Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810-c. 893)

A family of confessors of the faith

The date of Photius's birth is known from no direct source: historians place it, according to reconstructions, between 810 and 820^[7][8]. He was born in Constantinople into a family of the high service aristocracy. His father, Sergius, held a high office at the imperial court — spatharios, that is, a bodyguard of superior rank — and his family was renowned for its fidelity to the veneration of images during the iconoclast crisis^[9]. According to the Orthodox tradition reported by OrthodoxWiki, his parents are said to have been exiled when Photius was about seven years old, their property confiscated by the iconoclast power, and both to have died as confessors of the faith for their fidelity to the holy images^[10] — a point of pious memory to be received with the caution that any late hagiographical source calls for, but one that corresponds to a well-attested historical context: that of the second iconoclast persecution under Leo V and his successors.

Photius's family was also linked to that of the patriarch Saint Tarasius (784-806), who presided over the Second Council of Nicaea which restored the veneration of images; the sources do not agree on the exact degree of kinship — uncle, great-uncle, or simply close relative according to different authors — but the link is attested by several Byzantine witnesses and recalled in the Ignispedia article devoted to Saint Tarasius^[11][12]. A late tradition also gives Photius a kinship link, on his mother's side, with the iconoclast patriarch John VII the Grammarian — an irony of history if it is accurate, an unwavering defender of images thus being related to one of their most formidable adversaries^[13].

The self-taught polymath

What immediately strikes Photius's contemporaries, friends and adversaries alike, is the truly staggering extent of his learning. The Catholic Encyclopedia itself, severe though it is on his canonical conduct, acknowledges that his "systematic" erudition covered practically every discipline of his time — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, medicine, law, theology, philosophy, natural sciences — without any precisely identifiable masters being attributable to him^[14]. He seems to have been, for the most part, a prodigious autodidact, capable of memorising and synthesising hundreds of works. One notable fact for a man called upon to battle Rome on doctrinal ground: he never mastered Latin, a linguistic limitation that would weigh upon his entire controversy with the West^[15].

From his youth, he privately taught grammar, philosophy, and theology to a circle of disciples who would later become the nucleus of his party within the Constantinopolitan clergy^[16]. This teaching activity was anything but incidental: it gave Photius a network of intellectual loyalty that would follow him even into his years of exile.

High official, ambassador, professor

Before becoming patriarch, Photius pursued a brilliant secular career. He became protasekretis, that is, head of the imperial chancery — the equivalent of a secretary of state — and protospatharios, captain of the imperial guard^[17]. This dual function, administrative and honorifically military, placed him at the heart of the Byzantine state apparatus well before any ecclesiastical engagement. He remained unmarried all his life^[18].

His career also included a diplomatic mission of the first importance: an embassy to the Abbasid court of Baghdad. Fortescue places it around 838^[19]; some Orthodox sources date it rather to 855, the year immediately preceding the crisis that would carry Photius to the patriarchate^[20]. This chronological uncertainty — some fifteen years' gap depending on the authors — illustrates the difficulty of reconstructing with precision the decades preceding his elevation: no source allows a definitive ruling, and both dates continue to circulate in scholarly literature.

The Bibliotheca (Myriobiblon): saving fourteen centuries of Greek literature

Photius's most considerable work is his Bibliotheca (in Greek Bibliothēkē), also known as the Myriobiblon ("of a thousand books"). It is a critical survey divided into 280 chapters, the "codices," describing 386 works he had read — theology, philosophy, rhetoric, medicine, natural sciences, secular and ecclesiastical history — often accompanied by long extracts and always by a personal judgment on each author's style and content^[21][22]. Hence the apparent discrepancy in counts between books: 280 is the number of chapters, 386 the number of distinct works summarised in them — some chapters covering more than one title^[23]. The work was born, according to its own preface, from a precise circumstance: at the moment his embassy was confirmed, his brother Tarasius asked him for a summary of the books they used to read and discuss together, to console himself for the separation and to learn of the works Photius had read alone^[24]. Photius then composed, in the urgency of a "long and perilous" departure, this sum as a farewell gift to his brother:

"Photius, to his beloved brother Tarasius, greeting in the name of the Lord. [...] Your idea was to have something to console you for our painful separation, and at the same time to acquire some knowledge [of the books you had not yet read with me]." — Photius, preface to the Bibliotheca, trans. J. H. Freese^[25]

The historical importance of this work far exceeds its initial ambition as fraternal correspondence. A considerable share of the ancient Greek authors summarised by Photius — historians, novelists, orators — are known to us today only through his extracts, the original manuscripts having vanished over the centuries^[26]. The American historian Warren Treadgold, in the scholarly study he devoted to this work, calls it the most important sum bequeathed by Byzantium's most important scholar, covering fourteen centuries of Greek literature on almost every subject^[27]. Without Photius, entire sections of ancient Greek historiography and literature would quite simply have disappeared.

The Amphilochia, the Lexicon, the Nomocanon, and the letters

Photius left a far vaster oeuvre than the Bibliotheca alone. The Amphilochia — composed during his first exile, between 867 and 877 — gather 324 questions and answers on biblical, philosophical, and theological difficulties, largely a synthesis of the Greek Fathers^[28]. His Greek Lexicon, partly compiled by his own disciples, has come down to us only through a single defective 12th-century manuscript, the Codex Galeanus^[29]. The Nomocanon, the canonical code traditionally attributed to him, in reality predated his patriarchate: Photius merely revised it and added to it the synodal decisions of 861 and 879^[30].

To these must be added dogmatic works — a treatise On the Holy Spirit defending the procession from the Father alone, and a treatise Against Those Who Say That Rome Is the First See, which would become a reference text of Orthodox anti-Roman polemic^[31] — as well as a refutation in four books of Paulician Manichaeism, between twenty and eighty homilies depending on the recensions, and a monumental correspondence: one hundred and ninety-three letters in Migne's edition, up to two hundred and sixty in the most complete editions, covering his whole life and constituting first-hand historical documentation^[32][33]. Among these letters figures the famous epistle to Boris-Michael, the newly baptised prince of Bulgaria, a veritable Byzantine "mirror of princes" on the moral and spiritual duties of a Christian sovereign, today available in annotated English translation^[34].

A master surrounded by disciples: the case of Constantine-Cyril

Photius's intellectual radiance extends through his pupils. The most famous of them is Constantine, called the Philosopher, the future Saint Cyril, apostle of the Slavs alongside his brother Methodius. After his studies at the imperial university of Constantinople, Constantine formed a close relationship with Photius, whose librarian he became at Hagia Sophia, before himself becoming professor of philosophy at the university of the Magnaura^[35]. It was under Photius's patriarchate, in 863, that Constantine and Methodius were sent on mission to Great Moravia, giving birth to the Glagolitic script and the Slavonic liturgy^[36]. This link deserves emphasis: the man history remembers first for his quarrel with Rome was also the one who made possible the evangelisation of the Slavs and, by extension, the whole Slavo-Byzantine liturgical and literary civilisation.

The Ignatius-Bardas crisis and the six-day ascent

In 857, the patriarch Ignatius, son of Emperor Michael I Rangabe and holder of the see of Constantinople since 847, entered into open conflict with Bardas, the all-powerful uncle of the young emperor Michael III, to whom Ignatius publicly refused communion on grounds of conduct judged incestuous^[37]. Ignatius was banished on 23 November 858^[38][39]. The vacant patriarchal see was then entrusted to Photius — a layman, admittedly, but already one of the most recognised minds of the empire.

The speed of this promotion remains, to this day, the most disputed point of his entire career. In the space of six days, Photius successively received all the minor and major orders, before being consecrated bishop on Christmas Day 858 by Gregory Asbestas of Syracuse — himself under a previous excommunication^[40][41]. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia notice still placed this sequence in 857^[42]; subsequent research, following Francis Dvornik, retains 858 — the year both of Ignatius's deposition and of Photius's consecration, on a 25 December^[43][44]. In the eyes of classical canonical discipline, this elevation simultaneously violated three rules: the absence of the required intervals (interstices) between orders, consecration by a bishop who was himself irregular, and above all intrusion upon a see whose living holder had not freely resigned^[45]. It is this triple defect of form — not Photius's talent, never called into question — that founds the classical Catholic judgment on the illegitimacy of his elevation.

Rome seized of the case: Nicholas I, the legates, and the synod of 863

In 861, a synod gathered at Constantinople in the presence of Roman legates accepted the deposition of Ignatius and recognised Photius^[46][47]. But Pope Nicholas I rejected this decision: he excommunicated the two legates, Rodoald and Zachary, for having exceeded their mandate, gathered a synod at Rome in 863 which annulled their judgment, recognised Ignatius as the sole legitimate patriarch, and threatened Photius with excommunication should he persist in occupying the see^[48]. The point is capital for understanding what follows: this disagreement no longer concerned only the person of Photius, but the question of whether Rome could subsequently correct the judgment its own legates had rendered on the spot — a substantive question that would resurface in every subsequent great East-West crisis. For the detailed analysis of this canonical sequence, see the article devoted to the Photian Schism.

It should be noted, in Photius's defence on this precise point, that even his most determined adversary recognised certain merits in him. According to Orthodox tradition itself, Pope Nicholas I, while firmly contesting the legitimacy of his elevation, is said never to have doubted his great virtues or his universal learning^[49] — an admission from an adversary worth more than a friend's compliment.

The Bulgarian and Slav mission

The conversion of Prince Boris-Michael of Bulgaria to Christianity, around 864, opened a new front of rivalry. Rome and Constantinople disputed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over this young, recently evangelised Slav kingdom, a major missionary and political stake for the religious balance of the Balkans^[50]. It was in this context that Photius sent, in 863, his former disciples Constantine-Cyril and Methodius to evangelise neighbouring Great Moravia — a missionary radiance whose scale contrasts with the bitterness of the Bulgarian rivalry^[51].

867: the break with Rome

In 867, Photius crossed a point of no return. He addressed to the Eastern patriarchs an encyclical claiming to condemn and depose Pope Nicholas I, and attacking several Latin usages in terms of rare violence:

"[The Latins are] forerunners of apostasy, servants of the Antichrist [who] would deserve a thousand deaths." — Photius, encyclical to the Eastern patriarchs, 867, as summarised by Adrian Fortescue^[52]

The most consequential grievance for the future was doctrinal: in it Photius denounced the Latin addition of the Filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, giving the controversy on the procession of the Holy Spirit its first great Eastern polemical formulation^[53]. This doctrinal dimension of the 867 crisis, and the Catholic theological response it calls for, are developed in the article Answers to Orthodox Objections.

That same year 867, the assassination of Michael III brutally overturned the political situation: Basil I the Macedonian seized power, immediately set Photius aside, recalled Ignatius, and requested of Rome, with him, the holding of a general council^[54]. That council — Constantinople IV (869-870), the eighth ecumenical council received by the Catholic Church — condemned Photius and confirmed Ignatius; its proceedings, canons, and disputed reception by the East are set out in detail in the article devoted to it.

Constantinople IV and the exile at Stenos

Deposed, Photius was confined for several years in a monastery at Stenos, on the Bosphorus^[55]. Far from sinking into oblivion, he organised his party from exile through active correspondence, and skilfully cultivated the good graces of Emperor Basil — going so far, according to Fortescue, as to fabricate for him a flattering genealogy linking him to Saint Gregory the Illuminator and to lend him prophecies of greatness^[56]. In 876, Basil recalled him to court as tutor to his son Constantine^[57].

The return to Basil I and the reconciliation of 877-880

Ignatius died on 23 October 877: the see then became genuinely vacant, and the canonical question changed in nature — the fault reproached to Photius in 858 concerned the occupation of an occupied see, not election to a vacant see^[58]. A strong faction demanded his return; Pope John VIII accepted his reconciliation, absolved him, and recognised him as patriarch in 878, in the hope of stabilising the East^[59][60]. A synod gathered at Hagia Sophia in November 879; the Roman legates took part in it and recognised Photius as legitimate patriarch^[61][62].

But the settlement remained fragile. According to the classical Catholic account, that same synod is said then to have revoked the decisions of 869-870, renewed the anti-Latin accusations, and anathematised anyone who would add to the Creed, provoking a fresh excommunication from John VIII and seven further years of tension between the two sees^[63]. The Orthodox reading, conversely, retains from this 879-880 synod the full rehabilitation of Photius, with the agreement of the pontifical legates, and refuses to see in it a new rupture^[64]. This divergence of memory — one same synod read as rupture by Rome, as reconciliation by Constantinople — is precisely what the article devoted to the Photian Schism documents in detail.

The break with Leo VI and the final deposition (886)

The death of Basil I, in 886, changed the situation once again. His son and successor Leo VI, though a former pupil of Photius, turned against him: accused of conspiracy against the throne, the old patriarch was deposed and banished, replaced by the emperor's own brother, Stephen^[65]. The Byzantine historian Pseudo-Symeon places his place of exile in a monastery named Gordon, in Armenia^[66]. A trial for treason is said to have been held in 887, but the sources diverge on its precise outcome^[67].

After this second deposition, Photius "suddenly disappears from history," in Fortescue's phrase^[68]: no document allows a certain dating of this second period of exile, and none of his many letters can be attached with certainty to these last years^[69]. The very place of the monastery in which he died remains uncertain.

The date of his death is itself disputed. Fortescue, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, gives it as "probably 6 February 897"^[70]. Orthodox liturgical tradition, on the other hand, traditionally retains 6 February of a year closer to 893, without absolute certainty either^[71]. This half-decade gap over the exact date of his death — like the still wider one over his date of birth — says enough about the difficulty of documenting with precision the last twenty years of a life otherwise so public: the great scholar-patriarch died in almost complete anonymity, hundreds of kilometres from the capital he had twice governed.

The classical Catholic judgment: a usurper patriarch, an immense scholar

Classical Catholic tradition, as Adrian Fortescue summarised it at the turn of the 20th century, passes a contrasting but clear judgment on Photius. It acknowledges without reserve his "eminent qualities" and his vast erudition^[72]; but it concludes to a fundamentally dishonest conduct:

"His insatiable and unscrupulous ambition" led him to occupy a see through the irregular deposition of a living holder, to deny Roman jurisdiction while professing obedience to it whenever it suited him, and to heap against the Latins accusations which Fortescue judges to be, in some cases, conscious falsehoods. — Adrian Fortescue, "Photius of Constantinople", The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911^[73]

It is this judgment — severe on conduct, unreserved on talent — that the classical Catholic memory of Constantinople IV retains, condemning the patriarch without ever questioning his intellectual competence.

The Orthodox judgment: a saint, a father of the Church, and a pillar of theology

In absolute contrast to this judgment, the Orthodox Church canonised Photius within the century following his death^[74]. It celebrates him on 6 February, under the title "Photius the Great," and counts him, with Gregory Palamas and Mark of Ephesus, among the "Three Pillars of Orthodoxy" — the three great figures who, according to late Byzantine tradition, defended Eastern Tradition against Rome's doctrinal claims^[75]. The Orthodox Church in America presents him without qualification as "one of the greatest bishops in Christian history"^[76], a major theologian whose critique of the Filioque — developed notably in his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, composed after his rehabilitation of 879-880 — remains to this day the great Orthodox reference on this question^[77].

The Byzantine liturgy itself fixed this memory in its hymns:

"Disciple of the Apostles and teacher of the universe [...]" — Troparion in tone IV for the feast of Saint Photius the Great, 6 February^[78]

"Star shining far and wide over the Church [...] inspired guide of the Orthodox" — Kontakion in tone VIII for the feast of Saint Photius the Great, 6 February^[79]

This last title of "far-shining star" echoes, almost literally though with an opposite judgment, the formula the Catholic Encyclopedia itself attributes to the Orthodox memory of Photius, hailing in him the one who "broke Roman pride"^[80]: the two traditions, Catholic and Orthodox, quote each other almost word for word, but draw from it an opposite verdict.

The modern reassessment: Dvornik, Congar, and the end of a "second schism"

The 20th century brought an important corrective, including on the Catholic side, to the most polemical reading of the affair. The Czech historian Francis Dvornik — a Roman Catholic priest, professor at Harvard and then at Dumbarton Oaks — established, in his now-classic study The Photian Schism: History and Legend (1948), that the alleged "second Photian schism," long dated to around 880 in Western historiography, never existed as an effective canonical rupture: Photius died in full communion with Rome^[81]. The Dominican theologian Yves Congar took up and confirmed this conclusion in his own historical dossier on Christian divisions^[82].

This reassessment is decisive for correctly situating Photius in the long history of East-West relations: he is not the cause of the definitive schism of 1054, which would not occur until a century and a half later under Michael Cerularius; he is the man of a first grave crisis, resolved in his lifetime, which nevertheless bequeathed to subsequent controversy its vocabulary, its grievances, and its mutual reflexes of suspicion^[83]. That is very exactly the assessment drawn by the Ignispedia article devoted to the Great Schism of the East: Photius gave 1054 a grammar of conflict, without being its direct cause.

The saviour of ancient Greek literature

Whatever judgment is passed on his patriarchal conduct, the cultural legacy of Photius remains undisputed. Without his Bibliotheca, dozens of ancient Greek authors — historians, novelists, polemicists — would have been purely and simply erased from Western memory, their manuscripts not having survived the following centuries^[84]. Photius belongs to that generation of 9th-century Byzantine scholars — the renewal historians sometimes call the "Macedonian Renaissance" — which enabled the transmission of Greek Antiquity through the Byzantine Middle Ages to the Western Renaissance, when Greek manuscripts flowed into Italy after 1453. In this sense, the fall of Constantinople itself, six centuries after Photius, saw fleeing to the West a share of that manuscript heritage he had helped preserve.

The father of Orthodox argumentation against the Filioque

On the theological plane, Photius remains, to this day, the structuring reference of Orthodox argumentation against the Latin addition to the Creed. His Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit is cited by nearly all Orthodox theologians who, for eleven centuries, have taken up the debate on the procession of the Holy Spirit^[85]. For the complete Catholic exposition of this question — distinction between eternal procession, Latin formula, and Greek reception, up to the Council of Florence — see Answers to Orthodox Objections.

Photius thus remains a figure impossible to reduce to a single trait: neither simply the "usurper patriarch" of the harshest Latin polemic, nor simply the "holy champion" of the most enthusiastic Orthodox piety, but a man of extraordinary intelligence, at the service of a Church he served with real devotion — and about whom history, centuries later, agrees on at least one point: he was one of the greatest minds Byzantium ever gave to Christendom.

• Read The Photian Schism for the detailed account of the diplomatic and canonical crisis of 857-880.
• Read Constantinople IV (869-870) for the Catholic council that condemns Photius and restores Ignatius.
• Read Answers to Orthodox Objections for the complete exposition of the Filioque, Roman primacy, and conciliar reception.
• Read The Great Schism of the East for the definitive rupture of 1054, a century and a half after Photius.
• Read Saint Tarasius of Constantinople, the patriarch to whose family Photius was related.
• Read Bartholomew I of Constantinople for the present holder of the same patriarchal see, an artisan of dialogue with Rome.