Tharasius

Saint Tarasius (also spelled Tharasius or Tarasios) was Patriarch of Constantinople in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and is remembered above all for restoring the public veneration of icons after the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm. He was born in Constantinople to a distinguished family: his father George held high judicial office and his mother was named Eucratia. Raised in the imperial capital, he received a thorough education in the secular learning of his age and entered the civil service. As a layman he rose to the influential post of asekretis (imperial secretary) at court. Contemporary accounts present him as a man of integrity who kept apart from the iconoclast policies that had dominated much of the eighth century under the Isaurian emperors.

When Patriarch Paul IV of Constantinople resigned in 784, having recanted his earlier iconoclasm, Empress Irene, ruling as regent for her son Constantine VI, chose Tarasius as successor. He was still a layman. According to the sources, he accepted only on the condition that an ecumenical council be convened to settle the iconoclast controversy and to restore communion with the Church of Rome and the other patriarchates. He received the monastic tonsure and was ordained through the minor and major orders in rapid succession, then consecrated patriarch on 25 December 784. His elevation from the lay state was unusual and later drew criticism from rigorist monastic circles, but it was accepted by the court and by much of the episcopate.

Tarasius’s principal ecclesiastical work was the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787. An earlier attempt to gather the bishops in Constantinople in 786 had been broken up by iconoclast troops. The council that met at Nicaea condemned iconoclasm as heresy, distinguished the veneration (proskynesis) due to icons from the worship (latreia) due to God alone, and sought to repair relations with the papacy; Pope Adrian I was represented by legates. In subsequent years Tarasius crowned Constantine VI and, after Constantine’s blinding and deposition in 797, Empress Irene. His administration is associated with efforts against simony and with charitable foundations, including hospitals for the poor.

The later years of his patriarchate were overshadowed by the so-called Moechian controversy. Constantine VI put away his wife Maria of Amnia and married Theodote, a lady of the court related to Tarasius. The patriarch’s relative leniency—he did not treat the second marriage as grounds for the kind of rupture that stricter monastic leaders demanded—provoked opposition from Plato of Sakkoudion and Theodore the Studite and a schism with the Studite monks. Tarasius died in Constantinople on 25 February 806 and was buried in the monastery he had founded on the European shore of the Bosporus. He was succeeded by Nikephoros. Both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches commemorate him as a saint on 25 February; his cult belongs to the era before the later formal processes of papal canonization.