Menas of Constantinople
Patriarch of Constatinople
Menas of Constantinople (also Minas; Ancient Greek: Μηνᾶς; died 25 August 552) was the 55th Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 13 March 536 until his death on 25 August 552.
Menas was born in Alexandria, and enters the records in high ecclesiastical office as presbyter and director of the Hospital of Sampson in Constantinople, where tradition has him linked to saint Sampson the Hospitable directly, and in the healing of Byzantine emperor Justinian I from the bubonic plague in 542.
He was appointed Patriarch of Constantinople by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I on 13 March 536. Pope Agapetus I consecrated him to succeed Anthimus I of Constantinople, who was condemned by Agapetus as a monophysite. This was the first time that a Pope consecrated a Patriarch of Constantinople.
At some date, very soon after his election, he received the order (keleusis) from the Emperor, whose text is not preserved, but which instructed him to call a synodos endemousa to examine the case of Anthimus, which would be heard at a series of five sessions, beginning on 2 May and ending 4 June 536. The Synod condemned Anthimus, as noted in Novellae Constitutiones XLII from Justinian, addressed directly to Menas. Within this same effort from Justinian to seal the growing rift between the Patriarch in Constantinople and that of Jerusalem, Menas later took a position against Origen, a crisis merging into the Three-Chapter Controversy, an attempt to condemn the writings of certain non-Chalcedonian figures. Menas' patriarchate represents the greatest extent of papal influence in Constantinople.
Almost immediately after the events of 536, which may be viewed as a Chalcedonian victory over monophysites, the ordination of an independent network of alleged monophysite / self-professed miaphysite bishops claiming apostolic authority would begin, leading eventually to the formation of a separate non-Chalcedonian church, the still-existing Syrian Orthodox Church that would be in communion with other excommunicated sees of the same theological persuasion.
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