International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

parties du texte ?
- dans quels environnements morphosyntaxiques apparaissent tels lemmes ou telles expressions ?
- etc.
L’exposé montrera comment, en fonction de ses attentes, l’utilisateur lambda, même peu 
expérimenté en matière de traitement informatique, peut tirer parti d’un corpus parfaitement lemmatisé.
Ces outils offrent aux chercheurs la possibilité de baser leurs observations sur un corpus 
parfaitement étiqueté, engageant les recherches vers une étude systématique et exhaustive du 
vocabulaire réellement utilisé par le Patriarche, dans l’ensemble de la 
Bibliothèque
. Il s’agit de 
compléter — grâce à l’outil informatique — les enseignements tirés des multiples lectures possibles 
d’un texte, en multipliant les modes d’accès aux données qu’il renferme.
Federico Montinaro
Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany; 
[e-mail]
On Photios and Anastasius the Librarian: The ‘Heresy of the Two Souls’ 
and the Two Tales of the Council of Constantinople of 867
Anastasius the Librarian (died ca. 879) is a towering figure in the ecclesiastical and intellectual 
history of the ninth century. His rhetorical skills and knowledge of Greek gained him the confidence 
of popes and Western emperors, for whom he acted as a secretary, especially in the relations with 
the Eastern Church and Byzantium. Anastasius was also the initiator of a grand translation project 
from Greek which, in line with the impact of his literary activity, has perceptively been called a 
“political hagiography”. This project included the Latin version of the acts of the general Church 
councils of the eighth and ninth centuries and notably of the one summoned in Constantinople 
in 869-870 to depose the patriarch Photios, which Anastasius attended. In 858 Photios, a scholar 
and a layman, had replaced Ignatios following a contested election which would eventually lead to 
internal conflict and schism with Rome.
In the introductory dedication to his translation of the 870 acts, Anastasius puts in the mouth 
of Photios’ friend Constantine (Cyril) the Philosopher, the Byzantine missionary later remembered 
as the apostle of the Slavs, the claim that the patriarch would have formulated a doctrine to the 

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effect that man possesses two souls. There is no obvious reason to believe that Anastasius, who 
is elsewhere extremely critical of Photios, had this story directly from Constantine and Francis 
Dvornik was probably right in attributing its origin to Metrophanes, the exiled Ignatian bishop of 
Smyrna, whom Anastasius met personally in Constantinople.
Anastasius is not the only source to accuse Photios of preaching a ‘heresy of the two souls’. The 
tenth-century Greek chronicler commonly known as Pseudo-Symeon, whose work is preserved in 
Paris. gr. 1712, made a similar allegation, although in a sensibly different context, placing Photios’ 
campaigning after his accession to the patriarchal throne. Recent research on Pseudo-Symeon’s 
sources has shown that much of the mid-to-late-ninth-century material in his chronicle may have 
come from the lost historical work of Niketas David of Paphlagonia, the author of the hagiographical 
Life of Ignatius
and, in all probability, the compiler behind the so-called ‘anti-Photian collection’ 
preserved in Marc. Gr. Z. 167.
The charge of heresy against Photios would thus seem to stem entirely from Ignatian circles 
and should be handled with great care. It is nonetheless worth noticing that the accusation of 
distinguishing two souls, one sinful and one which is not, had been a stock argument of Christian 
polemics against Manichaeism since the 4
th
century, as evidenced by Augustine’s treatise 
On the 
two souls
and, sparsely, in his other writings. Whether Augustine understood the Manichean 
thought correctly on this point, that such an accusation could be brought against Photios may tell 
us something about 9
th
-century Byzantine cultural history. For the theory of the existence of two 
human souls certainly was a feature of ancient Gnostic philosophy which in Late Antiquity came to 
be accepted, with modifications, by pagan philosophers such as Porphyrios.
Incidentally, Anastasius’ acquaintance with Ignatian circles in Constnatinople and with the 
exiled bishop Metrophanes in particular may also explain the discrepancy between his presentation 
of the council of Constantinople of 867, where Photios had allegedly slandered the papacy, and the 
very account given by the bishops who three years later condemned Photios. Even the latter did not 
venture beyond accusing the deposed patriarch of having tampered with the signatures appended to 
the 867 acts. Anastasius knew this account for having translated it into Latin but, like Metrophanes 
in a contemporary document, presented the 867 acts as being entirely Photios’ forgery and alleged 
that the council itself had never taken place.