The Scholar and Statesman

Photius before the patriarchate: a son of one of the great families of Constantinople, raised in an iconophile household that had suffered for the icons; kin to the iconophile Patriarch Tarasios on one side and to the iconoclast Patriarch John the Grammarian on the other; an imperial secretary, senator, and ambassador who became, by common verdict, the most learned man of his age. This is the formation that made it conceivable, and to many scandalous, that a layman should be raised to the throne of Constantinople.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

A Constantinopolitan Family of the First Rank

Photius (Greek Phōtios, “the enlightened”) was born into the Byzantine aristocracy of the capital, by the usual reckoning around 810, though the year is not securely fixed and estimates range across the first two decades of the ninth century (Adrian Fortescue, “Photius of Constantinople,” Catholic Encyclopedia 12 [1911]; A. Kazhdan, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium [1991], s.v. “Photios”). His father, Sergios, held the court rank of spatharios; the family was wealthy, well-connected, and — the point on which everything in his formation turns — conspicuously committed to the holy images during the last and bitterest phase of Byzantine iconoclasm (Fortescue 1911; Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius [1958], introduction). The Orthodox tradition venerates Sergios, together with his wife Eirene, as confessors who suffered for the icons under the iconoclast emperors; their commemoration is kept on May 13 (OrthodoxWiki, “Photius the Great,” following the synaxarion). Photius would later speak of his parents as confessors and his own birth as that of a child of persecution, a self-understanding that colored his lifelong identification with Orthodoxy against innovation.

To grasp what this meant one has to recall the temper of the second iconoclasm. After the icons had been restored at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, the policy was reimposed under Leo V in 815 and pressed, with renewed vigor, through the reigns of Michael II and Theophilus until the final “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843 (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Iconoclasm”). Photius’s whole boyhood and youth thus fell within a generation in which holding to the images was a matter not of mere opinion but of fidelity under pressure: the families that suffered confiscation, exile, or worse for the icons formed a recognizable confessing party, and Photius belonged to it by birth. The household that shaped him was one in which the contested questions of the day — the lawfulness of the image, the authority of the Fathers, the limits of imperial power over doctrine — were not academic but lived. It is no small thing for understanding the later patriarch that he came out of the persecuted side of the iconoclast struggle rather than out of the imperially favored one; the man who would later resist what he took to be innovation in the Creed had been formed in a house that had resisted what it took to be innovation in the cult.

The family’s place in the ecclesiastical history of the age was doubled and, to a modern eye, ironic. On one side Photius was kin to St. Tarasios, Patriarch of Constantinople (784–806), the iconophile patriarch who had presided over the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 and restored the veneration of icons. The exact degree of the relationship is uncertain in the sources: Photius himself used the Greek theios, which strictly means a paternal uncle but in usage could extend to a great-uncle, and modern reconstructions accordingly render Tarasios variously as his uncle, great-uncle, or great-granduncle (Fortescue 1911, who gives “uncle or great-uncle”; ODB, s.v. “Photios”). The safest statement is that Tarasios was a near forebear on the paternal side, and that Photius’s iconophile pedigree ran directly to the patriarch of the Seventh Council. On the other side, his mother’s family connected him to John VII the Grammarian, the formidably learned iconoclast patriarch (837–843) — so that the boy who grew into the great champion of the images was, by blood, near both the chief iconophile and the chief iconoclast patriarchs of the iconoclast century (ODB, s.v. “Photios”; Fortescue 1911). The learning that ran in the family ran on both sides of the divide.

The Most Erudite Man of Byzantium

What set Photius apart, by the testimony of friend and foe alike, was the range and depth of his learning. He stands at the head of the ninth-century Byzantine intellectual revival — the so-called “first Byzantine humanism” — and his contemporaries and later historians have called him simply the most learned man of his age (N. G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983], ch. 5; Mango 1958, introduction). His erudition was not narrow: it spanned theology and biblical exegesis, the whole of classical Greek literature — historians, orators, philosophers — together with grammar, rhetoric, law, medicine, and the natural sciences. The single greatest monument to that reading is the Bibliotheca (or Myriobiblon), his collection of summaries and critical notices of some two hundred and eighty books he had read, compiled for his brother Tarasios before he ever entered the clergy and treated in its own place (see The Myriobiblon). To it belong also his Lexicon and his vast collection of answered theological and philosophical questions, the Amphilochia (see The Lexicon and the Amphilochia).

The phrase “first Byzantine humanism,” given currency by Paul Lemerle’s study of that title, names a particular cultural fact: in the ninth century, after the long dearth of the iconoclast and pre-iconoclast crises, the secular learning of antiquity was recovered, copied, and studied with fresh seriousness in Constantinople, and the older majuscule books were transcribed into the new compact minuscule hand that preserved them for posterity (Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin [1971]; Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983]). Photius is the central figure of this recovery on the side of reading and judgment — not chiefly as a copyist but as the reader who had absorbed the inheritance and could weigh it. What is distinctive about his learning, and what the Bibliotheca makes plain, is that it was not antiquarian piety but critical: he read pagan and Christian authors alike with an eye to style, reliability, and argument, and he did not hesitate to register a verdict (Wilson 1983; Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca [1994], introduction). This was a Christian appropriation of the classical heritage that took it seriously enough to assess it, and it is the intellectual atmosphere in which the future patriarch was formed and in which he in turn formed others.

He was, in the strict sense, a man of the book in an age when books were scarce and costly. The reading documented in the Bibliotheca presupposes access to a great body of texts — his own collection and those of the circle around him — at a moment when such access was itself a mark of standing and labor (Wilson 1994; Lemerle 1971). That a layman in imperial service should command this range of reading, and command it critically, is precisely what made his learning a public fact rather than a private accomplishment, and what lent weight to the later judgment that the most cultivated mind in the empire ought not to be passed over for its highest office.

He was, moreover, a teacher. Most scholars hold that he did not occupy a chair in any imperial school but rather gathered students in his own house, which became a center of learning frequented by the brightest young men of the capital — among them, by reliable association, Constantine the Philosopher, the future St. Cyril, apostle to the Slavs, who studied and worked in the same Constantinopolitan circle of letters (Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium; D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth [1971]; see Cyril and Methodius). The famous personal library that lies behind the Bibliotheca is itself testimony to the scale of his reading. To a degree unusual for a churchman, Photius’s authority rested first on intellect.

Imperial Secretary and Senator

Before he was a cleric Photius was a statesman. He rose in the imperial administration to the high office of prōtasēkrētis — first or chief secretary of state, the head of the imperial chancery — and held the dignity of prōtospatharios and a seat in the Senate (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Photios”). The asēkrētis (from the Latin a secretis) was a confidential imperial secretary, and the prōtasēkrētis who stood at the head of that corps directed the drafting of the emperor’s documents and the keeping of the chancery — an office at the very center of the bureaucratic state, requiring exactly the command of language, law, and learning that Photius possessed in abundance (ODB, s.v. “asekretis,” “protasekretis”; Fortescue 1911). His dignities of prōtospatharios and senatorial rank placed him formally among the highest ranks of the Byzantine court hierarchy. In the Byzantine order these civil dignities and offices were not honorifics merely but the structure of governance itself, and to hold them was to belong to the small educated elite from which the empire drew both its administrators and, not infrequently, its bishops. He served the regime of the empress-regent Theodora and her brother Bardas, the powerful Caesar who in effect governed for the young emperor Michael III and who was the chief patron of the cultural revival — the same Bardas associated with the reorganization of higher studies at the capital, in whose ambit Photius’s own learned circle moved (Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983]; ODB, s.v. “Bardas”). Photius’s standing was such that he was sent on at least one major diplomatic embassy — the sources connect the genesis of the Bibliotheca with a mission to “the Assyrians,” generally understood as the Abbasid court, though the dating and even the historicity of the embassy are debated (Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca [1994], introduction; on the debate, P. Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin [1971]).

This is the decisive fact for what follows. When the patriarchate fell vacant at the end of 858, the candidate the court turned to was not a monk or a bishop but its own most distinguished lay servant — a senator, a chancery chief, and the most celebrated scholar in the empire, but a layman who had never received any holy order. That a man of such standing and learning could be thought a fit patriarch is intelligible only against the Byzantine sense of the unity of the Christian polity, in which the highest secular and ecclesiastical service drew on the same educated elite; that he was nonetheless a layman is the root of the canonical storm that broke at once (see Raised to the Patriarchate (858)). The case was, in truth, less unprecedented than the bare shock of a layman-patriarch suggests. His own near-kinsman St. Tarasios had been raised from precisely the same office of imperial secretary to the patriarchal throne in 784, and Tarasios had gone on to preside over an ecumenical council and to be numbered among the saints (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Tarasios”). In a polity that did not draw the modern sharp line between the formation of a churchman and the formation of a statesman — both being grounded in the same culture of letters, Scripture, and law — the elevation of a learned senator to the highest see was a known, if always contestable, expedient. Photius came to the throne of Constantinople as the embodiment of Byzantine learning and Byzantine statecraft — and as a man who, his enemies never tired of repeating, had until a few days before been no churchman at all.

See Also

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; used here for the family, the lay career, and the kinship to Tarasios, cited by author and date.
  • Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Photios,” “Tarasios.” On the dates, offices, and family.
  • Mango, Cyril. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Introduction, on the family and the iconophile context.
  • Wilson, N. G. Scholars of Byzantium. London: Duckworth, 1983, ch. 5. On Photius’s learning, teaching, and library.
  • Wilson, N. G. Photius: The Bibliotheca. A Selection Translated with Notes. London: Duckworth, 1994. Introduction, on the embassy and the genesis of the Bibliotheca.
  • Lemerle, Paul. Le premier humanisme byzantin. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. On the debate over the embassy and the date of the Bibliotheca.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. On the Constantinopolitan learned circle and Constantine the Philosopher.
  • Photius the Great. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Photios_the_Great); used to locate the synaxarion commemoration of Sergios and Eirene (May 13) and cross-checked against the published menaion tradition.