Byzantine Culture

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Patriarch Photios

Photios was the greatest scholar of medieval Byzantium and twice patriarch of Constantinople. The Bibliotheca, the Photian schism, the mission to the Slavs, and his case against the filioque.

Photios, patriarch of Constantinople in 858–867 and again in 877–886, was the most learned man in medieval Europe, the architect of the Byzantine mission to the Slavs, the first theologian to articulate the eastern case against the filioque, and the central figure in a quarrel with Rome that prefigured the schism of 1054 by two centuries.

He was also a layman when he was made patriarch, promoted through all the clerical grades in six days, which is the fact his enemies never stopped mentioning.

The Scholar

Photios came from a well-connected Constantinopolitan family that had suffered under the second phase of iconoclasm; his uncle was the patriarch Tarasios. He held the office of protoasekretis, head of the imperial chancery, and taught privately.

His Bibliotheca — the Myriobiblos, “ten thousand books” — is a collection of 280 reviews of works he had read, written, according to its preface, for his brother before Photios left on an embassy. Each entry summarises a book, quotes from it, and assesses its style and reliability.

Its value is incalculable. Of the 280 works discussed, something like half are lost, and for many of them Photios’s summary is the only evidence that they existed. Lost histories, lost novels, lost theological treatises, the lost books of Ctesias and Memnon, the romances — we know them through him.

He is also a genuine critic. He judges prose style with confidence, complains when authors are prolix or obscure, notices when a historian is partisan, and makes literary judgements that modern scholars still find defensible.

His other works include the Lexicon, the Amphilochia (a collection of some 300 questions and answers on scripture and philosophy), homilies, and letters. His place in the ninth-century revival of learning, and in the transmission of classical learning, is central.

The Contested Patriarchate

In 858 the patriarch Ignatios, an austere figure of the monastic party, was deposed after a political clash with the regent Bardas. Photios, a layman, was appointed in his place.

The circumstances were irregular enough to give Ignatios’s supporters a permanent grievance, and both parties appealed to Rome. Pope Nicholas I sent legates, who approved Photios; Nicholas repudiated his own legates, declared the appointment invalid in 863, and demanded Ignatios’s restoration.

The dispute then acquired two further dimensions.

Bulgaria. Khan Boris, having accepted baptism from Constantinople in 864, opened negotiations with Rome in 866 in search of an autonomous church. Latin missionaries arrived in Bulgaria and began criticising Greek practices: married clergy, the Byzantine fasting rules, the eastern form of confirmation. For Photios this was an intrusion into a jurisdiction that the Byzantine mission described in Cyril, Methodius and the Cyrillic alphabet had just brought into being.

The filioque. The Latin missionaries in Bulgaria were using a creed that said the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Photios’s Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs of 867 attacked this as both a doctrinal error and an illegitimate alteration of a conciliar text.

His argument, developed further in the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, is twofold. Canonically, no local church may add to a creed defined by an ecumenical council. Theologically, the Father is the sole source within the Trinity; to make the Son a co-source either introduces two principles or confuses the persons. The eastern position has not substantially changed since Photios formulated it.

In 867 a council in Constantinople excommunicated Pope Nicholas. Weeks later Basil I murdered the emperor Michael III, seized the throne, and deposed Photios to conciliate Rome. Ignatios was restored, and a council in 869–870 — counted by the Roman church as the eighth ecumenical council — condemned Photios.

The Second Patriarchate

The reversal that followed is the part of the story that is usually left out.

Photios was rehabilitated, became tutor to Basil’s sons, was reconciled with Ignatios, and succeeded him peacefully on his death in 877. A council in Constantinople in 879–880, attended by papal legates, annulled the council of 869, recognised Photios, and — with Rome’s legates assenting — affirmed the creed without the filioque. Pope John VIII accepted the outcome.

This council is counted by some Orthodox theologians as the eighth ecumenical council, which produces the odd situation of two different assemblies bearing that number in the two traditions.

Photios was deposed a second time in 886 by the new emperor Leo VI, his own former pupil, for reasons that were purely political, and died in retirement around 893.

The “Photian Schism”

The standard western narrative of a great schism caused by Photios’s ambition has been substantially revised. Modern scholarship, Catholic as well as Orthodox, generally accepts that:

  • The breach of 867 was brief and was healed at the council of 879–880
  • Rome and Constantinople were in communion at Photios’s death
  • The nineteenth-century picture of Photios as the villain of eastern Christendom owes more to later polemic than to the ninth-century record

What is true is that the issues Photios identified — jurisdiction in the Slavic lands, the unilateral alteration of the creed, and the nature of Roman primacy — were the issues on which the churches eventually divided.

Legacy

In the church. Photios is a saint of the Orthodox Church, commemorated on 6 February. His formulation of the filioque question defines the Orthodox position to this day.

In the mission field. The mission of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia was sent under his authority, and the conversion of Bulgaria was negotiated by him. The Slavic Orthodox world exists substantially because of decisions he made.

In scholarship. Without the Bibliotheca, our knowledge of Greek literature would be significantly poorer. He belongs in any account of Byzantine literature, and his career is the strongest single argument against the idea that the Byzantine church was hostile to secular learning — he was a patriarch who read novels, summarised them, and rated them.

Inside the Bibliotheca

A sense of what the Bibliotheca actually contains does more than any description of its importance.

The 280 entries — codices, as Photios calls them — vary from a line to forty pages. They cover theology, history, philosophy, medicine, rhetoric, law, hagiography and fiction, pagan and Christian without distinction.

Among the lost works known chiefly or only through him:

  • Ctesias, Persica and Indica — the fifth-century BC accounts of Persia and India
  • Memnon of Heraclea, a history of his city
  • Conon, a collection of myths
  • Antonius Diogenes, The Wonders Beyond Thule — an ancient novel, summarised at length
  • Iamblichus, Babyloniaca — another novel
  • Hegesippus, an early Christian historian
  • Large parts of Olympiodorus, Candidus, Priscus and other late Roman historians

His method is consistent: identify the author, summarise the contents, quote where he finds something striking, and assess the style. He is opinionated about prose — he praises clarity and complains about affectation, obscurity and excessive length — and his judgements are those of a working critic rather than a cataloguer.

He is also remarkably unembarrassed about reading novels. A patriarch of Constantinople summarising Greek erotic fiction, noting where the plot sags and where the Greek is good, is not the picture of Byzantine clerical culture that most people carry.

The Mystagogy

Photios’s treatise on the procession of the Holy Spirit is the foundational text of the Orthodox case against the filioque, and its structure is worth knowing because everything since has followed it.

His arguments fall into two families.

The canonical. The creed was defined by ecumenical councils, which forbade additions. A local church cannot amend a universal text on its own authority. Whatever the theology, the procedure is illegitimate — and this is the argument Orthodox theologians have pressed hardest, because it does not require settling the doctrinal question.

The theological. Within the Trinity the Father alone is the source (arche) and cause of the other two persons. To make the Son a co-cause of the Spirit either introduces two principles into the Godhead, which is incoherent, or collapses the distinction between Father and Son. Photios pushes the argument to a series of reductions, several of them formally elegant.

He also anticipates the standard Latin reply — that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son — and distinguishes eternal procession from temporal mission, conceding the second while refusing the first.

The treatise is polemical and at points unfair to positions he is describing. It is also the point at which a disagreement that had been latent for centuries became a formulated argument with a literature, and the Orthodox position has not fundamentally changed since.

The Reassessment

The rehabilitation of Photios in western scholarship is one of the clearer cases of a reputation being revised on the evidence, and the credit belongs largely to one book.

The nineteenth-century picture — an ambitious layman who usurped a see, invented a quarrel with Rome and split Christendom — was standard in Catholic historiography.

Francis Dvornik’s The Photian Schism: History and Legend (1948) took the sources apart and showed that the second schism, which later polemic placed at the end of Photios’s life, never happened: he died in communion with Rome, and the council of 879–880 that reconciled the two sees was accepted by Pope John VIII.

Dvornik was a Catholic priest, and the argument was accepted in Catholic scholarship. Modern treatments on both sides now generally present Photios as a formidable churchman in a genuine jurisdictional dispute rather than as the author of a schism that came a century and a half after his death.

The Orthodox Church commemorates him on 6 February as Photios the Great.

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