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Cyril Hovorun rightly believes ‘that the issues of Christ's energeia and will … were among the most important challenges that Christology was ever to face’ and, as he writes in the introduction, the purpose of his book is to demonstrate the point. These issues were, as he writes later, the subject of two important councils (the Lateran, 649, and Constantinople III, 680/1); they produced outstanding theologians (I should prefer to say one outstanding theologian, Maximus) and contributed importantly to the philosophical understanding of Christ's human nature and so of human nature in general. His demonstration succeeds: this is a learned book, well researched with useful references (often to documentation available on the internet), and written in plain, if not absolutely perfect, English. Dr Hovorun follows the standard account of the origin of the controversy: it was the politics of the Empire that evoked it. In the face of the menace of Persian and Arab armies the Empire needed ecclesiastical unity. The confession of one energy was excogitated to supply a formula which would satisfy the nonconforming dissidents attached to the memories of Severus of Antioch and Theodosius of Alexandria. It was always a somewhat ad hoc Christology according Dr Hovorun, and lacked popular support. Certainly it failed to satisfy. Controversy over monenergism passed on by a natural transition to controversy about Christ's will and to the judgement of the council of 680/1 that two wills, a human and a divine, should be ascribed to Christ. Dr Hovorun's three chapters deal with early monenergism and its background in the Severians, the history of attempts to secure union, and what he calls ‘imperial’ monenergism and monotheletism in counterpoint with dualist constructions. In general the controversy is seen as a consequence of inherent tensions within the neo-Chalcedonian consensus. That seems to me to be correct. The account of the political background is somewhat costive and room was found for only one joke: Polychronius, a monk, undertook at the council of 680/1 to revive a corpse by putting an allegedly divinely inspired volume in favour of monothelitism on top of it; the corpse failed to resurrect. But there was much to recount and little space for amused reflexion or indeed nuancing of the judgements on the personalities. I commend some instructive paragraphs on the Maronites and their contribution to the discussion. I could have wished to read something more about gnome, the human element not present according to Maximus in Christ; but this would no doubt have taken the reader too far afield and raised awkward problems of interpretation which are better resolved elsewhere.
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