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Updated: July 10, 2025
The Simon of Epiphanius and Philaster leads us to speak of a remarkable feat of scholarship performed by R.A. Lipsius, the learned professor of divinity in the university of Jena. From their accounts he has reconstructed to some extent a lost work of Hippolytus against heresies of which a description was given by Photius. This treatise was founded on certain discourses of Irenaeus.
This work is now lost, and we know it only by the abstract given by Photius in the passage quoted.
Photius was about to embark on a dangerous journey, and he was implored to leave a record of what had been done since his brother had last taken part in the readings.
Pope Nicholas, in a most powerful letter, exhorted the Emperor Michael III to set bounds to the disorders of Photius, warning him that a fearful judgment would await him if the faithful were misled and so many believers caused to swerve from the right path. It was not, however, till the reign of his successor that Photius was banished and the much-tried St. Ignatius restored to his rights.
In the year 857 the wicked Bardas, uncle to the reigning Emperor, who wielded an almost absolute power and disregarded all laws, human and divine, unjustly banished from his See, Ignatius, the rightful patriarch of Constantinople, and placed in his stead the learned, but worthless, Photius.
To this effect he wrote to the authorities of the Eastern Church, calling upon them at the same time to concur in the decrees of the apostolic see; but subsequently, having obtained full information as to the harsh treatment to which the deposed Patriarch had been subjected, he excommunicated Photius, and commanded the restoration of Ignatius "by the power committed to him by Christ through St.
But he made light of all that had passed, forgot the oaths which he had sworn to Photius and his other intimates, and followed his wife in a strange ecstasy of passion for her, though she was already sixty years of age. When he arrived in Italy, things went wrong with him daily, for he had clearly incurred the enmity of heaven.
Some bibliographers have assigned it to Photius; but the opinion of Achilles Tatius expressed by the patriarch, and quoted at the commencement of this article, precludes the possibility of its being from his pen. See Mitford's History of Greece, ch. xiii, sect. 1. "Aliter non fit, avite, liber."
But hardly had Ignatius died in the year 879, when the crafty Photius, who knew well how to ingratiate himself with the Emperor, reascended the ill-fated chair and began afresh his old courses. His rule did not last long. He was again deposed and banished to a monastery, where he died about the year 891. His death, however, in nowise healed the wounds which he had inflicted on the Eastern Church.
Thus that sectarian spirit which Photius had kindled continued to smoulder on like a spark beneath the ashes, and spread itself wider and wider, as well among the worst sort of the clergy as among the fickle and discontented population. It was after all this that the patriarchs of Constantinople attempted to make themselves fully independent of the West.
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