St Gennadios Scholarios

Biography

George Scholarios, the most learned Byzantine of his generation, went to the council of Ferrara and Florence in 1438 as a lay adviser inclined to the union. The arguments and the person of St Mark of Ephesus turned him; he left before the signing, and after Mark's death in 1444 he received from him, at the deathbed, the leadership of the Orthodox resistance to the union.

He became the monk Gennadios; and after the City fell in 1453, the conqueror himself invested him as the first patriarch of enslaved Constantinople in 1454. He bore the patriarchate three times amid impossible conditions, then withdrew to the monastery of the Forerunner near Serres, where he reposed about 1473.

The controversy

• The aftermath of the false union of Florence: the decree had been signed by nearly every Orthodox bishop present, and the question of the age was whether the Church would receive it. Under Mark's leadership, and then under Gennadios, she did not.
• As patriarch of a captive Church he had to rebuild the patriarchate, answer the questions of the conqueror about the faith, and guard the flock against both Latin pressure and despair.

Position taken

• The reception of a council belongs to the whole Body: Florence, though outwardly ratified by the highest authorities, was refused by the Church, and the refusal was led by one bishop and his lay and monastic heirs.
• The guardianship of the faith belongs to the whole people: his charge to the faithful to watch their own bishops' Orthodoxy, and to mark false doctrine and concelebration with the heterodox, states in the fifteenth century what the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 would state again.