Nicephorus Blemmydes

Biography

Born in 1197, the son of a doctor, he left Constantinople at the age of 7 after the city was taken by the Latins in 1204, and took refuge in Asia Minor in the Empire of Nicaea, studying first in Bursa, Nicaea and Smyrna, and finally in Scamander in Troy. Noticed by Emperor John III Ducas Vatatzes and by Patriarch Germanus II, he joined the patriarchal clergy in 1224. He became a monk in 1234 and a little later settled near Ephesus. Around 1241 he decided to found his own monastery in the region, dedicated to "Christ Who Is". He probably moved there in 1249. He refused the office of Patriarch in 1254 and lived increasingly secluded in his monastery, where he died in 1269 or 1272.

A pedagogue, scholar, philosopher and theologian, tutor of Prince Theodore II Laskaris, he was called in his time "Nicephorus the Philosopher", becoming a great intellectual figure of 13^th-century Byzantium. Through his research in all fields of knowledge, for instance his Epitomes of Logic and Physics (PG 142, 675-1320), translated into Latin and published in 1501 in Venice by Giorgio Valla with Aldus Manuca, he proved to be one of the artisans of the Western pre-Renaissance. In two theological letters on the procession of the Holy Spirit (1255-1256), he defends the expression of several Greek Fathers that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son (Per Filium). This doctrine means, according to him, that the Spirit takes his existence from the Father alone and "shines eternally" through the Son on whom he rests. Seeking to reconcile the Per Filium with both the procession of the Spirit from the Father alone (Photius) and the Filioque's initial intuition, which was to value the eternal relationship between the Son and the Spirit, Blemmydes proposed in his time a way out of the ancient dogmatic quarrel between Greek monopatrism and Latin filioquism.