Chapter 13

Constantinople II and III — Christ's Human Will and the Completion of Conciliar Christology

Introduction: Why the Story Did Not End at Chalcedon

We might think that after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the church had said everything it needed to say about who Jesus Christ is. Chalcedon gave us one of the most important statements in all of Christian history. It told us that Jesus Christ is one Person in two natures — fully God and fully man — united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." That is a stunning declaration, and it remains the bedrock of orthodox Christology to this day.¹

But here is the thing: Chalcedon settled the question of natures — Christ has two of them, divine and human. What Chalcedon did not fully settle was the question of wills. And that turns out to be enormously important. If Christ has two natures, does He also have two wills? Does He have a genuinely human will that can choose, deliberate, and submit — alongside His divine will? Or does He have only one will, the divine will, which controls everything He does?

These questions may sound technical and abstract, but they go right to the heart of what it means for Jesus to be truly human. If Christ has no human will, then in what sense did He genuinely choose to obey the Father? In what sense was His suffering a real human struggle? In what sense did He truly pray, "Not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42)? Without a genuine human will, the Gethsemane prayer becomes a kind of divine monologue — God talking to Himself — rather than a genuine act of human submission.²

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: The Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) and especially the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 681) completed the conciliar Christological framework by affirming that Christ possesses a genuine human will — a doctrine called dyothelitism (from the Greek dyo, meaning "two," and thelēsis [θέλησις], meaning "will"). These councils also explicitly condemned monothelitism — the view that Christ has only one will. And I want to show that these conciliar decisions carry enormous significance for the argument of this book, because a genuine human will presupposes a genuine human soul. If physicalism is true — if there is no immaterial soul — then what the councils called a "human will" becomes nothing more than electrical activity in a physical brain. And that raises serious questions about whether physicalism can account for what the councils actually meant.

Constantinople II (553): The Fifth Ecumenical Council

The Historical Context: The "Three Chapters" Controversy

To understand what happened at Constantinople II, we need to understand the mess the church found itself in after Chalcedon. The Chalcedonian Definition had been a great theological achievement, but it left many Christians in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire deeply unhappy. Monophysites — Christians who held that Christ had only one nature (the divine nature, which had absorbed the human) — saw Chalcedon as a betrayal. They believed that Chalcedon's "two natures" language was too close to the theology of Nestorius, who had been condemned for allegedly dividing Christ into two separate persons.³

Emperor Justinian (who reigned from 527 to 565) was deeply interested in theology and desperately wanted to reconcile these Monophysite Christians with the Chalcedonian mainstream. His strategy was to condemn certain writings by three theologians whom the Monophysites particularly disliked — Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa. These writings became known as the "Three Chapters," and Justinian believed that condemning them would show the Monophysites that Chalcedon was not secretly Nestorian.⁴

This caused enormous controversy. Many Western bishops, including Pope Vigilius, resisted Justinian's pressure because they feared that condemning theologians who had been accepted at Chalcedon would undermine the authority of Chalcedon itself. The politics were ugly. Justinian pressured, threatened, and even physically detained Pope Vigilius to force his compliance. Eventually, the Fifth Ecumenical Council was convened in Constantinople in 553, and the Three Chapters were formally condemned.⁵

Now, we need to be honest: the political maneuvering behind Constantinople II was not the church's finest hour. But as the great patristic scholar Aloys Grillmeier observed, the political motivations and machinations of the major parties do not invalidate the theological achievements of the council. Constantinople II represents a significant step in the outworking of Chalcedonian logic and its development toward a coherent final form.⁶

The Christological Achievements of Constantinople II

Despite the political turmoil, Constantinople II made several important Christological contributions. The council did far more than condemn the Three Chapters. It clarified the relationship between Chalcedon and Cyril of Alexandria, showing that Chalcedonian "two natures" Christology and Cyrillian "one incarnate nature" language are not contradictory but complementary — both affirming the unity of Christ's Person and the completeness of His two natures.⁷

Grillmeier concluded that one of the most significant contributions of Constantinople II was its confirmation and vindication of Chalcedonian Christology. He writes that at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, "Chalcedon received those hermeneutical aids which confirmed it as the greatest theological event in the whole Church after Nicaea."⁸

The theology that emerged from this clarification is often called "neo-Chalcedonian" Christology. It incorporated the legitimate concerns of Cyril's theology — especially the emphasis on the personal unity of Christ as "one of the Holy Trinity" — into the Chalcedonian framework. Most Christology since then bears the marks of these clarifications.⁹

One of the most important developments during this period was the anhypostasia and enhypostasia distinction — the teaching that Christ's human nature does not exist as an independent person (anhypostasia) but subsists in the Person of the Logos (enhypostasia). Though the exact terms are not used by the council, the underlying theology was adopted and affirmed as the proper interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology.¹⁰ (We will explore anhypostasia and enhypostasia in much greater detail in Chapter 19.)

Constantinople II and the Human Soul of Christ

For our purposes, the most critical contribution of Constantinople II lies in its anathemas — its formal condemnations of false teaching. The council issued fourteen anathemas (sometimes called "capitula" or "canons"), and several of them are directly relevant to the argument of this book.¹¹

Canon IV of Constantinople II is especially significant. It condemns anyone who does not confess that the union of the Word of God with flesh "animated by a rational and intellectual soul" (empsychon psychē logikē kai noera) is a union according to composition — that is, according to hypostasis (person). The language is unmistakable: Christ's human nature includes a rational soul. The flesh that the Logos assumed is not mere flesh — it is flesh animated by a rational, intellectual soul.¹²

Canon V reinforces this by condemning anyone who understands the hypostatic union in any way that compromises the completeness of Christ's two natures. The union is "of the God-Word with flesh having a rational soul" — not bare flesh without a soul, not flesh with a merely animal soul, but flesh animated by a soul that is rational and intellectual.¹³

Canon III is also important. It condemns the view that the Word of God who performs miracles and the Christ who suffers are two different subjects. Rather, it is one and the same Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, who both performs miracles and suffers — because He is one Person in two natures. This reinforces the personal unity of Christ while maintaining the distinction of natures.¹⁴

John Meyendorff has concluded that Constantinople II "essentially ratified the Christology of Leontius of Jerusalem," and Demetrios Bathrellos has offered a concise summary of the council's consolidation of important Christological advances from the Leontian tradition.¹⁵

I want to be fair here. Physicalists today are not intentionally denying what Constantinople II affirmed. Christian physicalists believe they are affirming Christ's complete humanity by affirming His complete physical body. They do not think they are committing a conciliar error. But the councils defined "complete humanity" as body plus rational soul — not body alone. The question is not what physicalists intend but what their position logically entails. And what it entails, as we will see more fully in Part V of this book, is a Christ who lacks what the councils explicitly required: a rational, intellectual soul.¹⁶

The Monothelite Controversy: The Next Great Christological Dispute

From Natures to Wills

After Chalcedon settled the question of Christ's two natures, and after Constantinople II clarified the relationship between Chalcedonian and Cyrillian Christology, one might think the church could finally rest. But theology never stands still, and questions have a way of pressing forward. If Christ has two natures — divine and human — does He also have two wills? Two operations (that is, two distinct modes of activity)? Or does He have only one will and one operation?

This question was not purely academic. It was driven in part by political considerations. In the early seventh century, the Byzantine Empire was under enormous military pressure from the Persians and (later) the Arab Muslims. Emperor Heraclius (who reigned from 610 to 641) desperately needed the support of Monophysite populations in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia. A theological compromise that could bridge the gap between Chalcedonians and Monophysites would be enormously helpful for imperial unity.¹⁷

The compromise that emerged was called monenergism (one operation) and then monothelitism (one will). The idea was this: even if we accept Chalcedon's teaching that Christ has two natures, perhaps we can all agree that He has only one will — one theandric (divine-human) operation. This seemed like it might satisfy the Monophysites (who emphasized the unity of Christ's activity) without technically denying Chalcedon's two natures.

Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople (who served from 610 to 638), was one of the leading advocates of this compromise. Sergius argued that affirming a human will in Christ would lead to conflict between the divine and human wills — which would introduce a kind of inner moral warfare into the Person of Christ. Surely, Sergius reasoned, we cannot say that Christ's human will ever resisted or opposed His divine will. So it is simpler and safer to speak of only one will.¹⁸

The Problem with Monothelitism

The problem, though, is that monothelitism is theologically devastating — even if the people proposing it had good intentions. Here is why.

If Christ has only one will — the divine will — then He has no genuinely human will. And if He has no genuinely human will, then He has no genuinely human moral agency. He never truly chose to obey the Father as a man. He never truly struggled with the prospect of the cross. He never genuinely submitted His own desires to the Father's plan. All of these acts — choosing, struggling, submitting — require a will. Without a human will, they are merely divine operations happening through a human body. And that effectively guts the humanity of Christ's entire moral and spiritual life.¹⁹

Think about it this way. What makes Jesus' obedience in Gethsemane so powerful and moving? It is precisely because He had a human will that naturally recoiled from the horror of the cross — and yet He submitted that will to the Father's will. "Not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42). If Christ has no human will, then there is no "my will" to submit. The prayer becomes meaningless — or at best, a kind of divine theater performed for our benefit. (Full exegesis of this text belongs to Chapter 14, where we will explore dyothelitism in greater depth; here I simply want to note the connection to Constantinople III's dogmatic definition.)

The same problem applies to the Epistle to the Hebrews. The author tells us that Jesus "learned obedience through what he suffered" (Heb 5:8). Learning obedience requires a will that is being trained, shaped, and submitted. If there is no human will, there is nothing to learn and no one doing the learning — at least not in any genuinely human sense.²⁰

The Key Figures in the Controversy

Several important figures shaped the monothelite controversy, and it helps to know who they are.

Sergius of Constantinople (565–638) was, as we mentioned, one of the chief architects of monothelitism. Sergius argued that a human will in Christ would inevitably conflict with the divine will. As Bathrellos explains, Sergius either confused mere difference with contrariety, or he believed that any natural difference between wills would necessarily produce moral opposition.²¹

Pope Honorius (d. 638) is a complex and controversial figure. He wrote a letter to Sergius that appeared to endorse the idea that Christ had only one will. Honorius argued that Christ's prayer in Gethsemane did not express a will different from the Father's, but was simply Christ teaching us to conform our wills to God's. This interpretation effectively denies the genuine humanity of Christ's struggle. Honorius was later condemned by name at Constantinople III — making him one of the very few popes to be formally condemned for heresy by an ecumenical council.²²

Pyrrhus (d. 654), another Patriarch of Constantinople, argued that the will cannot be located in the nature but belongs to the person. If the will belongs to the person, then Christ (being one Person) has only one will. This argument sounds logical at first glance, but it confuses two different senses of the word "will" — as we shall see when we examine Maximus's response.²³

Paul of Constantinople (d. 653) made a similar argument, claiming that a second, human will would entail two "willers" in Christ — effectively two persons. Again, this argument was driven by the fear that dyothelitism would lead to Nestorianism.²⁴

Emperor Constans II attempted to silence the debate altogether. In 647 (or 648), he issued the Typos — an imperial decree that simply forbade anyone from teaching either one will or two wills. The idea was that if everyone just stopped arguing, the problem would go away. Needless to say, it did not work. Theology does not resolve itself through imperial gag orders.²⁵

The Lateran Council of 649

Before we get to Constantinople III, we should mention the Lateran Council of 649, which was convened by Pope Martin I with the theological guidance of the great Maximus the Confessor. This council formally condemned both monenergism and monothelitism and affirmed that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations. The Lateran Council is not counted among the seven ecumenical councils, but it was an important step toward the dogmatic resolution that would come at Constantinople III. Both Pope Martin and Maximus suffered terribly for their stand. Martin was arrested, tried, and exiled, dying in 655. Maximus was arrested, tried, had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off — so that he could no longer speak or write in defense of dyothelitism — and was sent into exile, where he died in 662.²⁶

The fact that Maximus endured mutilation and death rather than compromise on the two wills of Christ tells us something important about how much was at stake. This was not a trivial theological squabble. Maximus understood that the very integrity of Christ's humanity was on the line.

Maximus the Confessor: The Theologian Who Saved Dyothelitism

Why Maximus Matters

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) is one of the most important theologians in the history of Christianity, and his contribution to the monothelite controversy was decisive. Without Maximus, it is not an exaggeration to say that monothelitism might have won the day, and the church's understanding of Christ's humanity would have been permanently impoverished.²⁷

What made Maximus so effective was his ability to cut through confused thinking with sharp philosophical distinctions. The monothelites had a seemingly powerful argument: if Christ has two wills, then the wills might conflict, and inner conflict implies two competing agents — which looks like Nestorianism (two persons). Maximus demonstrated that this argument was based on a fundamental confusion — the confusion between difference and opposition.²⁸

Maximus's Key Insight: Will Belongs to Nature, Not to Person

The most important move Maximus made was to locate the will in the nature, not in the person. Let me explain what that means in plain language.

A "nature," in this theological context, is the what — what kind of thing something is. A "person" is the who — the individual subject who possesses a nature. So when we say "Christ has a divine nature and a human nature," we are saying that Christ is what God is and what a human being is. And when we say He is one Person, we mean there is one who — one individual subject — who is both divine and human.²⁹

Now, where does the will fit? The monothelites said the will belongs to the person — the who. Since Christ is one person, He has one will. It sounds clean and logical.

But Maximus saw the problem immediately. If the will belongs to the person rather than the nature, then consider the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three Persons who share one divine nature. If will belongs to person, then the three Persons of the Trinity would have three separate divine wills — which would destroy the unity of God. Trinitarian orthodoxy locates the divine will in the divine nature, which is shared by all three Persons. That is why the Trinity acts with one will — because all three Persons share one nature, and the will is a faculty of the nature.³⁰

The same logic applies to Christology. Christ has two natures — divine and human. Since the will is a faculty of the nature, Christ has two wills — one belonging to His divine nature and one belonging to His human nature. The person (the Son, the Logos) is the one who wills through both natures. But the faculty of willing belongs to the nature.³¹

Natural Will vs. Gnomic Will

Maximus made another critically important distinction — between the natural will (thelēma physikon, θέλημα φυσικόν) and what later interpreters call the gnomic will (thelēma gnōmikon, θέλημα γνωμικόν). This distinction is subtle but crucial, and Maximus used it to address the monothelites' deepest worry.³²

The natural will is the faculty of willing that belongs to a nature simply by being what it is. Every human nature, by definition, has a natural will — the capacity to desire, choose, and act. This capacity includes both the rational, self-determining aspect (the ability to deliberate and decide) and the instinctive, vital aspect (the natural desire for life, food, drink, and the natural aversion to pain and death). Maximus taught that the natural will encapsulates both of these dimensions — the rational and the instinctive — and that the instinctive is properly subject to the rational.³³

The gnomic will, by contrast, involves the mode in which a fallen person deliberates and chooses. In fallen human beings, the gnomic will involves uncertainty, vacillation, and the possibility of choosing wrongly — choosing against God's will. The gnomic will is not essential to human nature; it is a consequence of the fall. It represents a defective mode of willing, not the natural capacity of willing itself.³⁴

Why does this matter? Because the monothelites' deepest fear was that two wills would mean inner conflict — the human will fighting against the divine will. But Maximus showed that conflict does not arise from natural difference between wills. Conflict arises from sin — from the gnomic will's tendency to choose wrongly. Christ, being sinless, had a natural human will but no gnomic will in the fallen sense. His human will naturally and freely submitted to the divine will — not because it was forced, and not because it did not exist, but because it was the uncorrupted human will functioning exactly as God designed human willing to function.³⁵

As Thomas Watts has summarized, Maximus simply pointed out that it is sin, not mere difference, that causes conflict or contradiction between the divine and human wills. Two wills that are different in nature can operate in perfect harmony — just as the three Persons of the Trinity will one thing through one divine nature without any conflict.³⁶

Maximus on Will and the Word Thelō

Andrew Louth, an expert on Maximus's theology, has observed that the terms the monothelites used for "will" were ambiguous, and this ambiguity lay behind the apparent plausibility of their views. The word "will" can refer either to a process — the act of willing — or to a result — the thing willed (the decision or deed). Maximus exposed this ambiguity by drawing a clear distinction between the natural level and the personal level. At the natural level, "will" refers to the process of willing — and since Christ has two natures, He has two processes of willing. At the personal level, "will" refers to the result — the final decision that the one Person makes. Since Christ is one Person, there is one result — one final decision — even though there are two natural processes of willing feeding into that result.³⁷

As Loke explains, Maximus's interest in the term thelō (θέλω, "I will" or "I want") was driven by the fact that the Gospels apply this term to Christ's volitional capacity. According to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, thelō carries a range of meanings in the New Testament: (1) to be ready or inclined; (2) desire; (3) intention; (4) resolve, decision, or choice. All of these are aspects of genuine willing, and all of them presuppose a functioning faculty of will — which, for the councils, is a faculty of the soul.³⁸

The Person as the Acting Subject

One more critical point from Maximus. While he located the will in the nature, Maximus was careful to insist that the person (the hypostasis, ὑπόστασις) is always the ultimate acting subject. The nature provides the faculty of willing; the person is the one who actually wills. As Bathrellos explains, Maximus spoke of the natural will's instinctive, nonrational orientation toward certain general objects — for example, the body's impulse toward life, or the automatic systems of the body. But even these common, natural forms of willing must be traced back to the personal hypostasis — to the person who self-subsists and bears the nature.³⁹

In other words, it is never the nature that acts on its own, as if it were an independent agent. The nature is the instrument through which the person acts. The person is always the subject; the nature is the means. Applied to Christ: it is the Person of the Son (the Logos) who wills through both His divine nature and His human nature. There is one subject of willing — the Son. But there are two faculties through which He wills — one divine, one human.⁴⁰

Michael Wilkinson captures this beautifully: "The person is always the ultimate subject and agent of the nature." The instinctive nature may be active in the sense of having a predisposition or inclination toward certain objects, but the personal hypostasis is still the ontological subject of those movements. And at all times, the personal hypostasis is the acting subject of the rational and self-determining aspects of human life.⁴¹

Constantinople III (681): The Sixth Ecumenical Council

The Council and Its Definition

After decades of controversy — including the suffering and martyrdom of Pope Martin I and Maximus the Confessor — the church finally convened the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 680–681. This council, Constantinople III, brought the monothelite controversy to a definitive close by formally affirming dyothelitism and condemning monothelitism.⁴²

The council's definition is one of the most important Christological statements in the history of the church. Let me present the key portions of the text, because the actual words matter enormously.

After affirming the faith of the previous five ecumenical councils, the bishops at Constantinople III declared:

We likewise declare that in him are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of the holy Fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will.⁴³

Several things are striking about this definition. First, notice the four adverbs: "indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly." These are the very same adverbs (the famous "four fences") that Chalcedon used to describe the relationship between Christ's two natures. Constantinople III deliberately applies them to Christ's two wills. The parallel is not accidental — it makes the theological point that the relationship between the two wills mirrors the relationship between the two natures. Just as the natures are distinct but united in one Person, so the wills are distinct but harmonious in one Person.⁴⁴

Second, notice that the council explicitly rejects the idea that the two wills are "in opposition." This directly addresses the monothelites' central worry — that two wills would mean inner conflict. The council says: no. Christ's human will is not in opposition to His divine will. It follows, submits, and cooperates — but it is genuinely distinct. Harmony does not require identity. Two violins playing the same melody in harmony are still two violins.⁴⁵

The definition continues with a fuller statement:

Preserving therefore the inconfusedness and indivisibility, we make briefly this whole confession, believing our Lord Jesus Christ to be one of the Trinity and after the incarnation our true God, we say that his two natures shone forth in his one subsistence in which he both performed the miracles and endured the sufferings through the whole of his economic conversation, and that not in appearance only but in very deed, and this by reason of the difference of nature which must be recognized in the same Person, for although joined together yet each nature wills and does the things proper to it and that indivisibly and inconfusedly. Wherefore we confess two wills and two operations, concurring most fitly in him for the salvation of the human race.⁴⁶

The Maximian Interpretation of the Definition

How should we interpret this definition? Wilkinson argues convincingly that Constantinople III should be given a Maximian interpretation — reading the definition through the lens of Maximus the Confessor's theology, since it was Maximus's theological vision that the council was ratifying.⁴⁷

Wilkinson explains that by applying the person-nature distinction, Constantinople III declared that Christ is God the Son incarnate according to a person-nature constitution, such that He acts according to a person-nature function, both as God and as man. After the Incarnation, the divine Person (the Son) has a human nature alongside His divine nature. He is a person-nature being as God and a person-nature being as man. As such, the same Person wills and acts through each nature to perform works in keeping with its respective divinity (for example, miracles) and humanity (for example, suffering).⁴⁸

Now, someone might worry about a particular phrase in the definition: "each nature wills and does the things proper to it." Does this make the natures into independent acting subjects — as if the human nature were a separate agent from the divine Person? That would be Nestorian. But Wilkinson gives several good reasons for rejecting this reading.⁴⁹

First, the council intended to provide a Maximian resolution of the controversy, and Maximus consistently located the acting subject in the person, not the nature. The nature provides the faculty; the person does the acting.

Second, making each nature an acting subject would contradict the council's explicit rejection of Nestorianism. The council affirmed the condemnation of Nestorian teachings from the Council of Ephesus (431) and was keen to ensure that dyothelitism did not introduce two subjects alongside the Logos.⁵⁰

Third, the council's language about "each nature" doing "what is proper to it" is best understood as emphasizing the distinction between the two kinds of activity — divine activity and human activity — rather than identifying separate agents. The point is that Christ's divine nature really does divine things (miracles), and His human nature really does human things (suffering, obeying, praying). But the one Person — the Son — is the subject of both kinds of activity.

As Wilkinson concludes, "The best interpretation of Constantinople III is a conciliar ratification of the Maximian teaching that the person-nature distinction leads to the person-nature constitution of Christ and his person-nature function, both as God and as man."⁵¹

The Condemnation of Monothelitism and Its Advocates

Constantinople III did not merely affirm dyothelitism. It explicitly condemned monothelitism and named its key proponents, including Sergius of Constantinople, Pyrrhus, Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Constantinople, Macarius of Antioch, and — perhaps most controversially — Pope Honorius. The council declared that monothelitism introduced a heretical novelty that effectively denied Christ's full humanity by stripping Him of a genuine human will.⁵²

The council stated that the promoters of monothelitism were guilty of "sowing with novel speech among the orthodox people the heresy of a single will and a single principle of action in the two natures of the one member of the holy Trinity, Christ our true God." Even more striking, the council connected this heresy directly to the integrity of Christ's humanity, declaring that monothelitism leads to "the blasphemous conclusion that his rationally animate flesh is without a will and a principle of action."⁵³

Notice the language: "rationally animate flesh." The council assumes that Christ's flesh is animated by a rational soul — empsychon logikōs. The will is a faculty of this rationally animated flesh — that is, a faculty of the human nature understood as body plus rational soul. To deny the human will is to deny the rational animation of the flesh. And to deny the rational animation of the flesh is to fall back into the very error that the church had been fighting since Apollinarius.

The Significance for Our Book's Argument

A Human Will Requires a Human Soul

Now we come to the point that matters most for the argument of this book. Constantinople III teaches that Christ has a genuine human will — a natural faculty of willing that belongs to His human nature. But what is the human will? Where does it reside? What is its metaphysical basis?

On the dualist view — the view affirmed by the church fathers, the councils, and this book — the human will is a faculty of the human soul. The soul is the seat of rational thought, moral deliberation, and volitional choice. The will is the soul's capacity to choose, decide, and act. When Maximus spoke of the "natural will" as a faculty of human nature, he understood human nature to include a rational, intellectual soul. The will is not a property of the physical body considered in isolation; it is a capacity of the soul that operates through the body.⁵⁴

This understanding makes sense of everything the councils said about Christ's human will. His human will could deliberate, choose, submit, and obey precisely because it was a faculty of a genuine human soul — an immaterial, rational soul with real capacities for thought and choice. When Christ prayed in Gethsemane, "Not my will, but yours, be done," it was the human will of His human soul that submitted to the divine will. The human soul is the metaphysical "home" of the human will.

But what happens if we adopt physicalism? If there is no immaterial soul — if human beings are nothing more than physical organisms — then the human "will" is nothing more than a pattern of neural activity in the brain. On physicalism, Christ's "human will" would be electrical impulses and chemical reactions in His physical brain. Can a neural firing pattern genuinely deliberate? Can a chemical reaction choose? Can a brain state submit to a divine will?⁵⁵

Can a Brain State Be a "Will" in the Conciliar Sense?

I want to be fair to physicalists here. A thoughtful physicalist would likely respond that neural activity is willing — that what we call "deliberation" and "choice" just are complex patterns of brain activity. On this view, there is no separate "soul" doing the willing; the brain itself wills. The physicalist is not denying that willing happens; she is denying that willing requires a non-physical substance.

That is a fair response, and I respect it. But I think it faces serious difficulties when applied to the conciliar context.

The councils understood the will as a natural faculty — a capacity that belongs to human nature by definition. For Maximus, the will was bound up with the rational, self-determining aspect of the human soul. It was not merely a biological process but a genuine power of rational agency — the capacity to deliberate according to reason, to choose in light of the good, and to act with moral responsibility. This is why Maximus connected the will so closely to self-determination (autexousion, αὐτεξούσιον) — the capacity of a rational nature to govern its own choices.⁵⁶

Can a physical brain, considered purely as a physical system, exercise "self-determination" in this robust sense? On physicalism, every brain state is determined by prior physical causes — the laws of physics, chemistry, and neuroscience. If the human will is nothing but a brain state, then Christ's human "choice" in Gethsemane was nothing but the inevitable result of prior neural events. And if that is the case, can we really say that Christ freely submitted to the Father? Or was His "submission" simply what His brain was going to do anyway, given its prior physical state?

I realize that physicalists have various ways of trying to preserve free will within a physical framework — compatibilism, for example. But the point here is not about whether physicalists can solve the free will problem in general. The point is about what the councils meant. The fathers at Constantinople III were not thinking in terms of neural networks and compatibilist theories of freedom. They were thinking in terms of a rational soul with genuine powers of self-determination. To reinterpret their language in purely physical terms is to change the meaning of what they affirmed — even if we do not change the words.⁵⁷

The Kryptic Model and the Two Wills

How does the author's preferred Christological model — Loke's Kryptic Model (the Divine Preconscious Model) — handle the two wills? I want to address this briefly here, since it connects directly to Constantinople III's definition. (A full treatment of the kryptic model appears in Chapter 17.)

On Loke's model, Christ had one stream of conscious experience — a genuinely human conscious experience. He had two wills (divine and human) consistent with dyothelitism, but only one conscious perspective. The human will operated at the conscious level; the divine will was always present but operated in harmony with the human will at the preconscious level.⁵⁸

This fits beautifully with Constantinople III's definition. The council says that Christ's two wills are "not in opposition" and that the human will "follows" and is "subject to" the divine will. On Loke's model, this harmony is grounded in the fact that the Person of the Son — who is the acting subject — wills through both natures simultaneously. The divine will at the preconscious level sets the ultimate direction; the human will at the conscious level freely follows and submits. There is no conflict because the human will is unfallen and uncorrupted — it naturally desires what is good, and the divine will guarantees that the direction is always toward the good.⁵⁹

Critically, this model requires a human soul. The "preconscious" level at which the divine attributes reside presupposes a metaphysical framework in which conscious and preconscious states can be organized. The human soul provides the seat of human consciousness — the "location" of Christ's genuinely human experience. The divine nature provides the "location" of the preconscious divine attributes. On physicalism, there is no soul to serve as the seat of consciousness — only a brain. And a physical brain cannot house the infinite information of divine omniscience at any level, preconscious or otherwise. The kryptic model collapses on physicalism.⁶⁰

Pawl's Analysis: The Conciliar Requirement of a Human Will

Timothy Pawl, in his rigorous philosophical defense of conciliar Christology, has emphasized that according to the councils, "a human nature is (or is constituted by) a human body ensouled by a rational soul, where the soul includes a human will and principle of action." This is not a minor footnote in Pawl's analysis — it is a central claim of the conciliar tradition.⁶¹

Pawl notes that the council's definition makes no sense if the human will is removed from the picture. The entire point of Constantinople III was to affirm that Christ has two wills — and to condemn those who denied the human will. If we remove the human will, we are left with exactly what the council condemned: a Christ who has only a divine will, with His "rationally animate flesh" stripped of its own principle of action.

Oliver Crisp, too, has argued that it is inconsistent with the texts of conciliar Christology to claim that Christ has only one will that is somehow counted as both divine and human. Richard Swinburne, for instance, has suggested that the one divine will simply "picks up" whatever is needed to count as a human will in the Incarnation. But Crisp rightly points out that this view is inconsistent with Constantinople III's clear affirmation of two wills, its language about one will following the other, and its insistence that each will is "proper to" one of Christ's natures.⁶²

Crisp himself has concluded that "if Christ had no distinct human will he was not fully human." And, like most of the church fathers and the medieval theologians, Crisp holds that a human nature is fundamentally a concrete particular composed of a human body and a distinct soul.⁶³

The Connection Between Constantinople III and the Rejection of Apollinarianism

At this point, it is worth pausing to notice a pattern in the conciliar tradition. Every major Christological council has reinforced the same fundamental point: Christ's human nature is complete — it includes everything that belongs to genuine human nature. Apollinarianism denied this by removing the rational soul. Monothelitism denied this by removing the human will (which is a faculty of the rational soul). Both heresies were condemned because they both undermine the completeness of Christ's humanity.

Gregory of Nazianzus's famous axiom — "what is not assumed is not healed" (to gar aproslepton, atherapeuton, τὸ γὰρ ἀπρόσληπτον, ἀθεράπευτον) — applies to the will just as much as it applies to the soul. If Christ did not assume a human will, then the human will is not healed — it is not redeemed. And since the will is the faculty by which we choose to sin, a Christ who has no human will cannot redeem us from our sinful choices. Our moral agency — our capacity to choose God or reject Him — is left unredeemed.⁶⁴ (The full development of Gregory's axiom and its application to the Apollinarian controversy is presented in Chapter 12.)

The conciliar trajectory is clear:

Constantinople I (381) condemned Apollinarianism — affirming that Christ has a complete human nature including a rational soul.

Chalcedon (451) defined Christ as "truly man of a rational soul and a body" — making the soul an essential component of the definition of Christ's humanity.

Constantinople II (553) explicitly condemned anyone who denies that Christ's flesh is "animated by a rational and intellectual soul" — the most explicit conciliar anathema against removing the soul from Christ's human nature.

Constantinople III (681) affirmed that Christ has a genuine human will — a faculty that presupposes a rational soul as its metaphysical seat.

Each council builds on the previous ones. Each one reinforces and extends the same fundamental truth: Christ's humanity is complete. It includes a body, a rational soul, a human mind, a human will, and human operations. Remove any of these, and you do not have a complete human nature — and you do not have an orthodox Christology.⁶⁵

Counterarguments and Responses

Objection 1: "The Councils Were Not Addressing Physicalism"

A fair-minded physicalist might object: "The councils were addressing Apollinarianism and monothelitism — heresies that specifically denied elements of Christ's human nature. Physicalism is different. We are not denying anything specific to Christ; we are making a general claim about all human beings. We believe that no human being — including Christ — has an immaterial soul, because immaterial souls do not exist. That is a different kind of claim from what the councils were dealing with."

This is a genuinely important objection, and it deserves a careful response.

I acknowledge that the historical context is different. Apollinarius denied the soul in Christ specifically; physicalists deny the soul in all humans. Apollinarius was making a Christological move; physicalists are making an anthropological move. I grant that difference fully.

But the Christological result is structurally identical. Whether you deny the soul only in Christ (Apollinarianism) or deny the soul in all humans (physicalism), the outcome for Christ is the same: He lacks an immaterial human soul. And the councils defined Christ's complete human nature as including a rational, intellectual soul. The councils did not say "Christ has a complete human nature — unless it turns out that souls do not exist." They said Christ has a complete human nature consisting of a body and a rational soul. If souls do not exist, then the councils were wrong about what constitutes a complete human nature. And if the councils were wrong about that, then the entire conciliar Christological framework collapses.⁶⁶

As I have noted throughout this book, physicalists do not intend to be Apollinarian. Their intentions are good. They genuinely believe they are affirming Christ's full humanity. But the question is not what they intend — it is what their position logically entails. And what it entails is a Christ without an immaterial soul, which is precisely what the councils condemned.⁶⁷

Objection 2: "The Will Can Be a Physical Faculty"

Another physicalist response might be: "We do not deny that Christ has a human will. We simply locate the will in the brain rather than in an immaterial soul. The will is a function of the physical organism — specifically, of the brain's capacity for deliberation, decision-making, and executive action. So we can affirm dyothelitism without affirming substance dualism."

Again, this is a thoughtful objection. But I think it faces several serious difficulties.

First, there is the question of what kind of "will" a purely physical brain can possess. The councils understood the will as a genuine faculty of rational, moral self-determination. Maximus explicitly connected the will to autexousia — self-determination, the power of a rational nature to govern its own choices. Can a purely physical system, governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, truly exercise self-determination in this sense? If every brain state is the inevitable product of prior physical states (via the laws of physics), then the "choices" the brain makes are not genuinely self-determined — they are physically determined. And if that is the case, then the "will" the physicalist affirms is not the same kind of faculty the councils were talking about.⁶⁸

Second, there is the problem of the divine-human interaction. Constantinople III says that Christ's human will is "subject to" His divine will. On dualism, this is intelligible: the human soul's will freely submits to the divine will. But on physicalism, the human "will" is brain activity. How does brain activity "submit" to a divine will? What is the metaphysical mechanism by which a physical organ is "subject to" an immaterial divine nature? This is not an unanswerable question — but it is far more puzzling on physicalism than on dualism.

Third, and most importantly, the councils consistently described the human will as a faculty of the soul, not of the body. Constantinople III speaks of Christ's "rationally animate flesh" — flesh animated by a rational soul. The will is a faculty of that rational animation. To relocate the will from the soul to the brain is to change the metaphysical picture that the councils assumed. It may be possible to construct a physicalist account of the will that preserves some of the councils' conclusions — but it cannot preserve the councils' metaphysics. And if the metaphysics changes, the meaning of the conclusions changes too.

Objection 3: "Dyothelitism Implies Nestorianism"

This was the monothelites' original worry, and some modern theologians have raised it again. If Christ has two wills, does that not imply two willing agents — and therefore two persons?

Maximus answered this objection decisively, and the council endorsed his answer. Two wills do not imply two persons any more than two natures imply two persons. The will belongs to the nature, not to the person. Since Christ has two natures, He has two wills — but since He is one Person, there is one subject who wills through both natures. The analogy with the Trinity is instructive: three Persons share one divine nature and one divine will. The will/person ratio is not one-to-one; the will/nature ratio is one-to-one.⁶⁹

As Wilkinson has shown, the bishops at Constantinople III explicitly affirmed the condemnation of Nestorianism and were careful to ensure that dyothelitism did not introduce two subjects. The phrase "each nature wills and does the things proper to it" was not intended to make the natures into independent agents. It was intended to affirm the distinctness of the two operations while maintaining the personal unity of the one acting subject — the Son.⁷⁰

The Completion of the Conciliar Framework

With Constantinople III, the conciliar Christological framework reached its completion. We can now see the full picture that the councils built over three centuries:

Nicaea (325): Christ is fully God — homoousios (ὁμοούσιος, "of the same substance") with the Father.

Constantinople I (381): The Apollinarian denial of Christ's rational soul is condemned. Christ is fully human — body and soul.

Ephesus (431): The unity of Christ's Person is affirmed against Nestorianism. Mary is Theotokos (Θεοτόκος, "God-bearer"), because the one she bore is one Person — the divine Son.

Chalcedon (451): Christ is one Person in two natures — divine and human — "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." His human nature includes "a rational soul and a body."

Constantinople II (553): The personal unity of Christ is reinforced. Christ's flesh is "animated by a rational and intellectual soul." Anyone who denies this is formally condemned.

Constantinople III (681): Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations — divine and human — operating in harmony. Monothelitism is condemned.⁷¹

The Second Council of Nicaea (787), the seventh ecumenical council, reaffirmed all of these Christological definitions while addressing the question of icons. In its definition, it repeated the affirmation of two wills and two operations in Christ.

This conciliar trajectory is remarkable in its consistency and its cumulative force. At every stage, the church affirmed the completeness of Christ's human nature — against every attempt to diminish, truncate, or reduce it. Every component of genuine humanity — body, soul, mind, will, operations — was affirmed as truly present in Christ. And every attempt to remove any component — the soul (Apollinarianism), the will (monothelitism) — was formally condemned.

Physicalism, I believe, runs headlong into this entire tradition. By denying the existence of the immaterial soul, physicalism removes from Christ's human nature the very component that the councils repeatedly and explicitly affirmed. It does so unintentionally, as I have acknowledged. It does so for different reasons than Apollinarius or the monothelites. But the Christological result is the same: a human nature without an immaterial soul, a will without a metaphysical home, and an anthropology that the councils would not have recognized as orthodox.⁷²

Conclusion

Constantinople II and Constantinople III completed the great work that the earlier councils began. They clarified, refined, and extended the Chalcedonian Christological framework in ways that are profoundly important for the argument of this book.

Constantinople II gave us the most explicit conciliar condemnation of any view that denies Christ's human rational soul. Its anathemas leave no room for ambiguity: Christ's flesh is "animated by a rational and intellectual soul," and anyone who denies this is formally condemned.

Constantinople III gave us the definitive affirmation of dyothelitism — the teaching that Christ has two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, operating in harmony within one Person. The council condemned monothelitism — the denial of Christ's human will — and named its key advocates, including Sergius of Constantinople and Pope Honorius.

The theological hero of this chapter is Maximus the Confessor, who showed with brilliant clarity that the will belongs to the nature, not the person — and therefore Christ, having two natures, has two wills. Maximus's insight resolved the apparent tension between dyothelitism and the unity of Christ's Person by grounding the distinction of wills in the distinction of natures, while maintaining that the one Person — the Son — is the sole acting subject who wills through both natures.

For our argument, the key implication is this: a human will requires a human soul. The councils understood the will as a faculty of the rational soul — the soul's capacity for deliberation, choice, and moral self-determination. On physicalism, there is no soul, and therefore the human "will" must be relocated to the physical brain. But a brain state is not the same kind of thing as a faculty of a rational soul. The councils affirmed a will that genuinely deliberates, chooses, and submits — a will with real rational agency. Whether a purely physical brain can provide this kind of agency is, at the very least, deeply questionable.

In the next chapter, we will explore dyothelitism in much greater depth, examining the hypostatic union, the communication of attributes, and the Gethsemane prayer in detail. But the foundation has been laid here: the conciliar tradition, from beginning to end, affirms that Christ is truly human — with a real body, a real soul, a real mind, and a real will. Any theology that removes the soul from this picture is at odds with the councils. And physicalism, whatever its intentions, removes the soul.

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