'THE BATTLE FOR THE SPIRIT' -The Council of Nicaea, 869 AD - A. P. Shepherd
'THE BATTLE FOR THE SPIRIT'
THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE, 869 A.D.
by A. P. Shepherd
In his exposition of the evolution of human consciousness Rudolf Steiner often spoke of the critical importance of the Council of Constantinople in 869, at which the Western Church officially renounced the ancient conception of man as a threefold being, of body, soul and spirit, by asserting that he is a duality of body and soul only. This article is an attempt to set out the historical background and spiritual significance of this Council. It will be seen to be a closely woven pattern of events which led up to the spiritual crisis of the ninth century.
It is impossible to understand this historical background unless we grasp clearly the ecclesiastical atmosphere of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. If Rome might be considered as the head of the Christian Church, and Antioch and Alexandria as its brain, Constantinople was its heart. Built in the first enthusiasm of Imperial Christianity as a Christian city, in which no pagan worship was to be allowed, it presented a real organic unity of Church and State. The famous Code of Justinian, by which the Empire was governed for centuries, began with an invocation of the Blessed Trinity, and was declared to be enacted in order to establish more firmly the practice of the Christian Faith. The Patriarch ranked next to the Emperor.
Another point to be borne in mind is the complete contrast between the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe, and, consequently, between Eastern and Western Christianity. The Byzantine Empire was for nearly a thousand years one of the most civilized, cultured and effectively ordered States the world has seen, while Western Europe was a welter of struggling tribal settlements, and later of rising and falling semi-barbarian kingdoms, encircling and often overwhelming the ever-diminishing remnant, in the centre of Italy, of what had once been the glory of Rome. Moreover, the Eastern Empire was in direct contact with the Persian and, from the seventh century, with the Arabian empires, in which the Aristotelian wisdom of Greece had taken root and was manifesting itself in the most advanced forms of science, medicine and astronomy. It was, in consequence. Eastern Christendom that was, for the most part, the home of theological learning. It was in Alexandria, Antioch and Syria that nearly all the heresies arose, and it was in Councils held at Constantinople or its neighbouring cities, under the presidency of the Emperor, that they had been settled. In these Councils the Bishops of the West were a minority.
We must have very clearly in mind one important result of the heresy disputes of the fourth to the seventh centuries, for it had a profound effect upon the life of the Byzantine Empire and on the subsequent spiritual evolution of Christendom. The main subject of dispute in the Church in those centuries was the attempt to explain the two-fold nature of Christ, as both human and divine. The dispute was divided between three points of view, that of the Nestorians - so-called after their founder, Nestorius - who so emphasized the humanity of Christ as to accord Him two wholly separate natures; the Monophysites, who so exalted Christ^s divine nature as completely to absorb His human nature into His Divinity; and the Orthodox point of view which Insisted on the presence of both natures in their fullness, united in Christ in one person.
The imperial demand for religious uniformity persecuted with varying rigour the two heretical Churches. The Nestorians were driven into Persia, where at Nisibis and Jundi-Shapur they became a centre of Aristotelian philosophy and theological learning. The Monophysites of Antioch and Alexandria enjoyed occasional spells of imperial toleration, but, for the most part, preserved a precarious existence in the deserts of Egypt and Syria.
With the rise of the Saracen Empire, early in the seventh century, both these Churches passed under Arab rule, where they enjoyed a freedom of thought and worship which the Church of Constantinople had never tolerated. Under this tolerant Islamic rule, the Monophysite Church spread, and in its monasteries, there developed a deeper and less secular wisdom than that of the Nestorians, which tended to ally itself with Arabism. This Monophysite wisdom was to be the counter to the spiritual rigidity, both of Byzantine imperialism and later, of Roman papacy.
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These facts give the general background of the events of 869, but we must bring the picture into closer focus. The Council of Constantinople of 869 was the aftermath of a century of the domination of Constantinople by a new heresy, one less of belief than of practice. The seventh century had ended in a welter of political confusion and intrigue. Moreover, it was not only the State which was corrupt but also the Church. While Constantinople was a city of intense religious observance, it was not itself a centre of religious learning. Its monastic orders did not give themselves to study, like those of the Nestorian and Monophysite Churches. The spiritual and philosophical interpretation of Christianity of the first three centuries, as it had found expression in Clement and Origen, had been abolished by Justinian in the sixth century, and had been replaced by a cult of the Liturgy, intensified by pilgrimages to holy places, especially those of Palestine. But the Saracen conquest of Syria and Palestine had closed Jerusalem to Constantinople. In place of the sacred pilgrimages there had grown up a veneration of images and relics, and this developed into superstition and charlatanry among both monks and people. The better-educated classes and the leading hierarchy were opposed to these practices, but they made little headway against them.
In 717 a distinguished general, Leo the Isaurian, seized the imperial throne. He came from the mountainous country of Isauria in southern Asia Minor, a land of hardy warriors, that had known the spiritually intellectual impact of the Monophysite Church and, for a century the neighbourhood of Islam, both of them opposed to the use of images in worship. With his reform of the army and the civil administration, Leo also ordered the immediate removal of all images from the city and its churches. There was a popular outcry and violent opposition from the monks, but the Emperor retaliated with persecution and banishment, and the suppression of many monasteries. The situation was parallel tothe Puritan and Catholic strife in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Leo was supported by the better-educated classes and by many of the more learned hierarchy.
Another result of the rise of the new dynasty, and one of the greatest consequence, was the gradual flow-back from the East of Aristotelian learning, and a revival in Constantinople itself of the Greek culture which Justinian had banished from the Empire two centuries before.
This iconoclastic tyranny, with varying rigor or leniency, continued for 60 years till 779, when the Dowager Empress Irene, herself an " image-worshipper,"* seized the power from her young son and reversed the Imperial policy.
(♦"Image-worshippers" ("iconodouloi") was the name given by the iconoclasts (image-destroyers) to those who used images in worship. The latter declared that the accusation was false, and that they only venerated images and relics because of their sacred associations. While this was for the most part true, the iconoclastic mind drew no distinction between veneration and worship.)
The violence of the iconoclasts had outrun their first reforming zeal and amounted to opposition not only to the veneration of images, but to all external expressions of piety and even to monasticism itself. Moreover, in their persecution they had ruthlessly destroyed works of art and had banished Byzantine artists. All this had provoked a reaction which allied itself with the recovery of Greek culture and created amongst the moderates of both parties a desire for "economia," a policy of freedom of conscience. The Empress did not commit the city to monastic reaction. She restored the worship of images, but she had appointed, as Patriarch, Tarasius, a layman and a moderate, who was President of the Imperial Chancellery.
There immediately followed an event of the greatest importance. A Synod of the whole Church was called at Nicaea in 787, at which iconoclasm was declared a heresy and, at the same time, the permissible use of images in worship was defined. This Synod is of importance to our present study because reference to it occurs frequently in the conflict between Rome and Constantinople that raged round the Council of 869. But it has an even greater importance for the spiritual understanding of the Council, yet one to which I have found no reference by any historian. The second canon of the Synod of Nicaea in 787 laid upon all bishops and clergy the essential duty of deep and constant study of the scriptures and concluded with these words.
" For the essence of our hierarchy is the divinely transmitted oracles, that is, the true knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, as the great Dionysius has declared it; and should anyone doubt this and not find his pleasure in thus acting and teaching, let him not be ordained."
How did it come to pass that this official acknowledgement of the authority of Dionysius' teaching is found in a Council of the whole Church, to which the Pope of that time set his seal, only 80 years before the Council of Constantinople of 869 abolished the Dionysian belief in the threefold nature of man as body, soul and spirit? How had this teaching established itself at orthodox Constantinople, where it had been rejected two centuries earlier, in the condemnation of Origen?
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Every student of Anthroposophy knows how often and with what emphasis Rudolf Steiner spoke of the mysterious figure, Dionysius the Areopagite, who retained and taught the ancient Mystery teaching about the spiritual being of man in the light of Christianity, which teaching, though banned by the Roman Church, continued in subterranean currents, bursting up again and again in the mystic life of European Christendom.
The writings of Dionysius appeared in Greek in the last 20 years of the fifth century in Egypt. They were deeply coloured with Neo-Plalonism, and were associated with a revival in Egypt at that time of the teaching of Origen. The fact that the claim that the author of the writings was the New Testament Dionysius the Areopagite has been rejected by scholars is of little importance. It was quite traditional to publish writings under a famous name of the past, and in any case occult teaching was preserved in secret oral tradition long before it was made public. The important fact is the great part which these writings played in the subsequent history of the Church, in the west as well as in the east. Evelyn Underhill considered that the influence of Augustine on the history of mysticism was as nothing compared with that of Dionysius the Areopagite. Nevertheless, how did this teaching win such authoritative approval at the Council of Nicaea in 787?
A clue to this problem is to be found in the fact that there was also a Syriac source of this teaching, as early as and possibly earlier than the Greek text. This affords us a definite and most important link with its appearance at Constantinople in the eighth century.
We have already spoken of the scholarly Monophysite monasteries. One of the most famous of these was set up in the fifth century at Edessa in northern Syria, from which the Nestorians had lately fled before the Catholic persecution. In the late part of the century a Monophysite monk of Edessa, Stephen bar Sudhaili, made a pilgrimage to Egypt, where, we are told, he met Monophysite monks who had secretly revived the teaching of Origen. Stephen returned to Edessa and produced a work in Syriac on these lines. Thus, the writings appeared, both in Greek and Syriac, at the end of the fifth century, through the activity of the Monophysite Church, and continued to be much used by the Monophysites.
The next link in our research is the fact that the Monophysite monastery of Edessa, while not an academy, had become a centre of learning as distinguished as the Persian University at Jundi-Shapur or that of the Nestorians at Nisibis, and was specially famous in the seventh century for the teaching of Greek. Here we have a direct connection with the influx of Greek culture into Constantinople with the coming of the Isaurian dynasty in 717. With this Christian Greek culture would come the knowledge of the Dionysian teaching, acting as a counter to the merely worldly learning of the more violent iconoclasts, and to the superstition of the more fanatical image-worshippers.
Meanwhile the leniency of the Synod of Nicaea towards the recanting iconoclastic bishops and priests aroused the resentment of the fanatical image-worshipping monks, and, relying on the support of the Empress, they gave way to violence and disorder. The result was that when Irene was supplanted by one of the State officials, she and her extremist party were so unpopular that imperial iconoclastic persecution broke out afresh and continued, with the exception of two short periods, until 843.
One of these periods adds another item to our knowledge of the Dionysian stream, and a most interesting one. In 820, Michael the Stammerer, a native of Phrygia, came to the throne, and he instantly ordered complete freedom of thought for all his subjects. During his short reign of nine years a Frankish Embassy came to Constantinople, seeking the imperial approval of the Pope's appointment of Louis the Pious, king of the Franks, as Emperor of the West. Together with his consent, Michael sent to Louis a Greek copy of the works of Dionysius. It is significant that a teacher in the Schools of Paris at that time was the Irish monk, Scotus Erigena, whose subsequent translation of Dionysius into Latin deeply influenced the later mysticism of Western Christianity. At last, in 843, the Dowager Empress Theodora, like the former Empress Irene, an " image-worshipper," succeeded to the regency during the minority of her infant son, and immediately the images were restored. From this time the issue was no longer between iconoclasts and "image-worshippers," but between the extremist party who desired the suppression of the former iconoclasts and the moderate party who sought for unity and peace. Theodora herself realised that the policy of " economia" was now a necessity, and she appointed to the patriarchate Methodius, a bishop of the moderate party, and to the imperial chancellery Photius, the nephew of Tarasius. Immediately the extremist monks, opposed alike to learning and to freedom of conscience, broke out into insurrection and violence. In 847 Methodius died, and Theodora, anxious to offend neither party, appointed as Patriarch a pious, but unfanatical, monk named Ignatius. It was from this point that the events took place that led up to the Council of 869.
In 856 the young Emperor, Michael III, came of age, a pleasure loving, but able, ruler, who had little sympathy with monkish extremism. He moved away from his mother's control and associated himself with his uncle Bardas, who had been co-regent with Theodora. A plot was laid against Bardas and Ignatius allowed himself to be involved in it. The insurrection was suppressed, Theodora was immured in a convent, and Ignatius was arrested and banished. To save deprivation, and almost certainly under some constraint, Ignatius resigned the patriarchate. In appointing his successor, the young emperor determined to avoid the conflict between the moderates and the extremists by disregarding the bishops of both parties. He turned to a layman, Photius, the President of the Imperial Chancellery. Within a week Photius had been ordained deacon and priest, consecrated as bishop, and installed as Patriarch. There was precedent for this. It had happened to his uncle Tarasius and to Nicephorus, both of whom had also been President of the Imperial Chancellery.
Now Photius is one of the two protagonists in this great conflict of the spirit, and we must pause to consider his personality. In the Western Church he has been constantly maligned as the author of the great schism between the East and the West. He was depicted as the bastard child of an escaped nun by a soldier of the Imperial Guard, and all kinds of defamatory legends were attached to him. In Eastern Christendom, on the other hand, he has always been lauded as a great saint and the champion of the Orthodox Church. A recent brilliant historical survey by Francis Dvornik justifies the Eastern viewpoint.
Photius belonged, in fact, to one of the great families of Constantinople. He was a Greek and not an iconoclast. Both he and his father had been persecuted as " image worshippers." But above everything else he was one of the most famous scholars of the Middle Ages and was regarded by post-Renaissance philosophers and philologists as the one most responsible for making available to Western Europe the knowledge of Greek and Hellenistic culture. He was spoken of by the Emperor Michael as " a man of colossal industry and almost universal knowledge, which he had received from no masters." This reputation, together with his name Photius, the Enlightened One, would seem to point in him to the intuitive knowledge of the Initiate. In him the Dionysian teaching, which his uncle Tarasius had embodied in the canons of the Synod of Nicaea, had reached a still higher level of expression. A man of high moral rectitude and spiritual insight, his own letters reveal how deeply he felt the wrench of leaving the calm fields of university scholarship and mystical meditation for the notoriously turbulent arena of religious party strife, for which, he declared, he felt the utmost contempt. Having, however, once accepted the patriarchate, he became the indomitable champion of the domestic independence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople against the growing claims of papal primacy and its political plotting against the Byzantine Empire.
This Roman policy was especially embodied in Pope Nicholas I, who was the counter-protagonist to Photius in this conflict, and before we resume the course of events, we must consider also the personality of Nicholas. Although he was Pope for only nine years, from 858 to 867, he was the leading figure in events which had a permanent effect on the history of Christendom, both in the west and in the east. Rudolf Steiner spoke of him as a great figure faced by difficult decisions at a critical moment. Since the division of the Empire in the fourth century, the influence of the Pope of Rome had gradually increased. Successive waves of barbarian conquest from the north had restricted the authority of the Byzantine Emperor in Italy almost to the exarchy of Ravenna. But most of die invaders were nominally Christian and venerated the person of the Pope, who, especially in the case of strong men like Gregory I, came to wield, not only spiritual, but also secular power, and felt themselves to be the focal point of the Western Empire. In 801 Leo III had consecrated Charlemagne as Emperor of the West, and when, after his death, the Frankish Kingdom began to break up, the Pope came to hold the position of king maker. This, together with the traditional spiritual primacy of Rome, gave the Pope an independence of the authority of the Byzantine Emperor such as no other Christian patriarch possessed, and also set up a rivalry with the patriarchate of Constantinople that sowed the seed of an inevitable split between Eastern and Western Christendom.
This position had just matured when Nicholas, a man of great ability and spiritual perspicacity, came to the papal throne. He was immediately confronted with two decisions. In the first place the kingdom of Bulgaria, on the north side of the Adriatic, had recently been converted to Christianity by Frankish missionaries, and Nicholas saw it as an invaluable addition to the Roman Patriarchate, and a check to the western influence of Constantinople. On the other hand, it was contiguous with the Byzantine frontier, and the Emperor regarded its possession and inclusion in the patriarchate of Constantinople as an invaluable protection against the growing thrust of the invading north. This political issue played a great part in the conflict between East and West that centred on the Council of 869.
But a deeper problem confronted Nicholas, a purely spiritual issue that was not manifest in surface events. It escapes the notice of most historians, although it found central expression in the Council of Constantinople. Rudolf Steiner expounded it in detail. *(See Building Stones for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha)
Nicholas was concerned, not only with the political unity of the West, but with the spiritual unity of Western Christendom. He was aware of three spiritual streams that were spreading westward from the East, under the pressure of the Islamic conquest. The first stream was the mystical interpretation of Christianity that had developed in the first three centuries of Christendom among those who still possessed some of the occult perception that flowed from ancient Mystery knowledge, and which had ripened again in Neo-Platonism. It had found expression in Clement and Origen, and although, through Justinian, the Church had officially condemned it in the sixth century, it still survived among the Monophysites and was already raising its head in the Eastern Church under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Nicholas could not but be aware of the significance of the second canon of the Council of Nicaea m 787.
The second stream was a cult of spiritual Imagination, originating in Persia, which had spread along North Africa and was penetrating the West through Spain. It was the cult centred round the Mystery of the Graal.
The third stream was one which had developed in Constantinople, after the gradual disappearance of the stream of direct spiritual apprehension. It was a cult of the Liturgy, which provided worshippers with a direct experience of spiritual exaltation and a consciousness of supersensible reality.
These three streams were contrary to the spirit of Roman Christianity. Ever since the fourth century Rome had tended to express Christianity along the lines of traditional Roman thinking. The Roman conception of man as essentially a political unit in the Empire militated against the ancient conception of him as a spirit-being, which lay at the heart of the Greek ideal of liberty. The Papacy saw itself as the spiritual transformation of the Roman Empire and conceived of Christendom as a spiritual empire held together by a legal system of dogma, in which the part of the individual was only that of unquestioning faith and absolute obedience. Any direct individual spirit-perception was suspect, and any organisation based on such a viewpoint must be suppressed as a heresy. Ever since the fourth century this spiritual policy had been organised in Italy and there stood behind Nicholas, and also behind his predecessor and successor, the figure of Anastasius the Librarian, a man of profound intellect and spiritual knowledge, who had made for himself a Latin translation of the works of Dionysius.
For all this Nicholas is not to be blamed. He was a man of great ability and far-seeing insight into what he conceived as the spiritual needs of Western Christendom. Rudolf Steiner emphasises this and speaks of "the necessity of Europeanised Christianity setting aside, from the concept of man, the idea of the spirit." It was the path that would lead to the evolution of European ego-consciousness, that has been the basis of western civilisation. But it must not be regarded as its ultimate goal.
Thus ,through a series of political and ecclesiastical circumstances, the spiritual issue was joined between Nicholas, the Pope of Rome, and Photius, the Initiate Patriarch of Constantinople.
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To resume the narrative of events, in 857 Ignatius fell and Photius was appointed Patriarch. A Synod was held in Constantinople confirming this. In 859 Ignatius appealed to Pope Nicholas against his deposition and against Photius' uncanonical appointment. In 860 the Emperor Michael invited Nicholas to send legates to attend a General Council, which he was summoning for a final elucidation of the Catholic doctrine about images. Nicholas consented on condition that his legates should at the same time examine the issue between Ignatius and Photius and report to him for his final decision. When the legates presented their letters, the Emperor objected that the issue between Ignatius and Photius was a domestic concern of Constantinople which was already settled, but, as a concession, he consented to a re-trial of Ignatius by the legates, provided that they came to an immediate decision, without further reference to Rome. This was agreed. Ignatius was condemned and Photius' appointment was ratified, and the legates returned to Rome to report their decision to the Pope. For a while Nicholas took no action, except to send letters to the Emperor and to Photius demanding the return of the ancient province of Illyricum, which included Bulgaria. The dispute at Constantinople appeared to be an excellent opportunity for the exercise of power politics. But to his letters he received no reply.
Meanwhile, in 863, the representatives of the extremist party in Constantinople arrived in Rome, asking for a re-trial of Ignatius and secretly promising their support in the matter of Bulgaria. Immediately Nicholas summoned a Synod at Rome, rejected the decision of his legates, annulled Ignatius' deposition, and vilified and deposed Photius. Letters to this effect were sent to the Emperor and to Photius.
In 864 Michael conquered Bulgaria. The Bulgarian king was baptised and applied to Photius for a patriarch of his own. Photius replied that at present that was impossible. In 865 the Emperor sent a scathing reply to Nicholas, denying his right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the patriarchy of Constantinople, for which, as the New Rome, he claimed equal status with Old Rome. He made no reference to Bulgaria but demanded the immediate return of the extremist Byzantines under threat of military action. This letter found Nicholas seriously ill, and the reply was drafted by Anastasius, in no less strong terms than Michael's letter. It made, for the first time, an explicit claim, not only to the primacy of Rome, but to its complete authority over the whole Church. It declared that the Pope alone had authority to summon a General Council—a complete disregard of all historical precedent. It also refused to send back the dissident Byzantines.
Suddenly an unexpected move by King Boris of Bulgaria gave a new turn to the crisis. In 866 he sent envoys to the Pope, making the same request which Photius had refused. Nicholas immediately dispatched two bishops to Bulgaria, with orders to expel the Greek priests. He also sent legates with further peremptory letters to Michael and Photius. When the legates arrived, they were kept waiting six weeks at the port. Meanwhile, the expelled Greek priests arrived from Bulgaria and reported that the Romans were tolerating the heretical practices of the Frankish missionaries, the eating of milk and cheese in Lent, the enforcement of clerical celibacy, the restriction of the right to confirm to bishops only, and, finally, the inclusion of the word " filioque " in the Creed, contrary to the credal form authorised by the first Oecumenical Council of Nicaea 500 years previously.
Photius immediately called a Synod and then, in 867, a Council, which was attended, not only by the Eastern bishops, but by a number of Western bishops who were opposed to Nicholas. The Council passed canons, condemning the Frankish heresies, condemning Pope Nicholas and demanding his deposition, declaring Louis II Emperor of the West—a bid for lay support—and finally declaring the Synod of Nicaea of 787 to be the Seventh Oecumenical Council, and so binding on the whole Church.
This was the first occasion on which the "filioque" dispute, which caused the final split between the Eastern and Western Churches, had been made an official issue, and for this reason Photius was always condemned by the West as the author of the schism. But Photius did not accuse Pope Nicholas of holding this heretical view, but only of tolerating its propagation by the Franks. The issue was not yet a theological one, but a question of credal orthodoxy. The Franks had claimed at the beginning of the eighth century that the "filioque" clause was part of the original Creed. The East replied that it was not in the Creed adopted in the First Oecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325. Pope Leo III agreed with this view and had the Nicene Creed engraved on silver plates and stored at Rome. Also, the " libellus," or declaration of orthodoxy used at all Synods and Councils, contained the Creed in the Nicene form. It was not until the eleventh century that a German pope forced the Italians to insert into the Creed the "filioque" clause, and it was not discussed as a theological issue until the Council of Florence in 1439. The theological question about the nature of the Holy Spirit did not arise in this dispute and is in any case a quite different issue to the denial by the Western Church of the threefold nature of man.
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The Emperor and Photius were deeply angered by the papal letters and by the Roman intrigue with Bulgaria, and felt themselves to be in a very strong position. But the public condemnation of Nicholas was impetuous and ill-judged. Unknown to Photius, Nicholas had already died, and his successor Hadrian, no admirer of Nicholas, was hesitating as to what line he should take. A more conciliatory action might have won him over.
At that moment an unexpected act of political treachery wrecked Photius' position and entirely altered the course of events. Basil, a friend of Michael, having already secured, in the spring of 867, the assassination of Bardas, Michael's uncle, in the autumn murdered the young Emperor himself and seized the throne, probably encouraged in this by Rome and the extremist party. To secure his position, Basil immediately reversed the Imperial policy. He wrote to Pope Hadrian, accepting Nicholas' decision of 863, deposing Photius. Photius immediately resigned and Ignatius was restored. Basil's letter decided Hadrian and the arrival in Rome of the Acts of the Photian Council of 867 confirmed his resolution. He immediately summoned a Synod in Rome and condemned Photius to deprivation and excommunication without hearing his defense. The canons of the Council of 867 were revoked and its Acts publicly burned. The primacy and supreme authority of the Pope were confirmed.
Immediately a demand was sent to Basil to summon a General Council, which was to meet under the presidency of the papal legates, in order to ratify and carry out the Pope's sentence. The Emperor was in no position to refuse and the Council met in Constantinople in 869. But Basil in his own capital was not in the same mood as the suppliant to Rome. He insisted on presiding in the person of his own representative, Baanes, and. to the indignation of the legates, he also insisted on their presenting their credentials and signing the usual declaration of orthodoxy. Moreover, he decreed that Photius must be heard in his own defense.
The legates took a very arrogant line, that there was nothing tor the Council to debate. All that was to be done was to confirm the resolutions passed at Rome. The Byzantines were humiliated, with the exception of Photius himself, who, with true Initiate understanding of the rigged situation, refused to utter a word in his own defense, except that, at one point, he urged the legates to do penance! Finally, on the proposal of the legates, Photius was excommunicated.
Among the canons of the Council was the one to which Rudolf Steiner specifically refers as banishing the spirit from the constitution of man. It must be remembered that the wording of this canon presented an entirely Roman point of view, for all the canons had been drawn up by Anastasius at Rome and passed at the Roman Synod, and were only mechanically confirmed by the Council at (Constantinople. This canon is hardly noticed by commentators. Dvornik does not mention it in his actual account of the Council, but only refers to it in another context as an instance of a fabricated charge against Photius. " Photius," he declares, " could not have been guilty of so crude a heretical utterance."
It is clear that Dvornik does not relate the canon to the demand for the oecumenicity of the Council of 787, with its recognition of the authority of Dionysius the Areopagite. It is in this light, however, that the reference to "two souls" is comprehensible. In point of fact, the charges in the canon are set out at considerable length, and its fierce denunciatory tone and detailed anathemas show that Anastasius was aware here of the deep spiritual issue between Rome and Constantinople of which Rudolf Steiner speaks.
The following is a literal translation of the canon.
"Although the Old and New Testaments both teach that man has one rational and intellectual soul, and all the divinely-inspired Fathers and teachers of the Church express the same opinion, certain men, given over to the pursuit of evil, have reached such a pitch of impiety as to enunciate the dogma that a man has two souls, and, by a certain irrational exploitation of a wisdom, which has already been made folly, seek to establish this heresy. Therefore this holy and Catholic Synod, hastening to root out, like utterly evil tares, this worthless belief, holding in its right hand the winnowing fan of truth, that it may cast out this chaff to the unquenchable flame, and present the world as the field of Christ, anathematizes with a loud voice the inventors and perpetrators of such an impiety, together with those who share their views, and decrees that no one shall pay any regard or obedience to the decrees of the author of this impiety. And if anyone dares to act contrary to the decrees of this holy and great Synod, let him be anathema, and an outcast from the faith and fellowship of Christians."
To those who are aware of the Dionysian background, the reference here to man as possessing two souls is clear. The Dionysian teaching was linked up with Origenism and Neo-Platonism, and, through that, with Neo-Pythagoreanism. Pythagoras (555 B.C.) had had direct access to Mystery knowledge, and he taught that the being of man has three parts: "Nous" (Thinking), "Thumos" (Feeling and Desire), and " Phrenes" (Bodily Instinct). " Nous " is the sphere of the activity of spirit, "Thumos" that of the soul, " Phrenes " that of the body. Of these the first only is sinless and immortal. By the ordinary man this is naturally understood as saying that "man has two souls, one of which is sinless." This would be anathema to the Roman conception of man as totally corrupt. In the thirteenth century the Scholastics justified their holding of " the double truth " on the ground that man's thinking had shared in the consequence of the Fall. This Thomas Aquinas could not accept, although at that very time it was in the process of becoming true!
We must note carefully the words in the canon, "man has one rational and intellectual soul." Steiner tells us that previously the phrase had been "one imaginative and spiritual soul," thus avoiding any separate mention of spirit. In the words of the canon there is a deliberate denial that man's " thinking and rational" faculty is anything more than a soul quality, and there is a deliberate exclusion of spirit.
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The defeat of Photius did not last long. In 870 Hadrian died and was succeeded as Pope by John VIII. In 873 Photius was recalled from banishment and restored to communion, and in 876 was reconciled to Ignatius. In 877 Ignatius died and immediately the clergy of Constantinople elected Photius as Patriarch, and this was finally accepted by the Pope as a fait accompli. In 879 Basil summoned a General Council to ratify the existing situation in Constantinople and to rehabilitate Photius, and asked the Pope to send legates. The Emperor, owing to his own absence on account of the sudden death of his son, appointed Photius himself to preside. All anti-Photian Synods were suppressed, the Acts of the Council of 869 were reversed, and, finally, the Council of Nicaea of 787 was declared once more to be the Seventh Oecumenical Council, under threat of excommunication of all who dissented. The resolutions embodying the Council's decisions were actually proposed by one of the papal legates, and were carried unanimously.
For the moment the conflict was at an end, but the seed had been sown which could only result in the ultimate division between Eastern and Western Christendom. From that time their paths diverged.
In the West the Council of Nicaea of 787 was not accepted as Oecumenical for some centuries. Meanwhile there was established under absolute papal authority a body of clearly defined dogma and ritual, to be accepted unquestionably by faith alone. Moreover, the Western Church adhered to the decision of the Council of 869 in regard to the twofold being of man, as soul and body. Aristotelian in origin, it fitted into the Roman framework of Grammar and Rhetoric in which the clergy expressed their theological concepts, and also into the evolving individual self-consciousness of man, in which his thinking appeared to him to arise out of himself. Through its exposition by Scotus Erigena the teaching of Dionysius spread into monastic studies, but it centred most entirely on the understanding of the Being of God. It had no effect on the official western concept of the being of man.
'Meanwhile among the early Scholastics there awoke the query as to the real nature and the reliability of man-derived concepts, a doubt fanned by the invading pantheism of Arabism. It began to penetrate even into the sacred realm of dogma. For a while Thomas Aquinas stemmed the rising tide of doubt by drawing from sources of earlier wisdom an understanding of the deeper activities of thought within man himself. Thereby he reconciled philosophy and theology up to the point beyond which, he said, human reason had no authority. But within a generation the doubt returned, to be gradually strengthened by scientific discovery into a sole reliance upon human sense-derived thinking, which has to a great extent captured many fields of religious thought.
But the deeper Dionysian teaching of the pathway to direct spirit knowledge by-passed the orthodox rigidity of Rome. It reached the West through the now independent patriarchate of Bulgaria, and during the deepening doubt from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it inspired a succession of mystical thinkers in South Germany and England.
For Eastern Christendom, on the other hand, the triumph of Photius was the beginning of an era of learning and spiritual culture in the Church of Constantinople, that lasted for over 500 years. The use of images in worship which had been restored was strictly controlled under ecclesiastical regulations. No three-dimensional image was allowed in any Orthodox church, but only the two-dimensional icon, or else mosaic. Strict rules also governed the painting of the icons, which were Imaginations, rather than the physical representations found in Western sacred art. They expressed and evoked the spirit behind the physical. They were the meeting in art of the " two paths" of Dionysius; the Greek representation of the physical and the Monophysite apprehension of the spiritual.
Perhaps the contrast between the Western and Eastern Churches is most clearly seen in the comparison of their Eucharistic worship. The Western Mass became a doctrinally-defined, hierarchically enacted, divine miracle, which the worshippers, convinced of their inherent sinfulness, partook of or beheld in hope of forgiveness and future immortality. The Eastern Liturgy was an undefined rite of Initiation, in which each worshipper participated, and experienced anew each time the transformation and renewal of his being as spirit. The earthly man became the receptacle of the supra-sensible reality and was transformed into the heavenly man. The Dionysian vision of the threefold being of man has always remained as the essence of the mystical thinking and teaching of the Orthodox Church. The long subjugation of the Orthodox Church to Turkish rule kept its outlook from being influenced by Western evolution.
To-day the greatest need of mankind is the recovery of the knowledge of man's true eternal self as spirit, and that knowledge must develop above all in the Christian Church itself. It was with surprise and delight that recently I heard an Oxford theologian say in a Convocation debate, "Theologians are beginning to turn away from the Western idea of twofold man, back to the Eastern idea of man as spirit soul and body."
END
First given as a lecture at an Anthroposophical conference and later published in the Golden Blade in 1963.
The article was also included in A. P. Shepherd's book, ''The Battle for the Spirit", published in 1994.
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Jan 21 2023