Philotheus I of Constantinople

Philotheos Kokkinos, known in the patriarchal lists as Philotheus I of Constantinople, was a leading Byzantine theologian, hagiographer, and hierarch of the fourteenth century. He was born in Thessaloniki in the early fourteenth century, in a city that remained one of the principal intellectual and monastic centres of the late Byzantine world. After receiving a substantial education there, he embraced monastic life and entered the Great Lavra on Mount Athos. On Athos he became closely identified with the hesychast tradition associated with Gregory Palamas, and he rose to serve as abbot of the Lavra. His learning, ascetic reputation, and alignment with the Palamite party brought him into the higher ranks of the church during the civil wars and theological controversies that marked the middle decades of the century.

In the 1340s he was drawn into the ecclesiastical politics of Constantinople. Around 1347 he was appointed Metropolitan of Heraclea in Thrace, a promotion that reflected the ascendancy of Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos and of the hesychast faction after the synods that vindicated Palamas. In 1353, when Patriarch Kallistos I refused to crown Kantakouzenos’s son Matthew as co-emperor, John VI had Kallistos deposed and elevated Philotheos to the ecumenical throne. During this first, short patriarchate (1353–1354) Philotheos crowned Matthew Kantakouzenos and continued to champion Palamite theology. The collapse of John VI’s regime at the end of 1354 brought John V Palaiologos to sole power; Philotheos was removed, Kallistos was restored, and Philotheos left the capital, spending the following years outside the patriarchal office.

After Kallistos died in 1363, Philotheos was recalled and restored as patriarch in 1364, beginning a second tenure that lasted until 1376 and constituted the main period of his influence. He used the office to consolidate the victory of hesychasm. In 1368 he presided over a synod that formally canonized Gregory Palamas and established his liturgical cult; Philotheos himself composed a Life of Palamas. He also wrote other hagiographical lives, including those of Athonite figures such as Sabbas the Younger and Germanos Maroules and of Patriarch Isidore I, together with homilies, liturgical compositions, and polemical treatises defending the Palamite distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies against remaining critics, among them Nikephoros Gregoras. These works made him one of the principal literary voices of late Byzantine hesychasm.

As patriarch he also sought to assert Constantinopolitan authority across the Orthodox world, intervening in the affairs of the Slavic churches and in the disputed jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Kiev. His second patriarchate coincided with mounting Ottoman pressure on the Byzantine state under John V Palaiologos. In 1376 the usurpation of Andronikos IV Palaiologos led to Philotheos’s deposition. He died in Constantinople in 1379. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, with commemoration on 11 October, and is remembered above all as a theologian-patriarch who bound the Palamite settlement to the official life of the church.