What the Sources Do and Do Not Settle

The twelfth century Crusader chronicler William of Tyre reported that the Maronites formally renounced Monothelitism at the time of their reunion with Rome, a claim which, read at face value, implies the community had actually held that condemned position during its centuries of isolation. Maronite Patriarch Estephan Douaihy and the historiographical tradition that followed him rejected this account as either a misunderstanding on William's part or a piece of Latin polemical exaggeration meant to flatter the church's own role in correcting an erring community, insisting instead that the Maronites had remained doctrinally orthodox, holding two wills in Christ, throughout their isolation and had never actually taught the condemned position at all.

Modern historians, Matti Moosa's critical history of the Maronites among them, have examined the conflicting medieval evidence at length without reaching a conclusion that satisfies both sides of the dispute, since the strongest sources on each side are also the most obviously interested parties in the outcome. The honest state of the question is genuine disagreement between two named scholarly camps rather than a settled attribution in either direction, and the Maronite Church today affirms Christ's two wills, human and divine, as orthodox dyothelite doctrine in full communion with Rome regardless of how the historical question of its own seventh century practice is ultimately resolved.