HISTORICITY AND POETRY IN NINTH-CENTURY

HOMILETICS: THE HOMILIES OF PATRIARCH

PHOTIOS AND GEORGE OF NICOMEDIA

Niki Tsironis

In Byzantium, as well as in other civilisations and cultures, from the

Jewish congregation to primitive shamanism and the Maori, 1 the
preacher played the role of the intermediary between God and the
community, leading its prayer, interpreting the word of God, mak-
ing the eternal revelation relevant to the present reality of the com-
munity, and teaching the rudiments of faith and the social and ethi-
cal implications of the sacred writings. In the early Byzantine period
the preacher was the one who, by means of exegetical, apologetic
and polemic writings, warded off the enemies of the truth, the
dogma of the church, as it was formulated through the negation of
heresies and the differentiation from non-Christian groups, like the
Hellenes, the Jews and later, the Muslims. 2 On the other hand, one
has to bear in mind that from the early Christian centuries preach-
ing had been a function of the church inextricably linked to the lit-
urgy, and that it was in this sense that it fulfilled part of the scheme
that was to be set forth by Karl Barth, namely that Christian truth
is the word of God and ritualised in preaching and sacrament.3
The preacher in ninth-century Byzantium seems to have the
same function. In this case the homilist fulfils the role of the

1
See C. L. Rice, 'Preaching', in M. Eliade (ed.), EncyclopediaefReligjon 7 (New York-
London, 1987), 494-6.
2 K. Corrigan, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge, 1992),
6; Averil Cameron, 'Disputations, polemical literature and the formation of opinion in
the early Byzantine period', in GJ. Reinink - H.LJ. Vanstiphout (edd.), Dispute Poems
and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 42
(Leuven, 1991), ro6-7.
3 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine efthe Word efGod, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1936-
56), passim. Barth, referring to the word of God and to its form, recognises three aspects:
the Incarnation where the Son of God became a human person; the written word, that
is, as I understand it, the Gospel and the canons of the church; and the Word of God
in ritual and in preaching. It is the same process inversed that justifies our ability to talk
about God. A human being can talk about God because God has chosen to become a
human being and to speak in our own language.
 NIKI TSIRONIS

prophet and the intermediary between God and his people through
a poetic process which aims at transporting the audience to the di-
vine realm. Rhetoric and rhythm are employed as the essential
tools for such an enterprise, together with the unlimited images
deriving from the scriptures. However, in the homiletic corpus of
the ninth century we shall be able to distinguish two distinct ap-
proaches to homiletics. Two figures will serve us as examples:
Photios, patriarch of Constantinople, and George, metropolitan of
Nicomedia. Our first source is much better documented4 than our
second and, given that the reader is probably familiar with the sec-
ondary literature about Photios, the 'minor figure' of George of
Nicomedia will be given first place in this paper. The essential para-
dox of the case is that the homilies of the far more important figure
of Photios survive only in seventeen manuscripts, whereas just one
of the homilies of George is preserved in thirty manuscripts. The
manuscript tradition attests to the greater liturgical use (and pre-
sumably popularity) of George of Nicomedia, in comparison to
Photios.5
How can this be explained? The answer lies in the difference of
approach of the two authors. George of Nicomedia writes in a
much more poetic and less direct style, whereas a great part of
Photios's homilies are written for particular occasions. Perhaps
their contemporary character made their use by other homilists
difficult and for this reason they did not circulate widely. Another
part of the answer concerns the nature of homiletics per se, and in
this respect we can take our case study as evidence for the 'rules' of
the genre of homiletics. This genre cherished much more the poetic
style of the latter since it conformed better with the style of ecclesi-

4 An extensive bibliography is at the disposal of the reader. For the works of

Photios see B.Laourdas, Photiou Homiliai (Thessalonike, 1959); Eng. trans. with introduc-
tion by C. Mango, The Homilies of Photius Patriarch of Constantinople (Cambridge, Mass.,
1958). See also P Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, Byzantina Australiensia 3 (Canberra,
1986), 205-35; F. Dvornik, The Photian Schism: History and Legend (Cambridge, 1948); idem,
'The Patriarch Photios and Iconoclasm', DOP7 (1953), 69-97; W. Treadgold, Byzantine
Revival 780-842 (Stanford, California, 1988). Photios has been studied more as a human-
ist, or with reference to Iconoclasm, the schism, and the Christianisation of the Slavs,
than as a theologian and preacher. Exceptional is the study of G. Kustas, 'History and
theology in Photius', Greek Orthodox Theological Review 2 (1963-4), 37-74.
5 For the manuscript tradition of the homilies of Photios see Laourdas (1959), 117*-
28*; Mango (1958), 8 and 24-35. For George ofNicomedia see my article, 'A biographi-
cal note on Hosios Georgios, Metropolitan ofNicomedia' (forthcoming).