The life of St Photios of Constantinople
Pope Nicholas I, hearing Ignatios's side of that story, refused to recognize Photios as legitimate and demanded Ignatios's restoration, a disagreement that widened over four years into what history remembers as the Photian Schism, tangled further by a dispute over which see, Rome or Constantinople, held jurisdiction over the newly converted Bulgarian church, and by Photios's own charge that Rome had corrupted the Creed by adding the Filioque to it. Excommunications passed in both directions before the quarrel finally quieted.
What followed said as much about Photios as the schism itself: he and Ignatios came, in time, to a real personal reconciliation, and when Ignatios died in 877 it was Photios who returned to the patriarchal seat for a second term, this time working actively to see his old rival formally honored as a saint of the Church rather than simply forgotten. He governed until 886 and reposed in 891, remembered as much for that late reconciliation as for the schism that had once divided him from the man he helped canonize.
