The Homilies

Photius’s surviving homilies, the work of a great preacher of the imperial city. This file covers the corpus as edited by Cyril Mango, the two famous sermons preached during and after the Rus’ attack on Constantinople in June 860 — and the careful distinction, required by the sources, between what Photius himself says about the city’s deliverance and the later miracle of the Theotokos’s robe — and the celebrated homily of 867 at the unveiling of the apse mosaic of the Virgin in Hagia Sophia.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Corpus

Eighteen homilies of Photius survive, delivered for the most part during his first patriarchate (858–867) and edited, translated, and annotated in the standard scholarly edition by Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3, 1958). They show Photius in his pastoral office: preaching on the feasts, on the Theotokos, on public events that shook the city, and on the restoration of the holy images after iconoclasm. The prose is learned and rhetorically polished — the homilies are among the best examples of Byzantine sacred oratory in the period — but they are also occasional and vivid, and two of them in particular are first-rank historical documents (Mango 1958, introduction and commentary).

The collection is not a treatise but a body of occasional addresses, each fixed to a moment in the liturgical or civic life of Constantinople, and Mango’s edition reconstructs that setting wherever the text and the chronology allow (Mango 1958, introduction). Several of the homilies expound the great Marian feasts and the events of the Gospel; others mark public occasions — a dedication, a deliverance, the unveiling of an image. The unifying voice is that of a patriarch addressing the whole city from the ambo of its cathedral, and the rhetorical register is consciously high: Photius draws on the inherited resources of classical and patristic oratory, the learning displayed at length in his other works, and bends them to the practical end of consoling, instructing, and rallying a congregation (Mango 1958, introduction; on the learning behind the rhetoric, see The Scholar and Statesman). What makes two of the homilies historically priceless is precisely that this polished oratory was, on those occasions, also reportage — the preacher describing before the city events he and his hearers were living through.

The Homilies on the Rus’ Attack (860)

On June 18, 860, while the emperor Michael III and his army were away campaigning against the Arabs, a fleet of the Rhos (the Rus’) — Scandinavian-led raiders from the north, here making their first recorded appearance against Constantinople — descended on the imperial city by sea, some two hundred vessels appearing in the Bosphorus, and ravaged its suburbs while the capital, stripped of its defenders, lay in terror (Mango 1958, commentary on Homilies III and IV; the date from the Brussels Chronicle). The blow fell with the more force because the city was caught unprepared: the field army and the emperor were far off on the eastern frontier, and the raiders, appearing without warning from a quarter from which Constantinople had not before been threatened, found the suburbs and the surrounding shores all but undefended (Mango 1958, commentary on Homilies III and IV). Photius preached twice on the event. Homily III (“On the Attack of the Rhos”) was delivered during the siege, while the danger still pressed and the patriarch sought to rally and console a panicked populace; he describes the suddenness and savagery of the assault and the city “barely able to stand against a spear,” and turns the calamity into an occasion for repentance, reading the attack as a chastisement for the sins of the city and summoning his hearers to penance (Mango 1958, Homily III). Homily IV was delivered after the Rhos withdrew, in thanksgiving for the deliverance (Mango 1958, the two homilies translated and dated). In it the note of terror gives way to gratitude, and the patriarch dwells on the supplication of the people and the protection of the Mother of God; yet, as the commentary stresses, he does not narrate the manner of the enemy’s departure (Mango 1958, commentary on Homily IV). These are the earliest narrative sources for the 860 attack and the first datable notice in Greek of the people who would become the Rus’ — the same people whose later evangelization Photius would help set in motion (see Cyril and Methodius). Their value to the historian is thus double: they preserve a contemporary’s vivid impression of the event itself, and they mark the entry of the Rus’ into the written record of the Christian world.

A point of attestation must be handled with care here, because the popular and liturgical tradition has elaborated the event well beyond what Photius’s own homilies report. The difficulty is a textbook case of the kind of source-criticism this collection is bound to: a contemporary eyewitness who is also a great rhetorician, whose silences are as significant as his statements, set beside a later tradition that supplies a vivid and edifying conclusion the eyewitness never gave.

[Disputed: the deliverance of Constantinople in 860 and the robe of the Theotokos. Photius’s own Homily IV refers to the people carrying the garment (the veil or robe, peribolē) of the Mother of God around the walls of the city in supplication — and Photius is the earliest source to connect the relic with the event — but his homilies give no account of how the Rhos withdrew and report no miracle of a storm: as the scholarship observes, “the sermons of Photius offer no clue as to the outcome of the invasion” (Mango, The Homilies of Photius [1958], commentary on Homily IV; Siege of Constantinople (860), summarizing Mango). The dramatic later story — that the emperor and patriarch dipped the Virgin’s robe into the sea and a sudden tempest arose and scattered the Rhos fleet — is a later elaboration, first found in the tenth-century chronicle of George Hamartolos (George the Monk) and passed thence into the Slavonic Russian Primary Chronicle; the broader association with the Feast of the Protection (Pokrov) and the Akathist is later devotional tradition (George Hamartolos, Chronicle; the Russian Primary Chronicle; OCA and OrthoChristian liturgical entries on the Placing of the Robe at Blachernae, which narrate the storm-miracle as received tradition). The honest summary, per METHODOLOGY §3.5: Photius attests the supplicatory procession with the Virgin’s robe; the storm-and-dipping miracle is a later accretion and is reported here as what those later sources attest, not as what Photius’s own homily claims.]

The Homily on the Apse Mosaic (867)

The other homily of the first rank is Homily XVII, preached on March 29, 867, at the inauguration of the great apse mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the church of Hagia Sophia — the first figural image set up in the cathedral after the end of iconoclasm and the restoration of the icons (Mango 1958, Homily XVII, pp. 286–96; on the date and the mosaic, the Dumbarton Oaks studies of the Hagia Sophia mosaics). Preached before the emperors Michael III and Basil I, it is at once a celebration of the image and a manifesto of the iconophile triumph. Photius describes the Virgin’s form as if raised “from the depths of oblivion” and declares that one would not be far wrong to call that day the beginning and the day of Orthodoxy — fixing the unveiling of the image within the great theme of the vindication of the holy icons (Mango 1958, Homily XVII).

The theology the homily articulates is the mature iconophile doctrine of the image, and Photius gives it a characteristically vivid expression. He dwells on the power of sight: the painted or mosaic image, he argues, conveys the holy reality to the beholder more immediately and more lastingly than the spoken word, so that what the ear receives through hearing the eye grasps and fixes in the memory through seeing (Mango 1958, Homily XVII). This is not an aesthetic observation but a theological one — it rests on the conviction, secured at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, that the Incarnation makes the depiction of Christ and his Mother licit and salutary, since the invisible God has made himself visible in the flesh. In the mouth of the patriarch who had just inaugurated the first great figural image in the restored cathedral, the praise of the seen image is at the same time a vindication of the whole iconophile cause against the iconoclasm that had only recently been overthrown (Mango 1958, Homily XVII, and introduction on the iconophile setting). The sermon is thus a primary witness both to the theology of the image that Photius, heir of the Seventh Council and of his own confessor-family, carried forward, and to the physical restoration of Hagia Sophia’s decoration in his patriarchate. The mosaic he inaugurated still survives in the apse of the building, so that the homily and its object can be read together — a rare conjunction of a Byzantine sermon and the very work of art it was composed to celebrate.

The Preacher

Taken together the homilies show why Photius’s contemporaries valued him as a preacher and not only as a scholar and controversialist. They are the public, pastoral voice of a man whose other writings are mostly polemical or learned: here he consoles a terrified city, gives thanks for its deliverance, celebrates the return of the images, and expounds the feasts. They are also, for the historian, a rare thing — sermons that are also eyewitness reports of events of the first importance, the 860 attack above all. The care the sources demand in distinguishing Photius’s own testimony from the later miracle tradition is itself characteristic of how this collection treats him: as a figure around whom devotion accreted, whose own words must be heard for what they say and no more.

See Also

References

  • Mango, Cyril. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople: English Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. The standard edition; Homilies III and IV (the Rus’ attack), Homily XVII (the apse mosaic, pp. 286–96), and the commentary establishing what Photius’s homilies do and do not attest.
  • George Hamartolos (George the Monk). Chronicle. The tenth-century source for the storm-and-robe miracle of 860 absent from Photius.
  • The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let), trans. S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. The Slavonic transmission of the 860 miracle tradition.
  • Siege of Constantinople (860). Used to locate the date (June 18, 860, Brussels Chronicle) and to summarize Mango’s point that Photius’s homilies give no account of the outcome; cross-checked against Mango.
  • The Placing of the Honorable Robe of the Most Holy Mother of God at Blachernae. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org) and OrthoChristian.com. The received liturgical narration of the robe-and-storm tradition, cited as later devotional attestation per METHODOLOGY §3.5.