St. Photius the Great (c. 810-893)

The most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium, a layman and imperial secretary, made Patriarch of Constantinople in 858 in six days, from layman to patriarch, when his predecessor was forced out. Pope Nicholas I refused to recognise him, and the quarrel that followed was the first open break between Rome and the East. Photius answered on the ground that mattered: in his encyclical of 867 and his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit he named the Filioque, then spreading in the West, as a change to the Creed and an error about the Trinity. Deposed and restored, he presided at the council of 879-880, which Rome’s own legates attended and which forbade any addition to the Creed. It was under him that Cyril and Methodius went to the Slavs. His Bibliotheca preserves summaries and extracts of hundreds of ancient books, many of them otherwise lost. Feast: February 6.