The 867 and 869 Councils

The dramatic middle of the controversy (867–870): the council of 867 that excommunicated and anathematized Pope Nicholas I over the Frankish Filioque in Bulgaria and the claims of Roman primacy; the murder of Michael III and the seizure of the throne by Basil I, who deposed Photius and restored Ignatius to win Roman favor; and the anti-Photian council of 869–870, which condemned Photius and which the Roman Catholic Church counts as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and the Eighth Ecumenical Council — a status the Orthodox Church does not grant it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Council of 867

By 867 the quarrel had outgrown the Constantinopolitan succession. The decisive new element was Bulgaria: the recently converted Khan Boris, frustrated in his bid for an autonomous Church under Constantinople, had turned to Rome in 866, and Latin missionaries sent by Nicholas had entered Bulgaria teaching Western customs and, gravest of all, the Filioque — the addition to the Creed asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” (see Bulgaria and the Jurisdictional Dispute). This was the catalytic change. So long as the dispute concerned the legates, the Constantinopolitan succession, and the jurisdiction over Illyricum, it remained — for all its bitterness — a quarrel over persons and provinces, the kind of conflict the one Church had weathered before. The entry of the Filioque onto formerly Eastern soil, taught to a newly baptized people as the faith of the Church, transformed the controversy: Bulgaria lay within the very Illyrian provinces the popes had long claimed, and the Latin mission there pressed the Roman jurisdictional claim and the Western form of the Creed together, so that for Photius the territorial grievance and the doctrinal grievance now stood as one (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; Hussey 1986, ch. 4). For Photius this was no longer a disciplinary or jurisdictional matter but a corruption of the faith on Eastern soil. In 867 he issued his Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs, summoning the other patriarchs to a council and indicting the Latin innovations — fasting practices, clerical celibacy, the manner of confirmation, and above all the altered Creed — with the Filioque named the gravest (treated theologically in The Encyclical of 867).

A council duly met in Constantinople in the summer of 867. Convened by the emperor Michael III and Photius — with Basil, lately raised to co-emperor, associated with its acts — it pronounced Pope Nicholas I deposed, excommunicate, and anathematized, condemned his claims over Bulgaria and his interference in the East, and issued the first formal conciliar condemnation by the Eastern Church of the Filioque (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Council of 867”). It was an extraordinary act — a council of the Eastern Church declaring a reigning pope a heretic — and it marked the high-water mark of the rupture. The condemnation was framed not as the founding of a new and separate Church but as a judgment passed upon a particular pope for particular errors, in the manner the Eastern Church understood its councils to be able to judge any see that fell into novelty; this is why the anathema could later be undone without anyone supposing that two Churches were thereby reunited (Dvornik 1948, part I; Hussey 1986). Nicholas, however, died in Rome in November 867 before word of his condemnation reached him — so that the pope who had reversed his own legates and deposed Photius, and the patriarch who had now anathematized that pope, each passed from the scene of this phase without ever submitting to the other’s sentence.

The Fall of Photius

Within weeks the political ground gave way beneath Photius entirely. In September 867 Basil the Macedonian — a former groom and favorite who had already engineered the murder of the Caesar Bardas in 866 — assassinated his benefactor, the emperor Michael III, and seized the throne as Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Basil I”). The new emperor, a usurper with blood on his hands, needed legitimacy, and legitimacy in the Christian world could be had from Rome. The reasoning of the coup runs directly into the ecclesiastical history that follows: a man who had murdered his way to the purple required, above all things, recognition — the acknowledgment of his rule by the great sees of Christendom — and the surest source of such recognition was the apostolic see he might so recently have feared. Photius, the patriarch who had just anathematized the pope and who was bound to the murdered regime, stood squarely in the way of any rapprochement with the West (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948, part I; Hussey 1986). His removal was therefore the price of Basil’s reconciliation with Rome, and the new emperor paid it without hesitation. Basil deposed Photius almost at once, around the end of September 867, and restored the aged Ignatius to the patriarchal throne on November 23, 867 (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Ignatios”). The whole sequence — anathema, murder, coup, deposition, restoration — unfolded within a few months, and its driving force was less the rights of the rival patriarchs than the political necessities of a usurper in search of legitimacy (Dvornik 1948; Hussey 1986).

[Disputed: the character of Photius’s deposition in 867. The Eastern account holds it was a purely political act — Basil sacrificing a canonically legitimate patriarch to purchase Roman recognition after a bloody coup, with no genuine ecclesiastical fault on Photius’s part (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], part I; OrthoChristian.com, “St. Photios the Great”). The Western/Ignatian account holds it the overdue restoration of the rightful patriarch Ignatius, whose uncanonical expulsion in 858 had never been validly remedied (Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911]).]

The Council of 869–870

To consolidate the reconciliation with Rome and to settle the Photian question against Photius, Basil and the restored Ignatius convoked a council at Constantinople, which sat in ten sessions from October 5, 869, to February 28, 870. Pope Hadrian II (Nicholas’s successor) sent legates — Donatus, Stephen, and Marinus (the last a future pope) — who brought with them the Formula of Hormisdas, a sixth-century profession of Roman faith and primacy, and required the assembled bishops to sign it as a condition of participation (Fortescue 1911; Fourth Council of Constantinople (869–870), in the acts, Mansi; papalencyclicals.net). The requirement of this signature is itself a window onto the character of the council and onto why the two traditions value it so differently. The Formula of Hormisdas had been composed to end the Acacian schism in the early sixth century, and its language is among the strongest patristic-era assertions of the Roman see’s freedom from error and of its primacy; to make subscription to it the price of admission was to demand that the assembled Eastern bishops endorse a high Roman conception of the papacy before they could take their seats (Fortescue 1911; the acts, Mansi). For the West this lends the council its dignity as an affirmation of papal authority; for the East it marks the proceeding as one staged on Roman terms under imperial compulsion rather than freely deliberated (Dvornik 1948; Hussey 1986). The council was small — attendance never exceeded about a hundred and three bishops, and at its opening far fewer — a fact later Orthodox writers would stress against its claim to ecumenicity, the more pointedly because the council that would reverse it a decade later gathered nearly four hundred (Hussey 1986; Dvornik 1948).

The council condemned, deposed, and anathematized Photius, who appeared before it but refused to defend himself in its terms, declined to answer his accusers, and (the acts report) met its questions largely with silence. That silence has been read both ways: as the contumacy of a condemned man and as the calculated dignity of a patriarch who would not lend the proceeding the appearance of a trial he recognized — and the acts preserve, in the Eastern memory, a few words attributed to him to the effect that his vindication was not of this world (the acts, Mansi; Dvornik 1948). The council confirmed Ignatius, renewed the Roman excommunications, and ordered the acts of Photius’s own 867 council to be destroyed; the records were burned during the proceedings. The burning is a detail of more than dramatic interest: it is one reason the 867 council is so poorly attested, and it stands as an early instance of the documentary destruction and manipulation that Dvornik would later show to have shaped the whole surviving record of the controversy (the acts, Mansi; Dvornik 1948). The council issued twenty-seven canons of discipline (Fortescue 1911; the acts, Mansi; Hussey 1986).

This is the council whose status the two traditions reckon so differently — the sharpest single instance of the disputed conciliar history.

[Disputed: whether the council of 869–870 is an Ecumenical Council. The Roman Catholic Church counts it as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and the Eighth Ecumenical Council, included in its canonical list of the ecumenical synods (the acts, Mansi; papalencyclicals.net, “Fourth Council of Constantinople 869–870”). The Orthodox Church does not recognize it as ecumenical, and indeed its decisions against Photius were formally annulled by the later council of 879–880 (see The Council of Union); Orthodox tradition reserves the title “Eighth” — where it is used at all — for 879–880 (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848; OrthodoxWiki, “Eighth Ecumenical Council”). Both traditions agree on a striking historical fact, established by Dvornik: the West itself did not originally count 869–870 among the ecumenical councils; it entered the Western canonical lists only later, around the era of the Gregorian Reform in the eleventh century, when its strong affirmations of papal primacy made it useful (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948]; A. E. Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]).]

The Reversal to Come

The condemnation of 869–870 was not the end of the story, and to read it as such is precisely the error of the older Western narrative. Ignatius and Photius were reconciled before Ignatius’s death; on his repose in 877 Photius returned to the patriarchal throne with the recognition of a new pope; and in 879–880 a far larger council in Hagia Sophia, with papal legates present, annulled the acts of 869–870 and restored Photius’s name and standing. That council, and the canon on the Creed that came out of it, are the matter of Section 07. The two synods of this file — 867 and 869 — represent the controversy at its most acute: a mutual anathema and a condemnation, framed at the time by all parties as reversible disciplinary acts within one Church, and only later, by the polemical tradition, hardened into the image of a permanent and dogmatic schism.

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 of the 867 council, the fall of Photius, and the 869–870 council; cited by author and date.
  • Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948, part I. On the politics of 867, the deposition of Photius, and the later entry of 869–870 into the Western ecumenical lists.
  • Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 4. On the chronology of 867–870 and the council of 869–870.
  • Mansi, J. D. Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 16. The acts of the council of 869–870 (the Western “Fourth Council of Constantinople”).
  • Fourth Council of Constantinople (869–870). Papal Encyclicals Online (papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum08.htm). The Western canonical text and numbering as the Eighth Ecumenical Council; used to document the Western position.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On the later Western reckoning of 869–870 as ecumenical.
  • Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Photios,” “Basil I,” “Ignatios,” “Council of 869–870.” On dates and persons.
  • Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848). For the Orthodox reckoning of the ecumenical councils; cited for the Eastern position on the “Eighth Council.”