John the Cappadocian

Chancellor of the Great Church

John was a Cappadocian, and the surname distinguishes him from the several other Johns of the Constantinopolitan throne and, more importantly, from the notorious John the Cappadocian who was Justinian's praetorian prefect a decade later — a wholly different man, a layman and no saint. Before his elevation he was presbyter and chancellor (σύγκελλος / χαρτοφύλαξ) of the church of Constantinople, that is, the senior administrator of the patriarchate, and had been designated by his predecessor Timothy I as his successor. He was enthroned on 17 April 518.

The reign of the Emperor Anastasius I was then in its last months. Anastasius had governed the Church for twenty-seven years in the interest of those who would not receive Chalcedon; Constantinople and Rome had been out of communion since 484, when Pope Felix III had excommunicated the patriarch Acacius over the Henotikon, the imperial formula of union that tried to make the two natures of Christ an open question. John came to the throne inside that settlement, and his first act as patriarch was necessarily a cautious one.

The acclamations of July 518

On 9 July 518 Anastasius died, and the guardsman Justin — a Latin-speaking Illyrian peasant of unshakeable Chalcedonian conviction — was raised to the purple. What followed is one of the best-documented crowd scenes in Byzantine history, preserved in the acts read into the record of the synod itself.

On 15 July, the Sunday after the accession, the people packed Hagia Sophia and would not let the Liturgy proceed. They shouted for the patriarch to come out; they demanded that he proclaim at once the Council of Chalcedon, that he anathematise Severus, the anti-Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, and that the bones of the excommunicated be cast out and the exiled bishops restored. John went up into the ambo. With twelve bishops who happened to be in the capital he consulted briefly, and then proclaimed from the pulpit the four holy councils — Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon — and their fathers as teachers of the Church.

The crowd was not satisfied with a proclamation. On 20 July John convened a synod of some forty bishops, which formally received the four general councils, entered them and the name of Pope Leo the Great in the diptychs of the Church — the roll of names read aloud at the Liturgy, and the outward and public sign of communion — anathematised Severus, and restored the memory of the deposed Chalcedonian bishops. The Church of the capital had reversed thirty-five years of policy in five days.

The union with Rome, 519

Justin and John wrote to Rome, and Pope Hormisdas sent legates, who reached Constantinople on 25 March 519. They carried the Libellus Hormisdae, the papal formula of reunion, which required subscription to the faith of Chalcedon, the condemnation of Acacius by name, and the striking of Acacius and his successors from the diptychs.

John accepted it, but not without a preface of his own: he prefixed to the formula a statement that the two churches — "the most holy churches of the elder and the new Rome" — were one, and so signed in his own handwriting, in Greek and in Latin, and the two copies were sent to Rome. On Easter Day 519 the reconciliation was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia with immense public rejoicing, and the Acacian schism — thirty-five years long — was at an end. Five names were struck from the diptychs, Acacius's first among them, and the removal cost the patriarch more grief in the provinces than anything else in the settlement.

Repose

John died on 19 February 520, less than two years after his enthronement and less than a year after the union he had achieved. He was succeeded by Epiphanius, who carried the settlement forward and is commemorated with him on the same day. The patriarch Photius, writing three centuries later, summed him up as "a dwelling-place of the virtues."