Theodora, Methodius, and 11 March 843

The second iconoclasm ended with the death of the emperor Theophilus in January 842; his widow the Empress Theodora, regent for the child Michael III, replaced the iconoclast patriarch with the confessor Methodius, and on the First Sunday of the Great Fast — traditionally 11 March 843 — a procession restored the holy icons to Hagia Sophia. This file narrates the restoration, identifies what the synod of 843 did and did not do, and pins the legend-tinged elements of the story to their attestations.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The End of the Second Iconoclasm

The second iconoclast period opened when Leo V revived the policy in 815 and closed with the death of the emperor Theophilus in January 842. His widow, the Empress Theodora, became regent for their infant son Michael III; she was herself an iconophile, and she moved with the surviving iconophile party to restore the veneration of the icons definitively. The iconoclast Patriarch John VII the Grammarian was removed and replaced by the confessor Methodius; a synod at Constantinople in early 843 reaffirmed the doctrine of the Seventh Ecumenical Council; and on the First Sunday of Great Lent — traditionally dated 11 March 843 — a solemn procession restored the holy icons to the church of Hagia Sophia (Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], on Theodora, Methodius, and the restoration; Patricia Karlin-Hayter, “Icon Veneration: Significance of the Restoration of Orthodoxy?” in Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006]; and see The Triumph of Orthodoxy (843), with which this account agrees).

Unlike the restoration of 787, this one held. No Byzantine emperor afterwards attempted to abolish the icons, and 843 marks the definitive close of the whole iconoclast controversy (see The Second Iconoclasm and the Triumph; The Iconoclast Controversy).

What the Synod of 843 Actually Did

It is important to be exact here, because the printed Triodion title of the Synodikon — The Synodikon of the Holy and Ecumenical Seventh Council for Orthodoxy — invites a confusion. The synod of 843 promulgated no new dogmatic definition. It restored the definition of Nicaea II (787), which the second iconoclasm had set aside. The editorial note prefixed to the standard English translation of the received text says so with unusual candor: the Triodion title, “although not entirely correct, we have retained… because the Synod of 843 did not form any new definitions, but was concerned to proclaim again the authority of the Seventh Council and to re-establish the definition of the Faith propounded there” (prefatory note to the Synodikon, English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston).

This matters for the whole collection. The Synodikon’s dogmatic authority on the icon question is Nicaea II’s authority; the Synodikon is the instrument by which that authority was made annual and audible. What 843 contributed was not a new definition but a liturgical institution — and a text.

Whether the Synodikon in its first form was drafted by Patriarch Methodius himself is stated confidently in much popular literature but is not a claim this collection can verify from the critical scholarship available to it. [Disputed: the attribution of the original composition to Patriarch Methodius is widely repeated in Orthodox sources but is not established by the textual studies consulted here; Lauritzen’s analysis of the earliest recoverable form speaks of an original text “of 844” without naming an author (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 122, 126). The safe statement is that the core belongs to the circle that carried out the restoration.]

The Date and the Anniversary

The preamble of the Synodikon itself supplies the strongest internal evidence for the occasion. It calls the day one on which “we owe yearly thanksgiving to God along with an exposition of the dogmas of piety and the overturning of the impieties of evil,” treats it as a dedication feast on the model of John 10:22 (“the consecration was in Jerusalem, and it was winter”), and speaks of deliverance “after a short thirty years of harassment” — a reckoning that fits the second iconoclasm from 815 to 842 (Synodikon, preamble; received text of the Triodion, and the parallel in the Louth/Lash translation of BL Add. 28816). Lauritzen observes that the preamble “describes an event which occurred one year after the end of the iconoclast controversy,” and accordingly dates the basic framework of the text to 844 rather than to the first celebration itself (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 122).

That is a scholarly correction worth registering plainly. [Corrected: the celebration is traditionally and rightly dated to the First Sunday of Great Lent 843, but the text of the Synodikon in its recoverable original form appears from its own preamble to have been composed for the first anniversary, in 844 (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 122). The two facts are compatible: the feast begins in 843, the charter for its annual keeping in 844.]

The Empress Theodora and Her Husband

The single most-repeated narrative element of the restoration — that Theodora obtained from the assembled fathers a pardon for her late iconoclast husband Theophilus, so that he should not be condemned by name — belongs to the hagiography of the feast rather than to its documented history. It is preserved in later, legend-tinged accounts of 843 and is reported here as a tradition of the day, not as fact [Disputed: Karlin-Hayter, “Icon Veneration,” in Byzantine Orthodoxies, 2006, treats the “pardon of Theophilus” as belonging to the later narrative elaboration of the restoration; this collection follows the same disposition as The Triumph of Orthodoxy (843)] (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What is textually secure is that the Synodikon in every recension known to this collection commemorates the pair. Both the primitive Constantinopolitan form and the received text acclaim “Michael, our orthodox Basileus, and Theodora, his holy mother: May their memory be eternal!” (Synodikon, Louth/Lash translation of BL Add. 28816, imperial acclamations; the same clause in the received text of the Triodion). The empress herself is venerated as a saint for the restoration.

The Confessors Who Are Named

The 843 stratum’s list of those acclaimed reads like a roll of the second iconoclasm’s survivors and dead, and Lauritzen has identified most of them:

Euthymius of Sardis (d. 840 under Theophilus), Theophilus of Ephesus, and Aemilianus of Cyzicus (d. 820 under Leo V), acclaimed as “the celebrated confessors and archbishops”;
Theophylact of Nicomedia (d. 846), Peter of Atroa (d. 837), Michael of Synada (d. 821), and Joseph of Thessalonica (d. 830, the brother of St. Theodore the Studite), “the blessed metropolitans”;
John the Confessor, abbot of the monastery of Katharon (d. 839), Nicholas the Confessor, abbot of Stoudios (d. 868), and George of Mytilene (d. 821);
St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826), acclaimed alone and — in BL Add. 28816 — with special prominence in the manuscript’s layout;
Isaac the wonderworker, abbot of Dalmatou (d. 396), and St. Ioannikios the Great (d. 846);
Hilarion, archimandrite and abbot of Dalmatou (d. 845);
St. Symeon the Stylite of Lesbos (d. 844)

(Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 122–123, identifying each figure; the names and their order as in the Synodikon, Louth/Lash translation of BL Add. 28816, and in the received text of the Triodion, which further inserts St. Stephen the New, the martyr and confessor of the first iconoclasm, and the Branded confessors Theodore and Theophanes.)

Lauritzen’s point about this list is textually decisive: several of these men — Theophylact of Nicomedia (d. 846), Ioannikios (d. 846), Hilarion of Dalmatou (d. 845), Symeon Stylites of Lesbos (d. 844), Nicholas of Stoudios (d. 868) — died after 843, and so cannot have stood in the text of the first celebration. They were added, probably between 845 and 870, and their addition reflects a concrete institutional interest: the monasteries of Dalmatou and Stoudios promoting their own saints as the champions of the restoration (Lauritzen, “Layers of Composition,” 2017, 123, 126). The Synodikon began to grow almost immediately.

Why the Icon Question Was the Whole Faith

The 843 restoration was, narrowly, the return of images to the churches. The Church did not call it “the Triumph of the Icons”; she called it the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and the Synodikon’s own confession explains why. Its dogmatic ascriptions are not about art but about the Incarnation: those are blessed who “acknowledge in Christ one Hypostasis, with different essences, and attribute to the one Hypostasis both the created and uncreated, the visible and invisible, the passible and impassible, the circumscribable and uncircumscribable” (Synodikon, received text, second ascription). The icon is defensible because the Word became genuinely, describably, circumscribably man; to refuse the image is to touch the reality of the flesh He took (Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, trans. Anthony Gythiel, 2 vols. [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992], vol. 1; Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed. [London: Penguin, 1993], on the meaning of the feast; and see Icons and Iconoclasm, The Theology of the Image).

Because the defense of the icon was a defense of Christology, the feast could grow — through the expanding Synodikon — into a commemoration of Orthodoxy as such. That growth is the subject of Sections 05 and 06; its seed is here, in the fact that in 843 the Church understood herself to have been vindicated not in a devotional practice but in the confession of the Incarnate Word.

References

Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (The 844 dating of the framework; the identification of the acclaimed confessors; the post-843 additions and the Dalmatou/Stoudios interest.)
Karlin-Hayter, Patricia. “Icon Veneration: Significance of the Restoration of Orthodoxy?” In Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. (The events of 843; the later elaboration of the “pardon of Theophilus.”)
Treadgold, Warren. A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. (Theodora, Methodius, and the restoration.)
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, with its prefatory note on the Triodion title and the synod of 843.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Trans. Andrew Louth, edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash).
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The theological meaning of the Triumph.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The feast and its significance.)