The Encyclical of 867

Photius’s Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs of 867, his first public indictment of the Latin innovations and the document that turned a jurisdictional quarrel into a doctrinal one. Occasioned by the Frankish missionaries in Bulgaria who were adding the Filioque to the Creed and imposing Latin customs, the Encyclical catalogues the Western errors, names the Filioque the gravest, and summons the patriarchs of the East to a council. It is the seed of which the Mystagogy is the mature fruit.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Occasion

In 866 the Frankish and Latin missionaries dispatched to Bulgaria by Pope Nicholas I — among them the future Pope Formosus — had begun to undo the work of the Greek clergy who had brought Boris’s people into the Church, re-baptizing or re-confirming converts, denouncing Byzantine usages, and, most seriously, teaching the Creed with the Filioque, the addition “and the Son” to the article on the procession of the Holy Spirit (see Bulgaria and the Jurisdictional Dispute). The setting gave the grievance its sting. Bulgaria was new ground, evangelized from Constantinople and only just gathered into the Church; for Latin clergy to arrive in its train and instruct the freshly baptized that the Greek baptism and chrismation they had received were defective, while teaching them an altered Creed, was felt at Constantinople not as a parallel mission but as an invasion of a young Church and a contradiction of the faith into which it had been born (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4; Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948]). For Photius this crossed a line that the jurisdictional disputes of 858–863 had not. Those earlier quarrels with Rome had turned on his own election and on the legates’ standing — questions of order and authority; what was now at issue was the Symbol of the faith itself, taught corrupt to new converts. A corruption of the Creed was being taught on territory recently won for Orthodoxy, and it was being taught with Roman sanction. In 867 he responded with a circular letter addressed to the patriarchal thrones of the East — Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — calling them to common counsel against the Latin innovations and summoning a council (Fortescue 1911; Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4).

The Encyclical survives among Photius’s correspondence; in the critical edition of his letters it is Epistle 2 (Photius, Epistulae et Amphilochia, ed. Laourdas and Westerink, vol. I, pp. 39–53). It is the first formal statement of the Eastern doctrinal grievances against the West that would define the controversy and echo down the later history of the schism.

The Catalogue of Latin Errors

The Encyclical lists the practices the Frankish missionaries had introduced in Bulgaria, presenting them as departures from the apostolic tradition. The principal grievances are these (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; summarized in Fortescue 1911):

The Saturday fast. The Latins fasted on Saturdays, against the Eastern observance; Photius condemns this by appeal to the apostolic canon forbidding the Saturday fast (Apostolic Canon 64).
The shortening of Lent. They began the Lenten fast a week later and reckoned its weeks differently from the Eastern practice.
The disparagement of married priests. The Latins taught the faithful to despise priests who were married, pressing clerical celibacy as though married clergy were unworthy — which Photius treats as touching on a Manichaean contempt for marriage.
The reservation of chrismation to bishops. The Latins re-anointed, or required a second anointing by a bishop (confirmation) of those whom Greek priests had already chrismated, denying that a priest may administer the seal of the Spirit — and so, in effect, treating the Eastern sacrament as invalid. Photius challenges the warrant: from what lawgiver, apostle, Father, or synod does this come?

These four are the disciplinary and customary complaints. The catalogue is, in its first four heads, a list of practices — fasts, the reckoning of Lent, the discipline of the married clergy, the administration of chrismation — and Photius presents them as departures from the apostolic tradition the East had received, breaches of the common usage of the Church rather than corruptions of the faith (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; Fortescue 1911). His tone toward them is sharp but measured: he asks repeatedly by what authority — what apostle, Father, or synod — the Latins justify the novelty, the same demand for warrant that runs through all his anti-Latin writing (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53). They matter, and the re-chrismation in particular touches on the validity of an Eastern sacrament; but Photius is clear that they are not of one order with the fifth. The first four concern custom and discipline, where local variety has long been tolerated in the Church; the fifth concerns the faith itself, and admits no toleration. The whole rhetorical architecture of the Encyclical is built to bring the reader to that fifth charge as the summit and to make the customary grievances its foothills.

The Filioque as the Gravest Error

Above all the customary differences Photius sets the Filioque. The addition of “and the Son” to the Creed’s article on the procession of the Holy Spirit is, he writes, the crown and summit of the Latin errors — not a difference of custom but a corruption of the faith itself, a tampering with the Symbol that the ecumenical councils had fixed and forbidden anyone to alter. He calls it the chief and gravest of the novelties, the head of all the lawless deeds, and presses that whereas a difference of fast or discipline does not wound the faith, an addition to the Creed strikes at the confession by which the Church knows itself orthodox (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; Fortescue 1911). The addition, he argues, introduces two principles into the Holy Trinity and so assails the monarchy of the Father, the single source of the Godhead (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; Fortescue 1911, who renders the charge that “they have added the filioque to the creed”). Already in 867, then, the two pillars of the later Eastern case are present in germ: the dogmatic objection that the double procession multiplies the principle and so subverts the monarchy of the Father, and the canonical objection that no one may add to the Creed which the councils sealed. The dogmatic argument is here in compressed, polemical form what the Mystagogy would later unfold at length (see The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit); the difference is one of scale and depth, not of substance — the seed and the full-grown tree. The Encyclical is the indictment; the Mystagogy is the brief.

A point of historical precision belongs here, and the better scholarship insists on it. In 867 Rome itself had not yet officially inserted the Filioque into its own recitation of the Creed; the official Roman adoption of the interpolated Creed is usually dated only to 1014. What had happened was that the addition, long current in the Frankish and Spanish churches, was being carried into Bulgaria by missionaries operating under Roman authority, and that Nicholas had permitted them to do so. The interpolation had spread northward from Visigothic Spain through the Frankish realms across the eighth and ninth centuries, and the Carolingian court had pressed it as orthodox even where Rome demurred; indeed the popes of the period — Leo III most famously — had defended the doctrine of the double procession while resisting the insertion of the word into the Creed, the very distinction on which the 867 situation turns (Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]; Haugh, Photius and the Carolingians [1975]). Photius’s protest is thus aimed at a Latin practice that Rome tolerated and exported rather than at a settled Roman dogmatic definition — a distinction that the later Orthodox and Catholic accounts of the affair both, in their better moments, acknowledge (Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]; on the dating of the Roman adoption, the same). The precision cuts in both directions. It does not soften Photius’s theological objection, for the doctrine he attacked was indeed taught in the West and sanctioned by Rome’s missionaries; but it does mean that the 867 quarrel cannot be described as a protest against the Roman Creed, which still ran without the addition. It locates the dispute accurately: the issue was the addition’s spread under Roman sanction in a contested mission field, not yet its formal definition at Rome — a definition that would come only generations later, and against which the principle Photius helped enshrine at 879–880 would then be invoked (see The Repudiation of the Filioque Addition).

The Call to a Council and the Sequel

The Encyclical does not merely complain; it summons. Its appeal to the other patriarchal thrones is itself a theological act: against the rising Frankish and Roman claim that doctrine might be settled by the West, Photius invokes the older conciliar principle that a question touching the faith of the whole Church must be judged by the whole Church in council, the patriarchs of the East taking common counsel (Photius, Encyclical = Ep. 2; ed. Laourdas–Westerink I, 39–53; Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4). He calls on the Eastern patriarchs to send representatives to a synod that would judge the Latin innovations in common, and that council duly met in Constantinople later in 867 — the synod that pronounced Pope Nicholas I anathematized and issued the first conciliar Eastern condemnation of the Filioque (see The 867 and 869 Councils). The Encyclical and its council together mark the moment when the Filioque entered the formal record of the East–West dispute as a matter of doctrine and not merely of custom — and they set the pattern, conciliar and pan-Eastern, on which the East would insist down to the present: that the addition is to be undone where it was made, by a council of the whole Church.

A note on the text’s transmission is warranted under the methodology’s care for provenance. Some scholars have observed that the Filioque passage sits a little awkwardly in the letter’s structure and have raised the question of its exact placement or possible expansion in transmission; and it is noted that in 867 Photius shows comparatively little acquaintance with the Latin patristic background that he would marshal in the Mystagogy two decades later. These are points about the text’s composition and Photius’s development, not grounds to doubt that the Encyclical raised the Filioque as its chief charge — which the manuscript tradition and the council that followed both attest (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology [1974]; Studia Orientalia Christiana 19/1 [2015], on the relation of Encyclical and Mystagogy). The honest summary is that the Encyclical of 867 is Photius’s first and occasion-driven statement of the case the Mystagogy would make in full, and that with it the Filioque became, and remained, the central dogmatic issue dividing the Churches.

References

Photius. Epistulae et Amphilochia, ed. B. Laourdas and L. G. Westerink, vol. I. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983. The Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs is Epistle 2 (pp. 39–53), the critical text used here.
Fortescue, Adrian. “Photius of Constantinople.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911 (newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm). For the catalogue of grievances and the naming of the Filioque; cited by author and date.
Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 4. On the occasion and the council of 867.
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On the state of the Filioque at Rome in 867 and the dating of the official Roman adoption.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. On the Encyclical’s relation to the later Mystagogy and Photius’s development.
Towards a Critical Edition of Photius’ Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Studia Orientalia Christiana 19/1 (2015). On the relation of the Encyclical to the Mystagogy.