The Iconoclast Controversy Begins

Nearly everything known about the first moves against images comes from their defenders. The fullest narrative used here, by the monk Theophanes, was written about 810. The Roman Liber Pontificalis is closer in time but far from the capital. The iconoclasts’ own case is given here from the definition of their council of 754, which survives because the council of 787 had it read out in order to refute it (Council of Nicaea (787), session 6).

According to Theophanes, the emperor Leo III began to speak of removing the holy icons about 725. When an eruption threw up a new island in the sea between Thera and Therasia in the summer of 726, Leo took it as a sign in his own favour and pressed harder. When his officers took down the image of Christ above the great Chalke gate in Constantinople, a crowd killed some of them, and many were punished with mutilation, flogging and exile (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6217–6218 (pp. 404–405)). The Roman account says that Leo ordered that no image of any saint, martyr or angel be kept, that Pope Gregory II refused, and that in the capital images were burned and those who resisted were executed or maimed (Liber Pontificalis Gregory II (ed. Duchesne, vol. 1, pp. 404–405)) (Liber Pontificalis Gregory II (ed. Duchesne, vol. 1, p. 409)).

On 7 January 730 Leo called the patriarch Germanus before a council of state and asked him to sign against the icons. Germanus answered that he could make no change in the faith without an ecumenical council, laid down his vestment of office and withdrew. His assistant Anastasius replaced him on 22 January (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6221 (pp. 407–409)).

John of Damascus, a monk whom Theophanes places at Damascus in Syria (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6221 (pp. 407–409)), a land that had passed under Arab rule a century before (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6127 (p. 339)), wrote three treatises in reply. Before the incarnation, he argued, God could not be depicted; now that God has been seen in the flesh, he may be. “I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake.” Worship in the full sense, latreia, belongs to God alone; the honour paid to an image is of another kind (John of Damascus, On the Divine Images 1 (pp. 9–10, 15–16)). He added that “kings have no call to make laws in the Church” (John of Damascus, On the Divine Images 2 (pp. 69–70)).

In 754 Leo’s son Constantine V gathered 338 bishops at the palace of Hieria. No one came from Rome, Alexandria, Antioch or Jerusalem (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6245 (pp. 427–428)). The council called itself the seventh ecumenical. It reasoned that a picture of Christ must either claim to show his divinity, which cannot be drawn, or show his humanity alone and so divide him; the only true image he left was the bread and wine of the Eucharist. It ordered images removed from the churches, upheld the intercession of Mary and the saints, and forbade officials to seize church vessels on the pretext of destroying images. It ended by cursing Germanus and “Mansur”, John of Damascus (Council of Hieria (754), definition).

The decision of 754 was reversed at the Second Council of Nicaea Restores Icons, and the question was finally closed at the Triumph of Orthodoxy.