Saint Mark of Ephesus

Scholar and monk of a dying empire

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Mark — baptized Manuel Eugenikos — was born about 1392 in Constantinople, in the last years of the Byzantine Empire, as the Ottoman Turks pressed ever closer to the ancient Christian capital. He received a superb education and became a celebrated teacher of rhetoric and philosophy, numbering among his pupils some of the finest minds of his generation. Yet, like so many of the Fathers before him, he turned from worldly distinction to the monastic life, taking the name Mark, and in time, against his own wishes, he was made Metropolitan of Ephesus.

The council that sought union

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Mark lived at a moment of agonizing crisis. The Byzantine Empire was on the verge of collapse, and the Emperor John VIII, desperate for military aid from the West, hoped to win it by reuniting the Orthodox Church with the Church of Rome, which had been divided from her for centuries. A great council was convened in Italy, at Ferrara and then Florence, in the years 1438 and 1439, and Mark of Ephesus traveled there as one of the chief spokesmen for the Orthodox side.

At Florence the pressure for union was immense. The Greeks were far from home, increasingly weary, short of money, and acutely aware that their Empire’s survival might hang on the outcome. One by one the Orthodox delegates gave way and agreed to accept the Latin positions — the addition to the Creed of the words “and the Son,” the claims of papal supremacy, and the rest — in exchange for the longed-for help from the West.

What was really at stake

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The disputes at Florence were not, for Mark, mere quarrels over words. The addition of the words “and the Son” to the Creed touched the very mystery of the Holy Trinity and had been made, he pointed out, by one part of the Church without the consent of the whole. The claim that the Pope of Rome held supreme authority over all the other bishops overturned the ancient order in which the bishops are brothers and the councils of the whole Church, not any single man, speak with final authority. Other points of difference — concerning the state of souls after death and the bread used in the Eucharist — were bound up with these. To paper over such things with a vague formula, Mark argued, would not be unity at all but a false peace purchased at the price of truth.

He knew well what hung in the balance, and the temptation to yield was enormous. The Empire was dying; the Turks were at the gates; and union with the powerful West seemed the last hope of rescue. To stand against it looked to many like stubbornness, even folly. But Mark believed that the faith handed down from the Apostles and the Fathers was not the property of the bishops gathered at Florence, to be traded away for soldiers and ships. It was a trust to be guarded and passed on whole — and no earthly advantage, however great, could justify surrendering it.

The one who would not sign

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Mark of Ephesus would not yield. With courtesy but utter firmness he defended the faith of the ancient councils and Fathers, refusing to confess as true what he believed to be error, however great the political need. When at last the decree of union was drawn up and signed by the Emperor and nearly all the Eastern bishops, one signature was missing: that of Mark of Ephesus, the lone Orthodox bishop who refused. When the news was brought to the Pope that Mark had not signed, he is said to have exclaimed, “Then we have accomplished nothing.”

“Never, O man, is that which concerns the Church set right by compromise. There is no middle ground between truth and falsehood.”St. Mark of Ephesus

Vindicated by the faithful

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And in the end the Pope was right. When the delegates returned home, the union of Florence collapsed almost at once. The Orthodox clergy and faithful of the East overwhelmingly rejected it; those who had signed found themselves without support, and many openly repented of what they had done. The promised military aid never saved the city. The one bishop who had stood firm became the rallying point and the conscience of the whole Orthodox world, honored as the “Pillar of Orthodoxy” and the “Atlas” who had held up the faith when all others let it fall.

His repose and his witness

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Worn out by his labors, Mark reposed in Constantinople in 1444, only a few years before the city itself fell to the Ottomans in 1453. On his deathbed he charged a disciple, George Scholarios — the future Saint Gennadios, who would become the first Patriarch under Turkish rule — to carry on the defense of the true faith, and Gennadios did. Three centuries later the Church formally proclaimed Mark a saint, confirming the verdict the Orthodox people had reached long before.

His memory carries a lesson that reaches far beyond the politics of a vanished empire. Mark of Ephesus shows that the unity Christians long for cannot be built on the surrender of the truth, and that faithfulness is sometimes the loneliest of all virtues. The whole council had signed; the Emperor had signed; the future seemed to demand that he sign too. He did not. And because one bishop refused to call falsehood true, the faith of the Fathers passed intact to the generations that came after. The Church numbers him among her saints and teachers as a witness for all time that the truth of the faith is not ours to bargain away, and that a single faithful voice, standing alone for what is right, can preserve the inheritance of generations.

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