Modern Scholarship

The arc of the modern study of Photius and the editions through which he is now read. This file surveys the scholarship — from Hergenröther’s hostile nineteenth-century monument, through Dvornik’s twentieth-century rehabilitation, to the Carolingian-context studies of Haugh and the irenic treatments of Kallistos Ware — and the modern critical editions and translations of the Mystagogy, the Bibliotheca, the Lexicon, the Amphilochia, and the Homilies that make serious study of Photius possible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Hostile Monument: Hergenröther

The modern critical study of Photius begins, paradoxically, with a work of condemnation. Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther’s Photius, Patriarch von Konstantinopel: sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische Schisma (3 vols., Regensburg, 1867–69) was the first comprehensive modern scholarly treatment — exhaustive in its documentation of Photius’s life, writings, and the schism, and entirely committed to the older Western verdict of Photius as villain and arch-schismatic (Hergenröther 1867–69; on its standing, Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948], introduction). Hergenröther wrote as a Catholic churchman and a formidable scholar — he would later become the first cardinal-prefect of the Vatican Archives — and his three volumes brought to bear an apparatus of sources no previous treatment had approached, fixing the documentary basis on which all later argument, including the argument that would overturn his conclusions, had to proceed (Hergenröther 1867–69; Dvornik 1948, introduction). For all its polemical purpose, his work was thus a genuine scholarly achievement that gathered and organized the sources, and it remained the indispensable — and standard — work on Photius for eighty years. The paradox is instructive: the very thoroughness of the hostile monument supplied the materials by which the hostile verdict could afterward be tested and found wanting. It is cited in this collection as the documented baseline of the hostile tradition, the position against which the twentieth century reacted.

The Rehabilitation: Dvornik

The decisive turn came with Francis Dvornik’s The Photian Schism: History and Legend (Cambridge, 1948), treated in full in The Dvornik Rehabilitation. Dvornik’s demonstration that the “two schisms” and the villain-portrait were largely legend, that Photius was reconciled with Rome and died in its communion, and that the hostile dossier was a later construction, became the standard scholarly view and reshaped the whole field. The arc from Hergenröther to Dvornik is the central story of modern Photian scholarship, and it is worth marking what kind of advance it was: not the substitution of one partisanship for another, but the application, to a dossier long read through confessional spectacles, of the ordinary tools of source criticism — asking which documents were authentic, which later interpolated, and which fabricated, and following the answers where they led (Dvornik 1948). Working over the same archive Hergenröther had assembled, Dvornik reached the opposite conclusion precisely by treating the sources critically rather than as a settled indictment. He restated and defended his findings in The Patriarch Photius in the Light of Recent Research (1958). Dvornik’s work is the pivot of modern Photian scholarship: every serious treatment since reckons with it, and it carries the more authority for having been the work of a Catholic priest correcting his own tradition’s verdict.

The Carolingian Context: Haugh and the Age of Eriugena

A further strand of modern scholarship situates Photius’s Filioque controversy in its Western intellectual context — the Carolingian theology that had pressed the double procession and the addition to the Creed. The point of this strand is that the Filioque dispute was not a bilateral quarrel between Constantinople and Rome but a triangular one, in which the driving force on the Western side was the Frankish church and its court theologians, who had championed the addition more aggressively than the popes themselves and had carried it into the Creed where Rome still hesitated (Haugh 1975; Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]). Richard Haugh’s Photius and the Carolingians: The Trinitarian Controversy (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975) is the principal monograph on this dimension, treating Photius’s Mystagogy as the culminating Eastern answer to the Frankish theology and devoting careful attention to his handling of the Latin Fathers (Haugh 1975, esp. ch. XI; see The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit). Photius’s lifetime overlapped that of the great Carolingian philosopher-theologian John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815 – c. 877), whose work at the court of Charles the Bald embodied the Western theological culture of the age — the same milieu in which the double procession was being elaborated and pressed; the juxtaposition of the two — the Byzantine patriarch and the Carolingian master, contemporaries on either side of the Filioque divide — frames the ninth century as the moment when the Eastern and Western theological traditions of the procession of the Spirit came into open and lasting conflict (on the Carolingian background, Haugh 1975; Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]). Reading Photius against this background corrects the older tendency to treat the controversy as a personal quarrel, and shows the Mystagogy as one side of a genuine confrontation of two developed and divergent theological cultures.

The Irenic Treatments: Ware and the Theologians

The twentieth-century Orthodox theological renewal gave Photius a renewed and, in its best representatives, an irenic reading. Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff placed Photius’s Mystagogy at the foundation of the Orthodox dogmatic case against the Filioque, while also tracing how the later tradition (Gregory of Cyprus, Palamas) developed and qualified his “Father alone” (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [1957]; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology [1974]; see The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit). The irenic character of this reading lies partly in its candor: these theologians do not present Photius’s “from the Father alone” as the last word but as the foundation on which a later and more supple synthesis was built, one able to accommodate the per Filium and the eternal manifestation of the Spirit through the Son — so that the Eastern case is engaged with its own internal development rather than frozen into a single polemical formula (Meyendorff 1974; Lossky 1957). Aristeides Papadakis set the controversy in the framework of the Eastern response to the rise of the papacy (The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy [1994]). Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, in the most widely read modern English account of Orthodoxy, treats Photius sympathetically — presenting the Encyclical of 867 as a foundational Orthodox doctrinal statement and the Filioque critique as central to the later tradition, while distinguishing the genuine doctrinal issue from the personal and canonical quarrels and resisting the older picture of a clean and permanent schism (Ware, The Orthodox Church [rev. ed., 1993], the chapter on the schism between East and West). The drift of this literature, taken together with Siecienski’s more recent and confessionally even-handed history of the whole controversy (Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]), is to treat Photius as a serious theologian whose case must be engaged on its merits, rather than as either a villain or a mere polemicist.

The Editions

Serious modern study of Photius rests on the critical editions and translations that have appeared, especially since the mid-twentieth century:

  • The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit: Greek in Patrologia Graeca 102 (treatise proper at PG 102:279–401); English translation by Joseph P. Farrell, The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987); a fully critical Greek edition has been in preparation (see the assessment in Studia Orientalia Christiana 19/1 [2015]).
  • The Bibliotheca: the standard edition is René Henry’s Photius: Bibliothèque, 9 vols. (Les Belles Lettres, 1959–1991), with Greek text and French translation; English access through N. G. Wilson’s selection, Photius: The Bibliotheca (Duckworth, 1994), and the older partial Freese translation (1920); reprinted in PG 103–104 (see The Myriobiblon).
  • The Lexicon: the critical edition of Christos Theodoridis, Photii Patriarchae Lexicon, 3 vols. (de Gruyter, 1982–2013), based on the Codex Zavordensis discovered in 1959 (see The Lexicon and the Amphilochia).
  • The Letters and Amphilochia: the critical edition of B. Laourdas and L. G. Westerink, Photii Patriarchae Constantinopolitani Epistulae et Amphilochia, 6 vols. (Teubner, 1983–1988); the Amphilochia also in PG 101; the Encyclical of 867 is Epistle 2.
  • The Homilies: Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople (Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3, 1958), the standard English edition with commentary (see The Homilies).

Each of these editions marks a real advance in access. Before Henry’s Bibliothèque the vast reading-record of Photius was available only in the older and less reliable texts; before Theodoridis the Lexicon was known mainly through fragments, until the discovery of the Codex Zavordensis in 1959 supplied a far fuller text; before Laourdas and Westerink the letters and Amphilochia lacked a critical foundation, so that even the Encyclical of 867, the seed-document of the Filioque controversy, could not be cited with confidence; and the Mystagogy, on which the whole dogmatic case rests, still awaits the fully critical Greek edition that has been in preparation (the editions as above; Studia Orientalia Christiana 19/1 [2015]). The chronology is itself revealing: the great editions cluster in the same decades as Dvornik’s rehabilitation and the Orthodox theological renewal, so that the recovery of the texts and the recovery of the man belong to a single mid-twentieth-century movement of scholarship.

Together these editions have, over the past century, made the whole Photian corpus accessible to critical study for the first time — and the combination of the new editions with Dvornik’s reassessment is what has restored Photius, in the modern academy, to his true stature as one of the great minds and great churchmen of Byzantium.

See Also

References

  • Hergenröther, Joseph. Photius, Patriarch von Konstantinopel: sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische Schisma. 3 vols. Regensburg: Manz, 1867–1869. The first comprehensive modern study; the hostile baseline.
  • Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948; and The Patriarch Photius in the Light of Recent Research. 1958. The pivotal rehabilitation.
  • Haugh, Richard. Photius and the Carolingians: The Trinitarian Controversy. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975. The standard monograph on the Carolingian context.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. On Photius’s place in the dogmatic tradition of the procession.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. On Photius and the later development of his teaching.
  • Papadakis, Aristeides. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. On the controversy and the papacy.
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. The widely-read sympathetic modern account.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. On the Carolingian background and the controversy’s later history.
  • The critical editions of Henry (Bibliotheca), Theodoridis (Lexicon), Laourdas–Westerink (Letters and Amphilochia), Farrell (Mystagogy, trans.), and Mango (Homilies), as detailed above.