This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Monothelitism was born from a political problem rather than a theological one. By the early seventh century the Byzantine empire had lost Egypt and Syria for a time to Persian and then Arab conquest, and those provinces held large populations of Christians who had never accepted the Council of Chalcedon two nature Christology from 451. Emperor Heraclius, trying to hold the empire together, backed a compromise formula worked out with Patriarch Sergius the First of Constantinople: keep Chalcedon two natures, but say Christ acted through only one will and one energy, hoping the non Chalcedonian churches could accept that much even if they balked at everything else in Chalcedon.
Pope Honorius the First, writing from Rome, gave the formula a cautious endorsement, a letter that would return to haunt his memory. The formula convinced almost nobody it was meant to win over, and it alarmed a growing body of Chalcedonian theologians instead, chief among them the monk Maximus the Confessor, who argued that will belongs to nature, not to person, so a Christ with only one will could not really possess a complete human nature at all, and could not have healed human willing through his own free obedience if he had never genuinely exercised a human will to obey with.
Maximus paid for the argument with his tongue and his right hand, both cut off by imperial order before his final exile. The Third Council of Constantinople, meeting in 680 and 681, vindicated his position after his death, defining two wills and two energies in Christ, corresponding to his two natures, and condemning monothelitism by name, along with Honorius himself for having lent it his support, a condemnation of a pope by an ecumenical council that later Catholic theology has had to reckon with directly rather than pass over.