The Council of 879–880: The Healing Rome Later Repudiated

The great council of Constantinople of 879–880, with the legates of Pope John VIII concurring, annulled the anti-Photian council of 869–870, restored communion between Rome and Constantinople, and solemnly reaffirmed the Creed without addition, anathematizing any who would alter it. For the Orthodox Church it stands as the model of how East and West could be reconciled; the later Western decision to repudiate it and count 869–870 as “the Eighth Ecumenical Council” is, in Orthodox eyes, a repudiation of the healing itself. This file defers details to the sibling collection St. Photius the Great.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Council of Union

When Ignatius died in October 877, Photius succeeded him on the patriarchal throne with general consent, and the new pope, John VIII, was asked to concur. The council that met in Hagia Sophia from November 879 to March 880 — some 383 bishops, the largest assembly since Chalcedon, with legates of Rome and of the three Eastern patriarchates — recognized Photius as lawful patriarch, annulled and struck from the record the council of 869–870 that had anathematized him, and restored full communion between the sees (Dvornik, The Photian Schism: History and Legend, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948, part II, the standard account; the acts in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vols. 17–17A; a modern study in Meijer, A Successful Council of Union: A Theological Analysis of the Photian Synod of 879–880, Analecta Vlatadon 23, Thessaloniki, 1975). The sibling collection treats the council fully in The Council of Union; here, its two achievements and their fate.

First: it undid a false council by a true one. The council of 869–870 — held under imperial duress, with a minuscule episcopate, on Roman instructions — was formally annulled with the concurrence of the Roman legates themselves, acting on John VIII’s instructions (Dvornik, The Photian Schism, 1948, part II). The East has never counted 869–870 among the councils; its “ecumenical” numbering in the West is a later development (below).

Second: it fixed the Creed against addition. In its session of 880 the council solemnly promulgated the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in its original form and decreed that whoever should “compose another confession of faith… or dare to adulterate the antiquity of this sacred and venerable Horos with illegitimate words, or additions, or subtractions” is to be deposed if a cleric and anathematized if a layman (Horos of the Council of 879–880, in Mansi 17; discussed in Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, on 879–880; and in Meijer, A Successful Council of Union, 1975). The Filioque was not named; it did not need to be. Roman legates subscribed to a conciliar anathema that, on its plain terms, covers the interpolated Creed — at a moment when Rome itself still sang the Creed without the addition (see Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor on Leo III’s shields and the Roman practice before 1014). The details and the debate over the Horos’ intent are in The Repudiation of the Filioque Addition.

The council also addressed the order of the churches: its Canon 1 provided mutual recognition of the disciplinary acts of Rome and Constantinople each in its own sphere — a working grammar of primacy-in-communion rather than jurisdiction of one over the other (Canon 1 of the Council of 879–880, in Mansi 17; Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, on the canon’s significance for the primacy debate).

What Rome’s Later Repudiation Meant

For roughly two centuries the Western church lived at peace with the settlement of 879–880. Dvornik — a Roman Catholic priest and the greatest modern student of the affair — demonstrated that the legend of a second, post-879 “Photian schism” (in which John VIII supposedly repented of the union and re-anathematized Photius) is a fabrication of later polemic with no basis in the contemporary sources, and that the canonists of the West began to count the anti-Photian council of 869–870 as “the Eighth Ecumenical Council” only from around the end of the eleventh century, when the Gregorian reformers, hunting precedents for the deposition of clerics (and for papal authority over councils), rediscovered its acts (Dvornik, The Photian Schism, 1948, part III, the historiographical demonstration; summarized in The Dvornik Rehabilitation).

The substitution matters more than a numbering dispute might suggest. In receiving 869–870 and forgetting 879–880, the medieval West canonized the failed, coerced council and erased the successful council of union — erased, that is, the precedent in which a pope’s legates had concurred in an Eastern settlement, on synodal terms, with the Creed guarded against addition. Orthodox theologians have long pressed this point: the council of 879–880 is the standing proof that the Church knew how to heal an East–West breach — by returning to the common faith and the common order, not by submission of one see to another — and Rome’s later repudiation of it was therefore a choice against that way of healing (Meijer, A Successful Council of Union, 1975; Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox, 2017; cf. Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin, 1993, ch. 3). Some Orthodox voices, from the Middle Ages to modern times, have argued that 879–880 deserves to be counted the Eighth Ecumenical Council; the Church has not formally so numbered it, and the question remains an open theologoumenon rather than a defined position (the medieval and modern advocacy is surveyed in Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox, 2017; per §4.2 this intra-Orthodox question is noted, not adjudicated; cf. The Seven Ecumenical Councils).

[Disputed: the intent and later history of the 879–880 settlement. (a) Whether John VIII fully accepted the council's Horos on the Creed or accepted the council with reservations — the surviving Latin correspondence is fragmentary and its interpretation contested (Dvornik, *The Photian Schism*, 1948, part II, arguing for genuine papal acceptance; some Catholic historiography before Dvornik held the opposite, and a minority still stresses the ambiguities). (b) Whether the anti-addition Horos was aimed at the Filioque specifically or at creedal tampering generally — Meijer and most Orthodox scholarship read the Filioque as clearly in view given the Bulgarian context; others note the addition is unnamed (Meijer 1975; Siecienski, The Filioque, 2010). The facts of the council's acts and the legates' subscription are not in dispute; their construal is.]

The Precedent and the Pattern

Seen from within the Church, the ninth century ends in a paradox that governs the rest of the story (METHODOLOGY §4.1). The crisis proved the two systems incompatible; the council proved the incompatibility curable — if Rome would meet the East in council, on the shared faith of the councils. Every later attempt at union inverted the method of 879–880: Lyons (1274) demanded submission without a real council; Florence (1438–39) held a council but demanded acceptance of the very additions 880 had anathematized; the Unia (1596) bypassed the Church’s body altogether (see Section 07 and Section 08). The Orthodox memory of 879–880 is thus not antiquarian: in the modern dialogue, Orthodox theologians have repeatedly proposed the council of 879–880 as the model of a healed communion — a point taken up in Section 09.

See Also

References

  • Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. (The council of union; the annulment of 869–870; the demolition of the “second schism” legend; the late Western adoption of 869–870 as “Eighth Ecumenical.”)
  • Mansi, J. D., ed. Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio. Vols. 17–17A. (The acts of 879–880; the Horos; Canon 1.)
  • Meijer, Johan. A Successful Council of Union: A Theological Analysis of the Photian Synod of 879–880. Analecta Vlatadon 23. Thessaloniki: Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1975. (The theological analysis of the settlement.)
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (The Horos and the Filioque question.)
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. (Canon 1; the council in the primacy debate; the “Eighth Council” question.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. Ch. 3. (Synthesis and Orthodox assessment.)