The Photian Schism

In the late 850s the patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople lost his see, and Photius, a layman in the imperial service, was made patriarch of Constantinople in his place. How Ignatius came to leave office was disputed from the start. The account preserved in the pope’s letters is that of Ignatius’s supporters: Photius was tonsured and consecrated in haste, by a bishop already under censure, while the lawful patriarch was still alive (Nicholas I, Letters, 91, chapter 1 (13 November 866), pp. 519–520).

Pope Nicholas I sent legates to inquire. At Constantinople they sided with Photius, and Nicholas disowned them. A synod at Rome deposed one of the legates, declared Photius stripped of every priestly office and threatened him with anathema if he continued to occupy the see or to hinder Ignatius (Nicholas I, Letters, 91 (13 November 866), pp. 517–518) (Nicholas I, Letters, 91, chapter 1 (13 November 866), pp. 519–520). The pope claimed, in effect, the right to judge who was patriarch of Constantinople.

The quarrel widened when the Bulgarian ruler Boris, baptized from Constantinople, turned to Rome. In 866 Nicholas answered his questions, held out the prospect of an archbishop, and told him that Constantinople ranked as a patriarchate by the favour of emperors and not by apostolic foundation (Nicholas I, Responses to the Bulgars 72; 92). Latin clergy began to work in Bulgaria. In 867 Photius wrote to the eastern patriarchs denouncing what they taught there, among other things fasting on Saturdays, the rejection of married priests, a second anointing by bishops, and the addition to the creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son, which he held to bring two sources into the Trinity. He asked the patriarchs to send representatives to a council (Photius, Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs 4–9; 34). Nicholas, for his part, listed the same Greek charges in a letter to the Frankish bishops (Nicholas I, Letters, 100 (23 October 867)). Photius’s council, according to the council that afterwards condemned it and burnt its records, pronounced the pope deposed and anathematized (Council of Constantinople (869–870), introduction; definition; canons 2, 4 and 6).

Neither sentence stood. A new emperor, Basil I, removed Photius and recalled Ignatius, and a council at Constantinople in 869–870, with legates of Pope Hadrian II, anathematized Photius, declared his ordinations void and burnt the records of his council (Council of Constantinople (869–870), introduction; definition; canons 2, 4 and 6). Within ten years Photius was patriarch again, and Pope John VIII was writing to the emperors that the Roman see may loose what a synod has bound, as it had for Athanasius and John Chrysostom (John VIII, Letters, 207 (879)).

The two churches remembered the affair differently. Rome in 1053 still recalled Nicholas’s stand against the “neophyte” Photius (Leo IX, Letter to Michael Cerularius (In terra pax) 22). The Orthodox Church commemorates Ignatius and Photius together among its holy patriarchs (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, acclamations). The dispute had joined three questions that would return in the Schism of 1054: the pope’s authority over other patriarchs, the control of newly converted peoples, and the wording of the creed.