The Adulterous Marriage Affair

The Moechian controversy: the emperor Constantine VI’s divorce of his lawful wife Maria of Amnia and his uncanonical marriage to Theodote (795); the priest Joseph of Kathara who blessed the union; the breaking of communion by Plato and Theodore with all who tolerated it, and their clash with Patriarch Tarasios over akribeia and oikonomia; the exile to Thessalonica (797); and the second phase under Nikephoros I (806–811), with Theodore’s second exile in 809. The affair that first made Theodore a confessor for the canons.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Sin and Its Name

The controversy takes its name from the Greek moicheia, “adultery.” In 795 the emperor Constantine VI — sole ruler since his mother Irene had been pushed aside, then restored to power-sharing — repudiated his wife Maria of Amnia, whom he had been made to marry years before, confined her to a convent, and married Theodote, a lady of his court who had been one of Maria’s attendants (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 89–90; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Moechian Controversy”). By the canons of the Church the divorce was without lawful ground and the second union was therefore adultery, whatever the imperial dignity of the parties. Theodote was, moreover, a kinswoman of Theodore himself — a fact that lent the abbot’s opposition the credit of disinterest, since he condemned the marriage of his own relation (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 60–75).

Joseph of Kathara

The marriage was celebrated not by the patriarch but by a priest, Joseph — abbot (hegumen) of the Kathara monastery and oikonomos (steward) of Hagia Sophia — who blessed the union and crowned Theodote (Pratsch, pp. 89–90; Cholij, pp. 60–75). [Disputed: popular Orthodox sources often call Joseph simply “a priest of Hagia Sophia”; the scholarship identifies him more precisely as abbot of Kathara and oikonomos of the Great Church (Pratsch; ODB s.v. “Moechian Controversy”). He is not to be confused with Theodore’s own brother Joseph, later Archbishop of Thessalonica.] Joseph’s act made him the immediate object of the rigorists’ censure: a priest who blesses an adulterous union shares in the sin, and all who commune with him share in it too — including, by extension, the emperor and the court.

The First Break and the First Exile (797)

The Patriarch Tarasios — the same who had ordained Theodore (see Family and Sakkoudion) — refused to bless the marriage himself, but he declined to excommunicate the emperor or to depose Joseph, judging that the prudent course was to tolerate the situation rather than provoke a ruinous breach with the throne. This was oikonomia — the pastoral economy that bends the strict application of discipline for the sake of a greater good (Cholij, pp. 60–90; Pratsch, pp. 89–105). To Theodore and Plato it was intolerable: an adultery had been committed in the face of the Church, and the patriarch’s silence amounted to communion with sin. They broke communion not only with Joseph but with Tarasios for tolerating him, demanding the excommunication of all parties to the affair — the rigorist principle of akribeia, the strict letter of the canon, against the throne and against a temporizing patriarch (Cholij, pp. 60–90).

The emperor’s response was force. The Sakkoudion community was broken up; Plato was imprisoned at Constantinople, and Theodore, flogged, was banished with about ten of his monks to Thessalonica, where he arrived on 25 March 797 (Pratsch, pp. 107–110). The exile was short. In August 797 Irene seized sole power, blinding and deposing her son Constantine VI (he died of the wound), and the new regime lifted the exile of the monks who had opposed him; under the changed circumstances Joseph was degraded from the priesthood, and the rigorists were vindicated (Pratsch, pp. 110–113; Cholij, pp. 75–90). It was at this point, with Theodore restored to favor, that Irene installed his community in the Stoudios (see Abbot of Stoudios).

The Second Phase (806–811)

The affair revived a decade later under a different emperor. In 806, when the lay official Nikephoros was raised to the patriarchate (over Theodore, whom some had wanted), and again when the emperor Nikephoros I pressed for a reconciliation, a synod rehabilitated Joseph to the priesthood and restored him to his post — an act of imperial-ecclesiastical economy meant to heal the old wound (Pratsch, pp. 147–149; Cholij, pp. 90–110). Theodore, who had at first not objected, came by about 808 to refuse communion with the rehabilitated Joseph and with the patriarch who had received him, on the same principle as before: the adultery had never been undone, and to restore the priest who blessed it was to ratify the sin (Pratsch, pp. 153–157).

The conflict came to a head in January 809, when a synod condemned Theodore and his followers as schismatics and the emperor exiled them. Theodore was banished to the Princes’ Islands — to Chalke, his brother Joseph to Prote, the aged Plato to Oxeia (Pratsch, pp. 170–173; Cholij, pp. 90–110). This second exile lasted until 811, when, after the death of Nikephoros I in battle against the Bulgars, the new emperor Michael I Rangabe recalled Theodore; Joseph was again deposed, and an outward reconciliation with the patriarch Nikephoros was achieved (Pratsch, p. 183; Cholij, pp. 105–115).

What the Affair Was Really About

On its surface the Moechian controversy was a quarrel over one imperial marriage. Underneath, it was the first full statement of the question that would define Theodore’s life: may the canons be set aside — even by economy, even by a holy patriarch — to accommodate the power of the throne? Theodore’s answer was no, and the scholarship reads him as the great theorist of the limits of economy: economy may relax discipline for a soul’s good, but it cannot be made to cover what is in itself a sin (Cholij, pp. 80–120, the central treatment; Pratsch’s subtitle, zwischen Dogma und Pragma, names the same tension). It must be said in fairness that Theodore’s antagonists were saints — Tarasios and Nikephoros are both venerated — and that the Church has not simply pronounced for Theodore’s akribeia against their oikonomia; the affair remains, within Orthodoxy, the classic case study of the legitimate scope and the limits of economy (Cholij, pp. 80–120). What Theodore drew from it — the conviction that the Church’s law stands above the emperor’s convenience — is the subject of the companion file (see Church and Emperor). It was the rehearsal for the greater confession to come.

The Political Context: Constantine VI and Irene

The marriage affair cannot be understood apart from the unstable politics of the reign in which it erupted. Constantine VI (b. 771) had come to the throne as a child in 780 under the regency of his mother, the empress Irene, the iconophile ruler whose restoration of the images at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) had reshaped the Byzantine religious world (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Constantine VI,” “Irene”; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 71–90). The relationship between mother and son was a long and bitter struggle for power. Constantine reached his majority and chafed against Irene’s tutelage; there were coups, counter-coups, oaths exacted from the army, and a succession of military and political humiliations that steadily eroded the young emperor’s standing. His first marriage, to Maria of Amnia, had itself been arranged by Irene — Maria was chosen through a bride-show, and the match served the empress’s purposes more than her son’s affections — which is part of why Constantine could later represent his repudiation of Maria as the casting-off of a union forced upon him (ODB, s.v. “Maria of Amnia”; Pratsch, pp. 89–90).

It is against this background that the adulterous marriage of 795 takes on its full political color. By divorcing Maria and marrying Theodote, Constantine was not merely indulging a private passion; he was asserting his autonomy against the marriage his mother had imposed, and the rigorists’ attack on the new union could not but read, in the charged atmosphere of the court, as an attack on the emperor’s freedom of action and indirectly as a stance in the mother-son contest. The denouement confirms the entanglement: in August 797 Irene seized sole power, had her son blinded and deposed — he died of the wound — and the regime that lifted the monks’ exile was the regime of the very mother whose marriage-policy Constantine had defied (Pratsch, pp. 110–113; ODB, s.v. “Irene”). The rigorists were vindicated, but their vindication came by the hand of a usurping and matricidal-in-effect empress, a fact that complicates any tidy reading of the affair as a simple triumph of canon over power.

The Canonical Issue: Why the Marriage Was Uncanonical

At the center of the storm lay a precise canonical question, and it repays stating exactly. Byzantine canon law did not forbid divorce and remarriage absolutely, but it permitted divorce only on specified grounds and regarded a second marriage with disfavor even where lawful. Maria of Amnia had given Constantine no ground for divorce recognized by the canons; the emperor’s pretext — variously an alleged attempt on his life and, more vaguely, incompatibility — was not among the lawful causes, so that the repudiation of Maria was itself uncanonical, and her confinement to a convent did not dissolve the marriage in the eyes of the Church (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 60–75; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 89–90). A second marriage contracted while the first spouse lived and the first union remained valid was, by definition, adultery — moicheia — whence the controversy takes its name.

Compounding the offense was the matter of digamy and the discipline attaching even to lawful second marriages. The canonical tradition — drawing on St. Basil’s penitential canons, which the Byzantine Church treated as authoritative — imposed a period of penance on those entering a second marriage even when it was permitted, and Basil’s canons explicitly stigmatized the union following an unlawful divorce as adulterous (Basil, Canonical Epistles, canons 4, 9, 77; Cholij, pp. 60–75). The participation of a priest made the breach graver still: Joseph of Kathara did not merely tolerate the union but crowned and blessed it, lending the Church’s own liturgical sanction to what the canons defined as adultery, and thereby — in the rigorists’ eyes — implicating in the sin every cleric and layman who remained in communion with him (Pratsch, pp. 89–90; Cholij, pp. 60–90). The canonical case, then, was not a technicality but a clear collision: an imperial marriage that the law of the Church could only name as adultery, solemnized by a priest of the Great Church, and tolerated by a patriarch for reasons of state.

Akribeia and Oikonomia: The Affair’s Lasting Significance

The deepest legacy of the Moechian controversy lies not in its chronology but in the principle it forced into the open: the relation between akribeia, the strict and exact application of the canons, and oikonomia, the pastoral “economy” by which the Church may, for the salvation of souls, relax the rigor of the letter (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 80–120, the central modern treatment; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 89–113). Oikonomia is a genuine and venerable instrument of Orthodox pastoral practice — not laxity but the prudent dispensation from discipline for a greater spiritual good, exercised on the model of God’s own condescension. Tarasios and, later, Nikephoros invoked it in good faith, judging that to press the canon against the throne risked a ruinous schism that would harm more souls than the toleration of one tainted marriage. They were not laxists but pastors weighing evils.

Theodore’s contribution — and the reason the affair became the classic Orthodox case study — was to mark the limits of economy. Cholij reads him as the great theorist of those limits: economy may bend a disciplinary canon for the good of a soul, but it cannot be stretched to cover what is in itself a sin, for that would make the Church the ratifier of sin rather than its physician (Cholij, pp. 80–120). To tolerate the adulterous marriage by economy was, on Theodore’s reckoning, to confuse the relaxation of discipline with the licensing of evil — to cross the one line economy may not cross. The rehabilitation of Joseph in 806 sharpened the point precisely because it presented economy at its most plausible (a gesture of peace, the healing of an old wound) over an offense Theodore held to be intrinsically sinful and never repented (see “The Second Phase,” above). The Orthodox tradition has not simply ratified Theodore’s akribeia against the oikonomia of the venerated patriarchs who opposed him; both are saints, and the question remains genuinely open within the Church (Cholij, pp. 80–120; Pratsch, pp. 89–113). But the terms of the debate — that economy is real, that it has limits, and that the limit falls at the point where discipline shades into the sanctioning of sin — are in large part Theodore’s bequest, and they are the affair’s enduring contribution to Orthodox moral and canonical theology (see The Formation of a Reformer and Church and Emperor).

References

Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The chronology of both phases: the 795 marriage, the 797 and 809 exiles, the 806 rehabilitation of Joseph, the 811 recall.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The central analysis of the akribeia/oikonomia question and Theodore’s theory of the limits of economy.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Moechian Controversy,” “Constantine VI,” “Tarasios,” “Irene,” “Maria of Amnia.”)
Basil the Great. Canonical Epistles (esp. canons 4, 9, 77), received into Byzantine canon law. On the penitential discipline of digamy and the adulterous character of marriage following an unlawful divorce.
“Moechian Controversy.” Encyclopedia.com (citing H.-G. Beck and P. J. Alexander) — used to locate the identity of Joseph as abbot of Kathara and oikonomos, cross-checked against Pratsch and the ODB.