Two Wills in Christ

 THE Monothelite tenet does not come into the range of subjects included in the foregoing Treatises; but as far as I understand it, it argued as follows:

 It was faulty in considering that no distinction was to be drawn between the physical and psychical emotions and volitions which belong to our nature, and which are not sinful, (such as the horror of death,) and those two acts of will, good and bad, which proceed from deliberate purpose and determination, and, as in the case in question, are of an ethical character. The Monothelites held mere volition to be an act of will, and to have the nature of sin, or at least to be inconsistent with that moral perfection which is possible to human nature, and was realised in our Lord. It follows that He could not have among His special constituents as man one which was of so dubious a complexion; in other words, He had no human will, and therefore He had but one will, viz., that which He had by being God.

 Such a resolution of the true doctrine led by a few steps to Eutychianism, that is, to a confusion of the received teaching on the Incarnation, and was seen to be dangerous when it came before the Schools and Councils of the Church, but till then it serves as an instance of the verbal mistakes into which the clearest and most saintly intellects may fall by living a little too early to have the experience necessary for a judgment on dogmatic questions. Athanasius says:

 "And as to His saying, If it be possible, let the cup pass, observe how, though He thus spake, He rebuked Peter, saying, Thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men . For He willed what He deprecated, for therefore had He come; but His was the willing, (since for it He came,) but the terror belonged to the flesh. Wherefore as man He utters this speech also, and yet both were said by the Same, to show that He was God, willing in Himself, but when He had become man, having a flesh that was in terror. For the sake of this flesh He combined His own will with human weakness, that destroying this affection He might in turn make man undaunted in the thought of death." Orat. iii. § 57.

 Several centuries later Anastasius says: "I say not, perish the thought, that there are two wills in Christ at variance with each other, as you consider, and in opposition; nor at all a will of flesh, or of passion, or evil ... But, since it was perfect man that He took on Him, that He might save him whole, and He is perfect in manhood, therefore we call that sovereign disposal of His orders and commands by the name of the Divine will in Christ, and we understand by human will the intellectual soul's power of willing, given it after the image and likeness of God, and breathed into it by God, when it was made, by means of this power to prefer and to obey, and to do the divine will and the divine orders. If then the soul of Christ was destitute of the power of reason, will, and preference, it is not indeed after the image of God, nor consubstantial with our souls ... and Christ cannot be called perfect in manhood. Christ then, being in the form of God, has, according to the Godhead, that lordly will which is common to Father and Holy Ghost; and, as having taken the form of a servant, He does also the will of His intellectual and immaculate soul, etc. ... Else if this will be taken away, He will according to the Godhead be subject, and fulfil the Father's will as a servant ... as if there were two wills in the Godhead of Father and of Son, the Father's that of a Lord, the Son's that of a servant." Anast. Hodeg. i. p. 12.