Photius the Great

Origins and the household of confessors

Photius was born at Constantinople, about the year 810–820, into one of the great families of the capital — of senatorial and, by tradition, of imperial connection: his great-uncle was the holy Patriarch Tarasius, who had presided over the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) and the restoration of the icons. The household into which Photius was born was of the same confessing stock. In the second, "Byzantine," iconoclasm his father Sergius (commemorated May 13) and his mother Irene held fast to the veneration of the holy images, were anathematised by the iconoclast synod, and suffered the loss of their goods and exile for it; the tradition of the Church honours Sergius as a confessor who "died as a martyr in defence of the holy icons." Photius thus grew up in a house that had paid for Orthodoxy, and the memory shaped him: the champion of the images' restoration was his own kinsman, and confession of the faith was his inheritance before it was his vocation.

Of that inheritance the most conspicuous fruit was learning. Photius became, by the common consent of friends and enemies alike, the most erudite man of his age — versed in grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, theology, law, natural science, and medicine, and possessed of a library and a memory that his contemporaries found almost incredible. His enemies whispered that so much knowledge could only have come by a compact with a Jewish magician; his admirers called him a man in whom all the wisdom of the ancients had gathered. He taught publicly at Constantinople — the schools of the capital counted him among their ornaments — and among his pupils, the tradition holds, was the young Constantine (Cyril), the future apostle of the Slavs.

The scholar in the world's service

Before he was ever a churchman Photius was a servant of the Christian empire. He rose through the imperial chancery to the highest lay dignities — prōtoasēkrētis (first imperial secretary) and prōtospatharios, a member of the Senate — and was entrusted with a great embassy to the Arabs, "to the Assyrians," at Baghdad or Samarra. It is to this journey that we owe his most astonishing book. Before setting out, at his brother Tarasius's request, Photius composed the Bibliotheca — the Myriobiblos, "the myriad books" — a collection of some 280 reviews of works of pagan and Christian antiquity he had read: histories, theology, philosophy, romances, medical and grammatical writers, orators and councils, each summarised, excerpted, and judged. A great part of the literature he handled has since perished, and for very many lost authors the Bibliotheca is our only window: it is at once the first great work of literary criticism to survive from the Christian East and one of the priceless salvage-vessels of ancient learning. To the same scholarly labour belong his Lexicon, his homilies, and the later Amphilochia, three hundred questions of Scripture and doctrine answered for Amphilochius, metropolitan of Cyzicus.

The first patriarchate (858–867)

The path to the patriarchal throne ran through one of the bitterest ecclesiastical quarrels of the age. In 858 the Patriarch Ignatius — son of the emperor Michael I, a man of rigorist and monastic temper — fell out with the kaisar Bardas, regent for the boy-emperor Michael III, and was deposed (whether he truly resigned, or was forced out, would be disputed ever after). The court and a synod turned to Photius, still a layman, as a man of unequalled learning and undoubted piety who might heal the breach. In the space of six days he was tonsured and passed through all the clerical grades — reader, subdeacon, deacon, presbyter — and on the feast of the Nativity, 858, was consecrated bishop and enthroned as patriarch by Gregory Asbestas of Syracuse.

The elevation, canonically hurried and made over a living predecessor, was challenged from the first by the strict party of Ignatius. Both sides appealed to Rome. Photius wrote to Pope Nicholas I in courteous and irenic terms, announcing his accession; a council met at Constantinople in 861 — the so-called Prōtodeutera, the "First-and-Second" council, whose disciplinary canons the Church still keeps — in the presence of Roman legates, and confirmed Photius and the deposition of Ignatius. But the legates had exceeded, or Nicholas judged that they had exceeded, their mandate; and the pope, pursuing at the same time the restoration of the papacy's jurisdiction over Illyricum, southern Italy, and Sicily — provinces recently transferred to Constantinople's obedience — reversed their act. In a Roman synod of 863 Nicholas declared Photius deposed and Ignatius the lawful patriarch, and pronounced anathema. The breach was now open, and it was as much a collision of two conceptions of the Church's order — the Roman claim to a universal appellate primacy against the Eastern conciliar and imperial polity — as a quarrel over two men.

Bulgaria, the mission to the Slavs, and the Filioque

Into this tension fell the conversion of the Slavs, and with it the question that would give the whole dispute its lasting theological weight. About 863 Photius sent the brothers Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, equipped with the newly devised Slavonic letters and the Scriptures and services in the Slavs' own tongue, to Great Moravia — the seed of the whole Slavic Orthodox world. In 864 the Bulgarian prince Boris received baptism and brought his people into the Church, and Constantinople sent him clergy.

But Boris, playing East against West, soon admitted Frankish and Latin missionaries as well; and these, Photius learned, were teaching his new Christians practices and doctrines at variance with the faith they had received — imposing a second anointing, forbidding married priests, altering the fast, and, gravest of all, reciting the Creed with the added word Filioque, that the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father and the Son." In 867 Photius answered with an encyclical to the Eastern patriarchs, denouncing these novelties, and singling out the Filioque as an addition to the Creed of the Councils and an error in the doctrine of the Trinity itself: the Father alone is the source and cause within the Godhead, and to make the Son a second principle of the Spirit's procession is to confound the Persons. A council at Constantinople the same year condemned the innovations and, in the heat of the crisis, pronounced against Pope Nicholas himself. This is the first full Orthodox articulation of the objection to the Filioque — the theological heart of the Eastern refusal, and the beginning of the argument Photius would complete, years later and in calmer ink, in the Mystagogy.

Fall, imprisonment, and the council of 869–870

In 867 the throne changed hands by murder. Basil the Macedonian, having made himself co-emperor, had Michael III assassinated and seized the empire. Photius — who, the tradition says, refused the regicide the Holy Gifts — was at once deposed and confined in a monastery, and Ignatius restored. To settle the schism with Rome and to condemn Photius, Basil and the new pope Hadrian II convened a council at Constantinople in 869–870, which the Roman Church counts as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and the eighth ecumenical. It anathematised Photius; his supporters were required to sign, and the Roman legates pressed on the Eastern bishops a libellus asserting the papal primacy. The council's authority was thin — few Eastern bishops attended, and many resisted the Roman demands — and Photius met his judges, the sources say, with a dignified silence, asking at last by what right they set themselves up as his judges. He was held in a hard captivity for some seven years, cut off from his books.

Reconciliation and the second patriarchate (877–886)

The reconciliation, when it came, was as complete as the rupture had been sharp. Photius and Ignatius were brought together before the end; Basil recalled Photius from confinement and made him tutor to his sons — among them the future Leo VI. On the death of Ignatius in 877, Photius, by now reconciled with the Ignatian party, ascended the patriarchal throne a second time with general assent. And in 879–880 a great council met in Hagia Sophia, larger than any since the seventh ecumenical — some three hundred and eighty bishops — in the presence of the legates of Pope John VIII, who knew Photius and esteemed him. This council of 879–880:

• annulled the acts of the anti-Photian council of 869–870 and restored Photius in full communion, East and West together;
• solemnly reaffirmed the Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, and forbade any addition or subtraction to it — a canon the Orthodox read as a conciliar condemnation of the Filioque;
• reasserted the ancient balance of the sees, honouring the primacy of Rome within the communion of equal and self-governing churches, without the universal jurisdiction the recent popes had claimed.

Pope John VIII's legates subscribed, and the pope ratified the reunion; for a season East and West were one again, and the "Photian schism" was healed by the very patriarch whose name it bears. Many Orthodox reckon this Council of 879–880 the Eighth Ecumenical Council, the true sequel to the seven, over against the Roman numbering of 869–870.

Repose

Under his old pupil Leo VI, who came to the throne in 886 with grievances of his own, Photius was accused afresh and deposed a second time (886), and retired — or was sent — to the monastery of the Armenians (the Bordi, or Eremia, monastery). There, in prayer and study to the end, he reposed on February 6, in the year 891 (some reckon 893). The Church, which had seen him twice cast down by emperors, kept his memory as that of a confessor of Orthodoxy and a teacher of the whole inhabited earth; and in the centuries after the final estrangement of East and West his stature only grew, until he stood in the Orthodox mind as the great forerunner and champion of the Church against the claims and the doctrine of the Latin West.

Writings

Photius is one of the great authors of the Orthodox tradition, and his works are of three kinds.

• The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (Περὶ τῆς τοῦ Ἁγίου Πνεύματος Μυσταγωγίας) — his mature treatise against the Filioque, the classical Orthodox refutation of the doctrine of the double procession. Its argument is Trinitarian before it is polemical: that the Father is the one source and cause (aitia) within the Godhead; that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, as the Lord himself taught (John 15:26); that to derive the Spirit also from the Son either introduces two principles into the Trinity or collapses the distinction of the divine Persons; and that the addition to the Creed, made without and against an ecumenical council, is on that ground alone unlawful. Every later Orthodox treatment of the question — down to Mark of Ephesus and beyond — is written in the light of the Mystagogy.
• The Bibliotheca (Myriobiblos) and the Amphilochia and Lexicon — the great monuments of his learning, described above.
• Homilies, letters, and canonical works. His homilies include two famous sermons preached in Hagia Sophia during the Rus' attack on Constantinople of 860, and a homily on the dedication of the new apse-mosaic of the Theotokos — landmarks of Byzantine preaching and of the history of the icon after iconoclasm. His hundreds of letters range over doctrine, church order, and pastoral counsel. To his authority is attached the great canonical collection, the Nomocanon in Fourteen Titles, whose definitive form and preface are his, the foundation of later Orthodox canon law.