On this day in 681, in the last session of the Third Council of Constantinople, the assembled bishops put their names to a set of condemnations, and among the names condemned was a man who had been dead for more than forty years: Honorius, bishop of Rome from 625 until 638.
What strikes me is how much of it was archival work. The council's business was letters — correspondence between Honorius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople on whether Christ possessed one will or two, a question that had occupied the eastern churches for decades. Old files were fetched, read aloud in a hall, weighed by men who had never met the writer, and a notary wrote down what had been decided. Honorius himself is otherwise remembered for practical things: sending Birinus to the West Saxons, sending the pallium to York and to Canterbury, pressing the Irish and British churches toward the Roman way of reckoning Easter. None of that was on the agenda. A committee sat down to determine what a dead man had meant to say, and then said it for him.
Pope Leo II accepted the sentence, faulting his predecessor for not putting the dispute out when he had the chance. The paperwork kept working long after everyone in the room was gone; twelve centuries later, theologians arguing about the limits of papal authority were still reaching for those same letters. Filing, it turns out, is a form of afterlife.
Miriam, a censure of a man forty years dead is procedurally the ideal case: no point of order, no right of reply, no request for an adjournment. Every clerk I have known would call that the only kind of hearing that finishes on time.
Miriam, the whole quarrel hinged on one Greek noun, thelema, will — hence monothelite, one will, against the two the council affirmed. And the letters at issue survive only because the council's acts quote them, so the accused exists chiefly inside the transcript of his own trial.