Agatho

Pope Agatho served as Bishop of Rome from 27 June 678 until his death in 681. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as Sicilian by birth and of Greek extraction; later tradition associates him with Palermo. Almost nothing about his youth or middle years can be established from contemporary evidence. He is reported to have lived as a monk before his election. Eastern Christian memory later honored him as a wonderworker because of a reputation for charity and gentleness. Claims that he reached an extreme old age of more than a century rest on late hagiography rather than on firmly dated records, and no verified year of birth survives.

Agatho succeeded Pope Donus and was consecrated on 27 June 678. His brief pontificate unfolded while Monothelitism still divided the Eastern Roman Empire and while Rome remained in formal, if often strained, relation with Constantinople. In the West he exercised appellate jurisdiction: in 679 a Roman synod under his presidency heard the appeal of Wilfrid of York, whose large Northumbrian diocese Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury had subdivided, and ordered Wilfrid restored. The decision is an early and well-attested instance of papal judicial intervention in the English church, even though its enforcement in England remained contested. Under Emperor Constantine IV, imperial policy toward Rome was comparatively conciliatory; certain fiscal charges and confirmatory delays that had attended papal consecration were eased in this period.

The defining work of the pontificate was preparation for the Third Council of Constantinople, the sixth ecumenical council, which sat from 680 to 681 to settle the doctrine of Christ’s wills. Agatho did not attend in person. He convened a synod at Rome and sent legates together with a lengthy dogmatic letter, subscribed by a large number of Western bishops, affirming that in the one person of the incarnate Word there are two natural wills and two natural operations, divine and human, without division or confusion. The council received the letter with honor, defined dyothelitism as orthodox, condemned Monothelitism, and, controversially, included the deceased Pope Honorius I among those censured for failing to extinguish the error. Agatho died in Rome on 10 January 681, months before the council closed in September, and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.

He was venerated as a saint in both East and West from an early date, without a later formal process of canonization of the medieval or modern type. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 10 January; the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 20 February. His historical importance lies chiefly in the clear Roman doctrinal contribution he organized to the sixth ecumenical council, which restored a measure of agreement between Rome and Constantinople on the two wills of Christ, even as the posthumous censure of Honorius continued to be discussed in later centuries.