Tarasius of Constantinople

Origins and imperial service

Tarasius was born at Constantinople about the year 730, into one of the great patrician families of the capital — a household of senatorial rank, related (the tradition and his kinsman Photius the Great attest) to the same confessing stock that would later give the Church the Patriarch Photius, his great-nephew. His father is remembered as a man of high judicial office, upright and charitable; his family gave him the finest education the city afforded, in the sacred writings and in the whole round of Hellenic learning, and he grew to be admired for eloquence, prudence, and a gravity of life beyond his years.

He entered the imperial service and rose swiftly, attaining the rank of senator and the office of imperial secretary (πρωτοασηκρῆτις, protasekretis) — the chief of the chancery, one of the most confidential posts in the palace — under the young emperor Constantine VI and his mother, the Empress Irene, who governed as regent. In the world he lived, the sources agree, as one already half a monk: unmarried, temperate, given to prayer and to the study of the Scriptures, using the wealth and station of his office as a steward rather than a possessor. It was this reputation — a layman of unblemished life, learning, and administrative genius, and known to be sound on the question of the icons — that would carry him, against his own will, to the throne of the Church.

The vacancy of the see and the iconoclast crisis

The Church into which Tarasius was called had been torn for two generations by iconoclasm — the imperial policy, inaugurated by Leo III and pressed with violence by Constantine V, of proscribing and destroying the holy images and persecuting those who venerated them, a policy given the false colour of a council at the palace of Hieria in 754. With the death of the iconoclast emperor Leo IV in 780 and the regency of his widow Irene, herself a venerator of the icons, the tide began to turn; but the hierarchy, the army, and much of the capital were still deeply committed to the iconoclast settlement, and the restoration of Orthodoxy could not be accomplished by a stroke of the pen.

In 784 the Patriarch Paul IV, who had governed uneasily and had taken the iconoclast oath on his accession, was seized with remorse. He withdrew to the monastery of Floros, received the great schism of the monastic habit, and — when the Empress and her son came to him — declared that he could no longer bear the guilt of a Church cut off from the other patriarchates and estranged from Orthodoxy, and that only an ecumenical council could set matters right. He died soon after; and when the question of a successor was put to the assembly of the people and the senate, the choice fell, by common acclamation, upon the layman Tarasius.

From layman to patriarch

Tarasius resisted. In a celebrated address to the assembly — which he afterwards set out in a letter — he protested that he was unworthy, that the office terrified him, and, above all, that he would not accept a Church at war with the rest of Christendom: he would take up the burden only if a general council were convened, in union with the see of Old Rome and the Eastern patriarchates, to restore the icons and the communion of the Churches. The Empress and the people consented; and, being still a layman, Tarasius was ordained in the space of a few days through all the intervening grades — reader, subdeacon, deacon, presbyter — and consecrated Archbishop of Constantinople on 25 December 784, the feast of the Nativity of Christ.

His elevation straight from the lay state drew criticism — from the rigorists at home, and from Pope Adrian I of Rome, who in his letters objected both to the uncanonical speed of the promotion and to the imperial style still used of the Constantinopolitan see; yet Adrian, recognising the Orthodoxy of the new patriarch and the promise of a council, sent his legates and lent his authority to the work. It was a pattern the age would repeat: after Tarasius, both Nicephorus and Photius would likewise be carried from the lay state to the patriarchate, and his own case became the precedent invoked for theirs.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787)

The great work of Tarasius's life was the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Letters went out to Rome and to the Eastern patriarchs, and a synod was summoned to meet at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople in the summer of 786. It was broken up almost before it began: soldiers of the capital's garrison, loyal to the memory of Constantine V and to iconoclasm, burst in under arms and scattered the fathers. Undismayed, Tarasius and Irene bided their time, replaced the mutinous regiments with troops drawn from the provinces, and reconvened the council the following year — not at the capital but at Nicaea in Bithynia, the city of the First Council, where in September and October 787 some three hundred and sixty-seven bishops assembled under the presidency of Tarasius, with the legates of Pope Adrian and representatives of the Eastern patriarchs.

Over seven sessions the council examined the whole question of the images. It heard the patristic testimonies read out, exposed the forgeries and the misreadings on which the council of 754 had rested, received back with mercy the iconoclast bishops who repented and confessed the Orthodox faith, and then set forth the definition (horos) that remains the Church's charter on the holy icons: that the making and veneration of the images of Christ, of the Theotokos, of the angels and the saints is agreeable to the Gospel; that they are to be honoured with reverence and the offering of incense and lights, but not with the true worship (λατρεία) which belongs to God alone; and that — in the words that became the touchstone of the whole doctrine — "the honour paid to the image passes to its prototype," so that he who venerates the icon venerates the person depicted in it. With the council's decree the first iconoclasm was, for a generation, undone, and the seventh and last of the ecumenical councils took its place in the Church's memory; the "Triumph of Orthodoxy" over iconoclasm is kept to this day on the First Sunday of Lent, and Tarasius is numbered among the fathers whose labour restored the icons.

Pastor and almsgiver

For twenty-two years Tarasius governed the Church of Constantinople, and the tradition remembers him as a shepherd of great gentleness. His policy toward the former iconoclasts was one of economy and mercy: bishops who had held office under the heresy were, on repentance and a right confession, left in their sees, rather than being deposed. This clemency earned him the sharp opposition of the rigorist party led by Theodore the Studite and the monks of Stoudios, who thought the discipline too lax; the disagreement, recorded honestly by both sides, runs through the whole later history of his patriarchate, and would flare again over the affair of the emperor's marriage.

Above all he was famed as an almsgiver. He lived himself in monastic austerity, and turned the resources of the patriarchate outward to the poor: he founded and endowed hospices and homes for the aged, the destitute, and the stranger, and made it his own practice — the synaxaria dwell on this — to gather the poor at his table and to serve them with his own hands, waiting on them as a servant, most of all at the Paschal feast. He kept careful watch over the clergy and against the buying and selling of holy office; the accusation of tolerating simony, which some later brought against him, he answered in a surviving letter to Pope Adrian, condemning the traffic in ordinations in the strongest terms.

The "adulterous marriage" (the Moechian affair)

The gravest trial of his rule came from the palace. In 795 the young emperor Constantine VI put away his lawful wife, the Empress Maria of Amnia, confined her to a convent, and took in her place a kinswoman of the court named Theodote. The act was a public scandal and a breach of the Church's law, and Tarasius refused to bless the union or to lend the patriarchate's sanction to it. A court priest named Joseph performed the marriage instead; and though Constantine, enraged, threatened the patriarch and is said to have hinted at a return to iconoclasm, Tarasius did not yield to the pressure to recognise the second marriage, and for his firmness fell for a time into the emperor's disgrace. The rigorists of Stoudios, for their part, held that Tarasius had not been severe enough — that he ought at once to have excommunicated the emperor and the priest Joseph — and the quarrel over the right measure of discipline, the "Moechian" (from μοιχεία, adultery) controversy, outlived both the patriarch and the emperor. Constantine VI was in the end deposed and blinded by the party of his own mother Irene in 797; Tarasius continued at his post, and the marriage he had refused to bless passed away with the reign that made it.

Repose

Tarasius served the Church under three sovereigns — Constantine VI, Irene, and Nicephorus I — and reposed in peace at Constantinople on 25 February 806, after a patriarchate of some twenty-two years. As his end drew near, the tradition relates, he was granted a vision of his soul's passage and the accusations of the demons at the toll-houses, and met death in prayer and confidence. He was buried in the monastery he had built on the Bosphorus, on the European shore, which bore his name; and there, the synaxaria record, miracles and healings were worked at his tomb, sealing the memory of the gentle patriarch who had given the icons back to the Church. He was succeeded on the throne by the confessor Nicephorus, who would defend the icons anew when the second iconoclasm broke out under Leo the Armenian.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

Tarasius was himself a writer. There survive from his hand the letters touching the council and the affairs of the Church — among them his apologetic letter on his own elevation, and letters to Pope Adrian I and to the Eastern patriarchs and bishops on the veneration of the icons and against simony — which are primary documents of the iconodule cause; a homily on the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple is also ascribed to him, one of the early festal witnesses to that feast. His life was written not long after his death by the deacon and later hierarch Ignatius (the biographer of the patriarchs Tarasius and Nicephorus), a near-contemporary source of much value. In the hymnography of his feast he is sung as a "rule of faith and image of meekness," a great sun lighting the world with the radiance of true doctrine.