Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century (review)

This book originated as a doctoral thesis at Durham under Andrew Louth. In three chapters the author examines the background, history, and theology of the seventh-century Christological controversies. Hovorun's historical argument is that the monenergist formulations of imperial Chalcedonian Christianity can be explained as an appeal to anti-Chalcedonian factions for political unity in the face of foreign invasion. But the author also believes that the intricate christological issues were theologically important in their own right and so he undertakes an extended clarification of the key terms of the debate.

Chapter One documents the pre-history of seventh-century monenergism in the Apollinarian, Antiochene, and Severan circles. The chapter's unstated implication is that although seventh-century monenergists-monothelites were Chalcedonian, the dyenergists-dyothelites were justified in linking them to heretical precedent. Although the resemblance between Antiochene and Severan formulations of monenergism is, as Hovorun observes, only superficial, the Antiochene formulations are important because, as Chapter Two explains, the seventh-century Emperor Heraclius exploited them in appealing to Nestorians to embrace imperial Christianity.

Chapter Two chronicles relevant political, military, and ecclesiastical events of the period. The tireless efforts of Heraclius, and his ally Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, to unite the Chalcedonian, Nestorian, and anti-Chalcedonian factions in the face of Persian and then Arab invasions, ultimately failed. For, although those efforts set in motion a bewildering progression of events and imperial decrees that saw some success, they also saw, in the persons of Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, Theodore I, the Greek-speaking pope, and Maximus the Confessor, the rise of dyothelite opposition to the imperial monenergist-monothelite project, which culminated provisionally in the dyothelite Lateran council of 649. Following Riedinger, the editor of the Lateran acta, Hovorun favors attributing the production of the acta (subsequently Latinized) to Maximus and his circle, but Hovorun demurs from Riedinger's suggestion that the council itself was a fiction. This chapter also includes a useful review of the eighteen sessions of Constantinople III. In addition to providing context, the point of the chapter is to argue that seventh-century monenergism-monothelitism was an artificial, politically expedient doctrinal program imposed by the elite. This conclusion raises a question that the author does not address: what were the political interests of the dyenergists-dyothelites?

Chapter Three examines the theology of the controversy by probing key terms (hypostasis, nature, energeia, will) and their relationships to each other. Both sides, Hovorun notes, affirmed that Christ was the single subject of all his actions and both attributed "unchangeable properties" to the two natures (165). So why did dyothelite partisans describe energeia and will as natural properties, while their monothelite opponents described energeia and will as functions of the person, the hypostasis? Hovorun's answer is that monothelites viewed a natural will as necessarily determined and therefore not free. For them a human will was by definition liable to corruption, which would compromise the sinlessness and unity of Christ. Alternatively, dyothelites denied that the human will is corrupt by definition. Instead they argued that a nature comes to expression and is rendered nameable in the outgo of energeia and will. (Hovorun notes the parallel between this understanding of energeia and that of Gregory Palamas in distinguishing the energeiai and essence of God [152].)

Since we can say that both sides intended to deny that Christ had a corrupted will, and since, as Hovorun allows, monothelites may have tacitly implied something like human volition in Christ, was the disagreement merely terminological? Was each side so locked in to its own approach that it was unable to understand what the other side was really trying to say? The author calls this suggestion an "oversimplification" (164); despite having much in common, the two sides put forward and intelligently debated two fundamentally different understandings of the human will.

Hovorun rightly notes that one cannot speak of the will apart from closely related concepts such as intellect, inquiry, choice...