The Trial of a Pope: Saint Martin I
Fr. Scott Haynes
A Meditation for the Feast of Martin I
November 12
Pope Martin I stands among the great confessors of the Church because he suffered, not for a political revolt, nor for some personal crime, but for defending the truth about Jesus Christ. His story belongs to one of the most dramatic theological struggles of the seventh century, when the Byzantine Empire tried to impose religious peace by blurring doctrine, and when a pope, together with a monk of extraordinary brilliance, refused to let the mystery of the Incarnation be reduced to an imperial formula.[1]
Martin was born near Todi in central Italy, and before his election to the papacy he had already served the Roman Church in an important diplomatic role at Constantinople. That experience prepared him for the crisis that would define his life. He had seen the East at close range. He understood the language, the court, and the doctrinal tensions that were shaking the Christian world. When he was elected pope in July 649, he was not inheriting a peaceful Church. He was stepping into a storm.[2]
The storm centered on the doctrine called Monothelitism. The issue may sound technical to modern ears, but it touched the very heart of salvation. The earlier Council of Chalcedon in 451 had taught that Christ is one divine Person in two natures, truly God and truly man. In the seventh century, however, some churchmen and imperial officials proposed that although Christ had two natures, He had only one will. This was offered as a compromise, meant to calm divisions in the East. Yet orthodox theologians recognized the danger immediately. If Christ lacked a true human will, then His human nature was not whole. And if His humanity was not fully assumed, then humanity was not fully healed. Later Catholic tradition would summarize the orthodox teaching very clearly: “it is therefore correct to say that in Christ there are but two wills.”[3] (britannica.com)
The emperors did not want endless theological controversy. They wanted unity in an empire under grave pressure, especially from Arab military expansion and internal strain. For that reason, imperial policy increasingly aimed not at settling the doctrine cleanly, but at silencing debate. Under Emperor Constans II there appeared the Typos, an edict that forbade discussion of whether Christ had one will or two. This was politically shrewd and theologically intolerable. It treated revealed truth as though it were a matter the state could suspend for reasons of public order. Martin saw at once that silence under such conditions would become complicity.[4] (britannica.com)
There was also a political edge to Martin’s very election. During this period the Byzantine emperor still expected papal elections to await imperial confirmation. Martin did not wait. He was consecrated without obtaining the emperor’s approval. This was not a small procedural matter in the eyes of Constantinople. It was read as a direct assertion of Roman freedom. The emperor now faced a pope who was already independent in manner and was certain to be independent in doctrine.[5] (britannica.com)
Very soon after his election, Martin took the decisive step of convoking the Lateran Council of 649. This council, held in the Lateran basilica in Rome, became the great doctrinal moment of his pontificate. It condemned Monothelitism, rejected the imperial Typos, and affirmed that Christ possesses two natural wills and two natural operations corresponding to His two natures. The council was not merely a local Roman meeting in spirit, even if technically it was a synod. It was prepared with remarkable care and aimed to speak for the orthodox faith of the universal Church. What made it especially striking was that it was convened by a pope independently of the emperor, something of immense significance in the Byzantine age.[6] (en.wikipedia.org)
Here we must bring in St. Maximus the Confessor, because the Lateran Council cannot be understood properly without him. Maximus was born around 580 and had once held a high civil office at Constantinople, perhaps even as first secretary to Emperor Heraclius, before leaving public life for the monastic vocation. He became one of the greatest theologians of the Greek East. He was not a Roman by culture. He was a Greek-speaking monk of the Byzantine world, steeped in patristic thought, ascetical theology, and the mysteries of Christology. That matters greatly, because the resistance to Monothelitism was not a crude contest of “Latin West” against “Greek East.” In Martin and Maximus, Rome and the best of the Christian East stood together.[7] (newadvent.org)
Maximus had already been fighting the doctrinal battle before Martin’s election. In North Africa he had engaged in a famous disputation with Pyrrhus, the former patriarch of Constantinople. There he argued that if Christ truly has two natures, then He must also have what belongs properly to each nature, including a human will. He saw the matter with crystalline clarity. To deny a human will in Christ was to diminish the Incarnation. The Son of God did not merely appear in human flesh as though acting from behind a mask. He assumed full humanity. He thought with a human mind, loved with a human heart, and obeyed with a human will. Maximus’s theology was not cold logic. It was the defense of the saving realism of the Gospel.[8] (newadvent.org)
Maximus was also deeply involved in the preparation of the Lateran Council. Modern scholarship and older historical summaries alike recognize that the council bore strong marks of his intellectual leadership. Its use of Greek patristic sources, its precision of theological language, and its careful refutation of Monothelite formulas all reveal the hand of a theologian who knew the Eastern debate from within. Pope Martin presided, judged, and promulgated. Maximus helped supply the theological artillery. Together they formed one of the most formidable partnerships in the history of doctrinal defense.[9] (en.wikipedia.org)
The Lateran Council’s teaching was both subtle and strong. It did not present Christ’s two wills as rival centers of action, as though the Incarnate Lord were divided within Himself. Rather, it taught that the one Person of the Word acts in and through both natures, so that the human will of Christ is real, complete, and always in perfect harmony with the divine will. This point would later be solemnly reaffirmed by the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, which declared: “we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him,” and added that Christ’s human will is not in opposition to the divine, but follows it and is subject to it.[10] The Lateran Council had defended that truth decades earlier, at enormous cost to Martin and Maximus.[11] (papalencyclicals.net)
Constans II could not let this stand unanswered. In his eyes, Martin had not merely contradicted a theological tendency. He had condemned imperial policy, rejected an imperial edict, and behaved like a pope beyond imperial control. The state therefore translated the religious conflict into political terms. Martin was to be treated as a criminal. At first the emperor ordered the exarch Olympius to act against him, but the order was not immediately executed. Whether through hesitation, local resistance, or changing circumstances, the arrest was delayed. Only later, under the exarch Theodore Calliopas, was the emperor’s will fully carried out.[12] (newadvent.org)
In June 653, Martin was arrested in Rome. The pathos of the moment is sharpened by the pope’s condition. He was not seized at the head of some rebellion. He was ill, weakened, and unable to resist. He was carried off from the city as a prisoner. The empire wanted not only to remove him but to humiliate him. A pope who had dared to speak with apostolic authority against imperial compromise would now be displayed as a subject crushed by the state.[13] (newadvent.org)
The voyage east was itself a form of punishment. Martin was transported under harsh conditions and eventually brought to Constantinople. There he was subjected to public indignities, chains, imprisonment, and a deeply unjust trial. He was accused in political terms, including charges touching imperial loyalty. This was the familiar method of persecuting power. It avoided saying openly, “This man suffers for orthodoxy,” and instead wrapped doctrinal fidelity in accusations of sedition. Martin was stripped of the visible signs of his office and condemned. The sentence first passed upon him was death.[14] (en.wikisource.org)
That death sentence was eventually commuted to exile, perhaps through the intercession of the patriarch of Constantinople, though this mitigation was not mercy in any meaningful sense. Martin was sent to Cherson in the Crimea, a bleak and distant outpost. Exile there was a slow destruction. It removed him from Rome, cut him off from influence, and placed him in a land already suffering deprivation. He arrived worn down by illness, imprisonment, and neglect. The surviving record portrays not a dramatic final execution, but the grinding martyrdom of hunger, weakness, cold, and abandonment. Older accounts emphasize that “numberless indignities were heaped upon him,” and that after these humiliations he was exiled, where he died in misery.[15] (catholic.com)
While Martin was wasting away in exile, the tragedy broadened. Pressures in Rome eventually led to the election of Eugenius I during Martin’s lifetime. Thus the suffering pope had to endure not only physical torment but the bitter knowledge that another now occupied the Roman see while he still lingered in banishment. Yet this does not diminish his witness. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Martin’s confession was purified of every earthly consolation. He could not cling to office, comfort, applause, or vindication. He could only cling to Christ and to the truth he had defended.[16] (newadvent.org)
St. Maximus would eventually walk a parallel road of suffering. Because he too refused to submit to the imperial religious program, he was arrested, tried, and condemned. He would later endure mutilation, with his tongue and right hand cut off according to the traditional accounts, so that the empire might silence both his speech and his writing. Yet even before that final cruelty, the tradition preserves one of his most memorable declarations. Pressed during the controversy and confronted with the possibility that nearly everyone might unite against him, Maximus is reported to have said, “Even if the whole universe holds communion with the Patriarch, I will not communicate with him.”[17] Whether read as a courtroom answer or a remembered saying from the dossier of his conflict, the sentence captures his iron constancy. Truth was not made true by numbers, by imperial favor, or by the appearance of consensus.[18] (orthochristian.com)
The bond between Martin and Maximus is one of the noblest features of this history. Martin gave the controversy the voice of Roman apostolic judgment. Maximus gave it unmatched theological depth. Martin suffered as pope. Maximus suffered as monk and theologian. Both were crushed by the same imperial machinery. Both bore witness to the same mystery, namely that the Incarnate Word is fully God and fully man, and that His human will is not erased by His divinity but perfected in filial obedience. The doctrine they defended was later vindicated by the Church universal at the Third Council of Constantinople. History therefore rendered its verdict against the persecutors. The emperor who chained them has long since turned to dust; the confessors he tried to silence are venerated at the altar.[19] (papalencyclicals.net)
Pope Martin I died in exile on September 16, 655. He is honored as a martyr because his death came through persecution endured for the faith. He was not killed in a single spectacular blow, but consumed by suffering imposed for his fidelity to Christ. His life shows with particular clarity that some of the Church’s martyrs die by swords, while others die by chains, prison, hunger, exhaustion, and abandonment. The violence may be slower, but the witness is no less radiant.[20] (britannica.com)
The whole story, then, is larger than the biography of one pope. It is the story of a Church tested by empire, of doctrine defended at immense personal cost, of a Roman pope and a Byzantine monk standing shoulder to shoulder for the truth of the Incarnation. Martin would not let Caesar decree silence about Christ. Maximus would not let subtle falsehood hollow out Christ’s humanity. The Lateran Council of 649 became their great act of resistance, and their sufferings became the seal placed upon its teaching. In their endurance, the Church learned again that dogma is not an ornament of peaceable times. It is the guarded form of the saving truth by which souls live and are redeemed.[21]
Footnotes
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Martin I,” last updated April 2, 2026, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Martin-I; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “What controversy did St. Martin I face during his pontificate?” last updated April 3, 2026, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/question/What-controversy-did-St-Martin-I-face-during-his-pontificate.
“Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09723c.htm.
“Monothelitism and Monenergism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10502a.htm.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Martin I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Why was St. Martin I arrested by the Byzantine emperor?” last updated April 3, 2026, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-was-St-Martin-I-arrested-by-the-Byzantine-emperor.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Why was St. Martin I arrested by the Byzantine emperor?”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Martin I.”
“Lateran Council of 649,” accessed April 13, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateran_Council_of_649; Mark DelCogliano, “Acts of the Lateran Synod (October 649): Selected Proceedings and the Synodal Definition,” in The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, Cambridge University Press, published online February 11, 2022, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-edition-of-early-christian-writings/acts-of-the-lateran-synod-october-649-selected-proceedings-and-the-synodal-definition/E8A694B3C343AA918D00E1C8E61DB645.
“St. Maximus of Constantinople,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10078b.htm.
Ibid.; Mark DelCogliano, “Maximus the Confessor, Opusculum 7,” in The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, Cambridge University Press, published online February 11, 2022, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-edition-of-early-christian-writings/maximus-the-confessor-opusculum-7/8121B8793B6E2427B6D70743403FAEA0.
“Lateran Council of 649”; “St. Maximus of Constantinople,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
“Third Council of Constantinople,” Church Fathers, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3813.htm; “Third Council of Constantinople: 680–681 A.D.,” Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum06.htm.
DelCogliano, “Acts of the Lateran Synod (October 649).”
“Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia; “Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Pope St. Martin I,” Wikisource, accessed April 13, 2026, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Pope_St._Martin_I.
“Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Martin I.”
“Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Pope St. Martin I,” Wikisource; “Martin I, Pope, St.,” Encyclopedia.com, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/martin-i-pope-st.
“Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Pope St. Martin I,” Wikisource; “Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
“Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia; “Pope Martin I,” accessed April 13, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Martin_I.
“Sayings of St. Maximos the Confessor,” OrthoChristian, February 3, 2017, accessed April 13, 2026, https://orthochristian.com/100726.html. The page attributes the saying to The Life of Our Holy Father St. Maximus the Confessor (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1982).
“St Maximus the Confessor,” Saint Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.saintherman.org/news_190203_1; “St. Maximus of Constantinople,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
“Third Council of Constantinople: 680–681 A.D.,” Papal Encyclicals Online; “General Councils,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2026, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04423f.htm.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Martin I”; “Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
DelCogliano, “Acts of the Lateran Synod (October 649)”; “Lateran Council of 649”; “St. Maximus of Constantinople,” The Catholic Encyclopedia; “Pope Saint Martin I,” The Catholic Encyclopedia.
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