The Seventh Ecumenical Council: Nicaea II (787)

The Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787 under the Empress Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius, is the Seventh and last of the Ecumenical Councils recognized by the Orthodox Church. It condemned the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754), defined the legitimacy of the veneration of icons, and fixed the distinction between the relative honor (timetike proskynesis) given to images and the worship (latreia) due to God alone. This file sets out the council, its Horos, and the boundaries it drew.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Convening the Council

After the death of the iconoclast emperor Leo IV in 780, his widow the Empress Irene governed as regent for their young son Constantine VI, and she and the newly elected iconophile Patriarch Tarasius set out to restore the veneration of icons through an ecumenical council. A first attempt to convene it in Constantinople in the summer of 786 was violently broken up by iconoclast soldiers of the palace guard, and the council had to be relocated; it met successfully the following year at Nicaea in Bithynia — the same city as the First Ecumenical Council of 325 — opening in the church of Hagia Sophia there in September 787, with a final session held in Constantinople in the presence of the emperor and empress (Richard Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Liverpool, 2018, introduction; Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6277–6280, trans. Mango and Scott). Some 300 or more bishops attended, with legates of Pope Hadrian I and representatives of the Eastern patriarchates, giving the council its claim to ecumenical authority (Price, The Acts, introduction; the papal and Eastern participation is discussed there).

The Sessions and the Refutation of Hieria

The council’s Acts, which survive in Greek (in Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, vols. 12–13) and now in Price’s English translation, record a series of sessions in which the fathers received back into communion bishops who had lapsed into iconoclasm upon their repentance, read out a long florilegium of patristic and scriptural testimonies in favor of images, and — in the celebrated sixth session — read the entire horos of the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754) with a point-by-point refutation appended (Acts of Nicaea II, Sessions 1–6; trans. Price, 2018). This sixth session is, incidentally, the reason the Hieria horos survives at all: it is preserved only because Nicaea II quoted it in order to answer it (see The Imperial Iconoclasm 726–787). The refutation dismantled the iconoclast Christological dilemma and the claim that the Eucharist is the only true image of Christ, arguing that the Eucharist is not an image but the reality of Christ’s Body and Blood (Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine, Brill, 2005, on the argument of the council).

The Horos (Definition)

The heart of the council is its Horos, the dogmatic Definition promulgated in the seventh session. It defines that, alongside the figure of the Cross, holy icons — “in painting and mosaic and of other suitable material” — are to be set up in churches, on sacred vessels and vestments, on walls and in houses and by the roadside: the images of “our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, of our spotless Lady the holy Theotokos, of the honorable angels, and of all holy and pious people.” The reason it gives is that the more often these are seen, the more are the beholders “lifted up to the memory and longing after the prototypes.” And it draws the crucial distinction:

“…and to these should be given due salutation and honorable reverence (aspasmon kai timetiken proskynesin), not indeed that true worship of faith (latreian) which pertains alone to the divine nature… For the honor which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented” (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; trans. in Richard Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool, 2018; the closing sentence adapts Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45).

Three things are fixed here for all subsequent Orthodox theology. First, the legitimacy of icons is defined as dogma, not left to custom: their production and veneration belong to the faith. Second, the object is bounded — Christ, the Theotokos, the angels, the saints — that is, the incarnate Lord and the members of His Body, not the invisible divine essence. Third, the kind of honor is specified with precision: timetike proskynesis, relative honor that passes to the prototype, categorically distinct from latreia, the worship reserved to God alone (see Image and Prototype). The council anathematized those who reject the veneration of icons and affirmed its continuity with the six preceding Ecumenical Councils (Acts of Nicaea II, Horos and acclamations; Price, 2018).

The Boundaries the Council Drew

Nicaea II is as important for what it did not do as for what it did. It did not command the latreia — the divine worship — of images; it explicitly denied it, a point later obscured by the Latin mistranslation that provoked the Frankish Libri Carolini (see Image and Prototype and The Divergence from Western Religious Art) [Corrected: contrary to the charge of the Libri Carolini, Nicaea II defined proskynesis (relative veneration), not latreia (worship), for the icons — the Franks’ condemnation rested on a faulty Latin rendering (Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009).] Nor did it prescribe how icons must be painted — it defined the theology of the image, not a canon of style; the artistic canons developed as tradition rather than conciliar law (see The Language of the Icon). And by bounding the object of the icon at the incarnate Christ and His saints, it implicitly guarded against attempts to depict the divine nature as such, a caution the later Orthodox tradition would develop in its reserve toward direct images of God the Father and of the divine essence (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 2).

Reception as the Seventh Ecumenical Council

Nicaea II is received in the Orthodox Church as the Seventh and final Ecumenical Council, completing the series that began at Nicaea I in 325 (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils: Nicaea II (787)). Its authority was not immediately universal: the Frankish church, misreading it, rejected it at the Synod of Frankfurt (794), and full Western reception came only later (Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, 2009). Within the East, its settlement was itself overturned by the second iconoclasm (815) before being finally vindicated in 843 (see The Triumph of Orthodoxy (843)). But from 843 onward the doctrine of Nicaea II has stood as the Church’s settled dogma of the icon, and its Horos remains the charter of Orthodox iconology — the conciliar text to which every later account of the icon, including this one, ultimately appeals (Giakalis, Images of the Divine, 2005; Price, The Acts, 2018).

References

The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (Translated Texts for Historians), 2018. (The sessions; the refutation of Hieria; the Horos and its distinction of proskynesis from latreia.) Greek: J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, vols. 12–13.
Giakalis, Ambrosios. Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The theological argument of the council.)
Theophanes the Confessor. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Trans. Cyril Mango and Roger Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. (The convening of the council; the disrupted attempt of 786.)
Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. (The Western reception; the Libri Carolini and the Synod of Frankfurt.)
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The boundaries of the icon; the depiction of the divine.)
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.