MONOTHELITES, in Church history, the name given to those who, in the 7th century, while otherwise orthodox, main tained that Christ had only one will. Their theory was an attempt to effect some kind of solution of the vital unity of Christ's per son on the basis of the now firmly-established doctrine of the two natures. The controversy had its origin in the efforts of the emperor Heraclius to win back for the church and the empire the excommunicated and persecuted Monophysites or Eutychians of Egypt and Syria. In Egypt especially the monophysite movement had assumed a nationalistic, patriotic character. It was in Ar menia, while on his expedition against Persia, in 622 that, in an interview with Paul, the head of the Severian Monophysites (q.v.) there, Heraclius first broached the doctrine that the divine and human natures in Christ, while quite distinct in his one person, had but one activity and operation. Sergius, patriarch of Con stantinople, was a strong upholder of the doctrine of one divine human energy (pia Oectv6puci il4p-yet.a), and was the emperor's adviser on the whole question. The emperor's action led to such intense and widely-spread controversy that his successor Constans II. issued an edict forbidding all discussion of the questions of the duality or singleness of either the energy or the will of Christ.
The scheme of doctrine of the first four general councils, with all its vagueness as to these points, was to be maintained ; so far as controversy had gone, the disputants on either side were to be held free from censure ; but to resume it would involve penal consequences. This decree secured silence, notwithstanding the protest of the Western Church at the Lateran Council of 649; but with the accession of Constantine Pogonatus in 668 the con troversy once more revived, and the new emperor resolved to sum mon a general council. It met at Constantinople in 68o, having been preceded in 679 by a brilliant synod under Pope Agatho at Rome, where it had been agreed to depart in nothing from the decrees of the Lateran synod. The will, Agatho said, is a property of the nature, so that as there are two natures there are two wills: but the human will determines itself ever conformably to the divine and almighty will.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-See the Histories of Dogma by A. Harnack, F. Loofs and R. Seeberg, articles in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics and Herzog-Hauck, Realencycloptidie; Gore, Dissertations on subjects connected with the Incarnation.