Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea
The minutes and decisions of the council that met at Nicaea in 787 under the empress Irene and restored the veneration of images. Its decree distinguishes the honour paid to an image from the worship owed to God alone.
Read the text at ccel.org ↗The same extracts, decree and canons on one page (New Advent) ↗
The council met in the church of Holy Wisdom at Nicaea, with a final session in the palace at Constantinople, and its minutes were kept session by session. They include the letters of Pope Hadrian I, the confessions of bishops who had sided with the iconoclasts and now asked to be received back, long files of passages from earlier writers, the reading and refutation of the definition of 754 in the sixth session, the decree, and twenty-two canons on church discipline.
The decree is the council’s own statement and is quoted in this wiki from Percival’s translation. For everything else his volume is a selection. The first Latin translation of the acts, made at Rome soon after the council, was word for word and hard to follow, and it was through this version that the Frankish court came to know and reject the council. See Libri Carolini (Opus Caroli regis contra synodum).
Cited in
- AD 726–730, estimated date
- AD 787, firm date