Monk and Teacher (c. 1418–1437)

The middle period of Mark Eugenikos: his withdrawal from the world to the monastic life, first as a hermit on the Isle of Antigone and then, driven out by Ottoman raids, at the great Mangana monastery in Constantinople; his ordination to the priesthood; and the scholarly and ascetical life out of which came his earliest writings — an irenic letter to the patriarch, a lament for fallen Thessalonica, a scholastic treatise on predestination, and his first work on the procession of the Holy Spirit. These years show a trained theologian and dialectician, not the narrow apophatic monk of later caricature.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Turn to Monasticism

Around the age of twenty-six — so about 1418 — Manuel Eugenikos left his school and the world and embraced the monastic life. According to his brother’s Synaxarion, he did not begin at the Mangana monastery with which his name is usually linked, but first as a hermit at the Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration on the Isle of Antigone in the Sea of Marmara, under a hesychast elder named Symeon, taking at his tonsure the name Mark (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion [Pétridès 1910: 101–102]; Davies, JLARC 19.1 [2025]: 30). About two years later, Ottoman raids on the islands of the Marmara drove him from his hermitage, and in 1422 he transferred to the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana in Constantinople, a great house with a rich library, where he would remain (with interruptions) for the rest of his life (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion [Pétridès 1910: 101–102]; Davies 2025: 30–31).

[Disputed: the common encyclopedic claim that Mark became a monk directly at the Mangana monastery around 1418 conflates two stages. The Synaxarion (Pétridès 1910: 101–102), followed by Davies (2025: 30–31), places the monastic beginning at the hermitage on Antigone under the elder Symeon c. 1418, with the move to the Mangana following only in 1422 after Ottoman raids — itself a small foreshadowing of the pressure under which his whole later life would be lived.]

The detail that the raids of the advancing Turks drove the young monk from his first cell is not incidental. Mark’s monastic vocation was lived out under the shadow of the same Ottoman ascendancy that would, within two decades, make the desperate search for Western aid — and so the council of union — the central fact of Byzantine policy. The hermit driven from Antigone in c. 1420 and the metropolitan who refused to sign at Florence in 1439 were the same man, formed throughout by the same closing vise.

Ordination to the Priesthood

Shortly after 1426, the Synaxarion reports, Mark was ordained to the priesthood — reportedly under some pressure, perhaps from the abbot of the Mangana or from the future Patriarch Joseph II (John Eugenikos, Synaxarion [Pétridès 1910: 102]; Davies 2025: 31). A monk who took ordination reluctantly, valuing the hidden life over ecclesiastical advancement, is a recurring type in the Byzantine ascetic tradition; the Synaxarion presents Mark in just these terms, as a man drawn out of the obscurity he preferred and into a public role he had not sought — a pattern that would repeat, on a far larger scale, with his elevation to the see of Ephesus in 1437 (see The Greek Delegation).

A Scholar’s Cell: The Early Writings

The years at the Mangana were years of study and writing, and the works that survive from before 1437 are the best refutation of the old portrait — owed largely to the Catholic scholarship of Petit, Grumel, and Jugie — of Mark as a narrow, ill-equipped, reflexively anti-Latin monk. The modern critical reading (Davies 2025; Constas 2002) shows instead a man at home in both the patristic and the Latin scholastic idioms, and one whose pre-conciliar engagement with the West began not in polemic but in irenicism.

The letter to Patriarch Joseph II (1422). Mark’s earliest known engagement with the disputed questions is a letter to Patriarch Joseph II, written amid the negotiations occasioned by the legation of the papal envoy Antonio da Massa (who reached Constantinople in October 1422), praising the patriarch’s defense of the invalidity of the unilateral addition of the Filioque to the Creed. Davies underlines that this is his only direct engagement with the disputed topics in the 1420s, and that its register is measured, not polemical (Mark, Epistula ad Patriarcham Constantinopolitanum, ed. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis [hereafter PO] 15: 337–338; Davies 2025: 30).

The Monody on the Fall of Thessalonica (1430). When the Ottomans stormed and took Thessalonica on 29 March 1430 — the empire’s second city, which Venice had been holding — Mark composed a humanist Monody (lament) on its fall, in an elevated, Homeric-epithetic style (Mark, Monody on the Fall of Thessalonica, ed. Pilavakis 1997: 66; Davies 2025: 29). The lament is a window onto the world of the dying empire from which the council would issue (see The Dying Empire and the Hope of Union).

The treatise on the limits of life (To the Hieromonk Isidore, On the Limits of Life). Among the most telling of the early works is a treatise on predestination and the limits of human life, addressed to a hieromonk Isidore. Crucially, Mark structured it as a Latin scholastic quaestio — thesis, counter-arguments, and resolution by distinctions — and it was read aloud before Emperor John VIII and impressed him before Mark’s appointment to the conciliar preparatory commission. Davies takes this as decisive evidence that Mark could competently handle the scholastic method, against the caricature of the apophatic monk out of his depth among the schoolmen of the West (Mark, Pros Isidoron… peri horon zoes, ed. Boissonade 1844: 349–362; Scholarios, On False Doctrines concerning Predestination, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Petit–Sidéridès–Jugie, vol. 1: 427–439; Davies 2025: 31–32; cf. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]: 125–126).

The first work on the procession of the Spirit. Mark’s first sustained treatment of the central dogmatic issue of the council, the Syllogistic Chapters against the Latins on the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father Alone (Capita syllogistica), belongs to the imperial study-group’s preparatory work and is dated by Monfasani to around 1438 — at the very threshold of the council — with Scholarios composing a Response to it (Davies 2025: 21; on the preparatory commission’s reliance on Neilos Kabasilas, Syropoulos, Memoirs 3.10 [ed. Laurent 1971: 170]). The title already states the position Mark would defend to his death and beyond: the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone (see The Filioque Debates).

A Palamite and a Hesychast

Underlying all of this was Mark’s formation in the hesychast and Palamite tradition that had become, after the councils of 1341–1351, the settled theology of the Byzantine Church. Mark was a self-conscious follower of St. Gregory Palamas, and the distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies — the framework Palamas had defended — would underlie his reading of the contested patristic texts on the procession of the Spirit at Florence (see East and West on the Spirit). The hesychast Mark formed on Antigone and at the Mangana, and the dialectician trained by Chortasmenos, were not two men but one: an ascetic who could argue, a monk who had read the Latins. This is the man whom Emperor John VIII would draw out of his cell in 1437 and make the chief spokesman of Orthodoxy.

References

John Eugenikos. Synaxarion of Mark of Ephesus. Ed. S. Pétridès, “Le synaxaire de Marc d’Éphèse.” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 15 (1910): 97–107. (Monastic beginning on Antigone under the elder Symeon, c. 1418; move to the Mangana, 1422; ordination shortly after 1426.)
Davies, Ewan. “Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444): Revisiting the Sources on His Life and Work.” Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 19.1 (2025): 18–54. (The corrected monastic chronology; the irenic register of the early works; the scholastic quaestio on predestination; the dating of the Capita syllogistica.)
Petit, Louis (ed.). Documents relatifs au Concile de Florence. II: Œuvres anticonciliaires de Marc d’Éphèse. Patrologia Orientalis 17. Paris, 1923. (The letter to Joseph II and Mark’s collected works.)
Boissonade, J. F. (ed.). Mark Eugenikos, To the Hieromonk Isidore, On the Limits of Life. In Anecdota Nova. Paris, 1844, pp. 349–362.
Pilavakis, M. (ed.). Mark Eugenikos, Monody on the Fall of Thessalonica. 1997.
Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (On Mark’s intellectual formation and standing.)
Constas, Nicholas (Maximos). “Mark Eugenikos.” In La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. II, ed. C. G. Conticello. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002, pp. 411–467.