The Dvornik Rehabilitation

The decisive modern reassessment of Photius, worked — remarkably — by a Catholic priest-historian. This file sets out Francis Dvornik’s The Photian Schism: History and Legend (1948), its demonstration that the traditional Western story of two Photian schisms and an unrepentant villain who died excommunicate is largely legend, its finding that Photius was reconciled with Rome and died in its communion, and the way Dvornik’s work changed even the Roman Catholic assessment of the patriarch.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Older Western Narrative

For most of a millennium the Western — and specifically the Roman Catholic — account of Photius was a story of villainy and rupture. In its classic form it ran thus: Photius, a man of “insatiable and unscrupulous ambition” (the phrase is Fortescue’s, summing up the tradition), usurped the throne of the lawful patriarch Ignatius; defied and anathematized the pope; was justly condemned by the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869–870; was restored only to break with Rome a second time; and died excommunicate and unreconciled, the author of “the Photian schism” that prefigured and prepared the final schism of 1054 (Fortescue, Catholic Encyclopedia [1911]; the monumental scholarly form in Hergenröther, Photius [1867–69]). The narrative was built around two schisms — a first under Nicholas I and a second after the council of 879–880 — and around Photius as the arch-schismatic, the villain at the origin of the estrangement of the Churches. It was not a folk legend but the considered verdict of the most learned Western scholarship, codified in Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther’s three-volume study, which remained the standard work for eighty years.

The strength of the older narrative lay precisely in its scholarly pedigree. Hergenröther was no pamphleteer but a formidable historian — later a cardinal and the first prefect of the Vatican Archives — and his Photius marshaled the Greek and Latin sources on a scale no earlier work had attempted (Hergenröther 1867–69; Fortescue 1911). This is what made the verdict so durable: it could not be dismissed as mere confessional prejudice, for it rested on a vast apparatus of citation, and its conclusions passed into the standard reference works of the West, Fortescue’s Catholic Encyclopedia article among them, as settled fact. The portrait had, moreover, a structural role in the larger Western account of the schism of the Churches: Photius furnished an origin and an author for the estrangement, a single culpable figure in whom the long alienation of East and West could be personified and dated. To overturn the portrait was therefore to disturb not one biography but a whole framework for telling the story of the divided Church — which is part of why Dvornik’s correction proved so consequential (Dvornik 1948; Fortescue 1911).

Dvornik’s Book

The narrative was overturned by Francis (František) Dvornik (1893–1975), a Czech Catholic priest — ordained in 1916 — and one of the foremost Byzantinists of the twentieth century, who would serve as professor of Byzantine history at Dumbarton Oaks. In 1948 the Cambridge University Press published his The Photian Schism: History and Legend, a work of immense documentary scholarship organized, as its title announces, in two parts: a reconstruction of what actually happened (“History”), and an analysis of how the false story grew up (“Legend”) (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948]). Its findings were revolutionary, and the more weighty for coming from a Catholic priest writing within his own tradition rather than from an Orthodox apologist.

The two-part structure of the book was itself a method, not merely an arrangement. In “History” Dvornik reconstructed the ninth-century events from the most nearly contemporary evidence; in “Legend” he traced how the surviving record had been shaped after the fact — how later documents had been compiled, edited, and weighted by the anti-Photian party so that the sources a historian inherited already carried the verdict the polemic wished to reach. By separating the reconstruction of the events from the analysis of the tradition that reported them, Dvornik could show not only that the received story was false but how it had come to be believed — which is why his correction held, where a mere counter-assertion would not have (Dvornik 1948).

Dvornik established three things. First, that Photius was genuinely reconciled with Rome at the council of 879–880, received into communion with Pope John VIII, his condemnation annulled — and that he remained in communion with Rome through the rest of his second patriarchate (see The Council of Union). Second, that the “second schism” never happened: there was no second rupture between Photius and Rome after 880; the story of a renewed breach and a renewed excommunication rests on sources Dvornik showed to be worthless — “pure mystification,” in his judgment — fabricated or distorted by the anti-Photian party. Third, that the hostile dossier on which the villain-narrative rested — the anti-Photian collection of documents — was compiled and exaggerated later, and that the council of 869–870 itself entered the Western list of ecumenical councils only well after the fact, around the era of the Gregorian Reform in the eleventh century, when its strong affirmations of papal primacy made it useful to the reforming papacy (Dvornik 1948; on the Gregorian-era entry, also Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]). The image of Photius as the man who twice broke with Rome and died in schism was, Dvornik demonstrated, a construction of the polemical tradition, not a report of the ninth-century record.

These three findings reinforce one another. If Photius was reconciled at 879–880 and remained in communion thereafter, the “second schism” has no place to stand; and if the documents that purported to record that second schism were themselves products of a later and partisan compilation, then the whole edifice of the villain-narrative loses its evidentiary base at once. The case did not rest on a single decisive document but on the convergence of the contemporary record and the demonstrated lateness and tendentiousness of the hostile sources — a cumulative argument that proved far harder to answer than any one of its parts (Dvornik 1948; Siecienski 2010).

What Dvornik Did and Did Not Claim

It is important to be precise about the scope of Dvornik’s thesis, since it is sometimes overstated. Dvornik did not dissolve the genuine ninth-century conflict: the contested elevation of 858, the quarrel with Nicholas I, the anathema of 867, the condemnation of 869–870 — these happened, and Dvornik narrated them. What he overturned was the interpretation of that conflict as a permanent, two-stage, doctrinally-driven schism authored by a villain, and specifically the “second schism” and the portrait of an unrepentant Photius dying excommunicate. He showed that the conflict, real as it was, was followed by a real reconciliation, and that the actors of the time treated even the anathemas and condemnations as the reversible disciplinary acts of churchmen still within one Church — not as the founding of two Churches. The dogmatic disagreement over the Filioque, and the conciliar disagreement over which council is “the Eighth,” he did not and could not dissolve; those remain. To present Dvornik as having proved the East right against the West on the substance of the controversy is therefore to overstate his thesis as badly as the old narrative understated Photius: what he established was a matter of fact and chronology, not a verdict on the rival ecclesiologies, and his own Catholic loyalties remained intact throughout (Dvornik 1948; Siecienski 2010). But within its proper scope the demolition was complete — the biographical and narrative frame, the man and the “two schisms,” did not survive his examination of the record.

The Change in Catholic Assessment

The most striking testimony to Dvornik’s work is what happened to it within the Catholic Church. Far from being suppressed, his rehabilitation of Photius was accepted at the highest levels. That a Catholic priest should overturn his own tradition’s verdict on a figure the other Church venerates, and be heard within his tradition rather than censured, is the feature of the episode most worth pondering: the correction came not as polemic across the confessional divide but as scholarship offered within the Western Church and received there on its merits (Dvornik 1948; OrthodoxWiki, “Francis Dvornik”). Dvornik himself served as an advisor for history and ecumenism at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and his account became the standard scholarly view in Catholic as well as Orthodox and secular Byzantine studies (Wikipedia, “Francis Dvornik,” and the biographical entries; OrthodoxWiki, “Francis Dvornik”). His later restatement, The Patriarch Photius in the Light of Recent Research (1958), consolidated the case and answered critics, and the convergence it secured — Catholic, Orthodox, and secular Byzantinists agreeing on the main lines of the ninth-century history — is itself a small ecumenical fact, a place where the disciplined study of the sources brought the divided traditions to common ground on the events even where they still divide on their meaning (Dvornik 1948, 1958). Mainstream Catholic historiography abandoned both the “second schism” and the villain-portrait; later Catholic reference works softened or reversed the old hostile verdict, and Photius came to be treated even in Western scholarship as a great churchman and theologian wronged by a polemical tradition rather than as its arch-villain. The hostility codified by Hergenröther in 1867 and repeated by Fortescue in 1911 ceased to be the operative Catholic position — which is precisely why this collection cites those works by author and date, as the older Western view, rather than as the current one (see East and West on Photius).

The Dvornik rehabilitation is thus a rare and instructive case: a scholar working within one tradition, on the strength of the documentary record, correcting that tradition’s verdict on a figure venerated by the other — and being heard. It did not end the dogmatic dispute between the Churches, but it cleared away the legend that had grown up around it, and restored Photius, in the judgment of serious scholarship East and West, to his true stature.

See Also

References

  • Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. The work that overturned the older Western narrative; structured in two parts, “History” and “Legend.” Restated in his The Patriarch Photius in the Light of Recent Research (1958).
  • Hergenröther, Joseph. Photius, Patriarch von Konstantinopel: sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische Schisma. 3 vols. Regensburg: Manz, 1867–1869. The monumental nineteenth-century hostile study Dvornik superseded; cited as the documented baseline of the older Western verdict.
  • 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 verdict (“insatiable and unscrupulous ambition”); cited by author and date as the older view.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On the later entry of 869–870 into the Western ecumenical lists.
  • Francis Dvornik. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Francis_Dvornik) and the standard biographical entries; used to locate his Vatican II role and the reception of his work, cross-checked against the published scholarship.