The Second Council of Nicaea Restores Icons

In 784 the empress Irene, who reigned with her young son Constantine VI, chose as patriarch of Constantinople a layman, the imperial secretary Tarasius. Theophanes reports that he accepted on condition that a general council be held to end the division over images. He was consecrated on 25 December 784 and wrote to Rome, and Irene asked Pope Hadrian I to send letters and representatives (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6277 (pp. 458–460)).

A first attempt failed. When the bishops sat down in the church of the Holy Apostles in the capital in August 786, soldiers of the guard regiments, who held to the teaching of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, came at them with drawn swords, and the meeting was abandoned. Irene sent those regiments out of the city on a pretext and disarmed them, and in May 787 she summoned the bishops to Nicaea instead (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6278–6279 (pp. 461–462)).

About 350 bishops met there in the autumn (Liber Pontificalis Hadrian I (ed. Duchesne, vol. 1, pp. 511–512)) (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6280 (pp. 462–463)), with two Roman legates and one envoy each from Antioch and Alexandria (Theophanes, Chronicle AM 6277 (pp. 458–460)). Hadrian’s letter, read at the second session, promised the rulers the fame of a new Constantine and a new Helena if the images were restored, and set out the authority of Peter’s see (Council of Nicaea (787), session 2, letter of Hadrian). Bishops who had supported iconoclasm read recantations and were received back (Council of Nicaea (787), session 1). At the sixth session the definition of the council of 754 was read out section by section and answered (Council of Nicaea (787), session 6).

The council then issued its decree. As the cross is set up, it says, so images of Christ, of his mother, of the angels and of the saints are to be placed in churches, on vessels and vestments, in houses and by the roads. They are to receive “due salutation and honourable reverence”, but not “that true worship of faith”, latreia, “which pertains alone to the divine nature”.

For the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents.

Those who reject images are to be deposed if clergy and excommunicated if lay (Council of Nicaea (787), decree).

The Roman church had the acts translated into Latin (Liber Pontificalis Hadrian I (ed. Duchesne, vol. 1, pp. 511–512)). At the court of Charlemagne the translation was read as commanding the adoration of images. A treatise written in the king’s name answered that images are for ornament and remembrance, that God alone is adored, and that the Franks would neither break images with the council of 754 nor adore them with that of 787 (Libri Carolini preface (pp. 3–6)). In 794 a Frankish synod at Frankfurt, with papal legates present, rejected what it called the new synod of the Greeks (Synod of Frankfurt (794), chapter 2) (Royal Frankish Annals, year 794).

The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches receive Nicaea II as the seventh ecumenical council (Confession of Dositheus question 4 (pp. 160–161)) (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2131–2132). The Reformer John Calvin did not: citing the Frankish treatise, he rejected its decree (Calvin, Institutes 1.11.14).