The Iconoclast Controversy

Beginning around 726 under Emperor Leo III and intensifying under his son Constantine V, the imperial government moved to destroy the veneration of icons as idolatry. Constantine gave the policy theological form at the Council of Hieria in 754, which condemned images with a Christological argument: any icon of Christ either confuses or divides his two natures. The Church’s answer would come at Nicaea in 787.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Outbreak of Iconoclasm

By the early eighth century the veneration of icons — images of Christ, the Theotokos, and the saints, honored with candles, incense, and prostration — was deeply woven into Byzantine piety. Around 726–730 the Emperor Leo III the Isaurian turned against it, ordering the removal of images and, according to the sources, the destruction of the great icon of Christ over the Chalke gate of the palace, which provoked riots (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the outbreak; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). The motives were mixed and are debated by historians: a genuine religious scruple that icon-veneration violated the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20:4); the pressure of a resurgent, aniconic Islam on the empire’s eastern frontier; recent military disasters read as divine punishment for idolatry; and the emperor’s desire to assert authority over the Church (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 1974; Louth, Greek East and Latin West, 2007). The persecution fell hardest on the monks, who were the icons’ chief defenders and guardians.

Constantine V and the Theology of Iconoclasm

Leo’s son Constantine V (741–775) was the movement’s ablest champion, a capable soldier and a theologian who gave iconoclasm a serious Christological argument in his own writings (the Peuseis, “Inquiries,” known through the refutations). The iconoclast case, at its strongest, ran thus (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979, on the iconoclast Christology; Pelikan, Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 1974):

  • The scriptural argument. The Old Testament forbids images and the worship of them (Exodus 20:4–5; Deuteronomy 5:8); to make and venerate icons is to relapse into the idolatry the Law condemns.
  • The Christological dilemma. This was the iconoclasts’ sharpest weapon, and it turned the earlier councils against the icons. Christ is one person in two natures. Now, an icon claims to depict Christ. But his divine nature is uncircumscribable and cannot be depicted. So either the painter claims to depict the divinity — which is impossible and blasphemous, “circumscribing the uncircumscribable” — or he depicts the humanity alone, separated from the divinity, which is the Nestorian error of dividing the one Christ; or he depicts a divinity fused with the flesh, which is the Eutychian error of confusion. On every horn, they argued, the icon of Christ is heretical (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, on the iconoclast dilemma). The only permissible “image” of Christ, Constantine held, is the Eucharist, which Christ himself instituted.

The iconoclast argument was thus not crude image-hatred but a theological case that claimed the mantle of Chalcedon and the Christological councils — which is precisely why the Orthodox answer had to be theological, and had to show that the icon affirms rather than violates the Incarnation (see The Defense of the Icons).

The Council of Hieria (754)

Constantine V gave his policy conciliar form. In 754 he convened a great council at the palace of Hieria, across from Constantinople, which gathered some 338 bishops and styled itself the “Seventh Ecumenical Council” (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Hieria condemned the making and veneration of icons as idolatry, deploying the Christological dilemma above, and anathematized the leading defenders of the images — including, posthumously, St. John of Damascus, who had written from the safety of Muslim-ruled Palestine and was beyond the emperor’s reach (see St. John of Damascus). Its Horos (definition) survives because Nicaea II later quoted it in full precisely in order to refute it clause by clause (the Horos of Hieria embedded in the Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; Percival, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), 2018).

Hieria is a textbook case of a council that had much of the outward apparatus of ecumenicity — imperial convocation, a large episcopate, the self-applied title “ecumenical” — and yet was rejected by the Church. It is decisive that Hieria had no representative of any of the five patriarchal sees: the see of Constantinople was vacant and the council itself elected a new iconoclast patriarch, while Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were entirely unrepresented (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979; Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990). Lacking the consent of the great sees and, above all, lacking the reception of the whole Church — which the genuine Seventh Council would supply against it — Hieria stands with Ephesus 449 as a “robber council,” proof that neither numbers nor imperial backing can make a council ecumenical (see Ecumenicity and Reception). Under Constantine V the persecution that followed Hieria was severe, especially against the monasteries; the iconodule patriarch Germanus had already resigned, and confessors such as St. Stephen the Younger were put to death.

The Turn Under Irene

Constantine V died in 775; his son Leo IV was a milder iconoclast and died in 780, leaving his widow Irene as regent for their young son Constantine VI. Irene was an iconodule, and she moved, with the new patriarch Tarasius, to restore the icons through a true ecumenical council in communion with Rome and the Eastern patriarchates. A first attempt to convene in Constantinople in 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers of the capital’s garrison; Irene reassembled the council the next year at Nicaea — the city of the First Council — where it met in 787 with legates of Pope Hadrian I and of the Eastern patriarchs, about 350 bishops attending (Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils, 1990; Price, Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, 2018). What it defined — the theology of the icon, the crucial distinction of veneration from worship, and the refutation of Hieria — is the subject of the next file.

See Also

References

  • Council of Hieria (754), Horos, as preserved and refuted in the Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Session 6. In Percival, ed., NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14; and Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), 2 vols., Liverpool University Press, 2018.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979; Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975.
  • Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
  • Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church, AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2007.
  • Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.