Gennadius of Constantinople

Gennadius became patriarch of Constantinople in 458 and held the office until his death in 471. He came in at a hard moment: the Council of Chalcedon was only seven years old, Egypt was in open revolt against it, and the patriarch of Alexandria, Proterius, had just been murdered in his own baptistery by a mob.

Gennadius stood with Chalcedon. He excommunicated Timothy the Weasel, the rival claimant installed at Alexandria after the murder, and worked with the emperor Leo I to hold the settlement together. Leo polled the bishops of the empire on whether Chalcedon should stand; the replies, gathered as the Encyclical Codex, came back overwhelmingly for the council, and Gennadius helped organize the answer.

His own mark, though, is on church discipline, and it is specific. Simony, paying money to be ordained, had crept back in, and it was corroding the clergy from the top. In 459 Gennadius convened a synod at Constantinople of some eighty-two bishops, with papal legates present, and issued an encyclical letter against it. The letter is blunt. It quotes Peter's words to Simon Magus in Acts 8, whose name the sin carries.

It declares that anyone who gives or takes money for ordination, bishop, presbyter, deacon, or the go-between who arranges it, is stripped of his office, and it puts an anathema on the practice so that no one could plead ignorance. The letter was circulated to the churches, and it became the standing canonical text on the subject in the East.

He was also a serious exegete in the Antiochene manner, writing commentaries on Daniel, Genesis and the letters of Paul. Almost all of it is lost; what remains survives as extracts in the medieval catena manuscripts, where later compilers quoted him alongside Chrysostom and Theodore. He also wrote against Cyril of Alexandria's Twelve Anathemas, which places him firmly in the Antiochene school.

He was remembered afterward for his personal severity about ordination, the tradition is that he would ordain no one who did not know the Psalter by heart, and for enforcing the discipline of the clergy in a capital where preferment was a currency.

He is honored as a saint in the Orthodox Church, commemorated on 31 August.

Sources: The Encyclical of Gennadius of Constantinople against Simony (in Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio); Theodore Lector, Ecclesiastical History; Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, s.v. "Gennadius (10)"; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Gennadius I".