The Renewed Persecution of 815

The revival of iconoclasm under the emperor Leo V the Armenian: the turn against the icons from 814; the deposition of the iconodule Patriarch Nikephoros (815); the iconoclast synod of 815 in Hagia Sophia that repudiated the Seventh Ecumenical Council; the famous Palm Sunday procession at the Stoudios, where Theodore had his monks carry the icons in open defiance; and Theodore’s emergence as the visible leader of the iconodule resistance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

Leo V and the Return of Iconoclasm

The veneration of the icons had been restored by the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) and had held for a generation. It was overthrown again by the emperor Leo V the Armenian (reigned 813–820). Leo, a soldier raised to the purple in a time of military disaster, read the empire’s defeats — above all at the hands of the Bulgar Khan Krum — as a sign of divine displeasure, and concluded, as the first iconoclast emperors had, that the displeasure was provoked by the icons; the iconoclast emperors of the eighth century had after all been victorious, the icon-venerating regime since had been beaten (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 205–215; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Leo V”). From 814 Leo moved cautiously toward a renewal of iconoclasm, commissioning a theological dossier and pressing the patriarch to compromise.

The Deposition of Nikephoros and the Synod of 815

The Patriarch Nikephoros I — the same who had once opposed Theodore in the Moechian affair, now firmly an iconodule — refused to yield, and was deposed in March 815 (the well-attested date is 13 March 815), to be replaced by the iconoclast Theodotos I (Kassiteras/Melissenos) (Pratsch, pp. 215–220; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Nikephoros I, Patriarch,” “Leo V”). Under the new patriarch an iconoclast synod met in Hagia Sophia in 815, which repudiated Nicaea II (787), reaffirmed the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754), and ordered the renewed removal and destruction of the holy images. The second iconoclasm had now the full apparatus of imperial and synodal authority behind it, and the iconodules — patriarch deposed, council overturned — were once more a persecuted party.

The Palm Sunday Procession

It is at this moment that Theodore steps to the front of the resistance with the single most famous gesture of his life. On Palm Sunday, 25 March 815, in open and public defiance of the imperial prohibition, Theodore had the monks of the Stoudios take up the icons and carry them in procession around the monastery — by the accounts, holding the images aloft so that they were visible over the monastery walls to the city outside, chanting as they went (Pratsch, pp. 220–225; the vitae; OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November). [Disputed: the year of the Palm Sunday procession is occasionally given as 814, but the scholarly chronology (Pratsch 1998) places it on Palm Sunday 815 — 25 March — immediately before the iconoclast synod of that spring, and the Julian computus confirms that Palm Sunday 815 fell on 25 March; “815” is to be preferred.] [Disputed: the number of monks in the procession is often given as about a thousand, a traditional figure drawn from the vitae‘s count of the Studite obedience as a whole; Theodore’s own community at the Stoudios numbered nearer three hundred (see the discussion at Abbot of Stoudios).]

The procession was a deliberate provocation and a deliberate confession. It announced, in the most public way available to him, that the Stoudios would not obey the imperial decree, that the icons would be venerated openly whatever the law said, and that the question was not negotiable. It made Theodore the unmistakable head of the iconodule cause and marked him for the persecution that followed within weeks (see The Exiles and Floggings).

Theodore Before the Emperor

Summoned with the other abbots to submit, Theodore answered Leo V with the refusal that became proverbial — that no power on earth or in heaven could move him from the faith of the Fathers, that the emperor’s authority did not extend to the dogmas of the Church, and that he would obey God rather than the throne (Pratsch, pp. 210–230; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 152–170). The tradition preserves the defiance in the ringing form: though an angel from heaven should preach iconoclasm, he would not be persuaded (cf. Galatians 1:8, which Theodore turns against the emperor’s theology). This was the ecclesiology of the Moechian years come to its full test: doctrine is not the emperor’s to define (see Church and Emperor). Where in 795 the issue had been a marriage and a canon, now it was the icon and the Incarnation itself — and Theodore met it with the same immovability, now armed with the Christological theology of the Antirrhetics (see The Three Antirrhetics).

Why the Second Iconoclasm Mattered

The second iconoclasm was, in one sense, a weaker thing than the first: it lacked the theological originality of Constantine V, rested more nakedly on imperial will and military superstition, and lasted a shorter time (815–843). But precisely because it was an attempt to undo a settled ecumenical council by imperial fiat, it raised the question of the Church’s freedom in its sharpest form, and it called forth, in Theodore, both the boldest confession and the most refined theology of the whole iconoclast age. The resistance he organized — the network of confessors held together from exile — and the theology he wrote against the iconoclasts are the subjects of the files that follow (see The Resistance, The Three Antirrhetics, and The Letters from Exile). The Palm Sunday procession was the opening act; the long confession that followed would vindicate it in 843 (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy).

The Theology of the Second Iconoclasm

The second iconoclasm differed in theological character from the first, and the difference is worth drawing out, because it shaped both the council of 815 and the reply Theodore made to it. The first iconoclasm had produced, in the emperor Constantine V (reigned 741–775), a genuine theologian of the heresy: his Peuseis (“Inquiries”) advanced a properly Christological argument against the icon, contending that any image of Christ must either circumscribe his uncircumscribable divinity (and so confound the natures) or depict his humanity alone (and so divide Christ, falling into Nestorianism), and that the only true and admissible “image” of Christ is the Eucharist (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Iconoclasm,” “Constantine V”; Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 205–230). This dilemma was the intellectual core of the whole movement, and it was given conciliar form at the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754).

The synod of 815 did not so much advance new theology as inherit and re-edit the old. Convened in Hagia Sophia under the new patriarch Theodotos, it set itself to undo Nicaea II (787) and to rehabilitate Hieria, and its horos (definition) rested on a florilegium — a dossier of patristic and pseudo-patristic testimonies assembled to demonstrate the antiquity of the iconoclast position — together with a renewed appeal to the Christological argument of Constantine V and the authority of 754 (Pratsch, pp. 215–230; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Iconoclasm”). Its most notable move was a small but telling retreat: where Hieria had branded the icon flatly idolatrous, the council of 815 was content to forbid the veneration of images and to call them, more cautiously, things made “without warrant,” reflecting both the strength of the iconodule reply since 787 and the more nakedly political character of Leo’s revival. The second iconoclasm was thus, theologically, a weaker and more derivative thing than the first — it produced no Constantine V — even as it rested more openly on imperial will and the superstition that read military defeat as the icons’ fault. This very derivativeness sharpened the issue Theodore seized upon: an attempt to overturn a settled ecumenical council by imperial fiat and a recycled florilegium raised the question of the Church’s freedom in its starkest form, and it was met by the refined Christology of the Antirrhetics, which turned Constantine’s own dilemma against him by grounding the icon in the reality of the Incarnation and the hypostatic depiction of the incarnate Word (see The Three Antirrhetics).

The Wider Cast of Confessors

Theodore was the most conspicuous leader of the iconodule resistance, but he was not alone, and his stature is best measured against the company of confessors who stood with him. Foremost among them was the deposed Patriarch Nikephoros I himself — the same who had earlier opposed Theodore in the Moechian affair, now his fellow in the iconodule cause — who refused Leo’s pressure, was deposed in March 815, and from his enforced retirement composed the great prose refutations of iconoclasm, the Antirrhetici and the Apologeticus, that stand beside Theodore’s own as the theological monuments of the second period (Pratsch, pp. 215–230; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Nikephoros I, Patriarch,” “Iconoclasm”). Patriarch and abbot together — the deposed hierarch and the unbroken monk — gave the resistance both its canonical and its monastic faces.

The lay and episcopal resistance had its martyrs as well. Most celebrated was Euthymios of Sardis, a metropolitan and a veteran of Nicaea II, who had already suffered exile under the first restoration and who now refused Leo’s iconoclasm to the end; he died in 831 under Theophilos from a flogging, and is venerated as a hieromartyr — a hierarch’s witness answering to Theodore’s monastic one (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 215–230; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Euthymios of Sardis”). The pattern across all these figures is consistent and was consciously cultivated by Theodore in his letters: the iconodule cause was to be carried not by an organized counter-hierarchy — the official Church having been captured — but by a dispersed company of confessors, each bearing personal witness, bound together by correspondence and by the common refusal of communion with the iconoclast patriarch (see The Letters from Exile). It was a strategy of confession rather than of conciliar contest, suited to a moment when the councils themselves had been turned against the icons.

Beside them stood a generation of monastic confessors who paid for the icons in their bodies. The brothers Theodore and Theophanes, Palestinian monks known to history as the Graptoi (“the written-upon”), became the emblem of the persecution under Leo’s successor Theophilos, when iconoclast verses were branded into the skin of their faces — a punishment that gave them their name and made them, with Theodore, the type of the iconodule martyr-confessor; Theophanes Graptos would survive to become, after the restoration, metropolitan of Nicaea and a hymnographer of the triumph (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.vv. “Graptoi,” “Theophanes Graptos”; Pratsch, pp. 215–230). Around these named figures stood the wider Studite obedience and the network of iconodule monks and laity whom Theodore would hold together by letter from his successive places of exile (see The Resistance and The Letters from Exile). To situate Theodore among them is not to diminish his leadership but to define it: he was the organizer and the voice of a party that already had its hierarch in Nikephoros and would have its martyrs in the Graptoi, the man who turned scattered refusal into a coherent confession and supplied it with both the gesture — the Palm Sunday procession — and the theology that vindicated it in 843 (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy).

References

Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The chronology of 814–815: Leo V’s turn, the deposition of Nikephoros, the synod of 815, the Palm Sunday procession of 25 March 815.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On Theodore’s confrontation with Leo V.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Leo V,” “Nikephoros I, Patriarch,” “Iconoclasm,” “Theodotos I.”)
Venerable Theodore the Confessor and Abbot of the Studion. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, 11 November. (The Palm Sunday procession and the defiance of Leo V, as the tradition attests them.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Constantine V,” “Hieria, Council of,” “Graptoi,” “Theophanes Graptos,” “Euthymios of Sardis,” “Florilegium” — for the theology of the two iconoclasms and the wider confessors.)
Nikephoros I of Constantinople. Antirrhetici and Apologeticus (against iconoclasm), in PG 100. (The patriarch’s prose refutations, companion to Theodore’s Antirrhetics.)