MARK OF EPHESUS

MARK OF EPHESUS, bishop, St. (ca. 1392–1445). Metropolitan of Ephesus from 1437 to 1445, Mark was one of the large contingent of Greek bishops at the Reunion Council (q.v.) of Ferrara-Florence in 1438 to 1439. He was the most outspoken defender of the Greek patristic (q.v.) tradition at the council’s long debates over the filioque (q.v.), and his particular claim to fame and veneration lies in the fact that he was the sole participant, still present at the council’s end (a number had left beforehand), who refused to sign his approval of the final decree of union. Deprived of his episcopate, though not otherwise persecuted, he spent his remaining years at Constantinople (q.v.) leading the opposition to the union. Toward the end of his life he won over George Scholarios to his views and tonsured him, with the name Gennadios (q.v.), while he lay dying. Gennadios would go on to become the first Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) following the city’s fall to Sultan Mohammed II in 1453. Mark was afterward (1456) canonized and is commemorated today, together with Photius of Constantinople and Gregory Palamas (qq.v.), as one of the “pillars of Orthodoxy.”