Bulgaria and the Jurisdictional Dispute

The Bulgarian question, the root of the doctrinal rupture of 866–870. This file traces the conversion of Khan Boris of Bulgaria, his frustrated bid for an autonomous Church under Constantinople, his turn to Rome, the entry of Latin missionaries teaching Western customs and the Filioque, and the way this contest over a single mission field transformed the jurisdictional quarrel between Photius and Pope Nicholas I into a dogmatic confrontation over the Creed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Conversion of Boris

In the early 860s the Bulgarian state, a powerful Slavic-Turkic realm on Byzantium’s northern frontier, came into the orbit of the empire’s faith. Bulgaria had long been Byzantium’s most formidable neighbor in the Balkans, an aggressive power whose wars with the empire stretched back generations; its conversion would therefore reshape the politics of the whole region as well as the spiritual map of southeastern Europe (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth [1971]). Under Byzantine military and diplomatic pressure, Khan Boris accepted baptism around 864–865, taking the Christian name Michael after his godfather, the emperor Michael III; the choice of the emperor as godfather sealed the new bond in the idiom of spiritual kinship that Byzantine diplomacy used to draw foreign rulers into the imperial family of Christian princes (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Boris I”). Greek clergy from Constantinople carried out the initial evangelization of his people (Obolensky 1971; Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire [1986], ch. 4; ODB, s.v. “Boris I”). The conversion was not without resistance: a revolt of the old Bulgar nobility, who saw in the foreign religion a threat to their traditions and to their standing, was suppressed by Boris with severity, and the new faith was imposed from above as an instrument of the ruler’s centralizing policy (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Boris I”). The conversion of Bulgaria was thus a major prize, drawing a strategically vital neighbor into the Christian commonwealth — and the question of which Church would organize and govern the new Bulgarian Church became at once a matter of the highest stakes for both Constantinople and Rome. For the prize was not merely a soul-count but the ecclesiastical allegiance of a powerful state astride the Balkans, and with allegiance came the long train of consequences — liturgical language, canonical dependence, and cultural orientation — that flowed from the choice of one Christian center over the other (Obolensky 1971; Hussey 1986).

The Refused Autonomy and the Turn to Rome

Boris wanted for his realm not merely missionaries but a Church of its own — ideally an autonomous or autocephalous Bulgarian Church with its own patriarch or archbishop, which would give his state ecclesiastical dignity and independence to match its political standing. His aim was characteristic of the new Christian rulers of the age: a national hierarchy of his own would let the Church serve the unity and prestige of his realm without subjecting it to the control of a foreign power, for an ecclesiastical dependency could readily become a channel of political dependence (Obolensky 1971). Constantinople, and Photius with it, were unwilling to grant so much; the Greek Church offered Bulgaria clergy and oversight but not the autonomy Boris sought, fearing that too generous a concession would set a precedent and loosen the patriarchate’s hold over a Church on its own doorstep (Obolensky 1971; Hussey 1986). Frustrated, Boris did what the politics of the age made natural: he played the two Romes against each other, using the rivalry of Constantinople and the papacy as leverage to extract the terms he wanted from one or the other. In 866 he turned to the West, sending an embassy to Pope Nicholas I with a famous list of more than a hundred questions about Christian faith and practice — touching matters of law, custom, morals, and ritual on which the newly converted Bulgarians sought guidance — which Nicholas answered in his lengthy Responsa ad consulta Bulgarorum, and requesting Latin clergy and a hierarchy from Rome (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986; ODB, s.v. “Boris I”). The Responsa is itself a revealing document, for in answering the Bulgarians the pope distinguished what was de fide from what was mere local Greek custom, and so implicitly set Roman usage against Byzantine in the eyes of the new converts (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986). Nicholas, eager to extend Roman jurisdiction into territory Constantinople claimed, responded promptly: Latin missionaries, led by Bishop Formosus of Porto (a future pope), entered Bulgaria.

The Latin Missionaries and the Filioque

The arrival of the Latin clergy in territory just evangelized from Constantinople was the spark. The Roman missionaries set about replacing Byzantine usages with Latin ones and undoing the work of the Greek priests: they treated the chrismation administered by Greek priests as insufficient and required confirmation by a bishop — in effect rebaptizing into full communion converts the Greeks had already received — taught the Saturday fast and the Latin reckoning of Lent, disparaged the married priesthood of the East, and — most gravely — recited the Creed with the Filioque, the addition “and the Son” to the article on the procession of the Holy Spirit (Fortescue 1911; Hussey 1986; and Photius’s own catalogue in the Encyclical of 867). To the Byzantine eye these were not trivial differences of custom but a wholesale repudiation of the practices in which the Bulgarians had just been instructed, calculated to teach the new converts that the Greek mission had given them a defective Christianity (Hussey 1986; and the Encyclical of 867). For Photius this was intolerable on two counts at once. It was an invasion of Constantinople’s rightful jurisdiction over a Church the East had brought to baptism; and it carried into newly Orthodox territory a corruption of the Creed itself. The two grievances were not separable in his mind, for the same intrusion that violated the canonical order of the Church was also the vehicle by which the dogmatic novelty was being spread.

A precision the better scholarship insists upon belongs here: in the 860s Rome had not yet officially adopted the interpolated Creed for its own use (the official Roman adoption is dated only to 1014), but Nicholas permitted the Frankish missionaries to teach the Filioque in Bulgaria — and it was this permitted export of the addition, not yet a settled Roman dogmatic definition, that Photius confronted (Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]; see The Encyclical of 867).

The Root of the Rupture

It is essential to see that the doctrinal confrontation of 866–870 grew directly out of this jurisdictional contest. Until Bulgaria, the quarrel between Photius and Rome had been about a contested patriarchal succession and about the reach of Roman judgment in the East (see Ignatius, Rome, and the Rival Claims) — serious matters, but not yet a dispute about the faith. Bulgaria changed that. The clash of two missions in one field forced the underlying differences of custom and doctrine into the open and gave Photius both the occasion and the urgency to make the Filioque a public, conciliar issue. The differences between the Greek and Latin churches had existed for generations, but they had remained largely latent, matters of divergent regional custom that had not been pressed to the point of mutual condemnation; what Bulgaria did was to set the two usages in direct and visible competition over the same flock, so that what could be overlooked at a distance became unbearable when taught side by side in a single mission field (Hussey 1986; Obolensky 1971). The Encyclical to the Eastern Patriarchs of 867 and the council of that year, which anathematized Nicholas, were the direct response to the Latin mission in Bulgaria (see The 867 and 869 Councils). In summoning the other Eastern patriarchs to take notice of the innovations being spread in Bulgaria, Photius lifted the matter out of the bilateral quarrel between Constantinople and Rome and made it a concern of the whole Orthodox East, which is precisely what gave the Filioque its lasting place at the center of the controversy (Hussey 1986; and the Encyclical of 867). The jurisdictional and the doctrinal are thus inseparable in this phase: the Filioque entered the formal East–West controversy not as an abstract theological disagreement but as a corruption being preached on the ground in a contested mission field.

The Aftermath

The Bulgarian contest did not end with the councils. Boris’s own calculus through these years remained that of a ruler seeking the best terms for an autonomous Church, and his disappointment with Rome was as decisive as his earlier disappointment with Constantinople: when the papacy too declined to grant the archbishop of his choosing and the independence he desired, the ground was prepared for his return to the Byzantine fold (Obolensky 1971; Hussey 1986). At the very council of 869–870 that condemned Photius, the Bulgarian question was reopened, and a decision of the Eastern patriarchs there assigned Bulgaria to the jurisdiction of Constantinople — a ruling that, ironically for Rome, undid much of what the Latin mission had sought, for Boris, having weighed both sides, ultimately attached his Church to Constantinople rather than to Rome (Obolensky 1971; Hussey 1986). The Latin clergy were withdrawn, and the Bulgarian Church passed definitively under Constantinopolitan oversight, soon to receive the Slavonic letters and liturgy carried south by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius (Obolensky 1971; see Cyril and Methodius). Bulgaria thus became, and remained, part of the Orthodox East. The longer consequence was that the conversion of Bulgaria, contested between the two Romes, became one of the great formative episodes both of Slavic Orthodoxy and of the East–West estrangement — the field in which the jurisdictional rivalry and the doctrinal dispute over the Creed first fused, in Photius’s lifetime, into the shape they would keep for centuries.

See Also

References

  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. On the conversion of Boris-Michael, the Bulgarian bid for autonomy, and the final attachment of Bulgaria to Constantinople.
  • Hussey, J. M. The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, ch. 4. On the Bulgarian question and its place in the Photian controversy.
  • Fortescue, Adrian. “Photius of Constantinople.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911 (newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm). On the turn of Boris to Rome, Nicholas’s Responsa, and the Latin missionaries; cited by author and date.
  • 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 the 860s.
  • Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Boris I,” “Bulgaria.” On the conversion and the jurisdictional contest.