Agathon of Rome

Origins and monastic beginnings

Agathon was born about the year 577, a Sicilian — the tradition places his birth near Palermo — and of Greek stock, in the age when Sicily was a Greek-speaking province of the Byzantine Empire and a nursery of Greek monasticism and of Greek popes. His parents were devout Christians who gave him a good education; on their death he distributed the inheritance that came to him to the poor and embraced the monastic life, the tradition naming the monastery of Saint John (San Giovanni degli Eremiti, later so called) at Palermo. Coming in time to Rome — as many Sicilian clergy did in that century, some fleeing the first Arab raids on the island — he was received into the service of the Roman church and rose to be its treasurer (arcarius), esteemed for his administration and his charity, before he was chosen for the papacy.

Pope of Rome

On the death of Pope Donus, Agathon was elected bishop of Rome and consecrated in 678 (some Eastern reckonings 679). His short pontificate of about two and a half years fell at the decisive moment of the Monothelete controversy. For half a century the imperial court at Constantinople had promoted, first the doctrine of one energy and then of one will in Christ — Monenergism and Monotheletism — as a formula to reconcile the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian; and the great confessors of Orthodoxy, Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin of Rome, had suffered and died under it. Now the Emperor Constantine IV (Pogonatus), seeking peace and unity, invited the Pope to send representatives to a general council at Constantinople.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council

Agathon met the summons with care and weight. He first held a synod at Rome — the tradition numbers it a gathering of some hundred and twenty-five Western bishops (Easter 680) — to establish a common confession, and then dispatched his legates to the East bearing two letters: one in his own name, and one, longer and dogmatic, in the name of the Roman synod. This Letter of Agathon to the Emperor set out, with full patristic documentation, the faith of two natural wills and two natural operations in the one Christ — a human will and a divine, distinct and unconfused, the human ever freely conforming to the divine — grounding it in the Chalcedonian confession of two natures and in the witness of the Fathers.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III) opened in the domed hall of the imperial palace on 7 November 680 and sat until September 681. Agathon's letter was read in its fifth and later sessions and received with acclamation — the Fathers crying, in the phrase the tradition remembers, that Peter had spoken through Agathon — and the Council's definition of faith confessed the two wills and two energies in Christ, anathematizing Monotheletism together with its chief promoters (among them, notoriously, the former Pope Honorius, condemned by name for his silence and complicity). The Council thus set the seal of the sixth of the Ecumenical Councils on the Christ of Chalcedon: perfect God and perfect man, with all that belongs to each nature, will and operation alike, whole and entire in the one Person.

Repose and the wonders

Agathon did not live to see the Council close: he reposed on 10 January 681, while its sessions were still in progress, in extreme old age — the Western tradition, perhaps with pious exaggeration, reckons him more than a hundred years old. The multitude of miracles ascribed to him, in life and after, won him from the Greeks the title Thaumaturgus, "the Wonderworker"; the tradition tells in particular of his healing of a leper, whom he embraced and kissed, and who — so the account runs — was revealed as a messenger of God. He was venerated at once as a saint, and his memory is kept in both East and West as a champion of the Orthodox faith of the Sixth Council.