Raised to the Patriarchate (858)

The events of late 858 by which the layman Photius became Patriarch of Constantinople: the conflict between Patriarch Ignatius and the Caesar Bardas, Ignatius’s departure from the throne, and the elevation of Photius — tonsured, then ordained reader, subdeacon, deacon, and priest on successive days and consecrated bishop on Christmas, all within about a week. The canonical objections this raised, and the rival accounts of whether Ignatius resigned or was deposed, are narrated here from both the Eastern and the Western sides.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Fall of Ignatius

The patriarch whom Photius replaced was Ignatius (patriarch 847–858, again 867–877), a son of the emperor Michael I Rangabe who had been castrated and tonsured as a boy after his father’s fall, and who governed the Church with the austere, uncompromising temper of a strict monastic reformer. His very origin shaped the conflict: deprived in childhood of any prospect of the throne and consigned to the monastic life, he became a representative of the rigorist, monastic strain in Byzantine churchmanship, suspicious of accommodation with the worldly power and inclined to draw the lines of discipline sharply (Hussey 1986, ch. 4; ODB, s.v. “Ignatios”). The crisis arose from his collision with Bardas, the Caesar and effective ruler of the empire for his nephew Michael III. Ignatius publicly refused the Caesar Holy Communion, on the charge — which Bardas’s partisans denied — that he was living in an incestuous relationship (Fortescue 1911; J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4). The breach was political as much as moral: Ignatius was identified with the rigorist party and with the fallen regime of the empress Theodora, and Bardas had every reason to want a more pliable patriarch. Behind the personal collision lay a longer fracture in the Constantinopolitan Church between the rigorist or “zealot” tendency, of which Ignatius was now the figurehead, and the more moderate or “economist” tendency that was willing to accommodate the imperial power and to relax discipline for the sake of peace — a division that ran back through the earlier disputes of the century and that would supply the two parties of the schism to come (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; Hussey 1986). Ignatius left the throne on November 23, 857 (Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Ignatios”).

Whether he left or was thrown out is the first of the disputed points, and it is not a trifle, because the canonical legitimacy of everything that follows turns on it.

[Disputed: the Eastern/Photian sources present Ignatius’s departure as a resignation — pressured, but a genuine abdication that left the see canonically vacant and open to a new election (so the acta of the Constantinopolitan synod of 859 and the Orthodox account in “St. Photios the Great, the Photian Council, and Relations with the Roman Church,” OrthoChristian.com); the Western/Ignatian sources present it as an uncanonical deposition, a forcible expulsion of a lawful patriarch who never validly resigned, so that the throne was not in fact vacant and Photius was an intruder (so Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911], following the Ignatian dossier and the Vita Ignatii of Niketas David Paphlagon).]

Six Days from Layman to Patriarch

With the see treated as vacant, the court and a synod settled on Photius — the chief imperial secretary, the most learned man in the empire, and a layman. The choice of a layman of the first rank was, in the circumstances, a deliberate one: with the Church split between the Ignatian rigorists and their opponents, a candidate from neither faction’s clergy, distinguished above all by learning and by service to the state, could be presented as a figure capable of reconciling the parties — though to the Ignatians he was precisely the court’s creature (Dvornik 1948, part I; Hussey 1986). The canons did not permit the consecration of a layman straight to the episcopate; the orders had to be passed through. They were passed through with extraordinary speed. In the standard reconstruction Photius was tonsured a monk and then ordained on successive days reader, subdeacon, deacon, and priest, and consecrated bishop and enthroned as patriarch on Christmas Day, December 25, 858 — the whole passage compressed into about six days (Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Photios”; Fortescue 1911, who dates the consecration to Christmas but assigns it to 857). The modern scholarly consensus places the consecration at Christmas 858; the older Catholic Encyclopedia’s 857 reflects a different reckoning of the year and should be noted as such.

The bishop who presided at the consecration was Gregory Asbestas, the deposed Archbishop of Syracuse — and this is no incidental detail. Gregory was himself under censure: he had been suspended or excommunicated by Ignatius, and the validity of that censure was itself contested. To the Ignatian party, a man under Ignatius’s ban could not validly consecrate anyone; to the Photian party, Gregory’s condemnation by Ignatius had been unjust and was not in force (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986; F. Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I). The consecration thus carried two distinct canonical questions at once: the lawfulness of raising a layman through the orders in days, and the lawfulness of the consecrator.

The Canonical Objections

The objections pressed against the elevation were real, and an honest account names them. They fall into three.

First, the rapid promotion of a neophyte. The ancient discipline, rooted in the apostolic warning against ordaining a recent convert “lest being lifted up with pride he fall” (1 Timothy 3:6) and codified in conciliar canons against ordaining men straight from baptism or the lay state to high office, was designed precisely to prevent what had just happened. The underlying concern of the canons was twofold: that a man should be tested over time in the lower ministries before being entrusted with the higher, and that office should not be seized by the powerful through the rush of ambition or favor — both of which a six-day ascent could be said to violate (on the canonical principle, The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings; Fortescue 1911). To pass a layman to the episcopate in a week was, on its face, a flagrant breach of this discipline. The Photian reply did not deny the rule but appealed to the Church’s long-acknowledged power to relax it by economy in necessity — the same power, its defenders observed, that the Church had exercised without lasting scandal in earlier and revered cases (Dvornik 1948, part I).

Second, the consecration by a censured bishop, Gregory Asbestas, as above.

Third — on the Ignatian reading — the consecration to an occupied see, since on their account Ignatius had never validly ceased to be patriarch.

Against these the Photian side set the weight of precedent and necessity, and here the argument is more than special pleading. The Church had in fact more than once carried a layman swiftly to the patriarchate when circumstances seemed to require it. The nearest and most embarrassing precedent for Photius’s opponents was his own near-kinsman St. Tarasios, who in 784 had likewise been a lay imperial secretary raised through the orders to the patriarchal throne — and who had presided over the Seventh Ecumenical Council and was a canonized saint (Dvornik 1948; OrthoChristian.com, “St. Photios the Great”). The Tarasios precedent was peculiarly awkward for the Ignatian party, because to condemn Photius’s elevation as such was to condemn, on the same principle, the elevation of the very patriarch who had restored the icons and presided at Nicaea II — a man the whole Church held in honor. Beyond Byzantium stood the venerable Western example of St. Ambrose of Milan, carried from the lay state to the episcopate of a great see while still a catechumen in 374, by the acclamation of the people and against his own resistance — a case the Latin Church itself revered, so that the Western critics of Photius could not consistently treat lay elevation as void in principle (Dvornik 1948; on Ambrose, the standard accounts of his election). The Photian case was not that the canons did not exist but that the Church possessed, and had repeatedly exercised, the authority to dispense from them by economy in a grave necessity — and that the elevation of a Tarasios or an Ambrose, far from disgracing the Church, had served it. Economy (oikonomia), in the Eastern understanding, is not the abolition of the canon but the considered relaxation of its strict application by lawful authority for the good of souls, where rigid enforcement would do more harm than the irregularity it would prevent; it is on this principle, not on a denial that any rule had been bent, that the Eastern defense of 858 rests (Dvornik 1948, part I; cf. the discussion of economy in The Rudder, trans. Cummings).

[Disputed: the canonicity of Photius’s elevation. The Western/Ignatian position holds it canonically void — a neophyte rushed through the orders, consecrated by an excommunicate to an occupied see — so that Ignatius remained the only lawful patriarch and Photius a usurper (Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911], following the Ignatian dossier). The Eastern/Photian position holds it irregular but valid, justified by economy and by the explicit precedents of St. Tarasios and St. Ambrose, with Ignatius’s departure treated as a resignation and Gregory Asbestas’s censure as itself unjust; a Constantinopolitan synod of 859 confirmed the election and even reopened the canonicity of Ignatius’s own earlier appointment (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; OrthoChristian.com, “St. Photios the Great”). Both traditions agree on the bare facts — a layman raised in days, consecrated by Gregory Asbestas, on Christmas 858 — and differ on their canonical weight.]

The Shape of the Conflict to Come

Photius’s elevation did not by itself break anything. It created two parties in the Constantinopolitan Church — a Photian majority that accepted the new patriarch and an Ignatian minority that did not — and it opened the way for the dispute to be carried, by both sides, to Rome. That carrying-to-Rome, and the synods of 861, 863, 867, and 869 that grew out of it, is the matter of the next section. What must be held clearly here is that the controversy began not over the Filioque or over the papal primacy in the abstract but over a contested patriarchal succession in Constantinople — a dispute that the canonical irregularity of 858 made acute, and that the appeals to Rome would soon entangle with far larger questions (see Ignatius, Rome, and the Rival Claims).

References

Fortescue, Adrian. “Photius of Constantinople.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911 (newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm). The pre-Dvornik Western account of the deposition of Ignatius, the six-day elevation, and the canonical objections; cited by author and date.
Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948, part I (“History”). On the resignation-versus-deposition question, the Gregory Asbestas consecration, the synod of 859, and the precedent of Tarasios.
Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 4. On Ignatius, Bardas, and the chronology of 857–858.
Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Photios,” “Ignatios,” “Gregory Asbestas.” On the dates and offices.
The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957. For the canonical principle against the rapid promotion of neophytes (the text of the canons, distinct from St. Nikodemos’ commentary).
St. Photios the Great, the Photian Council, and Relations with the Roman Church. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/97929.html). The Orthodox account of the resignation of Ignatius, the synod of 859, and the precedents; an aggregator used to locate the Orthodox conciliar position, cross-checked against Dvornik.