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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
THE TRUTH ABOUT POPE HONORIUS
By ROBERT SPENCER
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 9
 September 1994 
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FOR the serious anti-Catholic, Pope Honorius
I (625-638) occupies a small but pivotal role in the drama of Rome's
errors and abuses. This obscure pontiff lacks the lurid luster of
the Crusades and the Inquisition in the anti-papist's arsenal; nevertheless
Loraine Boettner and other Protestant polemicists have used Honorius
in attempting to deflate papal claims. Eastern Orthodox apologists
such as John Meyendorff and Kallistos Ware and even Catholic anti-Catholics
such as Hans Kng and Richard McBrien have pitched in to make Honorius
the favorite pope of everyone who disparages the papacy.
While Alexander VI Borgia and other notorious Renaissance popes rate
high among pope-haters, Honorius trumps his colleagues in that his
problem was dogmatic, not merely behavioral. By all contemporary accounts
Honorius' personal conduct was beyond reproach, but his sincere attempts
to resolve a controversy resulted in one brief sentence that many
see as the destruction of the idea of papal infallibility and even
of papal supremacy.
As a young Episcopalian, I first encountered Pope Honorius during
my undergraduate years. I had joined the Episcopal Church just a year
or so earlier, leaving behind a campus Evangelical movement bitterly
divided over the charismatic gifts. My friends on both sides of that
chasm started all their arguments with "The Bible says . . ."
I was led by a kind Episcopal priest to seek a resolution to this
confusion in the Church's great tradition. That tradition took me
places I never expected to go.
After a year with the unblinking theological leftism of the Episcopal
Church as a full-time "social ministries intern" with the
campus parish, I was reading John Henry Newman and Karl Adam, all
Brown
equal time to answer the Catholic claims. I also picked up Meyendorff
and Ware on the Orthodox Church, and books like Hans Kng's Infallible?
An Inquiry, thinking it would be an explanation and defense of
the doctrine.
My primary question in all this was: What is Christianity? Or more
precisely: How can one determine precisely what Christianity is? I
had bitter first-hand experience with the contradiction of the Protestants'
sola scriptura doctrine: What was plain and simple in Scripture,
what was obligatory for every Christian, depended on who was reading
the book.
The Episcopal Church gave me an appreciation of tradition, but its
own discarding of that tradition posed the same problem as with Scripture:
tradition according to whom? So I began to study the papacy. Cardinal
Newman explained masterfully, in An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine, that an ongoing, infallible authority in the
Church was necessary to preserve the integrity of revealed truth.
Whatever the confusion in the Church, a Christian always had recourse
to this sure repository of the actual content of revealed truth. Without
such a repository, the content of revelation would be subject to mere
human conjecture and opinion, thus essentially ceasing to be revelation
at all.
The truth, of course, is one. If the papal office really were its
repository, then the popes never had contradicted themselves on matters
of faith and morals. As I studied Church history, I saw that this
seemed to be so. When compared with the other great ancient see of
the Church, the patriarchate of Constantinople, the papacy possessed
monumental purity. Among the patriarchs of Constantinople were the
arch-heretic Nestorius, a collection of grubby Iconoclasts and fellow
travelers, and even a Calvinist, Cyril Loukaris! In Rome, on the contrary,
was the saint Newman called "the majestic Leo," who stood
virtually alone against the Monophysite heresy; Julius I, who faced
down the Arian bullies chasing after Athanasius; Gregory VII Hildebrand,
whose last words were "I have loved justice and hated iniquity;
therefore I die in exile" and others who, without compromising
one iota of the faith, outlasted Diocletian and Julian the Apostate,
Henry V and Philip the Fair, Napoleon and Bismarck, Hitler and Stalin.
Yet the comparison of Constantinople with Rome would be unfair without
looking at the papal black sheep or, perhaps, the papal wolves. Most
of these were dissolute scoundrels who were too busy drinking and
whoring to occupy themselves with doctrine; thus for a consideration
of papal infallibility they were irrelevant. Three names, though,
kept popping up in all the sources, whether Protestant, Orthodox,
or liberal Catholic: Liberius (352-366), Vigilius (537-555), and Honorius.
I disposed of the first two quickly. They had been made to sign questionable
statements of faith while under duress. That doesn't count: Papal
infallibility applies only to free acts of the pope, not to acts under
torture. No contract signed under duress is binding; thus Liberius
and Vigilius, whatever their failings, were excused.
That left Honorius. Opponents of infallibility said that his case
demolished any pretension of papal infallibility, for he was not only
a heretic but was condemned as such by an ecumenical council, Constantinople
III, in 680, which declared, 42 years after the Pope's death, that
Honorius be "expelled from the Church and anathematized . . .
because we find in his letter to Sergius that in all respects he followed
his view and confirmed his impious doctrines." [Quoted in Warren
H. Carroll, The Building of Christendom: A History of Christendom,
vol. 2 (Front Royal, Virginia: Christendom College Press, 1987), 253].
Sergius was another one of those stalwart patriarchs of Constantinople,
anathematized in the same conciliar declaration for originating the
Monothelite heresy. Monothelitism was one of a series of attempts
to reconcile the Monophysites, who at that time were a huge portion
of the Christian world, with the Catholic Church they had torn by
schism more than two hundred years previously.
The Monophysites maintained that our Lord's human nature had been
absorbed into his divine nature. They could not accept the decree
of the Council of Chalcedon (451) that "the only-begotten Son
of God must be confessed in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably,
indivisibly, inseparably united . . . without the distinction of natures
being taken away by such union." ["The Definition of Faith
of the Council of Chalcedon, 451," in Colman J. Batty, O.S.B.,
Readings in Church History (Westminster, Maryland: Christian
Classics, Inc., 1985), 104].
Sergius, the first Monothelite, tried to affect a compromise by teaching
that our Lord had only one will, a divine will. Like many compromises,
this one ultimately pleased no one. To the orthodox it was anathema,
for it denied the fullness of Christ's human nature. To Monophysites
it was no more welcome, for this will-less but otherwise intact human
nature which Monothelitism attached to Christ seemed to them to deny
his unity.
None of this was clear in the palmy days of 634. Monothelitism had
encountered some criticism from the prescient Patriarch of Jerusalem,
Sophronius, but elsewhere it was more politely received. The Pope
had not yet heard of it. With evident high hopes in his own inventiveness
and craftiness, Sergius wrote to Honorius about his thoughts.
In his two letters Sergius warned that teaching two wills in Christ
would lead to the idea that the human will of the Son of God was opposed
to that of his Father. He advised the Pope that it was better to speak
of only one will in our Lord. Sergius was trying a little sleight
of hand: He was attempting to deny the existence of Christ's human
will by pointing out that our Lord never opposed the Father. Yet if
two persons agree, they may be spoken of as being of "one will"
this doesn't mean, of course, that one of them has no will at all.
The Pope, with no idea of Sergius' between-the-lines message, answered
the Patriarch on the unthinkable subject of Christ's "opposition"
to the Father. "We confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ,
since our (human) nature was plainly assumed by the Godhead, and this
being faultless, as it was before the Fall." [Quoted in Charles
Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, vol.
5 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896; AMS Reprint, 1972), 29]. Since
Christ's human will is "faultless," there can be no talk
of opposing wills. (Christ hardly would have been faultless if he
opposed his Father's will.)
Monothelites, as they grew in numbers and influence over the ensuing
years, seized upon Honorius' confession of "one will of our Lord
Jesus Christ" as confirmation that the Pope believed with them
that Christ had no human will. Newman and other commentators have
noted that Honorius' letters to Sergius are not doctrinal definitions
ex cathedra; thus they are outside the scope of infallibility
defined by the First Vatican Council.
That is true, but, even more to the point, a look at Honorius' exact
words shows that while he did use a formula--"one will"--that
was later declared heretical, he used it in a sense that implied the
orthodox belief.
This was picked up as early as 640 by Pope John IV, Honorius' successor,
who pointed out that Sergius had asked only about the presence of
two opposing wills. Honorius had answered accordingly, speaking, says
Pope John, "only of the human and not also of the divine nature."
Pope John was right. Honorius assumed the existence of a human will
in Christ by saying that his nature is like humanity's before the
Fall. No one would claim that before the Fall Adam had no will. Thus
Honorius's speaking of Christ's assumption of a "faultless"
human nature shows that he really did believe in the orthodox formula
of two wills in Christ: one divine, one human, in perfect agreement.
The Third Council of Constantinople was thus in error when it condemned
Honorius for heresy. But a Council, of course, has no authority except
insofar as its decrees are confirmed by the pope. The reigning Pontiff,
Leo II, did not agree to the condemnation of his predecessor for heresy;
he said Honorius should be condemned because "he permitted the
immaculate faith to be subverted." [Carroll, 254]
This is a crucial distinction. Honorius probably should have known
the implications of using the "one will" formula; he could
have found out by writing a letter to Sophronius of Jerusalem. But
he was no heretic.
The anti-papists got the wrong guy. It seems incredible that so many
readers of Honorius's letters, from Patriarch Sergius to Hans Kng,
see only what they want to see in Honorius's "one will"
formula. We should thank God that this poor old pope saw fit to explain
himself. Rarely outside of the homoousios/homoiousios
controversy at the First Council of Nicaea has so much hinged on so
few words.
Since this case seemed to be the best one the anti-infallibilists
could turn to, I became an infallibilist, a Catholic with faith in
the pope as the Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter. The Church
will live beyond the trials of these days as it did those of Honorius's
day. That bare fact may seem abstract and impenetrable in the convulsions
of our age, yet it is our unshakable guarantee.
Robert Spencer freelances from the Bronx.
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