Dear in Christ Brothers and Sisters,

Congratulations with the feasts of the Resurrection of the Lord, the Meeting of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, and the Martyrs Adrian and Natalia!

Today let’s briefly discuss the Sixth Ecumenical Council. After the unsuccessful attempts of the Emperor Justinian to heal the rift between the Orthodox and the Monophysites, a long period of time ensued during which there were no significant developments regarding these theological disputes. When the Emperor Heracleus (reigned 610 - 641) came to the throne, serious theological discussions with the goal of returning the heretics to the bosom of the Church once again began to take place. Patriarch Sergius, as well as the Roman Pope Honorius, proposed a compromise between the Orthodox teaching that there are two natures in Christ and the Monophysite teaching that Christ has but one divine nature. They proposed a new teaching whose central idea was that in Christ, there truly are two natures, a human and a divine, but that there is only one will, the divine. This doctrine is called Monothelitism. The Church battled against this heresy for over forty years. The main defenders of the Orthodox faith in these years were the Holy Hierarch Sophronius of Jerusalem, the Holy Hierarch Martin the Pope of Rome, who died in exile in the Crimea, and the Holy Monk Maximus the Confessor, who had his tongue cut out and his right hand cut off so as to deny him the ability to preach and write the truth.

In 668 the great-grandson of Heracleus, Constantine the Fourth (reigned 668 - 685), ascended the throne of the Byzantine Empire and called the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 680. The 170 fathers of this council met for about ten months in Constantinople. Both the Orthodox and Monothelites participated in the meetings at which the arguments of both sides were diligently examined. When it became clear that many of the citations of the Holy Fathers that were being used by the Monothelites were forgeries, the position of the heretics fell to pieces and most of them accepted the Orthodox faith. Monothelitism was deemed a version of the larger Monophysite heresy. With this council the theological disputes concerning the second person of the Holy Trinity came to a close, not because all the heretics returned to the Orthodox Church, but simply because those provinces in which the Monophysites lived were no longer part of the Byzantine Empire. It so happened that most of the faithful within the Byzantine state were Orthodox, while many that were living in Egypt and the East were Monophysites. This situation persists to this day.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council is important because it defended the understanding that Christ has a full-fledged human nature, which must of course have its own personal will, and that this nature with its will is exactly like ours, except that it is without sin. A person without his own personal free will is no man, but simply some kind of robot which has been programed by someone else. If the Saviour did not have a human will, as the Monothelites taught, it would mean that He was not a complete human. If He was not a true man, it means that God did not join Himself to us and, as a consequence, our pathway to God ceases to exist. It is also important to note that although the God-man Jesus Christ has separate human and divine wills, the human will is always in obedience to the divine.

Let us try to always subject our human, earthly, selfish will to the Divine will. Of course, we do not have a divine nature like Christ, but traces of the will of our Creator can be found in each one of us. Every person has a conscience which counsels us on how we should act with exactness and reproaches us when we sin, if only we have not smothered it. We also hear the will of our Lord in Holy Scripture. Therefore, let’s listen to the words of these divine texts and live accordingly. Through the prayers of the Most Pure Virgin Mary and the Holy Martyrs Adrian and Natalia, may our Lord help us in this task.

priest Alexis