Addressing the Honorius issue, Richard Price, in his commentary and translation of the Lateran Synod of 649 wrote that:
Around 641 [Maximus
the Confessor] composed a defence of Pope Honorius’ orthodox credentials in his
First Letter to Sergius, arguing that the pope’s ‘one will’ had in fact
designated the divine will (and indeed, in a desperate addendum, that he had
not stated ‘one will’ in the first place) . . . Maximus, cannot, of course, be considered
a proto-champion of the later, monarchic claims of the post-Gregorian popes:
the principal criterion of Rome’s pre-eminence remained its commitment to
orthodox doctrine. (Richard Price, “Understanding the Crisis” in The Acts of
the Lateran Synod of 649 [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014], 36,
37)
Continuing, Price acknowledges Honorius did
teach Monothelitism:
Honorius’ letter to
Patriarch Sergius is famous, indeed notorious, for its statement of one will in
Christ, which resulted in the pope’s anathematisation as a heretic at the Council
of Constantinople in 681. Honorius’ profession has sometimes been taken as a
misguided Latin intrusion into a sophisticated Greek debate, the significance
of which the western pope could not have appreciated. But this statement was
but incidental in a letter the chief purpose of which was to express agreement
with Sergius’ prohibition of the expression of either one or two operations in
Christ. Honorius extends and elaborates on the propositions put forward by
Sergius, agreeing with him in his criticism of Sophronius, whom Sergius had
described as jeopardising the great gains made for orthodoxy by Cyprian of
Alexandria, and repeating the position of the Psēphos that a single Christ
is the subject of both the divine and the human acts. Honorius supports Sergius’
prohibition on the grounds that the expressions one or two operations are
innovations in the faith, ‘utterances which not even synods ordained or
canonical authority saw fit to clarify’. He himself refuses to judge whether these
expressions are correct or not, but echoes the sentiments of Sergius against
hairsplitting theological argument (which the patriarch had dubbed as ‘superfluous
wrangling over words’), by saying that these are matters for ‘grammarians or
wordsmiths’. Honorius’ rejection of defining the number of operations in Christ
was intended as a defence of Chalcedon against the introduction of changes or
additions to it. He sets out the ‘royal road’ of Chalcedon, condemning the
heretical extremes of Nestorius and Eutyches, and deploring unnecessary theological
debate that can only undermine the teaching of Chalcedon.
Honorius’s statement
of one will in Christ was prompted by a passage in Sergius’ letter where the
patriarch, discussing how the idea of two operations could be an occasion for
scandal, stated that Christ cannot possess two opposed wills. The pope builds
upon Sergius’ statement, explaining how Christ’s will was not subject to
conflict as human will is because how Christ’s will was not subject to conflict
as human will is because his will was without sin: ‘We acknowledge one will in
the Lord Jesus Christ, since manifestly our nature was assumed by the Godhead
without sin in it – clearly the nature that was created before sin, not the one
that was corrupted after the transgression.’ Christ’s sinless will did not
oppose the divine will, but was in complete obedience to it. Honorius explains
the conflict expressed by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane as not indicating
a real conflict of wills, but rather as intended to give an example of mankind
of submission to God’s will. In his affirmation of one will in Christ, Honorius
sets out a monothelete position, denying that Christ possessed a human will
subject to human passions. But at the time he made these statements these
views were not seen as controversial. It was only when Maximus developed his
own critique of the monothelete position that affirmations of one will came to
be seen as incorrect. (Ibid., 46-47, emphasis in bold added)
It was not just as the 6th
Ecumenical Council (3rd council of Constantinople [680/681]) that Honorius
was (formally) condemned as a heretic. At Quinisext (AKA Trullo) in 691/692,
Honorius was also condemned. In its explanation of canon 1 (“Ordinance about
preserving without innovation or impairment the faith handed down by the six
holy ecumenical councils”), the bishops at Quinisext wrote the following,
reaffirming the anathema issued against Honorius et al only a decade prior:
[23] We also acknowledge
as something to be kept inviolate the confession of faith of the holy sixth
council convoked recently in this imperial city in the reign of our emperor
Constantine of divine memory, which received powerful confirmation through the pious
emperor’s sealing its rolls in order to preserve it for all time. It issued the
devout clarification that we are to believe in two natural wills or volitions
and two natural operations in the incarnate dispensation of our one Lord Jesus
Christ true God. It condemned by a pious decree those who falsified the
correct teaching of the truth and taught the congregations that there is one
will and one operation in the one Lord our God Jesus Christ, namely
Theodore of Pharan, Kyros of Alexandria, Honorious of Rome,
Sergios, Pyrrhos, Paul and Peter who presided in this God-protected city,
Makarios bishop of Antioch, his disciple Stephen and the insane Polychronios. It
thereby preserved intact the common body of Christ our God. (The Canons of
Quinisext Council (691-2) [trans. Richard Price; Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2020], 79, emphasis added)
Commenting on the above, Price notes that:
The reaffirmation of
the anathematization of Pope Honorius, because of his letter to Sergios of
Constantinople of 634 that speaks of ‘one will’ in Christ, is not to be
interpreted as an anti-Roman gesture, since the coupling of his name with those
of the condemned monothelete bishops of the East was prominent in the
Definition of Constantinople III (Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, Series
secunda, II.2, 772, 6-10), which Rome had fully accepted. (Ibid., 79 n. 42)
