Justified True Belief

(●) The best-read man in ninth-century Christendom, who rescued hundreds of books by taking notes on them and pressed the question about the Creed that still separates East from West. + Sometime in the middle of the ninth century a senior civil servant in Constantinople was packing for a long journey. He had been named to an embassy heading east to the caliph’s court, and his younger brother Tarasius, who would not be going, asked him for a favour before he left. The two of them had been reading their way through a private library together. Would he write down what was in the books his brother had missed? He would, and he did, and the result is one of the odder accidents in the history of literature. Photius set down summaries of two hundred and seventy-nine books, most of them from memory: pagan novels, court histories, medical handbooks, the theology of men the church had condemned, and the theology of men it had canonized. He apologised in advance for the gaps. A great many of the works he described have since vanished, and for those his hurried notes are the fullest account anyone will ever read. He matters to Christian readers for a second reason, and it is the one his name is usually attached to. As patriarch of Constantinople he objected, in public and at length, to four syllables the Latin West had added to the Nicene Creed, and he built the case against them that the Eastern churches have used ever since. Whether he was right is a question on which Christians still divide, and nothing written here will settle it. What is not in dispute is that he framed the question, and that a thousand years of conversation between East and West has been conducted in the terms he set.

(●) c. 810 AD: He was born in Constantinople to a family that had been punished for keeping its icons. + Nobody wrote down the year Photius was born, which is the first thing to know about him and a fair warning about the rest. Historians place it somewhere between about 810 and 820, and every date in his early life is reckoned backward from that guess, so the "c." in front of his birth year is doing real work. What the sources do tell us is the shape of the household, and the household is where the story starts. His father Sergios and his mother Eirene belonged to the party of the images during the second wave of iconoclasm, the imperial campaign to strip Christian pictures out of the churches on the argument that a painted Christ is an idol. Under the emperor Theophilos that campaign had teeth. The family was condemned and driven from the capital, which meant the loss of rank, of income, and of the city itself, and so Photius grew up knowing that his parents had paid for a doctrine rather than merely holding one. The connection ran back further than his parents, as it happened. Tarasios, the patriarch who presided when the council of 787 restored the icons the first time, was a kinsman on his father’s side, an uncle or a great-uncle depending on which source you follow. So the boy was raised inside a controversy that had already cost his family something. In 843, when he was a young man, the images came back for good under the empress Theodora, and the day the church still keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy was, for the household he came from, a family vindication.

(●) c. 840–855 AD: He rose to the top of the imperial civil service and taught the brightest students in the city, and never once took orders. + Photius made his career on the secular side of Byzantine life. He held the dignity of protospatharios, a senior court rank that had begun as chief of the emperor’s guardsmen, and served as protoasekretis, the chief secretary who ran the emperor’s correspondence and drafted his documents. Think of a cabinet secretary with a scholar’s habits: he held one of the most demanding administrative posts in the empire and spent his evenings on Aristotle. He also taught, privately and by reputation rather than by appointment, and his house became a place where ambitious young men came to read. One of them was a brilliant linguist named Constantine, remembered by the monastic name he took at the end of his life, Cyril, who would later carry the gospel to the Slavs. At some point in these years, on a date the sources do not settle, he was sent on an embassy east to the court of the Abbasid caliph. That commission is the occasion he gives for the Bibliotheca, the reading notes he wrote for his brother, though the reading itself had been done in the years before. His position in these years was a strange one, and worth a moment. The most learned Christian in the empire, the man who would shortly be its patriarch, was a layman with a government job and a house full of students. There is no sign he expected any of that to change.

(●) 858 AD: On Christmas Day he was consecrated patriarch, six days after he had still been a layman. + The crisis that put him in the chair was not about him at all. The patriarch Ignatius had refused communion to Bardas, the emperor’s uncle and the real power at court, over a domestic scandal. To refuse a man communion is to turn him away from the bread and the cup at the altar, which in a city like Constantinople meant a judgment delivered in front of everyone who mattered, and Bardas was not a man who absorbed that quietly. He had Ignatius removed. Whether Ignatius resigned or was deposed became, for the next twenty years, the whole question, because everything else turned on it. The court needed a successor who was respected, uncommitted, and not a monk of Ignatius’ party, and it settled on the chief secretary. The difficulty was that the chief secretary was not a churchman at all, so the whole clerical career had to be run through at speed. He was tonsured a monk on 20 December 858, the ceremonial cutting of the hair that marks a man’s entry into monastic life, and then passed through every clerical rank in a matter of days: reader, subdeacon, deacon, priest, and on 25 December bishop and patriarch. Church law had long required intervals between the orders, called interstices, precisely so that a man’s fitness could be tested at each step rather than assumed. A carpenter does not become a master the week he picks up a chisel, and the church had built the same patience into its own ladder. Photius got none of it. The bishop who consecrated him, Gregory Asbestas of Syracuse, was himself under censure at the time. Photius insisted afterward that he had not wanted the office and had taken it under pressure, and there is no particular reason to disbelieve him. It made no difference. His enemies had been handed a permanent objection on the first day, and they used it for the rest of his life.

(●) 863–867 AD: Rome deposed him, and he answered by putting the Western church itself on trial. + Pope Nicholas I sent legates to Constantinople to look into the affair. A legate is a personal representative of the pope, sent to act with the pope’s own authority in a place the pope cannot go himself, and the arrangement works only so long as the man who sent him stands behind what he does when he gets there. At a council in the capital in 861 the legates sat, heard the case, and accepted Photius as patriarch. Nicholas then repudiated them, and in 863 a Roman synod declared that they had exceeded their instructions, deposed Photius, and recognised Ignatius. Constantinople did not accept that a Roman synod could depose an Eastern patriarch, and the two churches were now saying different things about who was in the chair. Then Bulgaria turned the jurisdictional quarrel into a doctrinal one. Boris, the Bulgarian ruler, had been baptised in 864 under Byzantine sponsorship, and in 866 he turned to Rome instead, hoping for better terms. Frankish and Roman clergy arrived in his territory, and they brought with them the Western form of the Nicene Creed, which says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son": in Latin, Filioque. To Photius this was not a local custom. It was a phrase inserted into the one confession the whole church had agreed on, by a part of the church acting alone. So in 867 he wrote to the other Eastern patriarchs, in an encyclical, a circular letter meant to reach all of them at once, laying out the Latin errors as he saw them and summoning a council. The council met that summer in Constantinople and declared Pope Nicholas deposed. Put it plainly: a quarrel over one bishop’s appointment had become, in nine years, a mutual condemnation between Rome and Constantinople, each of them announcing that the other’s chief pastor was no longer in office.

(●) 867–877 AD: A new emperor threw him out, a council condemned him, and he came back as tutor in the palace. + In September 867 Basil the Macedonian murdered the emperor Michael III, took the throne, and found himself in need of Rome’s goodwill. Photius was deposed within days and Ignatius restored. A council met in Constantinople from 869 to 870, with papal legates presiding, and condemned Photius; the Western church counts it as the Fourth Council of Constantinople and numbers it eighth among the ecumenical councils, the gatherings whose decisions the whole church rather than one region is held to have received, the first of them being Nicaea in 325. Photius was summoned. He said almost nothing in his own defence, and he was anathematised, which is the church’s heaviest sentence: his name pronounced cut off, in public, with a curse attached to it. He spent the next years in a monastery, cut off for a time even from his books, which for this man was the sharper punishment of the two. What happened next is the part of the story that gets left out of the polemics on both sides. Photius and Ignatius reconciled. The two men had been set against each other by other people’s politics for the better part of a decade, and at some point they stopped. The deposed patriarch was brought back to the palace as tutor to the emperor’s sons, including the boy who would reign as Leo VI, which is to say that the man Basil had thrown out was now the teacher in Basil’s own household. The sources report that he visited Ignatius in his last illness. When Ignatius died in October 877, Photius took the chair again, this time with no rival alive to dispute it.

(●) 879–880 AD: A second council, with Rome’s legates in the room, cancelled the first and left the Creed exactly as it stood. + Photius did not simply take the office and keep quiet. He asked Rome for legates and got them: Pope John VIII recognised him as patriarch and sent representatives to a council that met in Hagia Sophia through the winter of 879 and 880. That council annulled the acts of 869 and 870, and it laid down that the Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople was to be confessed without addition or subtraction, anathematising anyone who altered it. Here is where the two halves of Christendom start telling the story differently, and the difference has never been resolved. Many Orthodox theologians, and some of the Eastern churches formally, count this council of 879 as the eighth ecumenical council; the Roman church counts the council of 869 instead, and from the eleventh century onward treated the 879 council as void. Both traditions therefore have an eighth ecumenical council held at Constantinople. They are not the same one, and they said opposite things about the same man. Whether John VIII went on to repudiate the council afterwards is itself disputed, and the documents are the trouble: the papal letters read out in the sessions survive in a Greek version that Latin writers have long held was doctored, and the later Western report that he annulled the acts rests on material historians have found hard to trust. What is clear is that Photius died in communion with Rome, meaning that the churches still recognised each other’s altars and each other’s clergy, and that the formal break between them was still nearly two centuries away.

(●) 886–893 AD: His own former pupil deposed him, and he finished his life in a monastery. + Basil I died in 886, and his son Leo VI, the boy Photius had taught, came to the throne and forced his old tutor to resign almost at once. Why he did it, nobody knows. Later writers mention a conspiracy at court, and perhaps the young emperor believed his tutor was mixed up in it; perhaps he simply wanted his own man in the chair, the way a new ruler often does; perhaps the two of them had fallen out years earlier over something that never reached a document. Whether Photius had any part in a plot we simply cannot say. He was sent to a monastery in the Armenian lands, and after that the sources fall quiet. He died there, by the usual reckoning on 6 February 893, though even the year is not secure and proposals have run from 891 to 897. There is something fitting in that. The man whose notes rescued so much of other people’s history left his own beginning and his own end as estimates. The Eastern churches remember him as Saint Photius the Great and keep his feast on the day he died. The Western church spent most of a millennium remembering him as the author of a schism, the split that left East and West out of communion with each other, and has lately grown a good deal more careful about saying so. A man who spent his whole adult life reading is a hard man to caricature for long: the books he left behind eventually got the last word.

What He Taught

(T1) The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, because two sources inside God would be two Gods. + Picture a river with one spring. Everything downstream, however far it spreads, traces back to that one opening in the rock, and if you found a second spring feeding the same river you would have to say the river had two origins, not one. Photius thought the doctrine of God worked something like that, and he thought the Latins had quietly dug a second spring. Two words have to be unpacked first, because the whole dispute lives inside them. Procession is the term Christian theology uses for the eternal relation by which the Holy Spirit is from the Father, the way begotten names the Son’s relation to the Father; it is not an event that happened, but a description of who the Spirit eternally is. The monarchy of the Father is the Greek fathers’ name for the conviction that within the Trinity the Father alone is the source, the single origin from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. That single origin is what keeps three persons from being three Gods. Photius’ argument runs by elimination, taking the two possible answers and finding both of them unliveable, and it is worth following slowly, because it is the argument the East has made ever since. Suppose the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. Then the Son either causes the Spirit in the same way the Father does, or in some different way. There is no third option. Take the first. If the Son causes the Spirit in exactly the way the Father does, then the one thing that was supposed to mark the Father off as Father has just been handed to somebody else, and what makes the two of them different persons at all becomes hard to say. Take the second. If the Son causes the Spirit in some other way, then God now contains two kinds of causing, one that belongs to the Father and another that belongs to the Son, and the river has two springs feeding it after all. Either way, Photius argued, the monarchy is gone. And once you have allowed that somebody besides the Father can be an origin inside God, he could see no principled place to stop counting. His scriptural anchor is the plainest text on the subject, Christ’s own words about the Spirit: "But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me." (John 15:26) Fairness requires the Latin reply, and it is stronger than Photius knew, because he could not read Latin and had no access to the Western literature. Augustine had already said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father principaliter, principally, meaning that the Father remains the origin and that whatever the Son contributes he has himself received from the Father. Two centuries before Photius, Maximus the Confessor had written to a correspondent in Cyprus that the Romans did not mean to make the Son a second cause of the Spirit at all, and that the Latin verb simply covers more ground than the Greek one does. Whether that answers Photius or merely relocates the question is the argument that has run from his day to ours.

(Q) "Leaving aside the aforementioned, if two causes are discerned in the divine, sovereign, and transcendent Trinity, and if the Spirit thus flows from two hypostases, then where is the much-hymned, divine majesty of the Monarchy?" + Source: Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit 11. The numbered sections follow the Greek. Two modern English versions exist, from Holy Transfiguration Monastery (1983) and from Joseph P. Farrell (1987), and the text that circulates freely online, used here, carries no translator’s name. Hypostasis is the Greek word for one of the three, what English usually renders "person". The Monarchy is the single source, the Father. Photius is not asking a rhetorical question for effect: the rest of the treatise works through the alternatives one by one, and this is the hinge they all turn on.

(T2) A creed the whole church confessed together is not one part of the church’s to edit. + The second half of Photius’ case has nothing to do with what is eternally going on inside God, and it is the half that has aged best, because a reader who cannot follow a word of the first half can follow this one without difficulty. Suppose the Latin doctrine is perfectly defensible, he said. Grant it for the sake of argument. Then by what authority did anyone put it into the Creed? The text at issue was settled by the councils of 325 and 381 and received by bishops from Spain to Persia. It was the one sentence the whole church said in the same words, which is exactly what made it useful: a shared confession is a place to stand together. The Latin addition did not come from a council of the whole church. It spread by local usage, appearing in Spanish councils from the late sixth century, carried north into Frankish worship, and sung in Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen as though it had always been there. Here is the detail that makes the complaint bite, and it is the one most people on both sides have never heard: Rome itself resisted the addition, and left the evidence in metal. Around 810 Pope Leo III told Frankish envoys that he held the doctrine sound but would not have the words added to the Creed, and he had the unaltered text engraved on two silver shields, in Greek and in Latin, and set up at Saint Peter’s where anyone could read them. Rome did not sing the interpolated Creed at Mass until 1014, more than a century after Photius died. So when he demanded to know which council had authorised the change, he was pressing a question that the popes of his own grandfather’s generation had pressed too.

(Q) "Who of our sacred and renowned Fathers said the Spirit proceeds from the Son? Did any synod, acknowledged as ecumenical, proclaim it?" + Source: Photius, Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit 5, in the same unattributed English version as (T1). Two questions, asked in that order, because for Photius they are the only two that matter: what did the fathers hand down, and what did the whole church, gathered, actually decide. It is the argument from received tradition in its bare form, and the Eastern churches have not stopped making it since.

(T3) A Christian scholar reads the whole shelf, pagans and heretics included, and reports honestly what is in it. + Anyone who has ever missed six weeks of a book club knows the feeling behind the Bibliotheca. Tarasius had been away, the reading had gone on without him, and he wanted to know what he had missed. What he got back was a volume of two hundred and seventy-nine numbered entries, ranging from a paragraph to forty pages, on everything his brother had read. The striking thing is the range, and the absence of a gate. Photius summarises church histories and conciliar acts, as a patriarch might. He also summarises pagan Greek novels, a lost erotic romance among them, and says frankly what he thinks of the author’s indecency while still telling you the plot. He summarises the church history of Philostorgius, an Arian who denied that the Son is fully God, and reports its contents rather than burning it. He gives the arguments of heretics in their own terms before he says what is wrong with them. Behind the habit is a conviction with a good pedigree. The Bereans in Acts are commended for checking the apostle’s preaching against the Scriptures rather than taking it on trust (Acts 17:11), and Paul tells the Thessalonians to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Photius read as a man who believed the truth could stand being compared with things that were not true. The effect on Western learning was accidental and enormous: because he did not filter his shelf, we still have summaries of books that every later generation would have let die.

(Q) "You asked to be furnished with summaries of those works which had been read and discussed during your absence. Your idea was to have something to console you for our painful separation, and at the same time to acquire some knowledge, even if vague and imperfect, of the works which you had not yet read in our company." + Source: Photius, Bibliotheca, prefatory letter to Tarasius (Freese translation). He is explaining to his brother why the book exists, and apologising in the same breath for how rough it will be: the summaries are set down in whatever order memory produced them, and some of them, he warns, will be inaccurate, because it is hard to remember a large number of books read a long time ago.

(T4) A great name on the cover does not make the book sound. + Clement of Alexandria was one of the most admired Christian teachers of the early centuries, a man who had argued that Greek philosophy was God’s tutor for the Greeks the way the Law was for the Hebrews. Photius read three of his works, and when he came to the Hypotyposes, a set of notes on passages of Scripture, he did not flinch from what he found. He lists the problems one by one, and they are not small: that matter is eternal, that the Son is reduced to something created, that souls pass from body to body, that the Word only appeared to be flesh. Then he does something a lesser reader would not have done. He adds that the blasphemies are the work of Clement "or some one else under his name", leaving open the real possibility that a revered author’s book had been tampered with by somebody else. That is a careful judgment, not a hostile one. Two things follow. The first is that Photius was not a man who read to have his settled opinions confirmed; he assessed a text on what the text said. The second is an irony he could not have foreseen. The Hypotyposes is lost. His unfriendly summary is now the main evidence anyone has for what was in it, which means that the scholars who defend Clement today are arguing with, and from, the notes of the man who condemned him.

(Q) "Although in some cases what he says appears orthodox, in others he indulges in impious and legendary fables." + Source: Photius, Bibliotheca, Codex 109 (Freese translation). His verdict on Clement of Alexandria’s Hypotyposes, in the entry that is now the principal witness to a book nobody has seen for centuries. The sentence is characteristic of how he reads: the concession comes first, and the charge is specific rather than sweeping (T4).

(T5) What a person sees teaches faster than what a person hears, and the Incarnation is something that was seen. + On Holy Saturday, 29 March 867, the great church of Hagia Sophia had something in it that had not been there for over a century: a figural image, a mosaic of the Virgin with the child Christ in her arms, set in the apse above the altar. The iconoclast emperors had scraped the church bare. Photius preached at the unveiling from the ambo, the raised platform in the nave where the Scriptures were read, with the emperors Michael and Basil standing in front of him. His defence of images is not sentimental and it is not about beauty. It runs on the Incarnation. God as God cannot be depicted, and no Christian ever claimed otherwise; but the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and what became flesh was seen by witnesses and can therefore be shown. A picture of Christ in his mother’s arms is, on this reading, the same testimony the Gospels give, delivered through the eye instead of the ear. Photius presses the point further than most: sight, he argues, plants a thing in the memory more directly than hearing does, which is why a martyrdom seen in paint moves a person to imitate it more than the same martyrdom read aloud. Christians have never all agreed with him, and many readers will be among those who do not. You might be one of them, thinking something like: the commandment says what it says, and no amount of theology about the Incarnation gets round a plain prohibition. Much of the Protestant world has held exactly that, that the second commandment forbids images in worship whatever the Incarnation permits (Exodus 20:4), and the Reformed churches in particular emptied their buildings on exactly that ground. Photius would have answered that the commandment forbids making a likeness of the invisible God, and that a God who took a visible human face has changed what is at stake. Both sides have been saying this to each other for a long time.

(Q) "Christ came to us in the flesh, and was borne in the arms of His Mother. This is seen and confirmed and proclaimed in pictures, the teaching made manifest by means of personal eyewitness, and impelling the spectators to unhesitating assent." + Source: Photius, Homily 17, preached in Hagia Sophia on Holy Saturday, 29 March 867 (Mango translation). The mosaic still in the apse of Hagia Sophia is almost certainly the one he was unveiling, which makes this one of the rare cases where the sermon and the thing the sermon is about have both come down to us.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The reading notes he dashed off for his brother turned into one of the great rescues in the history of books. + Photius was not trying to preserve anything. He was answering a letter. But the ninth century sat at a narrow place in the transmission of ancient literature, when the old manuscripts written in capitals were being copied out into the new compact hand or not being copied at all, and a great many were not. His summaries are therefore the last word on authors whose own words are gone. A short list gives the flavour. Ctesias was a Greek doctor at the Persian court, and he wrote a history of Persia from the inside, which is the sort of book a historian would give a great deal to open; it is gone, and Photius’ summary of it is the fullest account anyone now has. The same goes for the local history of Memnon of Heraclea, and for the history of Olympiodorus of Thebes, a major source for the fall of the Western empire. Heaviest of all, for anyone interested in the early church, is the church history of Philostorgius, which survives essentially only in Photius’ epitome of it, his boiled-down summary. That one matters a great deal, because it is the one substantial Arian account of the fourth-century controversies, the losing side’s version told by a man who thought the winners had it wrong, and without Photius almost nothing of it would be left. There is one more entry worth naming, and it is the very first one in the collection. Codex is the word the manuscript tradition uses for each numbered entry, so codex 1 is the first thing anyone opening the Bibliotheca meets: a treatise by a presbyter named Theodore defending the genuineness of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert Paul made in Athens. Photius reports, clearly and without editorial panic, the four arguments against their authenticity that Theodore had written to answer. None of the fathers who came after Dionysius cites them or quotes a line of them. Eusebius leaves them out of his list of church writings. They describe church customs that only grew up gradually, long after Dionysius’ own lifetime. And they cite a letter of Ignatius of Antioch, martyred under Trajan two generations after Paul preached in Athens, which a companion of Paul could not have read. Those four objections are, near enough, the case modern scholarship makes. Western scholars began pressing them only in the Renaissance, with Lorenzo Valla, and did not fix the corpus at around AD 500 until the end of the nineteenth century. Photius had them on his desk in the ninth, set down without alarm, in a summary he was writing for his brother.

(†) The question he pressed about the Creed became the East’s standing question to the West, and both sides are still answering it. + Every later round of the conversation has been shaped by the terms Photius set. When Anselm of Canterbury argued the Western case before Greek bishops at the council of Bari in 1098, and wrote it up afterwards, he was answering Photius’ objections whether or not he had read him. The reunion councils of Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439 both produced agreed formulas on the procession of the Spirit, and both were repudiated in the East once the delegations got home, largely because Photius’ second question, about who may alter a common creed, had not been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. The modern round has gone further than the medieval ones, and it has moved along the line Maximus the Confessor had drawn two centuries before Photius, that the two languages were not quite saying the same thing. In 1995 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity published a clarification distinguishing the Greek verb for procession, which names the Spirit’s origin from the Father, from the broader Latin verb, and affirming that the Father is the sole origin within the Trinity. A joint North American Orthodox and Catholic consultation recommended in 2003 that the Catholic Church confess the Creed of 381 without the addition. And popes have stood beside Orthodox patriarchs and said the Creed aloud without the Filioque in it, which is a small thing to watch and a large thing to mean. None of this has reunited the churches, and Photius’ question is not closed. But the shape of the conversation is his. A Christian who belongs to neither side of that argument, or who has never heard of it until now, may reasonably wonder how much is at stake. The honest summary is this. Two halves of the church have disagreed for over a thousand years about a clause in a creed they both confess, and the disagreement is real theology rather than mere politics, which is why a thousand years have not dissolved it. But it does not touch what Christians of every tradition hold together, that the Spirit is God, that he is worshipped with the Father and the Son, and that the church has one Lord, one faith, one baptism (Ephesians 4:5).

(†) The missionaries he sent gave the Slavs the gospel in their own letters. + In 862 Rastislav, the ruler of Moravia in what are now the Czech and Slovak lands, asked Constantinople for teachers who could instruct his people in their own tongue. The emperor Michael III and Photius chose two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius. Constantine, a former pupil of Photius, did something no missionary had done for the Slavs before: rather than teach them Greek, he invented an alphabet for their language and began translating the Gospels and the liturgy into it. The consequences outran the mission. Moravia itself was lost to Frankish pressure within a generation, but the disciples of the two brothers carried the Slavonic books south into Bulgaria, where Boris gave them shelter, and the alphabet that eventually came out of that school is the one that bears Constantine’s monastic name, Cyrillic. It is the script of Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ukrainian to this day, though Constantine himself devised the earlier Glagolitic letters rather than the Cyrillic ones his followers shaped later. Photius also reported, in his encyclical of 867, that the Rus had accepted a bishop. The Rus were the northern people of the river routes who would in time give their name to Russia, and they had come down on Constantinople seven years earlier in a raid the city did not forget. That claim about a bishop is disputed in its details, and the conversion of the Rus properly belongs to the following century. Still, the principle the mission ran on was his, and it is worth saying in plain words: a nation hears the gospel in the language it actually speaks, at home, to its own children. That was contested at the time, and the Frankish clergy fought it hard, holding that Scripture belonged in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and nowhere else. The judgment of history has gone the other way, and every believer who has ever read a Bible in a language the apostles never heard is on the far side of that argument from the Franks.

(†) Where his own record tells against him: he made customs into heresies, and he took a chair whose occupant was still alive. + A fair ledger has a second column, and in Photius’ case the primary sources fill it without any help from his enemies. - Customs treated as heresies. The encyclical of 867 does not confine itself to the Creed. It arraigns the Latins for fasting on Saturdays, for reckoning Lent differently, for teaching the faithful to think less of married priests, and for reserving the anointing that follows baptism to bishops rather than letting the local priest give it, and it puts all of this beside the Filioque as though the items were the same kind of fault. They are not. A church may keep Lent on a different calendar without believing anything false about God, in the way that two families may keep Christmas on different days without disagreeing about the Nativity, and Photius could tell the difference when he chose: the Mystagogy, written years later, keeps to the doctrine and drops the list of customs. Turning practices into charges widened a breach that the doctrinal question alone would not have widened, and it set a pattern of polemic that both sides then followed for centuries. - The manner of his elevation. Ignatius was alive and, by his own supporters’ account, had not freely resigned. Photius accepted consecration inside a week, from a bishop under censure, and then defended the arrangement. He may well have been pressed into it, and he said so. But the objection was substantial rather than technical, and his own later conduct suggests he felt its weight, since he twice sought and obtained recognition from Rome for an office he insisted had been his all along. - The habit of his polemic. In the very homily that makes the case for images (T5), he reached for contempt of the Jews as a ready insult against the iconoclasts, calling the stripping of the icons the daring deed of "a wretched Jewish hand, lacking in no insolence". It was a stock move of Byzantine preaching and it was beneath the argument he was making, which stood perfectly well on the Incarnation without it. Paul had warned Gentile Christians against exactly this posture toward Israel (Romans 11:18). None of this touches his learning or his honesty as a reader, and the church that canonised him did not pretend otherwise about the rest. He was a first-rate mind placed in an impossible position by other people’s politics, and he did not always rise above it.