East and West on Photius

The long divergence and recent convergence of memory. This file traces how the Orthodox East and the Roman Catholic West each remembered Photius across the centuries — the East venerating him as a saint and champion of Orthodoxy, the West condemning him as the arch-schismatic — and how, in the twentieth century, the factual record came to be largely shared even as the dogmatic and conciliar disputes remain.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

Two Memories

For most of the second millennium, East and West remembered Photius in incompatible ways, and the incompatibility was not a matter of detail but of the whole shape of the man. To the Orthodox East he was Photius the Great, a saint and confessor, the most learned of patriarchs, the defender of the Creed against the Latin innovation, and the figure in whom the East’s resistance to Roman overreach and Frankish corruption of the faith found its first great voice. To the Roman Catholic West he was the villain of “the Photian schism,” an ambitious usurper who anathematized a pope, was condemned by an ecumenical council, broke with Rome twice, and died excommunicate — the author of the estrangement that 1054 would complete (Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911]; Hergenröther, Photius [1867–69]; for the Eastern memory, the liturgical office and the synaxaria). The two traditions were not describing the same man differently; they were telling two different stories. The same events bore opposite valences: the anathema against Nicholas that the East remembered as a defense of the faith, the West remembered as the insolence of a usurper against the see of Peter; the council the East counted as the Eighth Ecumenical, restoring communion, the West either ignored or counted spurious; the reconciliation that the Eastern record kept, the Western narrative replaced with a fabricated “second schism.” Each memory was internally coherent, and each bore the marks of the estrangement — though not symmetrically: as Dvornik would show, the Eastern record had kept the facts of the reconciliation, its polemical coloring an overlay on a substantially sound account, while the Western story rested on a dossier compiled to condemn — so that for a thousand years the two Churches did not so much disagree about Photius as inhabit two non-overlapping accounts of him (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948]; Fortescue 1911).

The Hardening of the Western Verdict

The Western verdict hardened over time and reached its most formidable expression in the nineteenth century. The medieval and early-modern West had inherited the picture from the dossier surrounding the council of 869–870 — the council Rome reckoned the Eighth Ecumenical — and from the polemics of the later schism, which read Photius backward through 1054 as the man who had first torn the seamless robe; by the time of the Counter-Reformation controversialists the “two schisms” of Photius were a fixed point of Catholic ecclesiastical history (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], on the formation of the legend). Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther’s three-volume Photius (1867–69) was the culmination of this tradition: a monument of erudition entirely in the service of condemnation — the fullest documentation, and the fullest indictment, the figure had ever received; it remained the standard Western work for eighty years (Hergenröther 1867–69; on its standing, Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], introduction). Half a century later Adrian Fortescue’s article in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) gave the verdict its widely-read English form, summing up Photius as “one of the worst enemies the Church of Christ ever had” and a man of “insatiable and unscrupulous ambition” (Fortescue 1911). Fortescue’s was the popular, accessible distillation of Hergenröther’s learning, and through the Catholic Encyclopedia it carried the hostile portrait to a vast Anglophone readership in the very decades before Dvornik would overturn it. This was the operative Catholic memory of Photius on the eve of Dvornik’s work: a scholarly and ecclesiastical consensus of hostility, organized around the “two schisms” and the villain, and resting on documents whose authority no one had yet thought to question.

The Eastern Veneration

The Eastern memory ran in the opposite direction and was, if anything, the more stable. Photius was venerated as a saint in the East within a few generations of his death — Dvornik judged that he “must have been venerated as a saint in the second half of the tenth century at the very latest” — and his cult only deepened as the East–West breach widened (Dvornik 1948; see Sainthood and Veneration). What the East venerated was not, in the first place, the controversialist but the great hierarch and teacher — the learned patriarch of the Bibliotheca and the homilies, the pastor and the defender of the icons’ heritage — and the anti-Latin coloring was a later overlay on an already firm cult (Dvornik 1948). But in the later Byzantine and Ottoman centuries, as anti-Latin feeling intensified, that coloring grew dominant: Photius became a symbol of Orthodox resistance to Rome, hymned in the liturgical office as one who had broken the pride of the Latins and defended the faith, his Mystagogy read as the charter of the Eastern case and his career as the type of all faithful resistance to Western encroachment (the liturgical office; Dvornik 1948). This was a polemical sharpening of his memory that mirrored, in the other direction, the hardening of the Western verdict — the two cults, of hero and of villain, growing in lockstep. Each tradition’s memory of Photius was shaped by the ongoing estrangement, and each grew more pointed as the breach endured, until the man himself was nearly lost behind the symbol the controversy had made of him on either side.

The Convergence

What changed in the twentieth century was not the dogmatic disagreement but the factual record. Dvornik’s demonstration that the “second schism” never happened, that Photius was reconciled with Rome at 879–880, and that the hostile dossier was a later construction (see The Dvornik Rehabilitation) was accepted across the scholarly world, Catholic as well as Orthodox and secular. The acceptance was the more striking for the quarter from which the correction came: a Catholic priest, working over the very documents Hergenröther had assembled, reaching by critical method the conclusion that his own tradition’s centuries-old verdict was largely legend — and being received, not resisted, by Catholic scholarship, which had no confessional stake in defending a fabricated dossier (Dvornik 1948; on the reception, the later Catholic reference works that revised their accounts of Photius). The result was a genuine convergence on what happened: both traditions now broadly grant that there was no permanent two-stage schism authored by Photius, that he died in communion with Rome, and that the villain-portrait was a polemical distortion (Dvornik 1948; the change reflected in later Catholic scholarship and reference works). Photius is now treated in serious Western scholarship as a great churchman and theologian, not as the arch-schismatic; the older verdict survives, where it survives, as a historical curiosity rather than as the operative position. The hostile Catholic Encyclopedia article of 1911 reads now as a period piece, its confident invective belonging to a verdict the next generation’s scholarship dismantled (Fortescue 1911; Dvornik 1948).

The convergence has limits, and honesty requires naming them. It is a convergence on the narrative, not on the theology or the conciliar reckoning. The two traditions still differ on whether Photius’s elevation in 858 was canonical, on which council — 869–870 or 879–880 — is the Eighth Ecumenical Council, on whether John VIII durably ratified 879–880, and, beneath all of these, on the Filioque itself and the nature of the Roman primacy (see The Council of Union and The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit). These are not matters of fact that more documents could settle; they are the doctrinal substance of the division of the Churches. It is worth being precise about what convergence does and does not mean here: scholars on both sides now largely agree on what happened — the sequence of councils, the reconciliation, the absence of a second schism — while continuing to disagree on what it means, on the authority of the rival councils and the truth of the doctrines at stake. The line between the shared facts and the contested theology is exactly the line between history and dogmatics, and the twentieth century moved the first without touching the second (Dvornik 1948; Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]). What the twentieth century achieved was to clear away the legend that had encrusted the dispute — to let both traditions agree on the man and the events, and so to face the real theological disagreement without the distortions of the villain-story.

A Figure of Reconciliation and of Division

There is a fitting irony in the modern memory of Photius. The man whom the Western tradition long made the symbol of schism, and whom the Eastern tradition made the symbol of resistance to the West, has become in the era of ecumenical scholarship a figure around whom East and West can at least agree on the history — and a Catholic priest’s restoration of him is one of the better-known instances of cross-confessional historical fairness. Photius remains a figure of division, because the Filioque and the primacy remain disputed, and his Mystagogy is still the East’s classic case against the Latin doctrine. But he is no longer a figure of legend. The distinction is worth dwelling on, because it is precisely the distinction the modern study of the schism has taught: a division of the Churches rooted in real doctrinal disagreement is a different thing from a division propped up by myth, and clearing away the myth does not dissolve the disagreement but lets it be seen for what it is. The older quarrel over Photius mixed the two inextricably — the villain-story and the Filioque argued together, as though to grant the doctrine one must grant the villain, and to honor the saint one must deny the schism. The convergence has separated them. One may now read the Mystagogy as a serious theological case to be weighed on its merits, while granting every fact of Photius’s reconciliation with Rome; and one may venerate the saint without subscribing the legend of the arch-schismatic. The convergence on his story is, in its modest way, a model of how contested history between the Churches can be handled — soberly, with both sides sourced, the facts shared and the disagreements named — which is the method this collection has tried to follow throughout, and to follow from where it stands: within the Orthodox Church, which venerates Photius as a saint and confesses the faith he defended, while reporting the other side accurately and in its own terms.

References

Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. On the convergence of the factual record and the dating of Photius’s cult.
Hergenröther, Joseph. Photius, Patriarch von Konstantinopel. 3 vols. Regensburg: Manz, 1867–1869. The fullest expression of the older hostile Western memory; cited as the documented baseline.
Fortescue, Adrian. “Photius of Constantinople.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911 (newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm). The widely-read English form of the older verdict (“one of the worst enemies the Church of Christ ever had”); cited by author and date.
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On the persistence of the dogmatic and conciliar disputes after the factual convergence.
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. On the Orthodox memory of Photius and the Filioque dispute (the chapter on the schism between East and West).