III
THE PHOTIUS SCHISM

 

Photius (820-891), the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is held to be responsible for making the schism between East and West almost inevitable, is one of the great ecclesiastics whom it is hard to judge dispassionately. He was a highly born and fashionable secretary of state, and his elevation to the patriarchal throne was an outrage. It was occasioned by the fact that the austere Patriarch Ignatius, on the Feast of the Epiphany, 858, very properly refused to give Holy Communion to the Paphlagonian Bardas, who was guardian of the dissolute young Emperor, Michael III. He had been guilty of incest. Thereupon Ignatius was deposed and a gathering held in the palace selected Photius to fill his place.

Within a few days Photius went through the different grades of ordination and then quickly made his mark on history. No one denies his chastity, his extensive learning, and his intellectual acumen. He was a consummate savant, an aristocrat to the tips of his fingers, and not a favorite with the monks, who withstood the interference of the civil powers in the offices of the Church. The Pope of Rome was Nicholas I, an active and courageous pontiff, one more ready and better fitted for acting as the supreme arbiter of Christendom than any Pope since Gregory the Great. He supported Ignatius, and in 863 held a Council in the Lateran which decided that, unless Photius vacated the see of Constantinople, he should be anathematized and denied the Eucharist until the hour of his death. It is worth noting that two years later the same Pope, perhaps with entire sincerity, gave recognition to the False Decretals which had been forged in Gaul in order to strengthen the discipline of the Church and enhanced the power of the Pope, decretals which duped the Christian world for seven centuries.

Nicholas I, in 866, wrote his famous 'Response to the Inquiries of the Bulgarians', in which he both claimed these new converts for Rome and showed a genuine interest in their welfare.

Photius regarded the arrival of the Roman legates who carried this letter to the Bulgarians as an encroachment upon his own jurisdiction. In the meantime his ingenious mind had been looking for joints in the Roman armor. He applied himself to prove that the Latins had been guilty of innovation and heresy in adding to the Nicene Creed the words that the Holy Spirit proceeds 'from the Son', and he was at any rate able to assert truly that the creed as ratified by the whole Church was without the phrase in question. Thus he endeavored to insert a doctrinal basis under an existing schism. Aware of the importance attached by the vulgar to merely outward usages, he also condemned the Roman practice of fasting on Saturdays, eating eggs in Lent, and shaving the beard. In 867 he persuaded a Council at Constantinople to excommunicate as a heretic the Pope who had excommunicated him as a usurper, and he embodied his denunciation of Western usages in an encyclical sent to the Eastern Patriarchs and to Italy.

Shortly afterwards the young monster, Michael III, who had previously secured the assassination of Bardas, was himself murdered when drunk, by Basil I 'the Macedonian', who was Emperor from 867 to 886. Basil, who was an Armenian by descent, had been an unscrupulous adventurer, averse from neither debauchery nor bloodshed. But he showed himself a man of extraordinary capacities, a born ruler and administrator, who helped mightily to raise the Eastern Empire to the apex of its greatness. His struggle against the Saracens in the West was on the whole a failure, a failure which was sealed when the Saracens took Syracuse in 878. But he extended the frontier of his Empire eastward in Asia Minor and lived in peace with Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria, Venice, and Germany. Like Napoleon I at a later date, he saw the wisdom of having the Pope on his side, though he had no intention of granting all that the Pope might claim. He continued the policy of Photius in preventing Boris, the newly converted khan of the Bulgarians, from putting his country under the supremacy of Rome. But he disliked Photius, and saw that the restoration of the virtuous Ignatius would enhance his own personal popularity. Photius was therefore shut up in a monastery and Ignatius placed upon the patriarchal throne.

Basil then sent an embassy to the Pope, and at the end of 868 Pope Hadrian II solemnly condemned the Council which Photius had convoked, and summoned a new Council at Constantinople. His legates entered the city on September the 29th, 869. Basil received them with the highest honors, but he and they were not in full agreement. He desired a detailed judgment in the case of Photius: they made it plain that they had simply come to publish the sentence of the Popes against Photius and to reconcile those bishops of his party who were prepared to agree with that sentence. Photius remained resolutely silent before his accusers and was condemned, the legates observing that they were only publishing the sentence already formulated. Basil was obliged to accept what they said; but he took a speedy revenge. He assembled the fathers of the Council and tried to obtain from the legates a formal recognition of the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople over Bulgaria.

The legates protested and departed. But they had hardly gone when Ignatius himself consecrated an archbishop and ten bishops for Bulgaria. By this act he made it clear that his view of papal jurisdiction was essentially the same as that of his rival Photius.

Ignatius died in 877. Photius, who had gained the goodwill of Basil, became Patriarch once more, and in 879 held a Council to which Pope John VIII sent legates. The Pope was willing to recognize Photius if he would ask pardon for his past conduct before a Synod, and abstain from any interference in Bulgaria. Photius, far from asking pardon, defended his conduct and was applauded by the bishops present. The question of Bulgaria was referred to the decision of the Emperor. The Council also pronounced an anathema against all who added to the Nicene Creed. It was three years before John VIII learnt the full facts; and he then excommunicated Photius. The Churches of East and West were separated. The rupture was complete.

The triumph of Photius was not for long. In 886 he was banished by Basil’s successor, Leo VI, to a monastery, where he survived for five years. Pope John VIII was murdered by his own household. Bulgaria became politically and spiritually allied with Byzantium. But the struggle with Rome was not forgotten, and the intrepid and erudite Photius became regarded as an apostle of orthodoxy who had intellectually vanquished the barbarians of the West and 'illuminated the ends of the earth'.

STATE OF CHRISTIANITY DURING THE TENTH CENTURY

Leo VI, immediately after the deposition of Photius, endeavored to heal the breach with Rome. A serious obstacle lay in the fact that the recent Popes had refused to recognize any of the bishops consecrated by Photius. But agreement was reached and a general amnesty proclaimed in 898. Two papal legates arrived in Constantinople, and everything was happily arranged, including the order of precedence to be observed by the papal and patriarchal secretaries at the Emperor's table. A permanent papal embassy was established in the Eastern capital.

It was the Emperor himself who broke the peace. Determined to consolidate his dynasty and his Empire, he desired to ensure an heir to his throne. He therefore resolved to marry a fourth wife, his mistress Zoe, 'the black-eyed'. To marry a fourth wife was against the canons of the Church, and the Patriarch Nicholas Mysticus gave expression to his disapproval of the match. Nevertheless, he consented to baptize in St. Sophia the son that Zoe bore to Leo, if the latter undertook not to live with his mistress. Leo agreed, and immediately after the baptism of his child violated his promise by privately marrying Zoe. The Patriarch and bishops then forbade the Emperor to enter the churches. He appealed to the Pope. That Pope was Sergius III, the lover of the powerful and infamous Marozia. Sergius supported Leo, and Nicholas then made the mistake of corresponding with Andronicus Ducas, a conspirator against the throne. Leo taxed him with treason, forced him to abdicate, and made Euthymius Patriarch in his stead.

In 912 Leo VI lay dying. He repented and recalled Nicholas Mysticus, who after various vicissitudes wrote to Pope John X asking him to send new legates to Constantinople. Thus peace was restored in 920 and it lasted with slight interruptions until the great schism of 1054. The papacy was morally weak, ravaged by schism, simony, and nepotism, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople grew in influence and were engrossed in their own duties and ambitions. They were less friendly towards Rome than the Emperors, who found it useful to have on their side even the least worthy of the successors of St. Peter.

A singular proof of this alliance was shown in 933 by the Emperor Romanus Lecapenus. He had adroitly detached Bulgaria more completely from Rome by giving his granddaughter Mary in marriage to the young king, Peter. But he secured the approval of Pope John XI for the consecration of his son Theophylact as Patriarch, and the ceremony took place in the presence of four papal legates. The lad was sixteen years of age, devoted to pantomimes and horse-racing. Nevertheless, the dawn of better days was at hand. Theophylact was succeeded by prelates who were monks of austere life, inflexible in their principles, and resolute in asserting their independence of imperial power. To this period of spiritual revival belongs the foundation of the great monastery on Mount Athos (961) through the efforts of Athanasius, the spiritual director of the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas. It has remained to this day the very focus of Eastern Orthodox asceticism. Nicephorus carried his victorious arms to the West and to the East alike. He captured Crete from the Arabs, who had been the scourge of the Mediterranean, and he crushed the power of the Muslim emirs of Aleppo. It was not to be expected that he would leave Italy outside his projects. As far back as 726 Leo the Isaurian had taken provinces in southern Italy from the Pope and attached them to the Patriarch of Constantinople. In these regions large numbers of Greek monks settled as a result of the conquest of Egypt and Palestine by the Muslims and the troubles connected with the iconoclastic controversy. In the eighth century the clergy of Sicily were firmly attached to the Eastern Church. No Emperor or Empress, however devout they might be, ever thought of restoring southern Italy to Rome. And Nicephorus Phocas, without consulting the Pope, organized the churches of the Byzantine rite in that country by creating the province of Otranto. One episode after another shows that the Greeks took advantage of the weakness of Rome, not exactly in order to create a schism, but to obtain Roman recognition for the independent authority claimed by the Patriarch as Pope of another world.

The Byzantine Empire of the tenth century not only boasted of a powerful military organization and a perfected legal administration. There was a similar development of intellectual life. There were historians, philosophers, theologians, and poets.

It was an Empire of dazzling wealth and splendor and of superb artistic achievement. In bronze and ivory, silk and glass, in the craft of the goldsmith and the jeweler, the workshops of the Empire rivaled those of ancient Greece. There was a veritable renaissance, in which we can trace both the influence of classical models and that of the delicate decoration favored by the Muslims in Baghdad and Damascus. The religious art displayed in the churches gathered together the beauty and the charm fostered by this refined intelligence. The 'New Church' built at Constantinople by Basil I was, if we may judge by the descriptions given us in the pages of Greek writers, hardly less wonderful than St. Sophia. It has entirely perished. But other churches at Athos and elsewhere remain and show us how the older Byzantine style became modified. The outline became more picturesque, the exterior surface of the walls more varied. The broad low dome was replaced by loftier and more elegant cupolas. The somewhat stiff basilican nave was abandoned, and the favorite plan was that of a Greek cross set within a square, a plan capable of many new forms and motives. And within there was a wonderland of walls, lined with shaded marbles, and above the marbles were mosaics flashing with gold and silver, and harmonies of color, richer than any known hitherto. As a result of the iconoclastic controversy, precise rules were laid down concerning the composition of these pictures, but the pictures are a new and true expression of life and animation no less than of orthodox belief.

The Arab terror was not far away; and an ugly blow was dealt to the Byzantine claim to be the sole and universal Empire when the Empire of the West revived and Charles the Great was crowned in St. Peter's, Rome, on December the 25th, 800. But the Greeks had most of the consolations which the present world could offer, and their faith and worship fortified their belief that God and the mother of God were on their side. Nor was this belief mere vanity. For, in spite of much fanaticism among both monks and laity, there often existed a degree of piety, purity, and self-denial which adorned the doctrine of God our Savior and gave a moral splendor to the Church. To understand Byzantine civilization we must remember the Byzantine saints.