Photios I of Constantinople

Photios I of Constantinople, known in the Eastern Orthodox Church as Saint Photios the Great, was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in two separate periods of the ninth century and one of the most learned churchmen of the Middle Byzantine age. He was born in Constantinople into a distinguished family of iconophile convictions. During the second phase of Iconoclasm his relatives suffered exile and confiscation of property for their defense of the holy images, a background that later informed his ecclesiastical loyalties. Photios received an unusually thorough education in both the classical Greek curriculum and Christian theology and gained a reputation as a teacher and man of letters while still a layman. He rose in the imperial civil service to the office of protoasekretis, or chief secretary, and undertook diplomatic work, including a mission to the Arab world. His Bibliotheca, also called the Myriobiblon, is a critical survey of hundreds of ancient and Christian books and remains a principal witness to many works otherwise lost.

In 858 Emperor Michael III and Caesar Bardas deposed Patriarch Ignatios and chose Photios, who was still a layman, as his successor. Photios was tonsured a monk and ordained through the successive degrees of the clergy within a few days, being consecrated patriarch on Christmas Day. The irregularity of this elevation, together with the unresolved claims of Ignatios, produced a prolonged conflict with the see of Rome later known as the Photian Schism. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognize Photios and continued to support Ignatios. Photios answered by convening a council at Constantinople in 867 that anathematized the Pope and condemned the Western addition of the Filioque to the Nicene Creed. Later that same year the assassination of Michael III and the accession of Basil I reversed Photios’s position: he was deposed and Ignatios was restored to the patriarchal throne.

Ignatios died in 877, and Photios was reinstated as patriarch with the support of Basil I. A council held at Constantinople in 879–880 confirmed his restoration and received a measure of recognition from Pope John VIII, although later Latin tradition judged the Photian episode more severely. During this second tenure Photios continued to assert the independence and doctrinal positions of the church of Constantinople, especially on the procession of the Holy Spirit, which he treated at length in the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. He was also involved in Byzantine missionary activity among the Slavs and in the contested conversion of the Bulgars, a dispute that further strained relations between Constantinople and Rome. In 886 the new emperor Leo VI removed Photios from office in favor of the emperor’s brother Stephen I. Photios spent his remaining years in exile and died in 893.

Beyond the political crises of his patriarchates, Photios left a substantial body of letters, homilies, canonical rulings, and theological treatises that display both pastoral concern and polemical vigor. He is remembered as a defender of the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity against the Filioque, as a promoter of learning at a moment when classical texts were being recopied and studied in Constantinople, and as a central actor in the ninth-century estrangement between the Eastern and Western churches. The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint and a Father of the Church and commemorates him on 6 February. Western assessments were long colored by the memory of the schism with Rome; modern historical scholarship generally recognizes both his intellectual stature and the complexity of the imperial and papal politics in which he was entangled.