The First Iconoclasm (726–787): Leo III, Constantine V, and the Council of Hieria

The first imperial iconoclasm, from the reign of Leo III through the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754) under Constantine V to its reversal at Nicaea II (787). This file sets out what the sources report — the Chalke gate, the persecution, the theology of the iconoclasts — while flagging, per METHODOLOGY §4, that the traditional narrative descends largely from the victorious iconophiles and that the dating and severity of the first phase are seriously contested in modern scholarship.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Outbreak Under Leo III

According to the traditional account, imperial iconoclasm began under Leo III “the Isaurian” (emperor 717–741). The iconophile chroniclers Theophanes the Confessor (Chronographia, early ninth century) and Patriarch Nikephoros (Breviarium) report that Leo, after a volcanic eruption in the Aegean in 726 which he read as divine anger at idolatry, began to preach against images and, in a much-cited episode, ordered the removal of the icon of Christ over the Chalke (“Bronze”) Gate of the imperial palace in Constantinople, provoking a riot in which the officer sent to take it down was killed (Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6218; ed. and trans. Mango and Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, Oxford, 1997). Leo is said to have deposed the iconophile Patriarch Germanus I of Constantinople in 730, replacing him with the compliant Anastasius, and to have issued an edict against images (Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6221–6222). It was in response to this first phase that St. John of Damascus, safe under Muslim rule in Palestine, wrote his Three Treatises on the Divine Images (see John of Damascus and the Defense).

[Disputed: the coherence, dating, and severity of Leo III’s iconoclasm are heavily contested. The older narrative — a systematic imperial policy from 726, the Chalke icon’s removal, a formal edict — rests almost entirely on ninth-century iconophile sources (Theophanes, Nikephoros) written after the fact and with a partisan interest. Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850 (Cambridge, 2011), and Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (2012), argue that Leo’s measures were far more limited and less doctrinally elaborated than the tradition claims, that the Chalke episode may be a later iconophile construction, and that a coherent imperial “iconoclast program” is largely a retrospective creation of the post-843 victors. Other scholars (e.g., earlier syntheses following Ostrogorsky) retain more of the traditional outline. This collection reports the traditional narrative as what the (iconophile) sources say, and flags that its historicity in the first phase is genuinely uncertain.]

Constantine V and the Council of Hieria (754)

The reign of Constantine V (741–775), Leo’s son, is the phase on which the sources are fullest and least ambiguous, and it is here that iconoclasm acquired a developed theology. Constantine — mockingly named Kopronymos (“dung-named”) by his iconophile enemies — was himself a theologian who composed treatises (the Peuseis, “Inquiries”) against the icons; these survive only in fragments quoted for refutation by Patriarch Nikephoros (Nikephoros, Antirrhetici; see Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 1–2, on Constantine’s arguments). In 754 Constantine convened a large council of some 338 bishops at the palace of Hieria, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, which condemned the veneration of icons and claimed for itself the status of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (the Hieria horos is preserved, with point-by-point refutation, in the Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; trans. Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool, 2018).

The theological case of the iconoclasts, as it emerges from the Hieria horos and Constantine’s fragments, ran on several lines:

The Second Commandment and God’s invisibility. The making and veneration of images revives the idolatry the Law forbade (Exodus 20:4); the divine nature is uncircumscribable and cannot be depicted (Hieria horos, in Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; see The Old Testament Prohibition and Its Fulfillment).
The Christological dilemma, turned against the icon. Constantine argued that any image of Christ must either circumscribe His indepictable divinity (confusing the natures, a Monophysite error) or depict His humanity alone (dividing the natures, a Nestorian error); therefore the icon of Christ is Christologically impossible (Constantine’s Peuseis, in Nikephoros; Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 2). This is the argument Theodore the Studite and Nikephoros would later invert against the iconoclasts (see Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument).
The Eucharist as the only true image. The iconoclasts proposed that the sole legitimate “image” of Christ that He Himself ordained is the Eucharist — the bread and wine which are (they said) His true likeness — as against the “lifeless” and “dead” matter of painted images (Hieria horos, in Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine, Brill, 2005, ch. 3, on the eucharistic argument and its refutation). The iconophiles answered that the Eucharist is not an image of Christ at all but Christ Himself, His very Body and Blood, and so cannot be the “image” the iconoclasts needed it to be (Nicaea II, Session 6, refutation).

The persecution under Constantine, as the iconophile sources report it, fell most heavily on the monasteries, which were the strongholds of icon veneration; the chroniclers record the destruction of images, the humiliation and execution of monks, and the martyrdom of figures such as St. Stephen the Younger (d. c. 764/765), whose hagiographical Life (by Stephen the Deacon, c. 809) is a principal — and partisan — source (Theophanes, Chronographia; Life of St Stephen the Younger, trans. in Marie-France Auzépy, La Vie d’Étienne le Jeune, 1997). [Disputed: the scale of Constantine V’s persecution of monks is uncertain; the vivid martyrdom accounts derive from later iconophile hagiography with an interest in maximizing the persecution, and Brubaker and Haldon (Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 2011) caution that the monasteries’ sufferings and the “war on monks” have likely been exaggerated in the tradition, even as they were real for particular individuals such as Stephen the Younger.]

The First Restoration: The Road to Nicaea II

Constantine V was succeeded by his son Leo IV (775–780), a milder iconoclast, and on Leo’s early death the government passed to his widow, the Empress Irene, as regent for their young son Constantine VI. Irene was an iconophile, and with the iconophile patriarch Tarasius she moved to restore the icons through a council. A first attempt to convene it in Constantinople in 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers of the palace guard; the council reconvened successfully at Nicaea in 787, the same city as the First Ecumenical Council, and became the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6277–6280; Richard Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool, 2018, introduction). Nicaea II condemned Hieria, restored the veneration of icons, and defined the doctrine (see The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787)). The first iconoclasm was thus formally ended in 787 — but not permanently, for a second imperial iconoclasm would break out a generation later (see The Second Iconoclasm and the Triumph).

Reading the Sources

The historian’s difficulty with the first iconoclasm is that the iconoclasts’ own writings were destroyed after their defeat, surviving only as fragments quoted by their opponents, while the narrative of the whole period comes overwhelmingly from ninth-century iconophile authors writing after the final victory of 843 (Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 2011, on the source problem). The Council of Hieria’s horos and Constantine V’s arguments are known only through the refutations in the Acts of Nicaea II and in Nikephoros — that is, through the filter of their enemies. This does not mean the iconoclasm was invented; that emperors opposed images, that Hieria met in 754, and that Nicaea II reversed it in 787 are secure. But the texture of the story — the systematic edicts, the Chalke drama, the scale of the martyrdoms — must be read with the knowledge that it reaches us from the side that won, and that modern scholarship has substantially revised the older picture of a coherent, ferocious, empire-wide persecution (Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm, 2012). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this file reports the traditional account as attested by its (named, dated, partisan) sources, and does not assert the contested details as documented fact.

References

The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (Session 6: the Hieria horos of 754 and its refutation; the eucharistic argument.)
Theophanes the Confessor. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813. Trans. Cyril Mango and Roger Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. (The Chalke episode; the deposition of Germanus; the persecution — an iconophile source.)
Brubaker, Leslie, and John Haldon. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. (The revisionist history; the source problem; the limits of Leo III’s and Constantine V’s measures.)
Brubaker, Leslie. Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012. (The retrospective construction of “iconoclasm.”)
Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996. (Constantine V’s Peuseis and the iconoclast arguments as preserved by Nikephoros.)
Giakalis, Ambrosios. Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The eucharistic argument and its refutation.)
Auzépy, Marie-France. La Vie d’Étienne le Jeune par Étienne le Diacre. Aldershot: Variorum, 1997. (The hagiographic Life of St Stephen the Younger; the martyrdoms under Constantine V.)
Scripture: Exodus 20:4.