The Union Collapses at Home

The non-reception of the Union of Florence: how the union signed at Florence was never received by the Orthodox East, but rejected by the faithful, the monks of Mount Athos, and the great body of the parish clergy, so that the anti-unionist party around Mark of Ephesus became the conscience of the Church; and how, in 1443, the three Eastern patriarchs gathered at Jerusalem to condemn the unionist clergy of Constantinople — the first conciliar act of the East against the union, three years after it was proclaimed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

A Union Never Received

The deepest fact about the Union of Florence is that it never became the faith of the Orthodox Church. Whatever the bishops had signed in Italy under the conditions of the council (see The Pressure to Unite), the union was not received — and in the Orthodox understanding, a council’s decrees become binding only when the whole Church, in time, receives them as expressing its own faith (see Ecumenical Councils). On this understanding the rejection of Florence by the faithful was not mere disobedience but the Church’s own verdict on the council, and it is the ground on which the Orthodox tradition holds Mark to have been right against the signatories.

The rejection was broad and deep. The leading centers of resistance were the monks of Mount Athos — the Hagiorites — and the ordinary parish clergy, who would not commemorate the union or concelebrate with the bishops who had signed it (Gill, The Council of Florence [1959]; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity [1968]). Several of the signatory bishops, met with the reproach of their own people, publicly recanted their signatures (see The Hero of the City). The churches where unionist clergy served stood empty; the faithful, in the testimony of the sources, “did not wish to serve with those who had signed the Union” even during the great fasts (Gill 1959). The union existed on parchment and in the policy of the emperor; it did not exist in the worshiping life of the Church.

The Holy Mountain as Spiritual Fortress

Of all the centers of resistance, none carried the weight of Mount Athos. The Holy Mountain stood, in the Byzantine imagination, as the spiritual fortress of Orthodoxy — a self-governing monastic republic that owed the emperor no policy and the unionist bishops no obedience, and whose authority over the conscience of the faithful was greater than that of many a see (Runciman 1968). The Hagiorite monks had a long memory of standing against imperial religious policy when it touched the faith, and they brought that tradition to bear against Florence at once: they refused communion with the unionists, withheld commemoration of the unionist patriarchs in their diptychs, and lent the prestige of the Mountain to the doctrine that the union reconciled the Church to heresy (Gill 1959; Runciman 1968). Because Athos drew its monks from across the Orthodox world — Greeks, Slavs, Georgians, and others — its rejection of the union radiated outward through the whole communion, carrying the resistance far beyond the walls of Constantinople. To have the Holy Mountain against the union was, in practical terms, to have lost the spiritual heart of Byzantine Christendom; and the union never recovered it.

The Unionist Patriarchs in Succession

The throne of Constantinople passed, in these years, through a short line of unionist patriarchs who could neither make the union live nor halt its decay. Metrophanes II held the see from 1440 to 1443, presiding over the formal apparatus of the union while the churches emptied beneath him; it was against his unionist policy that the metropolitan Arsenios of Caesarea raised the protest that led to the Synod of Jerusalem (Gill 1959; Runciman 1968). After Metrophanes’ death the see passed, after an interval, to Gregory III Mammas, a committed unionist who had been Mark’s antagonist and who likewise found his authority hollowed out by the non-reception of the union among clergy and people (Gill 1959; Blanchet, Georges-Gennadios Scholarios [2008]). Unable to govern a Church that would not own his policy, Gregory eventually abandoned Constantinople for Rome around 1451, leaving the patriarchal throne effectively in the hands of the anti-unionists even before the city fell (Runciman 1968; Blanchet 2008). The succession is itself a parable of the union’s failure: each unionist patriarch in turn presided over a Church that withheld its assent, until the last of them departed for the West and the resistance held the field.

Why an Unreceived Council Does Not Bind

The Orthodox conviction that Florence was not binding rests on the doctrine of reception: a council’s claim to authority is vindicated only when the whole Church, over time, receives its decrees as the expression of its own faith, and a definition the Church will not so receive does not bind, however regular the procedure that produced it (see Ecumenical Councils). The tradition points to precedent. The Robber Council of Ephesus of 449 — the Latrocinium — had been convened with imperial sanction and the full forms of a general council, yet because the Church refused to receive its acts it was condemned at Chalcedon two years later and remembered not as a council but as a robbery (Runciman 1968). The Orthodox reading places Florence in the same category: a gathering with the outward credentials of an ecumenical council whose definitions the body of the Church declined to receive, and which therefore lacked the one thing that an ecumenical council must have. On this view the monks and the people who refused the union were not defying a valid council but registering the verdict — non-reception — that, in the Orthodox understanding, is part of how the Church determines which councils are ecumenical at all (Gill 1959; Runciman 1968).

The Rejection in the Slavic Lands

The non-reception of Florence reached well beyond the Greek world into the Slavic and Russian lands, with consequences that outlasted Byzantium itself. The union had been carried into the Russian Church by Isidore of Kiev, the Greek metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’ who had signed at Florence and was created a cardinal for his part in it. Returning to Moscow in 1441 to proclaim the union — entering with the Latin cross borne before him and commemorating the pope in the liturgy — Isidore was repudiated outright: Grand Prince Vasily II had him arrested as an apostate, a council of Russian bishops rejected the union, and Isidore fled to the West (Runciman 1968; Blanchet 2008). The Russian rejection had a lasting structural result. Cut off from a Constantinople they now regarded as compromised by union, and unwilling to receive a metropolitan from a unionist patriarch, the Russian bishops in 1448 elected Jonah of Moscow to the metropolitan see on their own authority, without reference to Constantinople — the decisive step toward the autocephaly of the Russian Church (Runciman 1968). The non-reception of Florence thus did more in the north than condemn a council: it set the Russian Church on the path to independence, and supplied later Muscovite thought with one of the grievances behind the idea of Moscow as a Third Rome that had kept the faith the second Rome betrayed (Runciman 1968).

The Anti-Unionist Party

Around Mark of Ephesus the opposition organized itself into a coherent party with a doctrine, a manifesto, and a discipline of separation. Its doctrine was Mark’s: that the Latins had departed from the faith on the Filioque and the rest, that the union therefore reconciled the Church to heresy, and that there could be no communion with the unionists until the union was undone (see The Anti-Unionist Leader). Its manifesto was Mark’s Encyclical Letter. Its discipline was the refusal of communion with unionist clergy, including the unionist patriarchs Metrophanes II and, later, Gregory III Mammas. When Mark died in 1444 he handed this party, intact, to George Scholarios, who would lead it through the fall of the empire and carry it into the patriarchate itself (see The Death of Mark (1444)).

The Synod of Jerusalem (1443)

The first conciliar act of the East against the union came not from Constantinople — whose throne was held by unionists — but from the three other ancient patriarchates of the East. In April 1443 the patriarchs Joachim of Jerusalem, Philotheos of Alexandria, and Dorotheos I of Antioch gathered at Jerusalem, prompted by Arsenios, Metropolitan of Caesarea in Cappadocia, who had denounced the unionist patriarch Metrophanes II. The synod declared Metrophanes’ ordinations suspended pending investigation, excommunicated persistent unionists, and authorized Arsenios to preach Orthodoxy freely (Runciman 1968). It was the first time the Eastern patriarchs acted together against the work of Florence — a sign that the rejection of the union was not confined to the Byzantine populace but reached the heads of the other Eastern Churches.

[Disputed: the authenticity of the acts of the 1443 Synod of Jerusalem. Joseph Gill argued that the surviving acts are a later (seventeenth-century) forgery, citing their rough Greek and harsh tone. Marie-Hélène Blanchet has rebutted him point by point, arguing that none of Gill’s arguments is convincing, pointing to fifteenth-century manuscript witnesses (including a Slavonic translation at the Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra), and noting that the rough Greek is exactly what one would expect of Arabic-speaking Melkite patriarchs (Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence [1964], for the forgery thesis; Blanchet, in the more recent scholarship, for authenticity). The synod’s historical reality as an event of Eastern resistance is generally accepted; the authenticity of its surviving acts is what is contested.]

The Setting of the Final Act

The collapse of the union at home set the stage for the last act, which Mark did not live to see. Because the union had no purchase among the faithful, the emperors who succeeded John VIII could not enforce it; the unionist patriarchs presided over half-empty churches; and the formal proclamation of the union, when it finally came in Hagia Sophia in December 1452, would be an occasion of public revulsion rather than reconciliation. Within months the city fell to the Ottomans, and the union — never received, resisted by the monks and the people, condemned by the Eastern patriarchs — died with the empire that had signed it. The story of that final proclamation, the fall, and the formal repudiation of the union in 1484 belongs to Section 08. What belongs here is the underlying fact that made all of it possible: that the Church Mark spoke for had already, in the four years after Florence, refused the union he alone had refused to sign. He did not create the resistance; he gave it its voice, its doctrine, and its leader, and the Church did the rest.

See Also

References

  • Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; and Personalities of the Council of Florence and Other Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964. (The unpopularity and non-reception; the recantations; the forgery thesis on the 1443 synod.)
  • Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The Hagiorite and clerical resistance; the 1443 Synod of Jerusalem.)
  • Blanchet, Marie-Hélène. Georges-Gennadios Scholarios (vers 1400 – vers 1472). Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 2008; and her studies defending the authenticity of the 1443 synodal acts.
  • Mark Eugenikos. Encyclical Letter. Ed. Louis Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 17. Paris, 1923, pp. 449–459. (The manifesto of the resistance.)