George I of Constantinople
Our Father among the Saints George I, Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch
Patriarch · Bishop · d. January 686, at Constantinople
Commemorated 18 August — Commemorated with John V, Patriarch of Constantinople
George I was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from November 679 until his death in January 686, and he is the patriarch of the capital under whom the Sixth Ecumenical Council met in the domed hall of the imperial palace in 680–681 and condemned Monothelitism, confessing in Christ two natural wills and two natural operations. He came to the throne from within a Church that had held the one-will formula by imperial policy for two generations; he presided with the emperor Constantine IV over the sessions that repudiated it, subscribed the definition, and saw four of his own predecessors — Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter — struck from the diptychs and anathematised, along with Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, the doctrine's last defender, who was deposed in the council's face. The Church keeps George on August 18 in a joint notice with John V.
Election, 679
Nothing is transmitted of George's origin, family or earlier career. He was raised to the throne of Constantinople in November 679, succeeding Theodore I — who had held it only some months, and who would hold it again after George's death. The chroniclers offer no account of the change; the likeliest reading is that Theodore was removed because the emperor, having decided to reopen the question of the wills of Christ and to negotiate with Rome, wanted a patriarch who would not obstruct him. Constantine IV Pogonatus had by then written to Pope Agatho proposing a conference.
The Sixth Ecumenical Council, 680–681
The council opened on 7 November 680 in the domed hall (trullus) of the Great Palace and sat through eighteen sessions to 16 September 681. The emperor presided in person at the opening and closing sessions; George, as patriarch of the see in which it met, sat first among the bishops, with the legates of Pope Agatho and the representative of the patriarchate of Jerusalem. The patriarch of Antioch, Macarius, attended in person and argued, session after session, for the single will.
The council's work was to undo the settlement of Heraclius and Constans II. It received the dogmatic letters of Pope Agatho and of his Roman synod; it examined the florilegia on both sides and detected the interpolations in the Monothelite dossier; and in its definition it confessed two natural wills and two natural operations in the one Person of Christ, "not contrary the one to the other, but His human will following, and not resisting or opposing, but rather subject to His divine and almighty will." It vindicated, posthumously and in substance, the theology for which Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin had died in exile.
It also condemned persons: the patriarchs of Constantinople Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, the Alexandrian Cyrus, and Pope Honorius of Rome; and it deposed Macarius of Antioch, who would not recant, together with his disciple Stephen. The Antiochian throne passed to Theophanes.
Where George stood
George's own position at the council is the interesting question, and the record allows a sober answer. He did not come to it as a confessor of the two wills; he came as the incumbent of a see whose four immediate Monothelite predecessors were about to be anathematised, and he was persuaded in the course of the sessions, changing his mind on the evidence of the patristic dossier and declaring his agreement with the Roman letters. He then subscribed the definition. The acts as transmitted also record that he asked the council to spare the names of his predecessors in the diptychs of the Great Church — a plea for the honour of the see rather than for the doctrine — and that the council refused, and struck them out.
This is not the profile of a hero, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. It is the profile of a bishop who was carried by an argument he had not begun, and who then held the line: George remained orthodox for the five years of his patriarchate that followed the council, and it is on the strength of the council and of that consistency that he is numbered among the saints.
Repose and succession
George died at Constantinople in January 686, having held the throne a little over six years. He was succeeded by Theodore I, the very patriarch he had displaced, who returned for a second tenure — an unusual arrangement which the sources record without explaining. Within five years the Quinisext council of 691–692 would meet in the same domed hall to supply the disciplinary canons which the Sixth Council, purely dogmatic in its acts, had not issued.
Why the Antiochian church remembers this council
For the see of Antioch the Sixth Council is not a distant Constantinopolitan affair. Its patriarch was the one hierarch deposed by it in person; the Monothelite party in Syria had been strong, and the doctrine had been framed in the first place as a bridge to the non-Chalcedonian populations of Syria and Egypt, then already under Arab rule. In the Antiochian tradition the council of 680–681 marks the point at which the Chalcedonian patriarchate of Antioch was finally and unambiguously separated from the one-will theology which the Maronite communion of Lebanon was later accused, in the polemic of the crusading centuries, of having retained — a charge the Maronite Church has consistently denied and which the entry for Maron the Hermit treats in its place.
Feast and commemoration
August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, in a joint notice with John V. The day's office belongs to the martyrs Florus and Laurus, and the two patriarchs are commemorated by their synaxarion notice with the common of a hierarch. George is also numbered among the Fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, whose collective memory the Byzantine calendars keep on the Sunday nearest 16 July.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest ever with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarchs John and George direct our life in peace.
Iconography
George is painted in the standard hierarchical type — an elder in the polystavrion, the cross-covered vestment proper to a patriarch, the omophorion crossed on the breast, the right hand blessing and the left holding the jewelled Gospel — and in the calendar frescoes of August stands paired with John V, the two distinguished only by their inscriptions. His more characteristic appearance is corporate rather than individual: in the compositions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, where the emperor Constantine IV is enthroned in the centre with the fathers ranged on either side and the condemned Monothelites cast down at the foot of the scene, the patriarch of the capital stands at the emperor's right hand. No pre-1900 image identifiable as George alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The dates. The Greek notices and the OCA give 678–683; the critical catalogues give November 679 – January (or February) 686. The repository follows the latter, since it is required by the fixed date of the council and by the second tenure of Theodore I; the older figures appear to arise from a confused reckoning of Theodore's two terms.
- His plea for the diptychs. The episode is reported in the acts as transmitted; some scholars read it as a later insertion made to explain why the Constantinopolitan diptychs had to be altered by conciliar order. The repository records the report and the doubt.
- Was he a Monothelite before the council? The sources do not say in terms. That he had to be convinced is implied by the way the acts describe his assent; that he was a partisan of the heresy is asserted by no ancient source and should not be inferred.
- Not to be confused with the later patriarch George II (1191–1198), nor with Gregory or George of other sees; and the joint August 18 notice with John V should not be read as making the two contemporaries — a decade and two patriarchs stand between them.