Ignatius of Constantinople

Origins and monastic beginnings

Ignatius was born Nicetas about the year 798, a son of the emperor Michael I Rhangabe (reigned 811–813) and grandson, on his mother's side, of the emperor Nicephorus I. When Michael was defeated and deposed by Leo the Armenian in 813, the imperial family was removed from the world: the boy Nicetas, about fifteen, was castrated — a customary means of barring a rival dynasty from the throne — and confined in a monastery. What was meant as a political disabling became a vocation. Taking the name Ignatius, he embraced the monastic life with fervour, in time was made abbot (igumen) of the monastery he had entered, founded monastic houses on the Princes' Islands, and won a reputation for austerity and pastoral firmness that carried his name far beyond the cloister.

Patriarch: the first tenure

In 847 the empress-regent Theodora, ruling for her young son Michael III and newly triumphant in the restoration of the holy icons, raised Ignatius to the patriarchal throne of Constantinople. His first tenure was marked by the severity of a monastic reformer: he defended the rigorist party in the Church, clashed with those he judged lax, and would not bend the discipline of the Church to the convenience of power. The collision came with Bardas, the uncle of Michael III, who as Caesar governed the empire in the young emperor's name. Bardas lived in open scandal — the sources charge him with an illicit union — and when Ignatius's rebukes went unheeded he publicly refused him Communion. Bardas for his part pressed the patriarch to tonsure the empress Theodora against her will, to shut her out of affairs of state; Ignatius refused, and matters broke into open conflict. In 858 he was accused of complicity in a conspiracy, deposed, ill-treated, and sent into exile.

Photius and the schism

To the vacant throne was raised Photius, the most learned man of the age, a layman rushed through the clerical grades in a few days. The partisans of Ignatius held his deposition uncanonical and refused to recognise Photius; Photius's supporters held Ignatius's cession valid. The quarrel, at first internal, drew in Rome: Pope Nicholas I, appealed to by both sides and pursuing his own claims (and the disputed jurisdiction over Bulgaria), declared for Ignatius and against Photius, who in turn, in 867, censured Roman usages — the addition of the Filioque to the Creed foremost among them — in what became the first great rupture between the Churches, the so-called Photian schism.

That same year the political ground shifted: Michael III was murdered and Basil the Macedonian seized the throne; Basil deposed Photius and restored Ignatius to the patriarchate. The Council of 869–870, later reckoned in the West as the Eighth Ecumenical Council, condemned Photius under Ignatius's presidency. Yet the two men were in time reconciled: Ignatius and Photius made peace before the end, and on Ignatius's death Photius succeeded him once more and was himself in due course vindicated by a further council (879–880). The Orthodox Church, keeping the memory of both, honours Photius the Great on February 6 and Ignatius on October 23, and holds their long contention not as a battle of a saint against a villain but as a tragedy of two holy and capable men caught in the collision of imperial politics, ecclesiastical discipline, and the widening estrangement of East and West. This entry records the Photian controversy without adjudicating it, following the Church's canonisation of both parties.

Repose

Restored to his throne, Ignatius governed the Church of Constantinople for a second period of some ten years and died in peace in the year 877, in one of the monasteries he had founded. He did not die a martyr; the Church numbers him among the confessors for the sufferings — deposition, ill-usage, and exile — that he bore for the discipline of the Church and the freedom of his conscience.