| #### 3. EASTERN CATHOLICISM: THE END OF ICONOCLASM: THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS: 813-925 |

| #### #### The General Council of 787, though it marked a definite victory of tradition over the Iconoclasts, hardly weakened the party's hold in those sections of the national life where for nearly a century now it had been all powerful. One stronghold of the party was the army; and the army's attachment to the religious fashions of the great military heroes of the century was possibly strengthened when the sovereigns of the Catholic restoration showed themselves, through twenty years and more, weak and incompetent rulers. The successful military revolution of 813 brought with it a vigorous Iconoclast reaction in the religious world. #### The emperor who then came to the throne, Leo V, was a soldier, an Armenian by birth. He began by commissioning the publication of a catena of texts from Holy Scripture and the Fathers which, apparently, favoured the practice of his sect. The next stage in the plan was that the Patriarch of Constantinople-Nicephorus I (806-815) -- should give the book an official approbation. But the patriarch remained true to the faith, and instead of approving what was, in effect, an Iconoclastic manifesto he summoned a council of 270 bishops and abbots in which the decisions of the General Council of 787 were renewed. The emperor bided his time and a few months later (March, 815) Nicephorus was sent into exile and a more tractable personage installed in his see. Almost immediately the new patriarch, in his turn, called a council. This time it was the Council of 753 that was re-enacted, and the canons of Nicea II were declared null and void. But the bishops were by no means unanimous in their support of this attempt to revive the heresy. They showed a much better spirit than their predecessors of sixty years before, and to subdue them the old edicts of persecution were put in force anew. The number of victims soon exceeded those of the persecution under Constantine V. Monasteries were sacked yet once again, the religious expelled and turned adrift. Many of the abbots were imprisoned and flogged, others sewn up in sacks and flung into the sea. So for five years the new reign of terror lasted, until Leo V died, assassinated, on Christmas night, 820. #### His successor, Michael II, and his successor's son, Theophilus, maintained the Iconoclast tradition and were also, in their measure, persecutors. Theophilus, towards the end of his reign (834-842), showed himself the most cruel of all. When he died (January 20, 842) the government of the empire, for the second time in sixty years, fell to a woman, for the new emperor was a baby two years old. Like her predecessor Irene, the new empress-mother, Theodora, was a Catholic, and the persecution ceased immediately. But, as in 784, while this was easy to accomplish, it was quite another matter to reverse the anti-Catholic development of the last thirty years and restore Catholicism officially. #### The position of the Empress Theodora was all the more difficult in that the patriarch was fanatically Iconoclast. However, within little more than a year she had negotiated the chief obstacles. The patriarch was removed and the abbot Methodius installed in his place. Methodius -- St. Methodius -- was the character for whom the circumstances called. He was a saint, he was a man of learning, firm in his principles and charitable in application of them. He gradually replaced the Iconoclast bishops, and while he made matters easy for those who abjured the heresy, he sternly repressed the tendencies towards an extravagant reaction favoured by one section of the Catholic party. #### So ended, after more than a hundred years of trouble and persecution, the movement to abolish the cult of images. It was just five hundred and twenty years since Constantine's victory over Licinius had delivered the churches of the East from the last of their pagan persecutors. For a great part of that time those churches had been racked by heresy. Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites and Iconoclasts -- each century had added to the list of these disturbers of ecclesiastical peace and unity. Eastern Catholicism, spared the material destruction which in the West was part of the social and political transformation of the fifth and sixth centuries, had been tested in a far more fundamental way. In no case had the trial of heresy gone by unaggravated by the action of the omnipotent emperor. Sometimes, as in the Arian troubles, the emperor was himself a heretic and strove to impose on the Church the errors it had solemnly condemned. At other times, for all that he adhered to the traditional belief, the emperor did his utmost to reunite Catholic and heretic by means of vague formulae that sacrificed the truth defined. Whence again, inevitably, a breach of communion with Rome. From one cause or another, and always, ultimately, from the emperor's hold on Eastern ecclesiastical life, the churches of the East had, out of those five hundred and twenty years, spent some two hundred and three years in schism. The reign of the emperor, Michael III, that opened with the final defeat of the Iconoclasts was to close with the beginning of the most serious breach of all. #### The occasion of this schism was, it is true, less important than any of the earlier occasions, and the schism lasted only a matter of ten years. But thanks to the fact that its leader, Photius, was a personality of the first rank, and thanks to his formulation of a definite case against the papal primacy, this breach in the ninth century left wounds that have never healed. The schism was indeed patched up; but during the time it lasted, a new mentality had begun to develop. The militant and aggressive anti-Roman spirit, already in evidence at the Council in Trullo a hundred and seventy years before, [ ] crystallised now into unforgettable formulae; it allied itself with the congenial principle of Byzantine superiority over the barbarised Latin West. During the century and a half that followed the final disappearance of Photius there was an apparent restoration of normal relations between Rome and the East. But below the surface the events of 858-869 had effected a permanent change, and it needed only the appearance of a second, able and ambitious personality to create anew the anti- Roman schism of Photius, in a bitter offensive, at a time when no shade of dissentient teaching troubled any of the churches in East or West. #### The patriarch of the restoration of the images, St. Methodius, died ill 846. His successor, Ignatius, was the youngest son of the Emperor Michael r, forced to become a monk when Leo V deposed his father in 813. Ignatius was a good man but autocratic, something of a martinet indeed, and presently his zeal to cleanse God's house began to make enemies for him in more than one quarter. There was already a strong anti-Ignatian party at Constantinople when, in the tenth year of his occupation of the patriarchal see, Ignatius came into conflict with the court. That party was led by Gregory Asbestos, an archbishop whom Ignatius had deposed, but whose deposition Rome had refused to confirm -- despite the patriarch's demand -- until it had heard both sides of the case. To the repeated requests from Rome to state his case, Ignatius, even so late as 858, had returned no answer. #### The empress-mother, Theodora, had by this time retired; the emperor, Michael III, was still only in his teens, and it was Theodora's brother, Bardas, who acted as regent with the title of Caesar -- a man of great ability, cultivated, but a loose liver. Michael III has gone down to history as Michael the Drunkard, and the Caesar, his wife turned out, was in 856 living with his daughter-in-law Eudokia. The circumstance is not, of course, unique in the history of courts, but Ignatius was not the man to let scandal go unrebuked simply because to rebuke it was to affront the man who had power of life and death over him. #### Remonstrances, however, were in vain; and on the feast of the Epiphany, 858, Bardas crowned all by presenting himself for Holy Communion at the patriarch's mass. Ignatius refused to administer to him. The emperor protested that this was an insult to his uncle, but Ignatius held firm. Later in that same year the emperor and the Caesar planned to rid themselves of Theodora by locking her up in some convent. But Ignatius refused to be a party to the scheme. The thing could not be decently done without his co-operation and now, weary of his continual interference, it was arranged that he should go. He was suddenly arrested, November 23, 858, and deported to the island of Terebinthos. #### The patriarchal see was declared vacant, and Bardas looked around for a likely man to fill it. Photius, upon whom his choice fell, was a candidate in every way unexceptional. He came of a great family which had suffered much for orthodoxy in the time of the Iconoclast emperors -- he was, in fact, a kinsman of the great patriarch Tarasios who had been the chief agent in the restoration of 787. Moreover, Photius had a distinguished record in the imperial service as counsellor and secretary; and he gave every sign, already at thirty, of what he was later to become-one of the most learned men who have ever lived. He was unmarried and his life was religious and beyond reproach. Had the see been really vacant Photius could hardly have been bettered as a candidate for it: save for the fact that he was a layman. But vacant it was for Bardas -- Ignatius having signed some kind of abdication, whether absolute or conditional is not clear -- and Photius accepted the nomination. On Christmas Day, 858, he was consecrated by Gregory Asbestos. #### Throughout the empire, however, a considerable party of bishops stood loyally by Ignatius. Whence there began a campaign to unite the episcopate in support of Photius. The Ignatian bishops met, declared the election of Photius null and void, and excommunicated him. Photius, in reply, held a council (spring of 859) which declared Ignatius and his partisans deposed. Next the government intervened, to carry out the sentences of Photius' synod. Soon the supporters of Ignatius were, like him, locked up in prisons, where they were maltreated and tortured. #### Rome, so far, had not come into the matter at all; but in 859, with the hope that the Roman prestige would reduce the opposition, both Photius and the emperor approached the pope-Nicholas I. They explained that Ignatius, broken by age and ill-health, had resigned; Photius, with extreme reluctance, had accepted the promotion in his place; there were still remnants of Iconoclasm in the capital, and Ignatius, in his retirement, had entangled himself in political matters; he had, also, been guilty of transgressing several papal decrees. For this reason Photius had been compelled to excommunicate him. #### Nicholas I was determined not to recognise Photius until he had gathered independent information about the whole affair He decided that an enquiry was called for and sent to Constantinople as his legates the Bishops of Porto and Anagni. They were sent to enquire into the circumstances in which Ignatius had ceased to be patriarch -- to report and not to judge. But, exceeding their commission, they went into the history of Ignatius' own election fourteen years before, and into the history of his treatment of the Roman requests in the matter of Gregory Asbestos. Then, in May 861, they presided at a synod where Ignatius was again deposed -- because his own election was irregular, and because of his illegal procedure with Gregory. Ignatius, thereupon, appealed to the pope. #### The affair dragged on very slowly. First of all the legates returned with their official report, and with more lying letters from Photius and the court. In March, 862, at a synod in Rome the whole matter was examined. The blundering of the legates was made clear: the pope disavowed them and ordered their punishment; as to Photius, he refused to recognise him as a bishop, holding Ignatius to be the holder of the see until the case against him should be established. Then, at last, there arrived in Rome the appeal of Ignatius against the synod of 861 and the legates, telling, for the first time, the story of the share of the palace in his original deposition. In a new synod (April 863) the pope, with the statements of all parties before him, now definitely decided for Ignatius; the legates were deposed; Photius was excommunicated, should he not surrender the place he had usurped; Ignatius and his supporters were solemnly restored. To the emperor the pope wrote "advising and commanding" him to restore Ignatius; while to the other patriarchs he gave the reasons for his case against Photius and the imperial court: they had condemned Ignatius without a fair trial; they had installed a successor before his case was canonically terminated; at the trial, when this did take place, Ignatius was judged by his own subjects; and finally Photius, a layman, had been consecrated patriarch without observance of the necessary canonical intervals between his receiving the successive orders of deacon, priest and bishop. #### The emperor replied in a letter which the pope described as "filled with insult and blasphemy". He utterly refused to accept the Roman decision, and threatened to send an army to bring the pope to his senses. Photius struck the pope's name out of the mass -- an action tantamount to excommunication. To all of which Nicholas replied in a famous letter, (September 28, 865) as long as a treatise, [ ] in which, while he reminds the Easterners again and again that the primatial rights of the Roman Church are of divine institution, he offers, if it will satisfy them, to have the whole case tried anew. #### The next two years saw no change in the situation save an additional aggravation due to the mission in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians had first made appeal for missionaries to Constantinople about the time when Photius had been intruded into the see. He had sent missionaries as they asked, and Michael III had stood sponsor to their king, Boris, at his baptism (864). But the mission had not been too successful. Boris wanted a hierarchy of bishops that would be independent of Constantinople. Photius made difficulties. And so, in 866, the Bulgarian king, influenced partly at any rate by political considerations, turned to Rome; and in answer Nicholas I sent two Latin bishops, one of them destined, in time, himself to be pope. This was Formosus, then Bishop of Porto, successor to the bishop deposed by the synod of 863. #### At the same time the pope sent legates to Constantinople to explain and defend his sending a mission into Bulgaria. They carried despatches of an even more violent tone than the letter of 865, the emperor being now bidden to burn publicly the "blasphemous" letter of 863. But the legates were turned back at the frontier, and Photius made the Latin "aggression" in Bulgaria the occasion for the most effective thing he ever did. This was a long and violent anti-Roman manifesto, set forth in an encyclical letter to the other patriarchs. It was destined to be, and it still remains, the charter of the separate status of Constantinople and its dependent churches. The Latin "invasion" of the Greek missionary territory is described, and the danger to the faith of the neophyte from the Latin ignorance and errors. These are listed: the Latins fast on Saturdays; they eat milk foods in the three days between Quinquagesima Sunday and Ash Wednesday; they look down on married clergy; they reject the Confirmation given by a priest; and they have corrupted the Creed by adding the words "and from the Son" to the clause which, speaking of the Holy Ghost, says " Who proceeds from the Father". For which reasons Photius summons all the bishops of his patriarchate to a council which shall discuss and condemn these errors. Of that council we know little, save that it met and declared Nicholas I deposed, and that it deposed, too, all who supported him, "forerunners of apostasy, servants of Antichrist. . . liars and fighters against God" as the encyclical proclaimed them to be. Also, it is to be noted, Photius endeavoured to win over the emperor in the West, Louis II. #### There is nothing new in Photius' refusal to accept the Roman sentence after invoking Rome's authority. What is new, and unprecedented, in a Patriarch of Constantinople, is his attack on the papacy as such, and on its hitherto universally recognised right. #### It was, apparently, in the summer of 867 that these last events took place, and it is hard to say if Nicholas I ever knew of them. His health was failing all through that year and on November 13 he died, making efforts to the very end to mobilise the scholarship of the West in opposition to an opponent whom he recognised to be a man supremely learned. By the time the pope died, and before he could have known of it, that able and learned, hut shifty adversary had, however, himself been removed. But not by death. One of the imperial equerries, Basil the Macedonian, had been gradually creeping nearer to the throne. In 866 he had had Bardas murdered, and had succeeded to his place. On September 23, 867, it was the turn of Michael III; and Basil was proclaimed emperor. A wholesale reversal of his predecessor's acts followed. Among the favourites who fell was Photius, a long-standing rival of Basil at the court; and on November 23 Ignatius was solemnly restored to the patriarchal throne. Photius was sent into exile. #### Between these events and the General Council of Constantinople which solemnly accepted the Roman judgement about them, there is the long interval of nearly two years -- an interval which is not merely practical testimony to the very real obstacle of geographical distance that now separated the two great centres of Christian life, but which also symbolises the distance which separated the Roman idea of the task before the council from what the new emperor, and his patriarch, had envisaged when they proposed it to the pope. Once more the meeting of a general council in the East was to be the occasion of new serious difficulties between pope and emperor, and, as on so many previous occasions, it was to leave behind memories whence would spring new, lasting troubles. #### For the new emperor, Basil I, the thing that really mattered, in these years 867-870, was the very urgent problem of reconciling the two factions of ecclesiastics and their followers into which the churches of his empire had been, for ten years now, divided-"Ignatians and Photians". If the pope would consent to judge between them, on the basis of the events of 858, and if both parties would appear before him to plead their case, such a Roman decision might very well end the troubles. And what the pope decided in Rome it would be well that a council, meeting at Constantinople, should ratify. #### But for the pope, these domestic troubles of the church of Constantinople were only one element of the affair. Since the original mischief arising out of the substitution of Photius for Ignatius in 858, there had occurred two events of the utmost gravity, and of far greater importance than the question, even, which of the two men was the lawful Patriarch of Constantinople. Photius, in his capacity as patriarch, had, in fact, denied the papacy's right as the divinely instituted primate of the Church of Christ; he had done this in the most solemn way, in a great council. And a host of Eastern bishops had supported his action. That Rome should, and would, forgive the now repentant bishops was very desirable and all to the good, but the pope in this reconciliation, could not, without betraying his primacy, ignore an event of such magnitude as the recent wholesale denial of its existence. #### When then, in June 869, the pope -- Adrian II -- considered with his council the letters sent by the emperor and Ignatius, the main question that occupied his mind was the Photian council of 867 and the patriarch's encyclical letter that had preceded it. This was the main subject of the Roman deliberations, and while an amnesty was offered to the Eastern bishops who repented their share in the event, the council of 867 was condemned and Photius again excommunicated, with the severe proviso that, even should he repent, he was not, ever again, to enjoy more than a layman's status in the Church. The emperor had asked the pope to take part in the council planned to assemble at Constantinople, and Adrian II agreed. The three legates he sent to preside in his name carried with them letters for the emperor and for Ignatius. The pope made it clear in his instructions to the legates -- and the legates faithfully obeyed his instructions -- that the council was not to reopen the questions he had already decided at Rome, but to accept his decisions, and give them a solemn public promulgation. #### The council reckoned as the Eighth General Council -- opened on October 5869. Besides the legates, and the patriarchs and their representatives, there were barely a dozen bishops present. Nor did the numbers greatly increase as the weeks went by. There were 21 bishops at the fifth session, at which Photius made his first appearance; 38 at the eighth, on November 8; 65 at the ninth and, for the solemn session which closed the council, February 28, 870, 103 -- of whom 37 were metropolitans. #### There was no difficulty about the condemnation of Photius, who maintained a haughty silence before his judges. But when it came to the trial of his supporters among the bishops, and to the testimony of those who professed repentance, there were occasional scenes. Adrian II's instructions were that all were to sign the famous formula drawn up three hundred years before by Pope Hormisdas (514-523), [ ] and used by him as a test of orthodoxy in the reconciliation which ended the schism of Acacius. "The first condition of salvation" the formula declared "is to keep the rule of the true faith and in no way to deviate from the laws of the Fathers. And because the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ: 'Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build My Church, etc., ' cannot be passed over. What things were thus said are proved by the resulting events, [ ] because in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been kept free from blemish. We then, wishing to be by no means parted from that hope and faith. . . anathematise all heresies. . . . And therefore I hope that I may deserve to be with you in that one Communion, which the Apostolic see teaches, in which [Communion] is the whole, real and perfect solidity of the Christian religion. And I promise that in future I will not say in the holy Mysteries the names of those who are banished from the Communion of the Catholic Church, that is who do not accord with the Apostolic See. " [ ] #### One bishop began to argue that this Roman assertion of an indefectible faith was not historically true, and the emperor showed signs of wanting the point argued. But the legates insisted. The bishop must sign or be condemned. Nor was this the only dissension. Basil, as though to forestall any action by the legates which might endanger his own plan, namely not so to antagonise the party of Photius that it would be impossible to reconcile them with Ignatius, had sent one of the high officials of the court to control the debates, and between this personage and the legates there was more than one lively incident. Finally there was the mysterious "suspension" of the council which, suddenly, did not meet at all for two whole months [ ] -- part of which period, according to one account, was spent by the chief of the legates, Marinus, under arrest, for resisting the emperor's wishes. #### But whatever the differences and difficulties the papal will was finally carried out, as the series of twenty-seven canons shows, promulgated at the final session February 28, 870. In these the Iconoclasts were again condemned. The interference of the State in episcopal elections was condemned too; elections where the State has interfered are to be held null and void: those so elected are to be deposed, even if consecrated. Synods, it is declared, do not need the presence of the emperor or his legate for the validity of their acts. No one is to presume to depose any of the patriarchs; and especially no one is to do what Photius has done of late, and what Dioscoros did of old, [ ] that is to say write and put into circulation calumnies against the pope. Should anyone so presume he is to be punished with the punishment meted out to them. Any prince who attempts to coerce the freedom of the pope, or of any of the patriarchs, is anathema. Should any doubt or controversy touching the Holy Roman Church come before a general council the matter is to be examined with becoming reverence. In no case is sentence to be defiantly given against the Supreme Pontiffs of the elder Rome. [ ] In this last session the emperor, too, intervened: with a speech urging the Church's right freely to manage its own affairs. #### Nevertheless, the tension in which the council had done its work continued to the end, and survived its close. In the last few days the legates had to complain of the theft from their baggage of the retractations signed by the bishops of Photius' party. And, a much more serious matter, in those same last days there arrived at Constantinople a mission from the Bulgarian king. He was finally determined not to link himself with Rome, since the pope resolutely refused to let him have Formosus as bishop. Once more, then, Boris besought the Patriarch of Constantinople to provide him with bishops and priests. The Roman legates protested vigorously; and there was a tense period when a new schism, with Ignatius as the papal adversary, seemed not unlikely. It ended by the legates formally forbidding Ignatius, in the pope's name, to send missionaries to Bulgaria, and in Ignatius making a dutiful, but very general, declaration of submission to the pope. Then the legates departed -- but by the time they had reached Rome the patriarch had equipped the Bulgarian Church with a complete hierarchy, an archbishop and twelve bishops. #### The legates were a long time on their way home. They left Constantinople in the spring of 870, but did not reach Rome until some time in June 871. The news of the council’s proceedings, and of the legates' difficulties, had preceded them; and Adrian II, instead of any formal ratification of the decrees, sent, along with a complimentary letter to the emperor, a strongly worded complaint to the patriarch about his new activities in Bulgaria, threatening him with excommunication, and actually laying the sentence upon those now usurping in Bulgaria the episcopal jurisdiction. #### The situation had not at all improved when, twelve months later, Adrian II died. His successor, John VIII, was a man of like views, but stronger and more vigorous in action. He had been archdeacon of the Roman Church for many years, and was thoroughly conversant with the complications of the problems before him. From the beginning of his reign this new pope took a strong line about the Byzantine "invasion" of Bulgaria. "If the treacherous Greeks do not depart, " he wrote to King Boris, "we are determined to depose Ignatius. " And, Ignatius proving obstinate, John VIII, in April 878, sent legates to offer him the choice between the faithful carrying out of his promises and deposition. But when the legates reached Constantinople they found that Ignatius was dead -- that he had died, indeed, six months before they set out. A new patriarch reigned in his place: it was Photius. #### The appointment was natural enough from the emperor's point of view. The main problem in the religious life of the day was still the division, now twenty years old, that had begun with Michael III's deposition of Ignatius in 858. Photius, at the time of this second nomination as patriarch, had himself long been reconciled with Ignatius, and had been set at liberty. His diplomatic gifts had erased from the emperor's mind the memory of their old rivalry, and he had been appointed tutor to Basil’s heir, the future emperor, Leo the Philosopher. There was every hope that the appointment of Photius as successor to Ignatius would finally rally all but the most fanatical of the dissidents. But what about the pope? Upon Photius there still lay the terrific sentences of the council of 869 and, above all, the pope's decision that henceforth he was to be no more than a layman in the Church. #### The legates had no competence to deal with any element of this new problem. But they did not return to Rome. Instead they wrote to John VIII, telling him of the great event and, it would seem, endeavouring to win him to sympathise with the emperor's solution. The emperor also wrote, and so did Photius. And the pope showed himself very favourable. #### It needs to be said that John VIII had other worries, very practical questions of life and death, which at this moment inclined him to take an easy view of the latest events at Constantinople. The Carolingian empire was now in the last stages of disintegration. It was only with difficulty that the pope could persuade one of the great family to take upon him the name of emperor: and this at a moment when the Saracens threatened to be masters, not only in southern Italy, but even in Rome itself! If the emperor at Constantinople could not be persuaded to defend the pope against the Saracens, Rome's case was desperate indeed. This political anxiety was, indeed, one of the matters with which the legates despatched to correct Ignatius in 878 had originally been charged; and in their letters reporting the re-appearance of Photius they were able to tell the pope of the emperor's sympathetic dispositions towards the problem of the safety of Rome. #### It was, then, in the happiest mood towards the emperor, and Photius, that John VIII, in the spring of 879, summoned his Roman council to consider the new aspect of the patriarch's career. He determined to recognise Photius as lawful patriarch and he cancelled and quashed all the sentences of the council of 869-870, and forbade anyone, ever again, to cite them against Photius. But Photius was to give some sign of repentance for his actions in the bad days of 867, and he was to pledge himself to withdraw the missionaries sent to Bulgaria. #### Once again the Roman decisions were to be given the publicity of acceptance and promulgation in a council at Constantinople and this took place the following winter, November, 879-March 880. Photius was now all that any pope could desire. He made all the prescribed promises, even about the Bulgarian mission, and the legates solemnly granted him acknowledgement, and robed him in the handsome vestments sent by the pope as a special mark of affection. #### There was, however, less agreement about the Roman demand that laymen were not to be promoted to the episcopate without the usual intervals between the various sacred orders received. And, according to one account, there was a tense moment when the question of the Filioque clause in the Creed was raised. This crisis, however, was resolved by the diplomacy of Photius -- so this same account -- and all the more easily since, so far, the popes too had refused to insert the words -- even Leo III when asked by Charlemagne. John VIII confirmed all that the council had done and for the short remainder of his reign -- he died, murdered in 882 -- the peace between Rome and Constantinople continued undisturbed. #### When Pope John VIII recognised Photius in 879 as the lawful patriarch of Constantinople, it was, however, an unfortunate by-product of his action that the party traditionally associated with the cause of the dead patriarch, Ignatius, the pro-Roman party of the crises of 858 and 867, now became the party whose policy was schism "on principle". The great council of 879 was to them an abomination; and their account of it, wholly misrepresenting what took place -- stating, indeed, the very contradictory of the fact -- not only served their party needs in the next generation, but continued to mislead all the Western historians until our own time. [ ] According to that false account, the pope repudiated the council of 879 and from this there resulted a renewal of the schism on the part of Photius. #### Behind the screen of the falsehood and the forgeries there lies this much of the truth, namely that John VIII's action did not have the universal approval of the high officials of the Roman Curia. Among those who, at Rome, still eyed Photius askance was the one-time legate to the council of 869, Marinus; and it was Marinus who succeeded John VIII as pope in 882. Stephen V, too, in whose time Photius was deposed by the emperor Leo VI (886), was of the same mind; as was also the next pope, Formosus, a strong personality seemingly, and a strong opponent of all John VIII's policies. There followed, then, upon the pro-Photius decision of 879, a period when it might seem that the anti-Photius party at Constantinople could still look to Rome for support. The imperial deposition of Photius, in 886, was an opportunity for the party to invoke it. #### But the popes were too wary to act on the first scanty statements of the events that came to them. Before granting recognition to the new patriarch Stephen -- a boy of sixteen, the emperor's own younger brother -- they asked for more information about the circumstances in which Photius had ceased to reign. In the end, it would seem, Stephen V granted the recognition. Then his successor, Formosus, intervened -- sending legates to state the Roman view about the validity of the orders conferred by Photius. This intervention, it is held, probably contented neither of the rival parties. It was not until the stormy reigns of Formosus (891-896) and his next five short-lived successors (896-898) were over that John IX, in a rare interval of peaceful papal possession of Rome, brought about a reconciliation between "Ignatians" and "Photians", and between the patriarchate and the Holy See (899). #### The peace lasted just eight years. What broke it up was a furious controversy about the legitimacy of the fourth marriage of the emperor -- Leo VI. His first wife had died in 893, and his second in 896. In 899 he had married a third time, and in 900 this wife too had died. None of these wives had brought him an heir and Leo, not venturing upon a fourth alliance -- so strong was the tradition in the Eastern churches against re-marriage-was living in notorious concubinage when, in 905, a son was born to him. He now approached the patriarch, anxious for some means to be found whereby this child should be recognised as his heir. The patriarch was Nicholas, called Mystikos, one of the major personalities of his line, who by his ability and his learning and his early career in the imperial service -- as well as by kinship -- was another Photius. Nicholas proposed that he should baptise the child with all the ceremonial appropriate to the emperor's heir, but that the emperor should separate from his mistress, Zoe. To this Leo agreed. But, the baptism over, he not only brought back Zoe, but himself crowned her as empress (906) and persuaded a priest to bless their marriage. #### And now, while the patriarch buried himself in his study to think out a canonical solution for the problem, the emperor bethought himself to consult, and to beg a dispensation from, the other three patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch and Jerusalem, and from the pope. Upon this Nicholas hardened his heart. The quasi-independence of his administration seemed threatened, and when the Roman legates arrived from Sergius III with what he knew would be a reply favourable to the emperor, Nicholas refused to receive them; and he organised his own metropolitans to swear to die rather than agree that a fourth marriage could be lawful (906). #### In February, 907 Nicholas was suddenly arrested, an obedient synod declared him deposed, and some kind of acceptance of his fate was obtained from him. The synod chose in his place one of the great ascetics of the day, the monk Euthymos, and it granted the emperor the permission he sought; the priest who had actually married Leo and Zoe was however deposed, for having done this without authorisation. Finally, when the emperor proposed to legalise fourth marriages the synod declared that not only fourth marriages but third marriages too were unlawful; and the new patriarch steadfastly refused to crown the empress, or to allow her to be publicly prayed for as empress. The emperor's personal problem was solved, but no more than this; and there were now new divisions throughout the East, between the partisans of Nicholas, and those who recognised Euthymos. #### Five years after these events when Leo the Philosopher died (912), there was a "palace revolution"; Nicholas was brought back and Euthymos deposed. In the general "revenge" Nicholas did not forget his score against Rome; and he sent the pope, Anastasius III, an ultimatum demanding that the decision given in 906 be reversed and the legates who bore it punished; otherwise he would strike the pope's name out of the mass. The Roman reply has not survived, but presently the threat was carried out. Once again the church of Constantinople was in schism, while in the capital the patriarch and the empress- mother Zoe fought for supremacy in a maze of palace intrigues. These came to an end when, in 919, the grand-admiral, Romanus Lecapenus, forced his way to the throne, marrying the boy emperor, Constantine VII, to his daughter and compelling recognition of himself as joint-emperor. In a great council at Constantinople in 920 Romanus forced upon the various religious factions a skilfully arranged compromise; and three years later the quarrel with Rome was also healed. No details of the reconciliation have come down to us. We know of two letters from Nicholas to the pope, John X, and that the legates he asked for were sent to Constantinople. We also possess the account which Nicholas gave of the affair to the King of the Bulgarians, Simeon. It is a curious document, and ominous for the future. The patriarch, who is sending with it a letter from the pope designed to lessen the Bulgarian king's hostility to the emperor, warns Simeon that "to despise the authority of the pope is to insult the prince of the apostles". And then he tells, in his own fashion, the story of the conflict about the lawfulness of fourth marriages, of the great scandal, and of how the Roman See has finally ratified all the condemnations issued by Nicholas. " Like Photius in 880, Nicholas came out of the fight with all the honours of war. " [ ] If there was a surrender anywhere, it was -- according to his version -- on the part of Rome. The letter is, by implication, yet another assertion of Constantinople's claim to autonomy, to a jurisdiction practically sovereign. And herein lies, no doubt, the main importance in history of this long-drawn-out, and not too well-known, Byzantine aggression. ####  |