"Thy Will Be Done":Christ's Two Wills and Us

Dogmatic Dyotheletism

In the second half of the fifth century, the Church formally defined that Christ's one Person had two wills, each corresponding to His two natures--divine and human.  This is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it:

Similarly, at the sixth ecumenical council, Constantinople III in 681, the Church confessed that Christ possesses two wills and two natural operations, divine and human.  They are not opposed to each other, but cooperate in such a way that the Word made flesh willed humanly in obedience to his Father all that he had decided divinely with the Father and the Holy Spirit for our salvation.  Christ's human will "does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will" (¶ 475).

What is key here is that Christ's two wills "cooperate" such that the humanity of the Incarnate Word was in "obedience" to God the Father.  Behind this language is a very specific choice of words in the language of the dogmatic canon:  The human will of Christ is "compliant" to the divine will and "submits" to it.

We are well acquainted with the classic text from Jesus' agony at the Garden of Gethsemane:

"My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will...

"My Father, it is not possible to let this cup pass from me unless I drink it, let Your will be done" (Mt 26:39, 42).

In both instances, Christ ultimately asks that His Father's will 'override' (so it would seem) His human will.  The question before us is this:  How did the divine will "override" the human will of Christ?  Commenting on these passages, St Thomas Aquinas says--

Nevertheless not as I will, but as you will, i.e., if it fits with your justice, I will do it; this is why he says, not as I will.  Hence he touches on two wills:  one which he had from the Father insofar as he is God, one which he had with the Father.  ...Also, another will which he had insofar as he is man;  and he submitted this will to the Father in all things, by this giving us an example, that we might submit to God's will... (Commentary on Matthew, 2232, underlined emphasis added).

At least three passages from the Fourth Gospel make the same point about Christ submitting His human will to the Father's:

Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me, and to accomplish his work" (Jn 4:34);

Accordingly, Jesus answered them, "Amen, amen, I tell you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but only what he sees the Father doing.  Indeed, whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise" (Jn 5:19);

"For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of the one who sent me" (Jn 6:18).

The Incarnate Lord repeatedly insists that He does not do "his own will" but the Father's.  Yet if Christ is one Person, how does He have two wills?

Christ's Two Wills Together--How?

The will is proper to nature, not to personhood, as both St Maximus the Confessor and St John Damascene explained.  Regarding the will proper to Christ's human nature, recall from our past entries that St Thomas Aquinas taught that one is human on account of possessing a soul; in the rational part of the soul is the intellect and the will whereby the intellect thinks about what ought or ought not be done, and informs the will about it.  When we speak of Christ's human will, therefore, we are speaking about the process of decisionmaking taking place in His soul.

The divine will, on the other hand, takes place in the Godhead.  St Thomas explains that the Son's consubstantiality with the Father includes the identity of the Son's will with the Father's (never the other way 'round!).  To speak of Christ's divine will means, by extension, the Father's, because the Son's nature is from the Father, and, again will is proper to nature.

So we ask the question again:  How does Christ's human will "cooperate" (Catechism) with the divine will in such a way that it is "compliant" and "submits" (III Constantinople) to it?

In the first place, it is false to say that Christ's humanly willed the Father's will by 'brute force' such that by His own human powers He simply "did" the Father's purpose.  (This is the heresy of Pelagianism.)  It was, rather, a specific working of the Holy Spirit in the soul of Christ which so transformed His human will to submit to His divine will.

This is no verbal pulling the wool over one's eyes.  Recall that the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit operate in the various parts of the human soul; with respect to our present discussion, the gifts of Fear of the Lord, Piety, and Wisdom operate in the human will.  By Fear, therefore, Christ clung to His Father; by Piety, He behaved in a 'sonly' way towards His Father and in a brotherly way towards the rest of us; by Wisdom, He contemplatively gazed upon the Father.  These "affective gifts" (as St Thomas calls them in his Commentary on Isaiah) in turn influenced the passions in Christ' sensitive soul.  Anterior to moving the will, the gifts of Understanding, Knowledge, and Counsel in Christ's intellect gave Him an insight to "the purpose of his will" (cf Eph 1:11), that is to say, the "stuff" of Divine Revelation.

This is why St Thomas, commenting on John 4:34, speaks of the rational creature "...being joined to his end and following a higher rule" (Commentary on John, 640, underlined emphasis added).  When St Thomas speaks of a "higher rule," he means something higher than the rule of human reason or logic and, more specifically, the rulership of the Holy Spirit.  Thus the Angelic Doctor speaks of the Seven Gifts as the "principle higher than human reason" (S.th., 1a2ae, q. 68, art. 1, resp., art. 2, ad 2 and 3) or as a "higher force," namely "grace" (S.th., q. 109, art. 5, resp.).  In his Commentary on Isaiah, St Thomas uses the expression "higher habit" to describe the Seven Gifts in Christ (361).

Therefore, Christ's human will was conformed to the divine will by the working of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in His soul.  More than that, Christ's two wills isn't about what Christ did, but about His disposition.  His perfect surrender and yielding to the Father was enabled--or, better, empowered--by the Holy Spirit in such a way that even if He appeared to be doing nothing (say, sleeping or eating), He was still in absolute conformity with the Father's will.  This is what the Evangelists mean when St John the Baptist saw the apparition of the dove "rest" upon the Lord Jesus Christ at His baptism:  As the Anointed One, Jesus enjoyed such a measure of the Holy Spirit that there was no 'empty space' in which He did His own will at variance with the Father's.

So when Christ appeared to be asking His Father to "override" His human will with the Father's will, He was in reality praying that His human will would maintain its yielding to the indwelling Holy Spirit.  It was, therefore, a preeminently "Christic" moment which He allowed us to see and to imitate.

"Thy Will Be Done"

When Christians pray the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we are praying to have the same receptivity to the Holy Spirit's anointing as Jesus did, so that our souls would be so re-engineered as to be disposed to do what the Father wills.  We ought not to imagine that doing "Thy will..." is an ad hoc, occasional experience, things we do here and there, now and then.  Rather, the petition "Thy will be done," more than 'doing,' is about disposition.

This is because the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit are habits in the Christian soul, that is, permanent fixtures by which we abide in the divine, supernatural life.  Ours is to be no different than Christ's:  There ought to be no single, however minute, gap between our wills and God's.  This is why St Paul was able to say, "This is the will of God, your sanctification" (1 Thess 4:3).  To be "sanctified" is to belong to God, and the work of sanctification is especially appropriated to the Holy Spirit, as the Cappadocian Fathers made clear.  To pray "Thy will be done" is to pray for an ever-deeper conformity to God's purpose, and it is in this purpose alone that we can find a fulsome freedom.  (This is why Occam was profoundly, profoundly wrong, in his notion of "freedom of indifference").

I have said that the dogmas of the Church are not "facts" but life.  The dogma of "Dyotheletism"--of Christ's two wills--gives us the pattern of life upon which we are to build our discipleship.  That being said, consider an expression often heard in the earlier days of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (and one we need to hear more of today!), namely, that we undertake an action only if we are "released by the Lord" to do so.  I have a Christian couple friend with whom I am close.  Occasionally, I will half-jokingly text them, "Does the Lord release you to have coffee with me this afternoon at Second Cup?"

Yet the attitude between seeking the Lord's "release" is in profound conformity with the dogma of Christ's two wills and His human will in perpetual and stable conformity to the divine will by the Holy Spirit's operation in His soul.  When I took a closer look at this "Dyotheletism," it became abundantly clear to me that this attitude is the correct one--that we must be in such conformity with the Holy Spirit that nothing we do is without the Holy Spirit's guidance.  Hence did St Paul write, "If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit" (Gal 5:25).  Here, the Apostle contrasts the merely 'having' the Holy Spirit ("live by the Spirit") from the active 'conformity' to the Holy Spirit ("walk by the Spirit").  The Greek word here for "walk by" is derived from στοιχέω, that is to say, in 'cadence' or 'to walk in rows' or 'to keep in step,' like the Prussian March.  The Christian life cannot be one of "autopilot" or "cruise control" but, rather, of us being the co-pilots and the Holy Spirit being the captain steering the course of our lives.

This is the heart of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal:  Not so much the exercise of the charism, but of surrendering and yielding to the Holy Spirit, of giving the Holy Spirit such sovereignty in our lives that we can truly say, "Thy will be done," because it is the Holy Spirit working to conform our wills to the Father's. 

This post is dedicated to my late Mother
on the second anniversary of her falling-asleep in the Lord,
who loved to pray, "Not my will, but thine be done!"