Joseph Bryennios

Biography

A Studite monk, Bryennios was the first theologian of his generation: a deep student of the patristic tradition, called upon to set the Orthodox dogma against the papal representatives in the formal disputations, to speak at the public assemblies of the Orthodox, and to teach on the procession of the Holy Spirit. He was sent as the representative of the patriarch and the Church of Constantinople wherever the Orthodox, pressed unbearably by the Frankish conquerors to change their faith and accept the papacy, needed strengthening.

He spent years in Crete and treated the Cypriot case at length. Cyprus had fallen to the Franks in 1191 during the Third Crusade; four Latin bishops were installed, the Orthodox bishops were reduced from fourteen to four and forcibly subjected to them by a bull of Pope Innocent III, and the property of the Orthodox churches and monasteries was transferred to the Latin foundations. His homily on the union sought with the Cypriots was delivered in the church of the Holy Wisdom, before the synod.

As a Studite he stands in the direct succession of St Theodore the Studite, and he handed that tradition on: his pupil was St Mark of Ephesus, who would refuse the union at Florence a generation later and wall off from all who signed it.

The controversy

• The Latin subjection of the Orthodox of Cyprus, and the successive attempts at union with Rome, pressed hardest exactly when the empire was collapsing and the papacy offered military and financial aid as the price of Orthodoxy.

Position taken

• That union purchased by the surrender of the faith is no union, and that the moment of greatest earthly pressure is the moment the confession matters most. He argued this while the Turks were literally before the walls and all eyes turned to Rome for help.
• That the laity, and not the clergy only, are to keep away from Latin minded priests. He preserved and pressed the charge of Patriarch Athanasius II to the Cypriot laity: to flee such priests entirely, not to gather with them in church, not to receive even a common blessing from their hands, for it is better to pray to God alone in one's own house than to gather in church with the Latin minded.
• That the plea “this difference is nothing, it does not matter” is the mechanism by which everything is levelled. He met that argument directly, and refused it.