Ignatius, Rome, and the Rival Claims

The first phase of the Photian controversy (858–863): the formation of an Ignatian party that refused to accept Photius, the appeals of both sides to Pope Nicholas I, the Roman legates sent to investigate, the Constantinopolitan council of 861 that confirmed Photius, and the Roman synod of 863 at which Nicholas reversed his legates and deposed Photius. This is the matter on which the Eastern and Western traditions divide most sharply, and it is narrated here with both sides sourced. The phase is jurisdictional and procedural before it is doctrinal: at issue is who holds the throne of Constantinople and who may judge that question, and beneath it the older grievance over the ecclesiastical provinces of Illyricum — questions that, on the modern reckoning, become a dogmatic quarrel only later, with Bulgaria and the Creed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

Two Patriarchs, Two Parties

The elevation of Photius in 858 (see Raised to the Patriarchate) split the Church of Constantinople. A majority accepted the new patriarch; a minority — the rigorist, monastic-leaning party that had been Ignatius’s strength — refused, holding that Ignatius was still the only lawful patriarch and that he had been uncanonically expelled. The deposed Ignatius, in exile, became the rallying-point of this party, and the charges and counter-charges quickly hardened into a full-blown ecclesial dispute, with two men each claiming to be the rightful patriarch of the imperial city (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4).

The division was not a simple split between rival factions of equal kind. The Ignatian party drew its strength from the zealot, monastic tradition that valued rigor and independence from the imperial court, while the Photian side gathered the moderates and the bulk of the episcopate who had accepted the change of patriarch under imperial authority (Dvornik 1948, part I; Hussey 1986, ch. 4). The substance of the quarrel was, at this stage, neither doctrine nor the Creed but the canonical regularity of two successive patriarchal accessions: whether Ignatius’s resignation under pressure had been valid, and whether Photius’s swift elevation from the lay state — passing in days through the grades of the clergy — could stand. These were procedural questions, and it is precisely their procedural character that makes the appeals that followed so revealing of how the ninth-century Church understood the ordering of its highest sees (Dvornik 1948; Fortescue 1911).

Both parties did what the order of the Church in such a case prescribed: they appealed beyond Constantinople, and in particular to Rome. This is a fact of the first importance, and one that the Orthodox sources themselves stress, because it shows the standing the see of Rome held even in the eyes of those who would shortly anathematize its pope: both Photius and his imperial patrons, and the Ignatian party against them, wrote to Pope Nicholas I (858–867) and acknowledged in their letters the primacy and the judicial standing of the Roman see (Fortescue 1911, who notes that the letters “emphatically acknowledge the Roman primacy”; Dvornik 1948). That both sides should turn westward at once is the kind of detail the polemical traditions have rarely known what to do with: the Ignatians appealed to Rome believing the apostolic see would vindicate their wronged patriarch, and the Photians and the emperor wrote because the recognition of the pope would confer on the new patriarchate an authority no purely domestic synod could supply (Dvornik 1948; Fortescue 1911). The two traditions would later read this shared recourse in opposite ways — the West as proof of Rome’s settled jurisdiction over the East; the Orthodox Church as the honoring of a primacy of authority within a communion of equals rather than a court of unappealable jurisdiction — and the latter is not, for this guide, merely one reading among two: the Church has never received the Roman claim of a settled, unappealable jurisdiction over the East (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology [1974]).

The Appeals to Nicholas I and the Legates

Photius’s own letter to Nicholas, accompanying the customary synodical announcement of his accession, was a model of courtesy; the emperor Michael III wrote as well, inviting the pope to send representatives to a council that would, among other things, settle the residue of the iconoclast controversy. Nicholas — a pope of exceptionally high conception of the Roman office — saw in the invitation an opportunity to assert Rome’s right to judge the affairs of Constantinople, and he replied by sending two legates, Rodoald, Bishop of Porto, and Zachary, Bishop of Anagni, with instructions to investigate the deposition of Ignatius and the election of Photius and to report back to him before any final judgment was given (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948). The terms of this commission are the hinge of all that follows, and both traditions agree on their general shape: the legates were sent to inquire, to gather the facts of the two patriarchates, and to bring their findings back to Rome for the pope’s own decision — not to pronounce a final and binding sentence on the spot (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948). The distance between investigating-and-reporting and judging-and-deciding is the whole substance of the later quarrel over the legates’ conduct, and the reason Nicholas could claim that whatever they had assented to at Constantinople was beyond their authority to settle.

In the same letters Nicholas pressed two long-standing Roman grievances against Constantinople that would run beneath the whole controversy: the return to Roman jurisdiction of the provinces of Illyricum, Sicily, and Calabria, which Byzantium had transferred to Constantinople in the previous century (Dvornik 1948; Hussey 1986). This jurisdictional substrate is easy to lose behind the high drama of the patriarchal quarrel, but it is never far beneath the surface. The iconoclast emperors had detached these territories — the Balkan provinces of eastern Illyricum together with Sicily and southern Italy — from the patrimony of Rome and placed them under Constantinople, and the popes had never accepted the loss (Dvornik 1948; Hussey 1986). Nicholas, in tying his recognition of any settlement at Constantinople to the recovery of these provinces, made plain that the Roman interest in the Photian affair was bound up with a jurisdictional claim of the first magnitude — and Illyricum, with Bulgaria astride it, would become the very ground on which the quarrel turned doctrinal a few years later (Dvornik 1948; see Bulgaria and the Jurisdictional Dispute).

The Council of 861 (the Prōtodeutera)

The legates arrived and, with them present, a great council met at Constantinople in 861 — the synod known in the Orthodox canonical tradition as the Prōtodeutera, the “First-and-Second” Council, held in the Church of the Holy Apostles. The title “First-and-Second” was understood to mark a council that completed and confirmed an earlier session, so that the two together formed a single canonical act — a detail that itself testifies to the regularity the assembly claimed for its work (the Prōtodeutera canons, in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings; ODB, s.v. “Council of 861”). The council examined the case, deposed Ignatius (who appeared and was condemned, on the Photian account, for canonical irregularities in his own original appointment), and confirmed Photius as the lawful patriarch. It also issued seventeen disciplinary canons that entered the received canonical corpus of the Orthodox Church and remain authoritative there to this day, dealing with monastic discipline, the founding of monasteries, and — in its celebrated fifteenth canon — the limits of lawful separation from a bishop (the Prōtodeutera canons, in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings; Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Council of 861”).

That a council convened to settle a bitter succession dispute should leave as its lasting monument not its verdict on the persons but its body of disciplinary law is itself significant. The fifteenth canon, much cited since, distinguishes lawful separation from a bishop who openly preaches heresy from the schismatic separation that is merely faction (the Prōtodeutera canons, in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings; Hussey 1986). The survival of these canons in the Orthodox corpus is a quiet but telling fact: the Eastern Church continued to receive as authoritative the disciplinary work of the very council whose confirmation of Photius the West would shortly declare void (Hussey 1986; the canons in The Rudder). The two Roman legates took part in these proceedings and assented to the confirmation of Photius — and their assent, given with the apparent authority of the apostolic see, is what made the council’s standing so difficult for Rome to undo by simple repudiation.

The Roman Synod of 863 and Nicholas’s Reversal

When the legates returned to Rome, Nicholas was displeased: they had, in his judgment, exceeded their commission. He had sent them to investigate and report, not to render a final sentence confirming Photius, and he refused to be bound by what they had done. At a Roman synod in 863 (held at the Lateran) Nicholas repudiated his own legates — degrading and excommunicating them — declared the acts of 861 null, pronounced Ignatius the lawful patriarch and Photius deposed and stripped of all clerical rank, and threatened excommunication against any who would not submit. From this position, in Fortescue’s phrase, “Rome never wavered” through the rest of Nicholas’s life (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948; Hussey 1986).

The 863 synod is the true point of rupture in this first phase, and its logic turns on opposite assumptions about what a legation is. On Nicholas’s view, a legate carries the pope’s voice only within the bounds of his instructions; what is done beyond those bounds is the legate’s own act and not the pope’s, and so binds no one. The legates had been told to inquire and report; in assenting to a final judgment they had spoken outside their mandate, and Nicholas was therefore free — indeed obliged — to set their assent aside and render the judgment himself (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948). On the Eastern view, a great council that had met with the recognized representatives of all the patriarchates, the pope’s included, could not be undone by the after-the-fact displeasure of one see acting alone; the rupture lay not in the council but in Nicholas’s unilateral reversal of it (Dvornik 1948; Meyendorff 1974). Either way, the practical effect was the same: the dispute over a Constantinopolitan succession had become a direct collision between the pope and the patriarch, and behind it stood the unresolved questions of jurisdiction over Illyricum and of the reach of Roman judgment over the affairs of the East. Photius did not yet respond with anathema; that would come only in 867, when Bulgaria and the Creed turned the quarrel from a matter of persons and provinces into a matter of the faith (Dvornik 1948; see The 867 and 869 Councils).

The Rival Accounts

Here the two traditions tell genuinely different stories, and the honest course is to set them side by side.

[Disputed: the conduct and standing of the legates Rodoald and Zachary at the council of 861. The Western/Ignatian account holds that the legates had been corrupted — “took heavy bribes,” in the older telling — and in any case exceeded their mandate, which was to report and not to judge; their consent to Photius was therefore void, and Nicholas rightly disowned them in 863 (Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911], following the Ignatian dossier). The Eastern account holds that the legates conducted a proper investigation and rightly confirmed Photius, that no contemporary evidence of bribery exists, and that the rupture was created not by the legates or by Photius but by Nicholas’s unilateral reversal at the 863 synod and by Rome’s larger ambition over Illyricum and the Eastern jurisdiction (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; OrthoChristian.com, “St. Photios the Great”).]

[Disputed: whether Nicholas’s 863 deposition of Photius was a lawful exercise of Roman primatial judgment or an unwarranted intrusion. The Western position is that Rome, as the apostolic see of final appeal, was entitled to review and reverse the Constantinopolitan synod and to restore the wronged Ignatius (Fortescue 1911). The Eastern position is that Rome had no canonical authority to overturn, by its own act, the decision of a properly constituted Eastern council confirmed by the patriarchs of the East, and that Nicholas’s claim to do so was itself the innovation at issue (Dvornik 1948; J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology [1974], on Eastern conciliarism versus Roman primacy). The two readings rest on the deeper, unresolved disagreement over the nature of the Roman primacy that the controversy brought to the surface.]

What both traditions now grant, after Dvornik, is that this first phase was a quarrel over a contested succession and over jurisdiction — not yet the dogmatic rupture it would briefly become in 867, and not the permanent “schism” of the later legend (see The Dvornik Rehabilitation). The catalyst that turned a jurisdictional quarrel into a doctrinal one was Bulgaria, and to that the next file turns.

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 appeals, the legates, and the 861 and 863 synods; cited by author and date.
Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948, part I (“History”). On the appeals to Rome, the legates, the council of 861, the 863 reversal, and the Illyricum question; the central modern reassessment.
Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 4. On the chronology and the conciliar sequence.
The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957. For the seventeen canons of the Prōtodeutera (861), received in the Orthodox canonical corpus.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. On Eastern conciliarism and the disagreement over the Roman primacy.
Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Photios,” “Ignatios,” “Council of 861.” On dates and canons.
St. Photios the Great, the Photian Council, and Relations with the Roman Church. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/97929.html). The Orthodox account of the legates and the rupture; an aggregator used to locate the Orthodox position, cross-checked against Dvornik.