St. Mark of Ephesus

Mark was born in Constantinople in 1392 and baptized Manuel, the son of a deacon of the Great Church. He received the finest education the imperial city could give, studying rhetoric and philosophy, and in time opened his own school. Drawn to the monastic life, he was tonsured with the name Mark and withdrew to a monastery, giving himself to prayer, fasting, and the study of the Fathers.

Ordained priest and known for his learning and holiness, he was raised, against his own wish, to be Metropolitan of Ephesus. When the emperor John VIII and the Patriarch resolved to seek union with the Church of Rome, hoping for aid against the Turks who pressed upon a dying Constantinople, Mark was chosen as one of the chief spokesmen for the Orthodox at the council that gathered in Italy.

At the Council of Ferrara-Florence, in the years 1438 and 1439, Mark contended for the faith of the Fathers against the Latin teaching. He defended the Creed against the addition of the Filioque, the clause that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, which the East had never confessed; and he opposed the Latin doctrine of purgatory, the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and the claims of the papacy over the whole Church.

When the decree of union was drawn up, every other Orthodox bishop present subscribed it, some from conviction, many from weariness, fear, or the emperor's pressure. Mark alone refused his signature. On hearing that Mark had not signed, the pope is said to have declared, We have accomplished nothing. Returning home, Mark became the rallying point of all who rejected the union; he would not concelebrate with those who had signed, and the faithful of the City looked to him as the guardian of Orthodoxy.

Worn by his labours and by exile, Mark reposed on the twenty-third of June, 1444, at the age of fifty-two, charging his disciple George Scholarios, afterward Patriarch Gennadius, to defend the faith in his stead. Within a few years the union collapsed utterly, and the Church glorified Mark of Ephesus as a saint and confessor, the Pillar and Defender of Orthodoxy, keeping his memory on the nineteenth of January.