Saint Germanus of Constantinople (c. 634–733)

Germanus, son of the patrician Justinian

Germanus was born in Constantinople, around 634 according to some, rather around 645–650 according to others, into a family of the highest Byzantine aristocracy^[7][8]. His father, Justinian, was a patrician — one of the highest dignitaries of the Empire — in the service of Emperor Constans II. In other words, Germanus was born at the summit of society: in the immediate entourage of the throne, where the affairs of Empire and Church were decided.

This origin is not a mere worldly detail. It explains Germanus's theological culture, his knowledge of the workings of power, and above all the drama that would mark his childhood. For in Byzantium, proximity to the throne is also a mortal danger: one rises there quickly, and falls there faster still.

A child mutilated by imperial politics

Around 668, Emperor Constans II was assassinated at Syracuse, and an attempted usurpation briefly brought to power the Armenian officer Mezezius (Mizizios). The patrician Justinian was involved — or suspected of being involved — in these troubles. When the young Constantine IV restored order, he had Justinian executed^[9][10][11]. The condemned man's son, Germanus, then suffered the fate reserved for the heirs of disgraced families whom men wished to keep from power for ever: he was castrated, made a eunuch, then destined for the clerical state and entrusted to the Church.

The meaning of this must be measured. Before he had even chosen his life, Germanus was dispossessed of it by a political decision: barred from descendants, excluded from every secular ambition, marked in his flesh by imperial power. The same power that mutilates him as a child will drive him as an old man from his patriarchal see. Germanus's whole life is thus caught between two imperial acts of violence — and it is from this wounded life that God would make a confessor of the faith.

Byzantium between councils and iconoclasm

To understand Germanus, his century must be placed. The seventh and eighth Byzantine centuries are an age of converging doctrinal crises and outward pressures. On the level of faith, the Empire has barely emerged from Monothelitism — the heresy which acknowledged only one will in Christ — condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) at the end of the struggle of Saint Maximus the Confessor. On the military level, conquering Islam is sweeping forward: Syria, Egypt and North Africa are lost, and twice already Arab armies have besieged Constantinople itself.

It is in this anxious world that there breaks out, under Leo III, the quarrel of the images — the last great heresy of the patristic age. Germanus will be its first witness and its first victim at the summit of the Church. His generation is the same as that of Saint Andrew of Crete and Saint John Damascene: the last great flowering of Greek patristics, at the hour when the Christian East must defend both the truth of Christ and the legitimacy of His image — after Saint John Climacus (d. c. 649), the great ascetic of Sinai of the preceding generation.

From disgrace to cloister, from clerical state to episcopate

Destined for the Church after his father's death, Germanus grew up in the clergy of Constantinople^[12][13]. He is found again, decades later, as Metropolitan of Cyzicus — an important see on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara. The ancient sources are silent on his intervening years, but the underlying movement is clear: the mutilated and fallen child becomes, through learning and virtue, one of the great bishops of the Empire.

It is as Bishop of Cyzicus that he first appears in great history — and, alas, on a false step from which he would know how to rise.

The fall of 712: the Monothelite synod of Philippicus

In 711, a usurper, Philippicus Bardanes, seized the throne. For political as much as doctrinal reasons, he wished to restore Monothelitism, condemned thirty years earlier. He convened in 712 a synod which claimed to abolish the decisions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. And there, like most of the bishops present — including his contemporary Andrew of Crete — Germanus of Cyzicus subscribed to the imposed retraction^[14][15].

It must be said without disguising it: this was a fault, a concession to imperial pressure. But the episode is also instructive. When Philippicus was overthrown in June 713, and his successor Anastasius II restored the orthodoxy of the two wills, Germanus returned at once to the faith of the council^[16]. Better still: once patriarch, he would himself anathematize the Monothelitism he had for a moment tolerated. Like Andrew of Crete, fallen the same year, Germanus is one of those saints who are not saints because they never bent, but because they rose again — and it is precisely this experience of redeemed frailty that would give his later firmness, in 730, its definitive weight.

Patriarch of Constantinople (11 August 715)

On the death of Patriarch John VI, Germanus was raised to the see of Constantinople on 11 August 715^[17][18]. His first care as patriarch was to repair the doctrinal wound: he gathered a council which solemnly reaffirmed the faith of the two wills of Christ and condemned Monothelitism, wiping out the synod of 712 to which he had himself yielded^[19]. He also sought to renew ties with the Armenian Church, separated since the Christological quarrels.

Germanus was already advanced in years when he took the head of the Byzantine Church — he was perhaps seventy or more. He would bear the charge for fifteen years, in one of the most dramatic periods in the history of the City.

The siege of 717–718 and the procession of the icon

From the second year of his patriarchate, Constantinople faced the supreme trial: the great Arab siege of 717–718. For a year, the fleet and army of the Umayyad caliphate gripped the capital. The city resisted, then prevailed — a deliverance which the Byzantines unanimously attributed to a divine intervention, obtained after a solemn procession bearing the icon of the Mother of God and the relic of the True Cross along the ramparts^[20][21][22].

For Germanus, the event was not without meaning: the city saved by an image carried in prayer was, in his eyes, a dazzling confirmation of the legitimacy of the cult of icons. He would return to it: how could the emperor ban tomorrow the image that saved the City yesterday? The memory of 717–718 would be one of the strongest arguments of his future resistance. Byzantine tradition would moreover lastingly associate the great deliverances of Constantinople with the protection of the Theotokos, whose Akathist hymn is the emblematic chant.

Leo III the Isaurian and the rupture

Emperor Leo III (reigning since 717), hero of the siege, was also an authoritarian reformer. Around 726–730, persuaded that the veneration of images was a form of idolatry drawing God's anger upon the Empire — and perhaps impressed by the iconophobia of the neighbouring Islam and Judaism — he decided to forbid it^[23][24][25]. This was the beginning of the first iconoclast crisis, which would tear the Christian East apart for more than a century.

Germanus opposed it from the outset. For him, the question was not a matter of discipline which the emperor might settle with a stroke of the pen: it was a question of faith, touching the mystery of the Incarnation, which could be decided only by the Church gathered in an Ecumenical Council, not by imperial decree.

The letters to the iconoclast bishops

Before the trial of strength, Germanus tried to persuade. He wrote letters to the first bishops won over by iconoclasm — John of Synnada, Constantine of Nacolia, Thomas of Claudiopolis — to bring them back to the tradition of the Church^[26][27]. These letters, read and approved later at the Second Council of Nicaea, count among the first theological documents of the defence of images. In them Germanus shows that the cult of icons is neither a novelty nor a popular superstition, but an ancient practice, rooted in faith in the Word made flesh^[28].

The theology of the image: because God made Himself visible

The heart of Germanus's argument — taken up and systematized by John Damascene and then Theodore the Studite — rests on the mystery of the Incarnation. God could not be depicted so long as He was invisible; but since He made Himself man, since He took a human face, depicting Him is no longer idolatry: it is a confession of faith in His true humanity. Benedict XVI draws from it this lesson for today:

"Christ invites us to imitate him, [...] so that in every person the Face of God shines out anew." — Benedict XVI, meditating on the theology of Germanus, catechesis of 29 April 2009^[29]

To venerate the icon is therefore not to adore wood and colours: it is to let honour rise, through the image, to the one it represents. To destroy images, conversely, is subtly to deny that God truly became visible flesh. That is why Germanus refuses to yield: it is not a question of art; it is the truth of the Incarnation that is at stake.

7 January 730: the refusal

On 7 January 730, Leo III convened a court assembly, the silentium, to have iconoclasm officially adopted and to have the dignitaries sign an edict against images^[30][31]. Germanus was ordered to subscribe. He refused and, according to Byzantine tradition, opposed to the emperor a principle which has remained one of the great sayings in the history of the Church:

"It is impossible for me, Sire, to innovate in matters of faith without the sanction of an Ecumenical Council." — words which Byzantine tradition lends to Saint Germanus of Constantinople refusing to sign the edict of Leo III (730)^[32]

The formula tradition lends him is momentous. Germanus does not merely say "I will not": he says that the emperor has no authority to define the faith, and that he himself, patriarch, has no power to innovate. The faith belongs neither to the prince nor even to the bishop: it is a deposit received, to be kept and handed on, not reinvented. In refusing to "innovate", Germanus defends the freedom of the Church against caesaropapism — the emperor's claim to govern souls as he governs provinces.

The resignation of 17 January 730 and the retreat at Platanion

Ten days later, on 17 January 730, understanding that he could neither bend nor prevail, Germanus laid down his omophorion — the insignia of his patriarchal office — and resigned^[33][34]. He left the patriarchal palace and retired to the family estate of Platanion, where he would end his days as a monk. Leo III installed in his place a docile patriarch, Anastasius, ready to sign what Germanus had refused.

In the eyes of the world, it was a defeat: the old patriarch was set aside, iconoclasm triumphed, and Germanus died a few years later, around 733 (or 740, according to the sources^[35]), retired at Platanion and "almost forgotten"^[36]. But the history of the Church is not measured by the world's yardstick. In preferring forced retirement to denial, Germanus performed the act that saves the honour of the episcopate and marks the way: half a century later, Nicaea II would prove him right on every point.

The commentary on the Divine Liturgy

Germanus is not only a confessor: he is a doctor of the liturgy. To him is attributed the famous commentary on the Divine Liturgy known as the Historia ecclesiastica (or Historia mystica ecclesiae catholicae) — a text which, for more than a thousand years, in Greek then in Latin, taught Byzantine faithful the spiritual meaning of every gesture of the Mass^[37][38]. Some scholars have debated the exact attribution of this or that layer of the text, but tradition recognizes in Germanus the great voice of this liturgical mystagogy of the East^[39].

The master idea of the work is that the liturgy is not a mere rite, but an icon in act: the stone church, the sanctuary, the altar, the processions, the chants figure forth and render present the mystery of salvation. On the level of prayer, this is exactly the same conviction as on the level of images: the visible leads to the invisible.

"The Church is the temple of God, a sacred space, a house of prayer, the convocation of people, the Body of Christ." — Saint Germanus of Constantinople, at the threshold of his commentary on the Divine Liturgy (Historia ecclesiastica, PG 98, 384B–385A), cited by Benedict XVI at the close of his catechesis of 29 April 2009^[40]

A mystagogy that already defends images

It is clear why such a theologian could not accept iconoclasm. For Germanus, the whole church — its architecture, its rites, its images — is one great sacrament of heaven on earth. To banish the icons was to mutilate that symbolic language by which the Church leads the people into the mystery. His theology of the liturgy and his defence of images are one and the same thought: God makes Himself present through sensible signs, because He Himself made Himself sensible by becoming incarnate.

Germanus stands, with Andrew of Crete and John Damascene, as one of the three great Marian preachers of that generation. His homilies on the feasts of the Virgin count among the summits of Greek patristic eloquence, and constitute a first-rate source for the history of Marian dogma^[41][42].

The homilies on the Entry of Mary into the Temple

Germanus is one of the great early witnesses to the feast of the Presentation (or Entry) of Mary into the Temple. His homilies celebrate the three-year-old child offered to God as the new temple surpassing the temple of stone, the bridge between the Old and the New Covenant. The tone is jubilant, woven entirely of biblical images:

"For her greatness is an immense sea, as the heavenly Drop born of her has shown." — Saint Germanus of Constantinople, First Homily on the Entry of the Mother of God into the Temple^[43]

"Come from Lebanon, my bride, come from Lebanon." — Saint Germanus of Constantinople, taking up the Song of Songs in his homily on the Entry of the Virgin^[44]

Mary, the "living temple" where the Uncreated would dwell: the formula sums up the whole theology of the Incarnation, and foreshadows the Church's later developments on the singular holiness of the Virgin.

The homilies on the Dormition and the Assumption

Germanus also left great homilies on the Dormition of the Virgin, among the oldest liturgical witnesses to this feast in the East. In them he sings Mary's passage from earth to heaven, the glorification of her virginal body preserved from corruption, her spiritual motherhood over the Church. These texts are so explicit that Catholic theology has held them to be major witnesses to faith in the Assumption.

Germanus cited by Pius XII in the definition of the Assumption (1950)

It is here that Germanus directly touches the most solemn Magisterium. When Pius XII defined, on 1 November 1950, the dogma of the Assumption in the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, he cited — in paragraph 22 — a homily of Germanus on the Dormition, as one of the great witnesses of Tradition^[45][46]:

"You are she who, as it is written, appears in beauty, and your virginal body is all holy, all chaste, entirely the dwelling place of God; so that it is henceforth entirely exempt from falling back into dust, and, while still remaining human, it is transformed into the sublime life of incorruptibility — living and glorious, intact, and sharing in perfect life." — Saint Germanus of Constantinople, In Sanctae Dei Genetricis Dormitionem, Sermo I, cited by Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, §22^[47]

That a patriarch of the eighth century, dead in retirement at Platanion under imperial disgrace, should be summoned twelve centuries later as a witness of faith in the definition of a Catholic dogma, says enough about Germanus's place in the great Tradition. His word on the incorruptible body of Mary has become one of the foundation stones of the proclaimed Assumption.

Falling and rising again

Germanus's holiness is not that of a flawless man. He yielded in 712; he rose again in 713; and he held firm in 730. It is the same trajectory as that of Andrew of Crete, his exact contemporary and companion in the fall: the holiness of men who knew their own frailty, and who drew from it not despair but a deeper firmness. He who has tasted how easy it is to bend under pressure knows, better than another, the price of fidelity.

The shepherd who prefers retirement to denial

At the evening of his life, Germanus embodies the figure of the good shepherd of the Gospel: the one who does not flee before the wolf, but who gives up his place — and almost his life — rather than surrender the flock. Stripped of the omophorion, removed from the palace, grown old in the retreat of Platanion, he chose the poverty of the confessor over the comfort of the compliant bishop.

"Constrained to resign, retired at Platanion and almost forgotten, Patriarch Germanus was, at the Second Council of Nicaea, recognized and celebrated as a defender of the holy images." — summary of Benedict XVI on the destiny of Germanus^[48]

His spiritual lesson is limpid: there are moments when fidelity costs office, reputation, security — and when holiness consists precisely in preferring truth to power.

The anathema of Hieria (754) and the rehabilitation of Nicaea II (787)

Germanus's story does not end with his death. In 754, the iconoclast conciliabule gathered by Emperor Constantine V at the palace of Hieria dared to anathematize the deceased patriarch, treated as a "worshipper of wood"^[49][50]. For a generation, his memory was officially cursed in the Empire.

But in 787, the Second Council of Nicaea — the Seventh Ecumenical Council — solemnly restored the cult of images, read and approved Germanus's letters, and proclaimed him a confessor of the faith and a saint. The man condemned by a false council was rehabilitated by the true one. His struggle, lost in his lifetime, was definitively won after his death.

The feast of 12 May, the relics

The Eastern Churches honour Saint Germanus on 12 May^[51][52][53]; the Catholic Church venerates him there too, in the Roman Martyrology^[54]. First buried at the monastery of Chora in Constantinople, he was long venerated there; part of his relics is said later to have reached the West. A confessor of the faith proclaimed a saint by the Second Council of Nicaea, he did not receive the formal title of Doctor of the Church, reserved to a restricted circle, but his authority in the liturgical and Marian tradition of the East is immense.

A Father for the East — and for the West

Germanus's legacy reaches far beyond his quarrel with Leo III. Through his commentary on the liturgy, he formed Byzantine piety for a millennium. Through his letters, he opened the way for the great theology of the image which John Damascene and Theodore the Studite would complete. Through his Marian homilies, he bequeathed to the whole Church — down to the definition of the Assumption in 1950 — some of its finest texts on the Virgin. His generation, that of Andrew of Crete and John Damascene, is the last great flowering of the Greek patristic age; Germanus is one of its jewels, and perhaps the most moving, because his greatness lies entirely in a refusal.

Germanus speaks to our time first through his freedom before power. At an age when men would often have the Church fall in line with the spirit of the times and let the prince — political, mediatic or ideological — dictate its faith to it, he recalls this inflexible principle: the faith is a deposit received, not a product to be reformed at the whim of majorities or decrees. "It is impossible for me to innovate without an Ecumenical Council" — the words tradition lends to Germanus: this sentence is a permanent antidote to caesaropapism in all its forms.

Then, through his theology of the image and of the visible. In a culture saturated with images but often emptied of meaning, Germanus teaches that the holy image is neither an idol nor a mere decoration: it is a window towards God, founded on the fact that God Himself made Himself visible by becoming man. To venerate the icon is to confess the Incarnation; to enter into the liturgy is to touch the invisible through the visible.

Finally, through the example of his reconciled and faithful life. Germanus is not a spotless saint: he yielded once, then held firm to the end. His holiness is that of a man raised up, who transformed his frailty into firmness, and who preferred retirement and oblivion to the denial of truth. For the Christian of today, tried by the pressure of the world, this is perhaps the most consoling of his lessons.

"You who are holier than the saints, higher than the heavens, more glorious than the cherubim, more venerable than all creation: rejoice, full of grace, the Lord is with you." — Marian salutation attributed to Saint Germanus of Constantinople, homily on the Entry of the Virgin into the Temple^[55]

• Saint Andrew of Crete (660–740) — his exact contemporary and companion in the fall (Monothelite synod of 712), the inventor of the canon and author of the Great Penitential Canon: the other great Marian orator of that generation.
• Saint John Damascene (675–749) — the theologian who systematized the defence of images begun by Germanus: the last of the Greek Fathers, himself a great singer of the Dormition.
• Saint Theodore the Studite (759–826) — the great confessor of the icons of the second iconoclast crisis, direct heir of Germanus's struggle.
• Saint Maximus the Confessor (579–662) — the theologian of the two wills of Christ, whose struggle sheds light on the Monothelitism to which Germanus yielded in 712 before condemning it.
• The Third Council of Constantinople (680–681) — the Sixth Ecumenical Council which condemned Monothelitism, vainly abrogated by the synod of 712.
• The Second Council of Nicaea (787) — the Seventh Ecumenical Council which restored the cult of images and rehabilitated Germanus as a confessor of the faith.
• The Marian dogmas — the Church's definitions on the Virgin, of which Germanus's homilies (Presentation, Dormition) are one of the patristic witnesses, down to the Assumption of 1950.