Callistus of Constantinople

Twenty-eight years on Athos

Callistus entered monastic life on Mount Athos, where he remained, by the account of his own writings, for about twenty-eight years. He was formed in the circle of St Gregory of Sinai, the teacher who carried the practice of the Jesus Prayer from Sinai and Crete to Athos and thence into the Slav lands, and who is the immediate father of the fourteenth-century hesychast revival. Callistus lived under him at the skete of Magoula, near the monastery of Philotheou, and later in the wilderness of Paroria on the Byzantine-Bulgarian frontier where Gregory settled his last brotherhood.

That formation determined everything he afterwards did. He was a hesychast before he was anything else, and he wrote — about 1351, when he had already been made patriarch — the Life of Gregory of Sinai, one of the most valuable documents of the movement, since it comes from a disciple who had lived under the man and who understood what he was teaching. His years on Athos also gave him the two friendships that shaped the middle of the century: with Gregory Palamas, and with Philotheus Kokkinos, who would twice succeed him on the patriarchal throne.

First patriarchate, 1350–1353

He was raised to the ecumenical throne on 10 June 1350, at the height of the civil war between John VI Kantakouzenos and the house of Palaiologos, and while the controversy over Palamas was still unsettled. His decisive act came the following year: the great council held at the Blachernae palace in 1351 confirmed the distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies, vindicated Palamas against Barlaam, Akindynos and Nikephoros Gregoras, and made the hesychast theology the public doctrine of the Church. Callistus presided, and thereafter used the whole weight of the patriarchate to press the Palamite settlement through the Church and beyond it — into the Slav Churches, into Russia, into the disputes of the Balkan sees.

In 1353 he broke with the Emperor who had made him. Kantakouzenos, having lost his eldest son, determined to have his second son Matthew crowned co-emperor in place of the young John V Palaiologos, to whom the throne belonged. Callistus refused to perform the coronation. Rather than yield he abandoned the city, withdrawing to the monastery he had built in honour of St Mamas on Tenedos — where the young emperor's party had its refuge — and was deposed in absence, Philotheus Kokkinos being enthroned in his place. It is one of the clearest cases in late Byzantine history of a patriarch treating the imperial succession as a matter of conscience rather than of policy.

Second patriarchate, 1355–1363

When John V Palaiologos entered Constantinople and Kantakouzenos abdicated to the monastic habit, Callistus was restored — in 1355 — and held the throne until his death eight years later. The second patriarchate was taken up with the consequences of the collapse of Byzantine power: the Turkish crossing into Europe and the establishment of the Ottomans at Gallipoli in 1354 and at Adrianople soon after; the pressure of Latin proposals of union in exchange for military help; and the jurisdictional quarrels of the Balkan Churches, in which the patriarchate's canonical authority was very nearly the last authority it still possessed.

The gravest of these was with Serbia. Stefan Dušan had had the archbishopric of Peć raised into a patriarchate in 1346 and had himself crowned "Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks," neither with the consent of Constantinople; Callistus responded with the excommunication of the Serbian king, his patriarch and his Church. The schism outlasted Dušan's death in 1355 and was still unhealed when Callistus died; it was lifted only in 1375, twelve years later, by his successor Philotheus.

He also received, in his last year, the exiled Theodosius of Trnovo and his disciples, who came to Constantinople when the Bulgarian hesychast community at Kilifarevo was broken up; Callistus, who had known Theodosius in the wilderness of Paroria under their common teacher, lodged them honourably, and after Theodosius' repose in the same year composed his Life as well. Both Lives — of Gregory of Sinai and of Theodosius — are written from inside the movement and are the principal narrative sources for it.

Repose at Serres

In the summer of 1363 Callistus was sent at the head of an imperial embassy into Serbia, to the court of the widowed empress Jelena — Dušan's widow, by then the nun Jelisaveta — at Serres. The mission had two objects: an alliance against the Ottoman advance, and the settlement of the schism which he himself had pronounced.

The Athonite tradition attaches to his departure a saying of St Maximos of Kavsokalyvia, the fool-for-Christ of the Holy Mountain, who is said to have watched the patriarch go by and remarked that "this old man will never see his old lady again" — that is, that he would not return to the city. So it fell out. He was received with honour at Serres and died there in August 1363, and was buried in that city. Byzantine gossip, reported by Nikephoros Gregoras and others hostile to him, whispered of poison; nothing supports it beyond the convenience of the death.

Writings

Besides the two Lives, Callistus left homilies, letters on doctrine and on the jurisdictional disputes of his patriarchate, and ascetic writings on prayer. His name is attached — with that of Ignatius Xanthopoulos — to the Century, the hundred chapters Directions to Hesychasts which passed into the Philokalia and became one of the standard manuals of the prayer of the heart in Greek, Slavonic and Romanian translation; on the authorship, see below.