Photios I of Constantinople

Photios was born at Constantinople about 810, into a family of high officials who had suffered for defending icons; his father died in exile. He grew up with money, books, and a first-class education, and he became the most learned man in the Byzantine Empire, a professor of philosophy and then a senior officer of state, chief secretary of the imperial council.

He was a layman. In 858 the Emperor Michael III's government deposed the patriarch Ignatios and put Photios in his place. He was rushed through every clerical order in six days and consecrated patriarch on Christmas.

That irregular start produced twenty years of conflict. Ignatios's supporters appealed to Rome. Pope Nicholas I declared Photios's election invalid; Photios convened a synod that declared the pope deposed. The quarrel widened into the first serious rupture between the Greek and Latin churches, over jurisdiction in Bulgaria, over Frankish missionary practice, and over the filioque, the clause the West had added to the Nicene Creed saying the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Photios wrote the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit against it, and the Eastern case on that point has been argued from his book ever since.

He was deposed in 867, restored in 877, and deposed again in 886. He died in exile about 893. The Orthodox church venerates him as a saint; Latin historians long treated him as the author of a schism. Both readings are of the same set of facts.

Meanwhile he did something no one else did. He read, constantly, and he took notes.

The Bibliotheca, sometimes called the Myriobiblon, is a collection of about 280 book reviews. Photios summarizes the contents of each work, quotes from it, and gives his opinion of the author's style. He covers histories, theology, medicine, romance, philosophy, lexicons, and the acts of councils.

Roughly half the books he describes no longer exist. Whole works of ancient history, whole schools of Greek prose, are known today only from Photios's summary and his excerpts. He is the reason we know that certain authors wrote at all.

He also compiled a large Greek lexicon, wrote the Amphilochia, nearly three hundred answers to questions on Scripture and doctrine, and sponsored the mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs, which gave the Slavic peoples an alphabet and a Bible.

Sources: Photios, Bibliotheca and Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; Adrian Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).