THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY
We have spoken already of two important periods in the history of the
Eastern Church. We must now briefly sketch another.
[Sidenote: Sketch of the period, 725-847.]
The third period (725-847) is that of Iconoclasm. Of this, the
originator was the emperor Leo III., one of those soldiers who
endeavour to apply to the sanctuary the methods of the parade-ground.
He issued a decree against the reverence paid to icons (religious
images and pictures), and, in 729, replaced the patriarch S. Germanus
by the more supple Anastasius; a docile assembly of bishops at Hieria,
under Constantine V. (Copronymus), passed a decree against every image
of the Lord, the Virgin, and the saints. A fierce persecution
followed, which was hardly ended before the accession to power of
Irene, widow of Leo IV., under whom assembled the Seventh General
Council at Nicae in 787, a Council to which the West and the distant
East sent representatives. This Council decreed that icons should be
used and receive veneration (_proskuêsis_) as did the Cross and the
book of the Gospels. A persecution followed, as bitter as that of the
iconoclastic emperors, and the troubled years of the first half of the
ninth century, stained in Byzantium by every crime, found almost their
only brightness in the patriarchate (843-7) of S. Methodius, a wise
ruler, an {156} orthodox theologian, a charitable man. In Antioch and
Jerusalem, about the same period, orthodox patriarchs were
re-established by the toleration of the Ommeyads and the earlier
Abbasaides; but on the European frontiers of the Empire conversion was
at a standstill during the whole period of iconoclastic fury and
reaction, while in the north-east of Syria and in Armenia the heresy of
the Paulicians (Adoptianism) spread and flourished, and the
Monophysites still throve on the Asiatic borders. In theology the
Church of Constantinople was still strong, as is shown by the great
work of S. Theodore of the Studium, famous as a hymn-writer, a
liturgiologist, and a defender of the faith.
Such are the facts, briefly summarised, of the history of rather more
than a century in the East. But we must examine more attentively the
meaning of the great strife which divided the Eastern Church.
[Sidenote: The orthodox doctrine of images.]
The orthodox doctrine, as it is now defined, is this--that "the icons
are likenesses engraved or painted in oil on wood or stone or any sort
of metal, of our Saviour Christ, of the Mother of God, and of the holy
men who from Adam have been well-pleasing to God. From earliest times
the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty
to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential,
for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any
Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of
those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to
their example. On this account also the Church decreed in early times
that due reverence should always be paid {157} by Christians to the
holy icons, which honour of course is not rendered to the picture
before our eyes, but to the original of the picture." This statement
represents the views of the orthodox Eastern theologians of the eighth
as clearly as it does the teaching of the nineteenth century. It
represents also the opinions of the popes contemporary with the
Iconoclastic movement, who withstood the emperors to the face. Leo was
threatened by Gregory II., and the patriarch who had yielded to the
storm, Anastasius, was excommunicated. The pope advocated, in clear
dogmatic language, the use of images for instruction of the ignorant
and encouragement of the faithful. In Greece there was something like
a revolution, but it was sternly repressed. [Sidenote: The acceptance
in the West.] In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and
Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a
large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered
that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and
blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ
and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he
should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from
all the unity and fabric of the Church." The answer to this, it would
seem, was the separation of the Illyrian territories and sees from the
Roman patriarchate, as well as the sees in Sicily and Calabria: the
pope's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate,
including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance
of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter
persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father
Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the
most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The
Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to
their old ways of worship in the eighth century was indeed not unlike
that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active
persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern
suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was
believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about
the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate
association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he
had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a
fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the
religious feeling of his time.
[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]
It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day
to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the
Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how
the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the
strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march
over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes
of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew
the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem
to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an
irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition,
an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when
materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great
city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against
"iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern
Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the
field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic
victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was
content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to
sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest
satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change,
without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in
form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great
Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church
in the decision of the Seventh General Council.
[Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]
S. John of Damascus, who died about 760, was clear in his acceptance of
all the Councils of the Church, clear in his rejection of Monophysitism
and Monothelitism. He described in clear precision the two natures in
one hypostasis, the two wills, human and Divine, with a wisdom and
knowledge related to each; but he was equally clear that the composite
personality involves a _communicatio idiomatum_ (_antidosis
idiômatôn_). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the
glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its
own glories, remaining itself impassible and without share in the
passions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's
humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future,
though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased
in age, and {160} that only for our sakes did He progressively manifest
His knowledge. While he declared that each Nature in the Divine Person
had its will, he explained that the One Person directed both, and that
His Divine will was the determinant will. It might well seem that in
his desire to avoid Nestorianism he did not attach so full a meaning to
our Lord's advance in human knowledge as did some of the earlier
Fathers. But the practical bearing of S. John's writings was in direct
relation to the great controversy of his age, to which he devoted three
addresses in particular. He defined the "worship" of the icons as all
based upon the worship of Christ, and attacked iconoclasm as involving
ultimately an assault upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. On this
ground S. Theodore of the Studium and Nicephorus the patriarch of
Constantinople, who was driven from his see by the emperor, are at one
with S. John Damascene.
[Sidenote: S. Theodore of the Studium.]
Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is,
perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there
never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the
schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might
seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would
not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers.
He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before
the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. Born
in the last half of the eighth century, and dying on November 11th,
826, Theodore lived through the most vital period of the Iconoclastic
struggle, and he left, in his {161} theological and familiar writings,
the most important memorial of the orthodox position which he did so
much to render victorious.
Theodore of the Studium is a striking example of the influence of
environment, tradition, and _esprit de corps_. His life is
inextricably bound up with the history, and his opinions were
indubitably formed to a very large extent by the influence, of the
great monastery of S. John Baptist of the Studium, founded towards the
close of the fourth century by Fl. Studius, a Roman patrician, the
remains of which still charm the traveller who penetrates through the
obscurest part of Constantinople to the quarter of Psamatia. The house
was dedicated to S. John Baptist, and according to the Russian
traveller, Antony of Novgorod, it contained special relics of the
Precursor. A later description shows the extreme beauty, seclusion,
severity of the place, surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on
the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the
splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the
crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a
striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous
as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called
from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies of the
later fifth century,[1] and fell themselves into error, but from the
date of the Fifth General Council to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic
controversy they remained in comparative obscurity.
The era of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and
which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and
lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of
Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in
Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the
Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic
Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the
Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by Constantine
Copronymus, they were restored at his death in 775, but had dwindled,
it seems, to the number of twelve. A new era of power began for them
under their Archimandrite Sabbas, and this was increased by his
successor, Theodore, whose life covered the period of the greatest
theological importance in the history of Iconoclasm. When the
patriarchal see was held for seven-and-twenty years by Iconoclasts,
Theodore upheld the spirits of his brethren, and even in exile
contrived to be their indefatigable leader and support. His was never
a submissive, but always an active resistance to the imperial attempt
to dragoon the Church, and a typical audacity was the solemn procession
with all the monastery's icons, the monks singing the hymn "_Tên
achranton eikona sou proskunoumen_, _agathe_" which caused his
expulsion. His exile produced a series of impressive letters in which,
with every vigour and cogency of argument of which a logical Greek was
capable, he exhorted, encouraged, and consoled those who, like himself,
remained steadfast to their faith. The Studium gave, too, its actual
martyrs, James and Thaddeus, to the traditional belief; and Theodore in
exile, who would gladly have borne them company in their death,
commemorated their heroism and {163} implored their intercessions.
Theodore's whole life was one of resistance, active or passive, to the
attempt of the emperors to dictate the Church's Creed; and though he
did not live to see the conclusion of the conflict, its final result
was largely due to his persistent and strenuous efforts. For a while
after his death there is silence over the history of the Studites,
till, in 844, we find them bringing back his body in solemn triumph
from the island of Prinkipo. Till the middle of the ninth century they
remained a potent force; from that time up to the capture of
Constantinople by the Turks, if they retained their fame, their
activity was diminished.
[Sidenote: The rule of the Studium.]
Professor Marin[2] has collected interesting details from many sources
as to the rule of the house, its dress, liturgical customs, learning,
discipline. The liturgy was said at six on days when the fast lasted
till nine, at three on other days; and the monks were expected to
communicate daily. While the house was essentially a learned society,
a community of sacred scholars, Theodore stands out from its whole
annals as a great preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal
character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule,
which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by
Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule
of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S.
Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of
floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did--and
this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164}
preached--seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane.
There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his
three _Antirrhetici_, in which he triumphantly vindicates the worship
of Christ in His Godhead and His manhood as being inseparable and
essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There
can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The worship of the image
is worship of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of
likeness to Christ."
This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who
defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images
were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true
humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and
worship,--reverence rather than worship in the modern English use of
the words,--of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the
Manhood of the Lord. The worship was not _latreia_, which can be paid
to God alone, but _proskunêsis schetikê_. Christ, said S. Theodore,
was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and
worshipped in an image.
The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the
Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great
religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional
opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had
exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and
they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.]
The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own
secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the
decrees that {165} had been passed at Constantinople in 754. In 787
for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora,
which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came
representatives of East and West, and the decision which was arrived at
was practically that of the whole Church.
The persecution of the orthodox was renewed for a time under Leo V.
(813-20), and it is said that more perished in his time than in that of
Constantine V. Theophilus (829-42) was almost equally hostile. It was
not till his widow Theodora assumed the reins of power in 842 as regent
for her son that the final triumph of orthodoxy was assured; and this
was followed by the five years' patriarchate of S. Methodius, a man of
peace and of wisdom.
To some the action of the emperors in attacking image worship has
seemed a serious attempt at social reform, an endeavour to raise the
standard of popular worship, and through that to affect the people
themselves intellectually, morally, and spiritually. But history has
spoken conclusively of the violence with which the attempt was made,
and theology has decisively pronounced against its dogmatic assertions.
The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because
it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so
decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so
expressively illustrates the close attachment, the abiding influence,
of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development
of theology and religious life.
[1] See above, pp. 8, 14.
[2] _De Studio Coenobio Constantinopolitano_, Paris, 1897.
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