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Homilies

St Photius the Great, tr. Mango, 1958

21. The Council of 867

XVIII

Of the Same,¹ Homily Delivered from the Ambo of St. Sophia, when the Triumph over All the Heresies was Proclaimed by Our Orthodox and Great Emperors Michael and Basil²

Time, it seems, has long since grown old, and brought forth no more the offspring of his youthful confidence and pride; but only brooded over those antique children of his and, being no longer able to renew his youth in any brilliant or noble generation, revolved about bearing the self-same things, and glorying only in the bringing forth of them whose birth³ past years had recorded, who gave him no return to youthful grace and bloom. Now, however, thanks to one man,⁴ the champion of pious, new and noble deeds, he is glorified with the birth-pangs of youth, and puts off old age with its reproaches, as if he had succeeded in showing everyone in the light of truth a well-born and excellent offspring blooming with the grace of all good things. Had he also borne a generation of orators, who knew how to make words commensurate with the facts, and to elevate the power of their tongue to the magnitude of the deeds, then his prime and renovation would have been altogether confirmed. At the moment, though losing not a little, he can none the less, thanks to the offspring of his prime, display his perfection to those who are here to see it,⁵ even though no orator be present. But to those who shall emerge in later ages of life he will not be able to bestow the memory in words, and will, I presume, be charged again with senility, sickness and the like. For words are wont to flow freely before deeds of moderate dignity,⁶ but hide away with cowardice and shrinking when they see a mass of events bearing down on them, or a vast expanse of accomplishments set before them. Wherefore I for my part intended to be silent, and not to insult with the feebleness of the speaker the magnitude of the deeds which surpass words, putting forward in self-defence, before being worsted, my fear of defeat. But since the deeds themselves are present with us, and the splendour of the actions is before everybody’s eyes, there will be, methinks, no great loss⁷ if the narrative falls below the mark. The visible facts will supply its deficiencies, and the shortcomings of the speech will only trumpet forth the pre-eminence of what has been done.⁸

Splendid to behold are the emperor’s feats in war, his victories, his trophies, whereof no moment of time since he has acceded⁹ to the kingly office has remained barren. It is not my intention to enumerate any of those; for it has often and on many occasions been proved that they are not due to strength or even to intelligence, nay, to neither of these, but rather to an unknown cause. Nay, not indeed the capture and depopulation of hostile cities and the construction and restoration of friendly ones; nor the fact that he converses with those he meets with a joyful and smiling countenance, and has removed all dejection from every face by changing the tyranny of fear into a spontaneous love, taking pride in being called the father rather than the master of his country, not assuming the titles prior to the deeds,¹⁰ after the manner of those men of yore, Cyrus and Augustus, the former ruler of the Persians, the latter of the Romans, who left to the populace a reputation for gentleness and mercy,¹¹ but, as proper reason ordains, glorying in the actions prior to the titles; not even that he has extended to the citizens a hand flowing with gold, having driven poverty out of the body politic as no man has driven it out of his own home, and that the queenly City, which lords it in wealth, has spread the gifts of prosperity to all subjects thanks to one imperial gesture; it is not my concern and purpose to enumerate any of these things, though they have truth herself standing by as witness. Nay, nor am I a showman artfully working to accord his hearers delectation out of words, for which those things I pass over would be fitting material;¹² nor indeed do I train my tongue in laudations to draw the applause of a theatre with my speeches, since both the manner of my life and the office of priesthood are incapable of assuming these roles, even if churches¹³ and the holy care of holy buildings have, thanks to him, reached an unhoped-for attainment and matchless beauty; the laudations I have left to others, while his care of churches forms the subject of another speech on another festival.¹⁴ Those themes only do I abstract from all the rest for my present narrative which bring out straightaway the purity of his faith and his extraordinarily great zeal.

But from where shall I start? What shall I narrate first? Shall I announce the good tidings of the Church, or exhibit the triumph over the heresies? Or shall I make a preamble about the spiritual courage and struggles on behalf of piety of the one who has won this triumph and erected these splendid trophies? For each of the said themes leaps forward in my thoughts, and striving to occupy the first place, makes the beginning of my story undecided. And just as in a fair meadow of many blooms, each beautiful flower and fruit, by drawing and attracting all eyes to itself, makes it impossible for the spectators to decide which one of the things they see should be adjudged the winner; so also these noble and beautiful spectacles before us, by dazzling the beholders with the splendour of piety through each of the aforesaid themes alike, make choice undiscriminating. Since, however, in the joyful gladness of the Church both the heresies abhorred of God are put to disgrace and the victor’s achievements shine forth, I shall in some way make this the beginning and foundation of my speech, and call out with the prophet the tidings of joy to Christ’s bride, the Church: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion; cry aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem; the Lord hath taken away thine iniquities; He hath delivered thee from the hand of thine enemies.”¹⁵ Seest thou thy beloved son, whom thou hast adopted from the very cradle and made Emperor, and after breeding him in piety and rearing him to manhood in reverence,¹⁶ hast led him up to the measure of Christ’s years?¹⁷ Seest thou him, what novel and gay rewards he has offered thee with great interest for his rearing, and with how many and how great trophies he has filled this holy and august church? For he does not bring thee Arius in chains, or Macedonius a captive, or Nestorius a prisoner, or the children of Dioscorus who barbarized the whole universe with a multitude of unnatural offspring, or this or that enemy and foe of the Church, or the leader of one or several heresies, but all the contingents of the enemy at once, with their leaders, their devices and their designs, he has laid dead and stripped bare with one and the same blow of his imperial right hand. Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold thy children gathered,¹⁸ whom the bacchantes and harpies of the heresies and schisms had formerly snatched away, and having filled them with corybantic frenzy and goaded them on, scattered them on the mountains and cliffs of perdition. Rejoice and delight thyself with all thine heart:¹⁹ the Son is proclaimed consubstantial with the Father;²⁰ the Spirit is included into the same Godhead with them;²¹ the Word which took on flesh from a virgin for the common salvation and renovation of our kind is not separated from the Godhead;²² the natures in Him remain unmingled,²³ and each volition²⁴ is seen to act after its own nature;²⁵ all error and tedious nonsense²⁶ are driven away, no transmigration of souls is vainly imagined, nor does a throng of demons, borne on myths, leap back into the sphere whence they have fallen through wilful wrong-doing.²⁷ Nay, nor is Christ Himself under the pretext of due reverence bitterly insulted and taunted:²⁸ this is another inanity,²⁹ and a strange kind of contumely devised by the Evil one, to inveigh against the image, while monstrously pretending to be tearing it apart in honour of the One represented, thus raging with a double frenzy. No manner of impiety shall henceforth speak freely. For our victorious protagonist, using the writing pen like a spear forged by God, has struck the plague right through the vitals. Now every kind of irreverence is lying prostrate, stripped of its very last hopes, and not even revived by dreams of a rebirth. This is by far more splendid and loftier than all the other trophies which long ages past have recorded, and the pious hands of pious emperors have set up; for what all of them scarcely accomplished in part and at different times, each one of those and all together, by one cast of the hand, have been mightily won by our faithful and great Emperor.³⁰ These are the military plans, the preoccupations, and the successes of the one who is truly God’s general. This delivers from every harassment and elevates above every disaster the whole universe that is encircled and crowned by the Christian creed, and opens up the streams of every kind of joy and happiness to gush and mingle with one another, on seeing³¹ one concord, and one confession of faith, and one Catholic Church extending to the ends of the world.

Let the mountains drop sweet wine and the hills gladness,³² because the Lord has looked upon His people and His inheritance with merciful eyes, in setting up and raising the truly imperial majesty of the state³³—His beloved son Basil. For it is clear that those things which the father³⁴ has succeeded in achieving, and which words leap with joy to narrate, he is inheriting as his own portion and pride. It was the grace of the most-holy Ghost that assembled the Councils which at different times cleansed the world of tares; but they too derived their wisdom from others. The First Council had the acts of many previous ones to imitate in part; the Second adopted the First as a pattern and model, while for the Third the Second in addition to the First served as exemplars, yea, and the Fourth was enriched by imitating them,³⁵ and the previous ones were the teachers of the ones following. As for thee, champion of piety,³⁶ what example hast thou taken in mind, in coming forward as the novel creator of this holy deed? What teacher hast thou found? To what leader hast thou referred thyself? What guide hast thou followed? Indeed it is evident that the common Lord and Creator of all has been thy initiator in this mystery also, Who Himself³⁷ proclaims in holy Scripture, crying out loud: “Whoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my father which is in heaven.”³⁸ For not only in the presence of men and of the angelic choirs, but also, methinks, with the Lord’s very nature looking on from above and awarding the victory, has the triumph over all the heresies been proclaimed with a bold mind, tongue and hand, and the mystery of piety, strengthened as never before, has been confessed again. Yea, he was also thy adviser, the keybearer of the heavenly gates, proclaimed by Truth to be the rock and foundation of the faith,³⁹ Peter, the chief of the disciples, who whispered some such inspired and holy words in the ears of thy heart, saying that thou shouldst be ready to give an answer to every man that asketh the reason for thy most-pure and unadulterated faith.⁴⁰ Thou tookest the advice to heart after the throes of study. Thou didst not await anyone to ask thee, but as soon as this work had reached maturity, thou didst know it,⁴¹ and didst bring it forth into the light, a work truly agreeable to God, having shown to all that the fruit was worthy of the seed, in that thou didst proclaim and set down the faith correctly, and didst hurl all the heresies into the snare of hell.⁴² This takes the prize over all those matters that are administered for the body politic by the emperor’s cares with a view to the peaceful condition of land and sea and an untroubled life, in the same measure⁴³ that the soul surpasses the body, and the sun surpasses the moon, and spiritual contemplation surpasses the apprehension of the senses. Thus, by a most splendid and novel exercise of piety, thou hast worked thy will in pious deeds, and every tongue is now busy with stories of thee.

That great Moses, God’s servant, who lashed Egypt with unheard-of⁴⁴ blows (for he turned the elements into scourges), who made passable the waves of the sea, who with his prayer and tongue tilled the clouds like furrows and reaped therefrom abundant food for those who were distressed in the desert, that very man, on seeing the people he guided, and on whose account everything was being done, a-whoring after idolatry, did not suffer the plight meekly, but straightaway roused himself, and, wishing to check the prevalence of evil, he dyed his sword in no small measure of blood, and after diminishing the throng, he delivered the remainder from error;⁴⁵ so that the salvation which he accomplished for the remnant depended on the destruction of his fellow-countrymen, whose massacre begat the conversion of the former. But Christ’s disciple has not destroyed fellow-men to deliver the remainder of the plague, nay, he saves the sum total of his subjects by defeating evil itself, and while thrusting against the latter the spear of his pen, he has showed all the people under his rule untouched by the stain of evil. That famous Phinees, too, checked the plague which was ravaging his whole people by transfixing the Israelite together with the Medianitish woman;⁴⁶ but not even he was innocent of a fellow-man’s blood, nor did he deliver from bodily destruction those whose champion he was. But our Phinees, not allowing the plague to prevail, nor drenching his right hand in kindred blood, but transfixing most courageously and royally the pestilence, not of the bodies, but of the souls, has made the whole commonwealth to rise above every error and plague. David rather, in that he was King, is closer by his example: for by slaying one foreigner, he snatched away his whole people from servitude, wounds and the enemies’ sword (yet here too he was caring about their bodies only); but in that he struck one only, and left behind many of the gentiles, who were engaged in an implacable war against the Israelites, he let the splendour of his victory be overshadowed by the expectation of another battle, so that the present joy of triumph did not gladden⁴⁷ the victorious camp any more than the fear of the future frightened and disturbed it. But the Emperor’s hand did not draw the sword of the Cross against one alien heresy, nor did it make the joy of the achievement incomplete, nor did it leave the enemy even the shadow of a hope to retrieve their defeat, but after breaking up all their ranks at once, and splendidly exhibiting its strategic feats against them all, it bestows on the whole body of the Church a profound and undisturbed peace, and secures for the whole commonwealth a similar and like concord,⁴⁸ having set up an eternal monument of the orthodoxy of our truly pious and victorious Emperors Michael and Basil for all generations to come.

Happy, therefore, and thrice-blessed are you also, choir of patricians, honorable and reverend old men, who were picked to share the command of such great generals and captains against so great and so many heresies, and have taken part in bearing these sacred and holy labours. As for you, O holy gathering of priests and bishops, why stand you so silent, and resemble, as it were, in the effusion of your excessive pleasure and joy, men who are amazed and in ecstasy, fixing your eyes and your mind itself on nothing else but the very joyfulness of the deeds? For great joy, like sorrow, though the two are diametrically opposed, are wont to produce the same disposition in those they come upon. Nay, but utter a sound worthy of the festival, and setting David, the ancestor of God, at the head of your choir, cry out clear and loud, “Bend the bow, prosper and reign, O admirable pair, in whom the grace of the Trinity dwells. Bend the bow and prosper and reign, because of truth and meekness and righteousness.”⁴⁹ Amen.

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