Sainthood and Veneration

Photius’s place in the calendar and devotion of the Orthodox Church: his death in exile around 893, his commemoration as a saint and as “the Great,” his feast on February 6, the early establishment of his cult and its later polemical sharpening as a symbol of Orthodox resistance to Rome, and the modern revival of attention to him. This file pins the development of his veneration to its earliest attestation per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The End of Photius

Photius’s second patriarchate ended as his first had, with a change of reign. When the emperor Basil I died in 886 and his son Leo VI (“the Wise”) — Photius’s own former pupil — came to the throne, the new emperor deposed Photius from the patriarchate, for reasons bound up with court politics and Leo’s wish to install his own brother Stephen (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Photios,” “Leo VI”). There is an irony in the ending that the sources do not fail to register: the emperor who removed Photius was the very pupil whose education the patriarch had once overseen, and the throne to which Stephen was raised was that of Photius’s own see. The deposition appears to have been an act of imperial policy rather than of any ecclesiastical condemnation — Photius was not anathematized, deprived of his priesthood, or cut off from the Church, but set aside so that a prince of the reigning house might hold the patriarchate (Fortescue 1911; ODB, s.v. “Photios,” “Leo VI”). Photius was sent to a monastery — the sources name the monastery of Bordi (or the Armenian monastery) — and there he spent his last years in retirement. He died about 891–893; the traditional date of his repose, kept as his feast, is February 6 (Fortescue 1911; OrthodoxWiki, “Photios the Great”; the synaxaria). He died, as Dvornik established, in communion with Rome, not under any excommunication — the “second schism” that the older Western narrative placed at the end of his life being a later fabrication (see The Dvornik Rehabilitation). That he ended his days quietly in a monastery, in the communion of the whole Church, is the historical ground on which his early veneration could arise without obstacle: there was no canonical shadow over his repose for a later cult to overcome.

The Firming of the Cult

The veneration of Photius as a saint arose early. Francis Dvornik, on the strength of the liturgical and documentary evidence, judged that Photius “must have been venerated as a saint in the second half of the tenth century at the very latest” — that is, within some two or three generations of his death — and his name appears in a mid-tenth-century Typikon of the Great Church of Constantinople (Dvornik, The Photian Schism [1948]; the Typikon of the Great Church). The dating matters for more than antiquarian reasons, and the methodology’s care for earliest attestation makes it worth pressing: a cult firmly in place by the later tenth century is a cult that arose before the great breach of 1054 and independently of the later anti-Latin polemic, which tells against the old Western suspicion that Photius’s sainthood was a partisan invention of the schism (Dvornik 1948). The veneration is older than the polemics that would later attach to it. The point bears directly on the Western verdict: Hergenröther and the tradition behind him had supposed that the cult of so contested a figure must be a late and tendentious growth, but the documentary evidence Dvornik assembled places it in the imperial liturgical books within living memory of those who had known the events, when reconciliation with Rome, not rupture, was the remembered close of Photius’s life (Dvornik 1948; the Typikon of the Great Church). A saint commemorated in the Great Church before the schism cannot have been canonized as a symbol of it. The cult thus has a respectable antiquity, established in the imperial city itself not long after his repose, in the liturgical books of the Great Church where his name stood among the commemorated hierarchs. He is commemorated in the Byzantine calendar on February 6, and the liturgical office for the day celebrates him as a great hierarch, teacher, and pillar of Orthodoxy.

The title by which he is most honored in the tradition is “the Great” (ho Megas) — Photius the Great, a designation reserved in the Church for a small number of pre-eminent saints, and applied to him in recognition of his learning, his defense of the faith, and his stature as a hierarch. The epithet is a rare one in the Church’s usage, shared with a handful of figures such as Basil the Great and Athanasius and the few popes and emperors to whom it has clung, and its application to Photius marks the estimate the East formed of him: not merely a saint among saints but one of the commanding teachers of the faith, ranked with the architects of Orthodox theology (the liturgical office for February 6; OrthodoxWiki, “Photios the Great”). The Orthodox tradition ranks him among the foremost of the patriarchs and teachers of the Church.

The Polemical Sharpening

It is honest to note, and the methodology requires noting, that the later development of Photius’s cult was colored by the East–West estrangement to which his own career belonged. The earliest veneration, as the tenth-century evidence suggests, honored the hierarch and teacher; the anti-Latin emphasis is a later accretion, growing as the breach itself grew (Dvornik 1948). As anti-Latin feeling deepened in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine centuries — through the controversies of the eleventh century, the bitterness left by the Crusades and the Latin occupation of Constantinople, and the failed unions of Lyons and Florence — Photius’s memory was sharpened into a symbol of Orthodox resistance to Rome; the hymnography of his feast came to celebrate him in pointedly anti-Latin terms — as one who broke the pride of the Latins and confounded their innovation — and his image as the great opponent of the Filioque and of Roman overreach intensified accordingly (the liturgical office for February 6; on the polemical coloring of the later cult, the standard accounts of his reception). This is the mirror-image, in the East, of the hardening of the hostile Western verdict described in East and West on Photius: each tradition’s memory of Photius grew more pointed as the breach between the Churches endured, the saint and the villain swelling together. The hymnography is the clearest witness to this development, for liturgical poetry tends to gather and crystallize a community’s settled estimate of a saint; in Photius’s office the note of triumph over the Latin error is unmistakable, and it presents him not merely as a holy hierarch but as the champion who guarded the Symbol against corruption — an emphasis that says as much about the centuries that sang it as about the ninth-century patriarch it commemorates (the liturgical office for February 6). The distinction worth holding is between the cult itself and its coloring: the veneration is genuine and ancient, older than the schism it came to symbolize; its later expression bears the marks of the controversy, and the two should not be confused. To venerate Photius the Great is not, in the Orthodox understanding, to canonize a polemic but to honor a teacher and confessor of the faith — though the tradition is candid that the polemic shaped how the honor came to be expressed.

The Modern Revival

The modern era has seen a revival of attention to Photius across the Orthodox world, of a piece with the broader Orthodox theological renewal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The recovery of the patristic and Byzantine sources, the renewed engagement with the Filioque question, and the rehabilitation of Photius’s historical reputation by Dvornik together restored him to prominence as a theological authority and a saint. There is a notable convergence in this restoration: the scholarly rehabilitation that came from the Western academy — and from a Catholic priest at that — ran alongside, and reinforced, the Orthodox theological recovery, so that the modern revival of Photius is one of the places where critical history and ecclesial veneration have moved in the same direction rather than against each other (Dvornik 1948; see Modern Scholarship). His Mystagogy was newly translated and studied as the classical Orthodox statement against the Filioque (Farrell’s translation, 1987; see The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit); his place in the dogmatic tradition of the procession of the Spirit was reaffirmed by theologians such as Lossky and Meyendorff; and across the Orthodox Churches his feast and his memory have a firm and honored place. The revival has been at once devotional and scholarly, and the two have reinforced each other: the same decades that saw Dvornik clear away the legend saw the wider recovery of the Greek Fathers and of Byzantine theology in which Photius’s writings — the Bibliotheca, the homilies, the Amphilochia, and above all the Mystagogy — were read afresh and given their due as the work of one of the commanding minds of the Eastern Church (see Modern Scholarship). Where the older Orthodox memory had honored chiefly the anti-Latin champion, the modern revival has been able to honor the whole figure — the scholar, the pastor, the theologian, and the saint — and to set his veneration on the firmer ground of a history now critically established rather than polemically asserted (Dvornik 1948). The patriarch whom the older Western scholarship made a villain, and whom modern scholarship has restored, is in the Orthodox Church a saint venerated without interruption since the tenth century — Photius the Great, hierarch, confessor, and teacher.

References

Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. On the early firming of Photius’s cult (venerated by the later tenth century) and on his death in communion with Rome.
Fortescue, Adrian. “Photius of Constantinople.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911 (newadvent.org/cathen/12043b.htm). On the deposition by Leo VI, the retirement, and the death; cited by author and date.
Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Photios,” “Leo VI.” On the end of the second patriarchate and the dates.
Farrell, Joseph P., trans. The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1987. The modern translation marking the revival of attention to Photius’s anti-Filioque work.
Photios the Great. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Photios_the_Great); the liturgical office and synaxarion for February 6; used to locate the feast and the title “the Great,” cross-checked against Dvornik and the ODB.