John V of Constantinople
Our Father among the Saints John V, Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch
Patriarch · Bishop · d. August 675
Commemorated 18 August — Commemorated with George I, Patriarch of Constantinople
John V was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from November 669 to his death in August 675, in the reign of Constantine IV Pogonatus. His six years on the throne fall in the hardest stretch of the seventh century for the capital: the empire had lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt within living memory, the Monothelite settlement imposed by Heraclius and his grandson still stood unrepealed, and in the last year of John's patriarchate the Arab fleet began the first great siege of Constantinople (674–678). Almost nothing of his acts is transmitted. He is remembered as an orthodox hierarch of that interval, and the Church keeps him on August 18 together with his later successor George I.
The see and the moment
John was raised to the throne of Constantinople in November 669, succeeding Thomas II. Of his birth, his family, his earlier career in the Church and his age at election the sources say nothing whatever; he belongs to that stretch of the patriarchal catalogue where the chroniclers of the seventh century, absorbed by the Arab wars, record little beyond the names and the dates.
The dates themselves are eloquent. John came to the throne some thirty years after the Arab conquest of Syria and Egypt, in a Church whose three eastern patriarchates were now outside the empire and whose emperors had spent two generations trying to hold the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian populations together with a doctrinal formula. That formula was Monothelitism — one will in the incarnate Word — promulgated in the Ecthesis of Heraclius and shielded by the Typos of Constans II, and resisted at the cost of their lives by Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin, both of whom had died in exile only a few years before John's election.
The siege
In 674 the Umayyad fleets of Muʿawiya began the operations against the capital which the Byzantine sources describe as a blockade of several years — the first Arab siege of Constantinople, broken at last in 678, and the occasion of the first recorded use of Greek fire. John died while it was still in progress, in August 675. Whatever his patriarchate consisted of, it was conducted with an enemy fleet wintering in the Sea of Marmara.
What is not transmitted
No writings of John V survive, no synodal act is preserved in his name, and no anecdote of his person. The Sixth Ecumenical Council, which would repudiate Monothelitism, met five years after his death; he neither prepared it, so far as the record shows, nor obstructed it. His successor Constantine I (675–677), who took the throne a month after John's death, is remembered explicitly as an opponent of the one-will doctrine, and the direction of the patriarchate under John is presumed from that, not attested.
The Church's judgement is the calendar's: he is kept as a saint, which in this period of the Constantinopolitan diptychs is itself a statement — the patriarchs whose orthodoxy the council of 680–681 found wanting (Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter) were anathematised and struck out, and John was not among them.
Feast and commemoration
August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. He is commemorated in the Byzantine synaxaria in a single joint notice with George I, patriarch 679–686 — the two set together although a decade and two other patriarchs stood between them, and although the notice offers no reason for the pairing beyond that both governed the Great Church under Constantine IV Pogonatus. No proper service is appointed: the day belongs to the martyrs Florus and Laurus, and the two patriarchs are kept by their notice and by the common of a hierarch.
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
John is painted, where he is painted at all, in the ordinary hierarchical type of the patriarchs of Constantinople: an elder in the phelonion — for a patriarch, the cross-covered polystavrion — with the omophorion crossed on the breast, the right hand blessing and the left holding the jewelled Gospel. In the calendar frescoes of August he appears paired with George, the two hierarchs side by side and distinguished only by their inscriptions, since neither has any attribute of his own. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The end of his tenure. Standard lists give August 675; some give the term as 669–674, and the Slavonic and OCA notices print "669–674". The discrepancy is of months, arising from whether the vacancy before Constantine I's enthronement on 2 September 675 is counted to John or to the interregnum. This repository follows 669–675.
- His number. He is John V in the modern numbering of the patriarchs of Constantinople; older Greek lists sometimes count differently, and he can be found as John IV or John VI in nineteenth-century catalogues.
- Not to be confused with the many other patriarchal Johns — above all John Chrysostom (November 13), John the Faster (September 2) and John the Almsgiver of Alexandria (November 12). This John has left no writings and no legend, and the homonymy has more than once caused his notice to be silently absorbed into theirs.