Confessor Germanus

Saint Germanus, commonly called Germanus the Confessor and numbered as Germanus I among the patriarchs of Constantinople, was a leading hierarch of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Church in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Later tradition places his birth in Constantinople in the seventh century, in a senatorial family; his father, a patrician named Justinian, was executed under Emperor Constantine IV, and the young Germanus was castrated and enrolled among the clergy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. Exact years of birth and death are not securely established: a round figure near the mid-630s is often repeated for his birth, and medieval and modern notices of his death vary, most often between 733 and 740. He advanced in the Constantinopolitan clergy and, in the early eighth century, was appointed metropolitan bishop of Cyzicus on the southern shore of the Propontis.

As metropolitan of Cyzicus he was implicated in the short-lived revival of Monothelitism under Emperor Philippikos Bardanes (711–713). Sources indicate that Germanus, together with other bishops, subscribed to a repudiation of the Sixth Ecumenical Council; after Philippikos fell and Dyothelite orthodoxy was restored, Germanus recanted. In 715 he was elected Patriarch of Constantinople. His patriarchate overlapped the accession of Leo III the Isaurian in 717 and the great Arab siege of Constantinople in 717–718, during which the patriarch was the principal ecclesiastical figure in the capital. Relations with Leo were at first workable, but they collapsed when the emperor moved against the public veneration of icons, a policy that later historiography treats as the opening of the first iconoclast period.

Germanus refused to give patriarchal sanction to iconoclasm. He corresponded with provincial metropolitans—among them John of Synnada, Constantine of Nakoleia, and Thomas of Claudiopolis—defending the traditional use of images on incarnational and pastoral grounds and urging that any change of practice required a proper synod, not an imperial fiat. In 730 Leo III convened a silentium in the palace and demanded that the patriarch subscribe to an iconoclast decree. Germanus declined, laid aside his omophorion, and was deposed; he was replaced by the iconoclast Anastasios, formerly his syncellus. The episode is why later calendars style him a confessor: he suffered loss of office for orthodoxy rather than death as a martyr.

A body of writing is associated with his name. The letters on icons are the most important contemporary witnesses to the first phase of the controversy and were later used by the defenders of images. Homilies and a treatise on heresies are also attributed to him. A commentary on the Divine Liturgy, circulating as an Ecclesiastical History or mystical contemplation of the rite, has long gone under his name; modern scholarship debates how much of the received text is his and how much is later expansion, but the work belongs to the same Constantinopolitan liturgical world. After his resignation he withdrew from public life, according to the sources to a family property (often named Platanion). The precise place of death and burial is not firmly recorded in the materials that can be verified here.

Veneration followed his stand against iconoclasm. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 praised him among the witnesses to the traditional faith. Both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches keep his memory on 12 May. He was never the object of a modern papal canonization or beatification process; his cult is of the ancient, pre-congregational type. No reliable medieval or modern list assigns him a distinctive patronage of places, trades, or illnesses. What can be said with confidence is that he was a eunuch cleric and patriarch, not a member of a named Western religious order, that he had no spouse and no children, and that his historical importance rests on the patriarchate of 715–730 and on the iconophile letters that survive from the crisis of 726–730.