02 — 843 and the Restoration of the Icons

The Synodikon was born of a specific deliverance: the definitive end of iconoclasm under the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodius, and the procession that restored the holy icons to Hagia Sophia on the First Sunday of Great Lent, traditionally 11 March 843. This section narrates the event and then asks the harder textual question — what, of the document we now have, actually belongs to that moment.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
theodora-methodius-and-11-march-843.md The end of the second iconoclasm; Theodora, Michael III, Methodius, and the synod of 843; what that synod did and did not do; the “pardon of Theophilus” pinned to its attestation; the confessors named in the earliest stratum; why the icon question was the whole faith
the-original-core-of-the-text.md The recoverable nucleus and how it is isolated; the strata of 845, 870, 925, and 1010–1043; the Skylitzes account of Keroularios removing St. Theodore’s name; the disputed older view of Mango; and a plain statement of what cannot be recovered

Reading Order

Read the narrative file first, then the textual one. The order matters: the second file will read as excessive scepticism unless one has first seen how much of the Synodikon’s dogmatic content is in fact very early — the ascriptions on the icon and the Incarnation are probably the oldest material in the document.

A Note on Precision

Everything in this section observes the collection’s governing rule. Clause-numbers used in the scholarship are not converted into “anathema no. N”; where a stratum cannot be pinned, the content is described and the uncertainty declared; and the traditional attributions of the text’s composition (to Patriarch Methodius) and of its later editing (to Patriarch Sergius II) are reported as tradition, since the textual scholarship consulted does not establish them.

See Also