The Two Wills of Christ and the Monothelite Question

The community that became the Maronite Church traces itself to Saint Maron, a Syriac hermit monk who died around 410 CE and whose followers gathered into a monastic community at Beit Maroun in the region between Antioch and Aleppo. As the community migrated over subsequent centuries into the mountains of Mount Lebanon, seeking refuge from both Byzantine imperial pressure and later Arab conquest, it spent long stretches without a resident presence in the theological debates being settled at imperial councils in Constantinople, including the Third Council of Constantinople of 680 to 681, which condemned Monothelitism, the seventh century attempt, associated with Byzantine emperors seeking to reconcile Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians, to teach that Christ possessed a single divine-human will rather than two distinct wills united in one person.

Maronite historiography dates a formal reunion with the Roman Catholic Church to the Crusader period, traditionally placed around 1182, an arrangement reaffirmed at the Council of Florence in 1445 and again, with reforms bringing Maronite practice closer to Roman norms, at the Synod of Mount Lebanon in 1736, while the church retained its own Syriac liturgical patrimony, the Maronite Rite, and a married parish clergy alongside celibate monastic orders.

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.