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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.
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