WHY WAS POPE HONORIUS CONDEMNED FOR HERESY?
[Above: Honorius I in an imaginary portrait—Chevalier Artaud de. Montor. Lives and Times of the Popes. New York: Catholic Publication Society of America, 1911. Public domain.]
ON THIS DAY, 27 OCTOBER 625, Honorius I began his reign as pope, which lasted until his death in 638. His thirteen-year pontificate created a lasting complication for proponents and defenders of papal infallibility because he was condemned as a heretic by a major church council.
At stake was the issue of Christ’s nature. The doctrine of Monothelitism, which Honorius held, taught that Christ had in effect only a divine will, not both the divine and the human wills. Writing to patriarchs who questioned this teaching, Honorius spoke in favor of the heretical doctrine. Eleven years after Honorius’s death, Pope Martin and more than a hundred Italian bishops condemned Monothelitism.
The question became controversial enough that Emperor Constantine IV decided to settle the matter by summoning a general council. This met in Constantinople in 680 and is known as Sixth Ecumenical Council or the Third Council of Constantinople. The council condemned and anathematized all the leaders of the Monothelite heresy—including Honorius I who was mentioned by name. The papal legates who were present joined in the condemnation. Some of Honorius’s writings were burned as heretical.
Pope Leo II endorsed the condemnation, as did later popes. Honorius’s name was struck from the diptychs (a list of names of living and dead Christians for whom special prayers are made during the liturgy in many eastern and western churches). As Janus (probably church historian Johannes Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger) would later write, “This one fact—that a Great Council, universally received afterwards without hesitation throughout the Church, and presided over by Papal legates, pronounced the dogmatic decision of a Pope heretical, and anathematized him by name as a heretic—is a proof, clear as the sun at noonday, that the notion of any peculiar enlightenment or inerrancy of the Popes was then utterly unknown to the whole Church.”
Defenders of Papal infallibility have fallen into three camps in dealing with this council. The first camp attacked the acts of the Council as spurious, and pretended they were a forgery. The evidence was always against this position and most Catholics abandoned it in the eighteenth century. A second tack was to rework Honorius’s words into some sort of resemblance to orthodoxy. A recent position has been to say in effect, “Yes, Honorius was wrong, but he was not anathematized for actually teaching error, but only for not taking a strong stand against it.”
The council’s sentence against Honorius says, according to the Labbe and Cossart’s translation, “[W]e define that there shall be expelled from the holy Church of God and anathematized Honorius who was some time Pope of Old Rome, because of what we found written by him to Sergius, that in all respects he followed his view and confirmed his impious doctrines.”
—Dan Graves
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For more about early heresies, consult Christian History #51, Heresy in the Early Church
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