The Triumph of Orthodoxy

The council of 787 had restored the veneration of images (The Second Council of Nicaea Restores Icons), but a later generation of emperors forbade it again; the Synodikon counts thirty years of this second attack (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, preamble). This entry depends chiefly on a history compiled at the Byzantine court about a hundred years later, which tells the story as the winners remembered it.

When Theophilus died, his son Michael III was a small child. Power lay with his mother Theodora the Empress and three regents: the eunuch Theoktistos, her brother Bardas and her uncle Manuel. According to the Continuator, monks of the Stoudios monastery promised the sick Manuel recovery if he would restore the images; he recovered and won over the others. Theodora answered that she had always wished it and had been held back by the number of senators and bishops attached to the other side, the patriarch above all (Theophanes Continuatus 4.1–2).

The patriarch, John the Grammarian, was told to accept the images or withdraw until a council met. The Continuator says that he wounded himself and let the rumour run that the empress had sent men to kill him, that Bardas exposed the trick, and that he was removed. In his place came Methodios I, whom the Continuator calls the church’s defender and who had come through a long imprisonment (Theophanes Continuatus 4.2–3). Theodora asked the assembled clergy to pardon her dead husband. They replied that they could not absolve a man who had died unrepentant; she swore that at the end he had asked for the icons and kissed them, and they gave her a written promise to pray for him (Theophanes Continuatus 4.4–6).

On the first Sunday of Lent, after a night vigil in the church of the Mother of God at Blachernae, the empress, the patriarch and the clergy went in procession to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and celebrated the liturgy there (Theophanes Continuatus 4.6). The thanksgiving composed for the occasion, the Synodikon, declares that the church honours Christ and his saints in word, in writing, in thought, in sacrifice, in churches and in icons. It wishes eternal memory to the patriarchs Germanos, Tarasios, Nikephoros and Methodios and to other defenders of the images, and pronounces anathema on the iconoclast patriarchs by name (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, acclamations and anathemas).

The Synodikon says that the church owes this thanksgiving every year on this day. With names and condemnations added by later generations, as the translator’s preface notes, it is still printed in the service books of the Orthodox Church for the first Sunday of Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, preamble).