MONOTII'ELITES ante), persons in the early church who, in the effort to explain the mystery of Christ's person, said that he possessed only one will. Eutyches, about the middle of the 5th c., had taught that Christ had only one nature, his human nature having been absorbed by his divine. The impersonal human nature, he said, was assimilated and, in a manner, deified by the personal Logos, so that his body was not of the same substance as those of mankind generally, but was a divine body. All human attributes, also, in his opinion, were transferred to the one subject, so that it must he said, God wns born, God suffered, was crucified, and died. The monophysites, in distinction from the Eutychians, held that the two natures were so united as to become only one nature. And these were follc-ved by the monothelites, who maintained that Christ, though retaining two natures, ]tat'. only one will, the human will being merged in the divine. That is, while speaking of two natures, they were in fact Entychians so far as respected the faculty of the will. This theory was made promi nent in the effort of the emperor Herachus to compose the disputes in the church, and especially to bring back the Eutychians and monophysites, the latter of whom were very powerful. Their leader, Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria. called a synod, 633 A.D., which approved the monothelite statement, and with good effects at least for a time. Many
Eutychians in Armenia, Egypt, and other remote districts, were brought back to the church. The decision, however, was, opposed by $ophronius, a monk of. Palestine. who, on being made patriarch of Jerusalem, did not ,hesitate to resist both the open approval of it by the patriarch of Constantinople and the tacit consent yielded to it by the pope of Home. He soon summoned a council, which condemned the doctrine of the one will as being a part of the Eutychian heresy. This decision, in its turn, was condemned by the emperor Ileraclins, who issued a decree forbidding all controversy on the subject; but his influence in upholding monothelism was soon arrested by his death; and, after much controversy and mutual condemnation, the first synod of t1.3 Lateran. 649, adopted the doctrine of the two wills and two energies. The final condemnation of monothelism was pronounced at th3 6th general council, Constantinople, 680, where it was declared that there are in Christ two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, con version, or change; with nothing like antagonism or like confusion; but at the same time that the human will could not come into collision with his divine will, but is in all things subject to it.