misuses.

Will belongs to nature; action belongs to the person

Later Catholic theology summarizes the council by distinguishing the natural power of willing from the personal subject who wills. Christ has a divine will because he is truly God and a human will because he is truly man; the one Son exercises both. The formula prevents Nestorian division without falling into an Apollinarian mutilation of humanity. It also protects the reality of Christ's human merit, obedience, prayer, sacrifice, and solidarity with every human person except in sin.

Condemnations and the case of Honorius

The council anathematized the principal promoters of monoenergism and monothelitism: Theodore of Pharan; the Constantinopolitan patriarchs Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter; Cyrus of Alexandria; Macarius of Antioch and his disciple Stephen; and Pope Honorius I. Personal condemnation served the council's protection of the faith, but historical responsibility was not identical in every case. Macarius defended monothelitism before the assembly; others had composed or imposed doctrinal formulas decades earlier; Honorius had answered Sergius in private correspondence.

Honorius's letters discouraged language about one or two operations and spoke of one will in Christ, apparently seeking to exclude sinful conflict rather than define that Christ lacked a natural human will. The wording nevertheless aided the spread of error and failed to guard the apostolic faith with the clarity his office required. The council included him among those who confirmed impious teaching. Pope Leo II, when confirming the council, faulted Honorius for permitting the purity of the Roman Church to be polluted and for failing to extinguish error at its beginning.

Catholic fidelity neither deletes Honorius from the decree nor exaggerates the episode into a contradiction of papal infallibility. The letters were not solemn definitions addressed to the universal Church in which the pope, exercising his supreme apostolic office, definitively proposed doctrine of faith or morals. Papal infallibility does not attach to every letter, silence, administrative act, or imprudent expression. Honorius remains a grave example of culpable failure in papal teaching responsibility precisely because the office is ordered to confirming the brethren in faith.[5]

Honorius I and papal infallibility

The First Vatican Council later defined the conditions of an ex cathedra judgment; it did not promise inspiration, impeccability, or universal correctness in non-definitive papal speech. Constantinople III therefore belongs inside Catholic doctrine about the papacy, not outside it. Leo II's confirmation also matters: Catholics receive the council through papal ratification that included, rather than suppressed, the condemnation. Historical debate may refine the precise degree of Honorius's personal error, but it cannot treat his letters as an infallible definition or his condemnation as fictitious.[6][7]

Confirmation and reception

The final session on 16 September 681 promulgated the definition, and the fathers and emperor subscribed the acts. Pope Agatho had died before the documents reached Rome. His successor Leo II examined and confirmed the council in 682 and ordered its reception in the West. Imperial edicts promulgated it in the empire. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and several other apostolic communions receive it as the sixth ecumenical council, although divisions over Chalcedon affect how some other Churches number or receive the sequence.

The council issued no disciplinary canons. Canons later associated with a council 'in Trullo' belong to the Quinisext Council of 691–692, which eastern authorities regarded as supplying discipline for the fifth and sixth councils. Rome did not receive the Quinisext assembly as the sixth ecumenical council or accept all its canons. Keeping the two gatherings distinct prevents later disciplinary controversy from being projected into Constantinople III's dogmatic act.

The council vindicated the central insight for which Maximus and Martin had suffered. Their sanctity does not mean every argument they used became a definition, but their insistence on Christ's complete humanity prepared the Church's precise judgment. The Catechism receives the result directly: Christ's human will does not resist or oppose but submits to his divine and almighty will. The dogma remains essential wherever Christ is presented as less than fully human or his obedience is reduced to divine appearance.

Permanent doctrinal force

Constantinople III did not add a third nature or divide Christ into parallel agents. It unfolded the faith of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon by naming what complete humanity requires. Its definition demands divine and Catholic faith as part of the Church's definitive Christological confession. Details of attendance, procedure, motives, and individual guilt remain historical questions. That distinction permits exact scholarship without making the defined mystery provisional.

The definition also governs Catholic teaching about the saving obedience of Christ. Redemption was not performed by divinity using a passive human instrument. The incarnate Son assumed a rational human soul, intellect, affections, and will, and in that complete humanity freely obeyed unto death. His human freedom was never diminished by perfect conformity to the Father; it was most fully itself in filial obedience. Christian freedom is therefore not fulfilled by independence from God but healed by grace so that the person can choose the good without slavery to sin. The council's Christology supplies the objective foundation for that moral and spiritual truth without reducing its dogmatic judgment to anthropology.

Liturgical prayer continuously presupposes the same mystery. The Church addresses the one Lord Jesus Christ, remembers his human Passion, receives his divine life, and offers his obedient sacrifice sacramentally in the Eucharist. Devotion to the Sacred Humanity, contemplation of Gethsemane, and confidence in Christ's human sympathy are secure because the humanity belongs personally to the eternal Son and remains complete. Catholics do not worship a human nature alongside God; they adore the divine person in and through the humanity he truly made his own. Constantinople III thus protects both the unity of Christian worship and the reality of the human acts by which the Son accomplished salvation.

Background

The council settled a set of theological controversies that went back to the sixth century but had intensified under the emperors Heraclius (r. 610–641) and Constans II (r. 641–668). Heraclius had set out to recover much of the part of his empire lost to the Persians and had attempted to bridge the controversy with monophysitism, which was particularly strong in Syria and Egypt, by proposing a moderate theological position that had as good support in the tradition as any other. The result was first monoenergism, i.e., that Christ, though existing in two natures (divine and human), had one energy; the second was monothelitism, i.e., that Christ had one will (that is, that there was no opposition in Christ between his human and divine volition). This doctrine was accepted in most of the Byzantine world. Still, it was opposed in Jerusalem and Rome and started a controversy that persisted even after the loss of the reconquered provinces and the death of Heraclius. When Heraclius' grandson Constans II took the throne, he saw the controversy as threatening the stability of the Empire and attempted to silence discussion by outlawing speaking either in favor or against the doctrine.[10] Pope Martin I and the monk Maximus, the foremost opponents of monothelitism (which they interpreted as denying a human faculty of will to Christ), held a synod in Rome in 649 that condemned monoenergism and monothelitism.[11] At Constantinople in around 653, some accused the Pope of supporting revolution; this was regarded as high treason, and Martin was accordingly arrested, tried, condemned and sent into exile, where he soon died. Martin and Maximus's position was supported by others at the Council of Constantinople.[12][13]

Preparations

After Constans' son and successor Constantine IV had overcome the Muslim siege of Constantinople in 678, he immediately set his sights on restoring communion with Rome: he wrote to Pope Donus suggesting a conference on the matter. When the letter reached Rome, Donus had died. Still, his successor, Pope Agatho, agreed to the Emperor's suggestion and ordered councils held throughout the West so that legates could present the tradition of the Western Church.[14] There was a synod in Milan under Archbishop Mausuetus;[15] another synod was held in 680 at Hatfield, over which Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury presided.[16] Pope Agatho then convened a synod at Rome at Easter 680, with representatives from the regional synods.[17]

Then he sent a delegation to meet the Easterners at Constantinople.[18] The delegates set out bearing two letters, one from Pope Agatho to the Emperor and the other from the bishops of the Rome synod to those gathered in Constantinople.[19]

In the meantime, Constantine summoned Patriarch George I of Constantinople and all bishops of his jurisdiction of Constantinople to a council. He also summoned Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, a Byzantine appointee permanently resident in Constantinople because of the Muslim occupation of his see.[20]

Proceedings

On 7 November 680, a mere 37 bishops and several presbyters convened in a domed hall called the Trullus in the imperial palace. The patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch participated in person. In contrast, the patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem were represented by Byzantine appointees (because of the Saracen Muslim conquest, there was, at this date, no patriarch in either of these sees). The Pope and a council he had held in Rome were represented (as was customary at eastern ecumenical councils) by a few priests and bishops. In its opening session, the council assumed the authority of an ecumenical council. The emperor attended and presided over the first eleven sessions, participated in the discussions, and returned for the closing session on 16 September 681, attended by 151 bishops.[9]

During the council, a letter by Pope Agatho was read, which asserted the traditional belief of the Church that Christ was of two wills, divine and human. Most of the bishops present accepted the letter, proclaiming that Peter spoke through Agatho,[18] though this council also proclaimed another historical pope as anathema. Macarius of Antioch defended monothelitism but was condemned and deposed, along with his partisans. The council, in keeping with Agatho's letter, defined that Jesus Christ possessed two energies and two wills but that the human will was 'in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will'. The council carefully avoided any mention of Maximus the Confessor, who was still regarded with suspicion. It condemned both monoenergism and monothelitism as heretical and included those who had supported this heresy, including Pope Honorius I and four previous patriarchs of Constantinople.[9] When the council had concluded, the decrees were sent to Rome where they were accepted by Agatho's successor, Pope Leo II.[18] In his letter of confirmation of the council, Leo accuses, "Honorius who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted".[21]

During the council's proceedings, a Monothelite priest named Polychronius claimed he could raise the dead, thereby proving his faith supreme. He had a corpse brought forth, but after whispering prayers into its ears, he could not revive the body. Despite his defeat, he continued to confess Monothelitism and was anathematised by the council.[22][23]

References

  1. 1.Benedict XVI on Saint Maximus the Confessor — Papal catechesis on Maximus's defense of Christ's true human will, his resistance to imperial compromise, suffering, and enduring Christological importance
  2. 2.Catechism of the Catholic Church, 467 and 475 — The Church's received Christology after Chalcedon and Constantinople III, including the confession of Christ's two natural wills and the submission of his human will
  3. 3.Code of Canon Law, canons 337–341 — Current Catholic law on the supreme authority of the college of bishops, papal convocation and confirmation, and the conditions under which ecumenical conciliar decrees bind
  4. 4.Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils — The critical introduction, exposition of faith, dyothelite definition, conciliar condemnations, subscriptions, and chronology of Constantinople III; English translation and critical introduction based on Norman Tanner's edition of the conciliar texts and their manuscript tradition
  5. 5.Lumen Gentium, 22–25 — Dogmatic constitution on the episcopal college with and under the Roman Pontiff, the Church's supreme teaching authority, infallibility, and the assent owed to authentic doctrine
  6. 6.Catholic Encyclopedia: Third Council of Constantinople — Historical Catholic account of the monothelite controversy, papal and imperial preparations, sessions, definition, condemnations, confirmation, and reception
  7. 7.First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus — Dogmatic definition of papal primacy and the precise conditions of ex cathedra infallibility, governing Catholic interpretation of the non-definitive letters of Honorius I
  8. 8.Continuity and Change in Creed and Confessions, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University Press, 2013), 15.
  9. 9.[9.2][9.3]George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (Rutgers University Press, 1995), 127.
  10. 10.The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Volume 1, transl. Richard Price and Michael Gaddis (Liverpool University Press, 2005), 55.
  11. 11.Tylenda, Joseph N. (2003). Saints and Feasts of the Liturgical Year. Georgetown University Press. p. 60. ISBN 0-87840-399-X.
  12. 12.Ekonomou, Andrew J. (2007). Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern influences on Rome and the papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590–752. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1977-8.
  13. 13.Siecienski 2010, p. 74.
  14. 14.McCoy | 02/01/2019, Debra Booton. "POPE DONUS". Catholic365. Retrieved 11 May 2025.
  15. 15.Hefele, Charles Joseph (1997). A History of the Councils of the Church: From the Original Documents (PDF). Vol. 5. Albany, OR: AGES Software. p. 124.
  16. 16.Rhodes, M. J. (1870). The Visible Unity of the Catholic Church Maintained Against Opposite Theories (PDF). Vol. 2. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. p. 180.
  17. 17."THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE - Exposition of Faith | EWTN". EWTN Global Catholic Television Network. Retrieved 11 May 2025.
  18. 18.[18.2][18.3]Joseph Brusher, S.J., Popes Through the Ages Archived 6 February 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
  19. 19.Hefele, Karl Joseph von. A History of the Councils of the Church, T. & T. Clark, 1896, §313
  20. 20.DelCogliano, Mark (2022). "Session I". Acts of the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681): Selected Proceedings and the Synodal Definition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781009057103. And on his right were seated likewise the most holy archbishop George of Constantinople, New Rome; the most sacred archbishop Macarius of Antioch, the City of God.
  21. 21.Chapman, John. "The Condemnation of Pope Honorius". London : Catholic Truth Society, 1907. p. 114.
  22. 22.Kelly, Joseph F. "Chapter Three: The Byzantine Councils." The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: A History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2009. p. 59. [ISBN 0814653766]
  23. 23.Meyendorff, John (1989). Imperial unity and Christian divisions: The Church, AD 450–680. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. p. 372. ISBN 978-0881410556.