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The seventh General Council, the Second Council of Nicaea, was summoned in
order to settle a controversy which "to a great extent was a domestic
controversy of the church of Constantinople and its immediate
dependencies."[178] And the subject of this controversy was a matter "in
which the peculiar character of all the nations concerned played a large
part."[179] It was a controversy about the lawfulness of venerating holy
images and relics, and about prayer to the saints. Why these controversies
arose, towards the year 725, historians still can only make guesses, as
they can also only guess what it was that led the emperor, Leo III (717-
40), to lead the anti-image party, so to call it.[180]
Leo III was one of the great emperors, a ruler under whose government "the
empire not only ceased to decline, but even began to regain much of its
early vigour."[181] Yet at the time he was proclaimed emperor, the empire was
threatened with immediate ruin. "Six emperors had been dethroned within the
space of twenty-one years. Four perished by the hand of the public
executioner, one died in obscurity, after being deprived of sight, and the
other was only allowed to end his days peacefully in a monastery, because
Leo felt the imperial sceptre firmly fixed in his own grasp. Every army
assembled to encounter the Saracens had broken out into rebellion. The
Bulgarians and Sclavonians wasted Europe up to the walls of Constantinople;
the Saracens ravaged the whole of Asia Minor to the shores of the
Bosporus."[182]
The new emperor's first task was to save his capital. He was crowned on
March 25, 717, and just four months later the siege of Constantinople
began; huge armies of Mohammedans on the land side, and a vast fleet in the
sea of Marmora and the Black Sea. The siege lasted just a year. In the end
it was the besiegers who starved, and little by little their fleet was
destroyed. For the next twenty years the empire had nothing to fear from
the Saracens, and the prestige of the great defence was perhaps Leo's main
resource in his unexpected career as a religious reformer.
"Unexpected" would seem to be accurate. For while we can fix the date when
the emperor first published his views on these religious practices, the
years 726 and 727, none can say whence these ideas came to him. But one of
the historians best versed in the story gives him credit for a sincere
desire to purify religion from an ever increasing superstition.[183] Images--
paintings, that is, mosaics, reliefs, statues--are in part the decorative
furniture of a church; they are reminders of holy personages now no longer
in this world, or of past incidents of religious history, and they are a
means by which the devout can pay honour to Christ and the saints,
honouring these by honouring their images; by using precious woods,
ivories, gold, and silver, out of which to make the image; by clothing it
in costly silks, ornamenting the figure with jewels and so forth; most of
all by a certain ceremonious use of the image, burning lights in front of
it, offering incense to it, and especially by kneeling before the image
when one is praying to the personage it represents. According to the
personal taste or temperament of the believer, these practices can vary
indefinitely from what seems mere gesture to what, no less certainly, can
seem the very extravagance of passion. But, even at the very extreme,
devotion to the image for the sake of the saint represented is, of course,
a different kind of thing altogether from the act of the ancient heathen
who thought the image itself a god, itself actually able to reward the
devotee or work him harm, and who addressed his prayer to the image itself
for the image's own sake--the image thus being, in his case, what we call
an idol.
What exactly the mentality was that underlay Leo III's anti-image policy we
shall probably never know. That he was a great reorganiser of the whole
machinery of the state is certain. Inevitably, in this particular state,
the Byzantine Empire, this meant a deep interest in the welfare of
religion. Was it as part of the very necessary regeneration of the state
that the question of the religious exercises of the ordinary man came under
the emperor's notice? somewhat as (just one thousand years later) they seem
to have fascinated another emperor, Joseph II?
The historians of the religious arts will tell us that round about the time
when Leo III grew up, religious art was passing from a state where the
pictures were repetitions of "typical" figures (saints in hieratic
postures, symbolised according to a rigid convention), to a very different
condition of things, where the pictures were more like those of ordinary
human beings. They speak of a new, naive, crude realism, especially in the
pictures of the martyrs, where the artist's imagination revelled in the
delineation of horrific tortures. And once the taste for pictures of the
saints in action grew, there began to appear, as well as their authentic
deeds, pictures of what they had never done except in pious fairy tales--
miracles and other wonders that had, in fact, never taken place at all; and
this even in the pictures of the Blessed Virgin and of her Divine Son. In
other words, legend was being given the same credence as truth--which is
one of the most direct routes, of course, to superstition. There seems to
be no doubt of these developments, particularly in the matter of icons
properly so called--that is, the pictures, in metal, wood, ivory, or
painted, made for private devotion. We read of icons alleged to have worked
miracles, and held especially sacred or valuable because of this
reputation, and of others not made by human hands, miraculously conveyed to
this earth. And all this with little or no supervision from the authorities
in the church. In a word, grave abuses, long tolerated.
We do hear of bishops who protested against these developments--it was with
three bishops of sees in Asia Minor[184] that the movement began which Leo
III was to take up. But we have not anything like sufficient detail about
episcopal action in general to judge the bishops as a whole. Later, the
emperors--Leo's son and successor, Constantine V, at least--were to take up
the position that image-veneration is simple idolatry. But was this the
original position? Or was it something like this: "Too many people pay
reverence to images in such a way as to make it seem that they are actually
idolaters"? Or did anyone assert: "Too many people have become idolaters
through the custom of venerating images"? Even today, strange to say, one
occasionally finds educated men, whom the Catholic use of images repels,
hard to convince that Catholics do not believe the actual wood or plaster
statue is a being capable of doing what is asked. I have never had reason
to think these non-Catholic friends of mine thought myself an idolater, but
every time they see a seemingly less educated Catholic (whom they presume,
of course, to be a less intelligent being than themselves) kneeling in
prayer before a statue, or lighting a candle to burn before it, their
suspicion is aroused that here is idolatry. Given the fact of the never
ceasing war of the Church on superstition in all its forms, the unanimous
violence of theologians and preachers, at all times, against even the
quasi-superstitions of social life,[185] the presumption is dead against the
accusation. The American Catholic can be just as startled as his non-
Catholic friend, at the spectacles he sometimes sees in the churches of
latitudes far to the south, at the way statues are dressed, bedizened with
jewellery, paraded around and apparently treated, at times, as though they
were the central feature of religion. A little experience shows that this
is but an instance of that general truth upon which Montaigne so loved to
dwell: "It is the common weakness, not of the lower classes only but of all
mankind almost, to form their judgments and their plans according to the
way of life where they were born."[186] Who will ever persuade the image-
loving Italian or Spaniard that the teen-age maidens of the United States
do not suffer from the freedom with which their parents allow them to run
around with the boys of their choice?
The point where the Iconoclasts roused against themselves the general
feeling of the Church was not that they said, "There is too much of this
image devotion in the religious life of the day," or "This if not checked
will lead to superstition,"[187] but the openly expressed principle of the
whole campaign: "Image devotion is idolatry." And, at a later stage in the
controversy, they protested that all prayer to the saints is superstitious
and sinful.
Leo III's first "iconoclastic" act of which we have certain knowledge was
the removal of the image of Christ from over the principal gate of the
palace at Constantinople. This caused a riot and there were some deaths,
and arrests, and punishments. Next there were mutinies in the armed forces
as the orders went round that images were to be destroyed. The emperor
endeavoured to win over the patriarch, Germanos, to approve the new policy,
and he also wrote to the pope, Gregory II. These letters are lost, but we
do possess the pope's replies, and we can learn that the correspondence was
an interchange of doctrinal treatises, the pope explaining to the emperor
that the Old Testament prohibition was about idol worship, and explaining
how idols and the Catholic images are different kinds of things. The
emperor's threat that unless the pope submitted he would be deposed had no
effect except to cause a revolt in the Italian provinces, and then,
February 11, 731, the pope died.
Gregory II died without knowing that on January 17 the emperor had called
together his senators and chief officers of state and the patriarch to put
before them an imperial declaration that whoever refused to destroy any
images he possessed, or whoever paid honour to images, was a rebel against
the state. The patriarch refused to put his name to the declaration. He
took off his badge of office and went away, not to the official palace he
had occupied for so long, but to the family home. The emperor appointed one
of his officials to succeed him, who signed willingly; the declaration
(thus fortified with the approval of the Church) was published, and the
first persecution began.
It was the newly elected Gregory III[188] who received the new patriarch's
demand for recognition as lawful bishop of Constantinople in a profession
of faith, made up, in part, of the edict or manifesto he had just signed.
This pope, like the emperor, was a Syrian by birth. He replied by refusing
the recognition asked for, and threatened the petitioner that unless he
returned to orthodox ways he would be cast out of the priesthood. Gregory
III was a man of great determination, and his "reaction" to the emperor's
violence was to call a council that sat at Rome from November 1 to the end
of the year--very much as Martin I had acted in 649. As many as ninety-
three bishops attended. The pope published a sentence of excommunication
against all who, "despising the ancient practice of the church," set
themselves against the veneration of images, destroyed or profaned them.
The emperor, on receipt of this news, prepared an expedition to punish the
Italian bishops and to arrest the pope. But the fleet was wrecked by
storms. Only the remnant of it reached Sicily. All that Leo could do was to
confiscate the vast papal domains in Sicily, upon whose revenues the popes
had depended for their administration of Rome and for their traditional
care of the poor.
Leo III died in June 740. His son, who succeeded as Constantine V, was to
reign for thirty-five years, and to show himself as capable as his father
had been. Such a succession--nearly sixty years of continuous, good, strong
government--was without precedent. The great event of the new reign, from
the point of view of religion, was the council called by Constantine in
753, for the purpose of solemnly condemning the cult of images. For this
emperor was much more of an Iconoclast than Leo III. In a treatise which he
wrote, and circulated to the bishops on the eve of the council, he
explained that all images of Christ were heretical, since they must portray
Him as merely human, i.e., as though He had but one nature. At the same
time that he thus, indirectly, seemed to reprobate the ancient Monophysite
heresy, he used its terminology to explain himself; and as well as this, by
refusing to the Blessed Virgin the name of Theotokos, by asserting her to
be no more than Christotokos, he aligned himself with the Nestorians. It
was at the first real breathing space of his reign--which had begun with a
civil war, in which the rebels held Constantinople--that Constantine V held
this council.
It met in the emperor's palace called Hieria, near Chalcedon, February 10,
753, and it sat for as long as seven months, with 338 bishops attending. So
far as numbers went, this was one of the
greatest of all the councils so far. The pope was not invited to it; the
see of Constantinople was vacant; Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were
now well and truly sees in partibus infidelium. The president was that
archbishop of Ephesus who, nearly thirty years before, had been one of the
first promoters of iconoclasm. What took up the time of so many bishops for
so many months was not the proposal to forbid the veneration of images.
Here all were agreed. But the bishops resisted the emperor steadfastly when
he proposed to go back on the earlier, acknowledged General Councils. They
refused to endorse his heresies about the nature of Christ, the Theotokos,
and her role of intercessor for mankind, the practice of prayer to the
saints, the veneration due to their relics. So that the final summing up of
the council does no more than speak of the images as being idolatrous and
heretical, a temptation to the faith that originated with the devil. No one
is to possess or venerate an image, even in the secrecy of his home. All
who disobey are to be excommunicated, and also to be punished by the law of
the emperor, for their disobedience is also a crime against the state.
It is now that the real persecution began. The names of several illustrious
martyrs have survived, some of them beheaded, others flogged till they
died. Especially did the emperor rage against the monks, against whom as a
class he organised a campaign of slander, whose dress and celibacy he
ridiculed in pageantry and shows. At one moment a law enacted that all the
emperor's subjects should swear never again to venerate an image, and the
first to take this oath was the patriarch of Constantinople, publicly,
holding up the relic of the true Cross, in the pulpit of St. Sophia. The
minority who refused suffered cruelly. And now the emperor went beyond his
council of 753. All prayer to the saints was forbidden, and all veneration
of their relics. These were to be destroyed. From the great basilica at
Chalcedon the body of the martyr to honour whom it was built, St. Euphemia,
was thrown into the sea. And so the reign of terror continued until
Constantine V died, the feast of Holy Cross, 775.
His son, Leo IV, lasted only five years, and then, as regent for the child
Constantine VI, Leo's widow, Irene, ruled. She was a devout Catholic; that
is to say, she had always been opposed to the whole iconoclastic business;
and once the winter was over (Leo IV died in September, 780) a Byzantine
embassy once more appeared in Italy. It was bound for the court of
Charlemagne, to negotiate a marriage for the young emperor. And it was an
augury of coming recovery, the first sign of the future seventh General
Council of 787.
In May 784 the patriarch Paul of Constantinople, without a word even to the
sovereign, suddenly went into retirement. Death was coming, he explained,
and he must repent, and make reparation for his bad oath to work for the
destruction of the cult of images. To the empress, he said, further, that
the church of Constantinople was in schism, and that the only remedy for
the evil was a General Council. Nothing but the unsettled state of the
empire after her husband's death had delayed Irene's plans to reverse the
policy of the last sixty years, and now she acted with decision. On August
29 the empress wrote to the pope (Adrian I, 772-95) that she had decided to
summon a General Council and, inviting him to take part in it, she said,
"It is God Himself, wishing to lead us to the truth, Who asks you to come
in person, in order to confirm the ancient tradition about the veneration
of images."[189] If Adrian could not come himself would he send worthy men
to represent him?
Shortly after the despatch of this letter the patriarch Paul died
(September 784). To fill the vacancy the empress chose a layman, one of the
highest officers of the state, Tarasios. To a great meeting of bishops and
state officials, he made a speech explaining exactly the present position
in law and fact of the see of Constantinople and the hundreds of sees
dependent on it. Ever since the time of Pope Gregory III, fifty-three years
before, all these had been cut off from the universal church. This state of
things could not be borne any longer. A General Council was the only way
out of the complex difficulty. If the assembly agreed and would support
him, Tarasios would accept the empress' nomination and consent to be
patriarch. There were some objections and a discussion, but in the end the
meeting pledged its support. On Christmas Day, Tarasios was consecrated.
His first act was to send to the pope the official notice of his election,
which, as was the usual form, took the shape of a detailed profession of
faith. Tarasios also frankly explained how he came to acquiesce in the
unusual (not to say irregular) business that he, a layman, had been chosen
to be the new bishop. With this so-called synodical letter, there went the
official announcement of the election and consecration from the empress.
It was many months before these letters reached the distant pope. His
replies are dated October 29, 785. Adrian was ready, he said, to be
represented at the council, if such a council was the only way to bring
about the restoration of the images. But, even so, on conditions: the
coming council was to anathematize the gathering at the Hieria of 753, and
this in the presence of the papal legates,[190] the empress was to guarantee
full freedom of action to the council, and that the legates would be
allowed to return to Rome. Adrian's conditions were accepted and so, from
the outset, by virtue of this initiatory letter, the pope's position vis-a-
vis the council is that of Agatho in 680 and of St. Leo in 451.
The summonses for the council--ordered to meet at Constantinople--went out
in the summer of 786, and on August 1 the bishops assembled in the basilica
of the Holy Apostles. But the proceedings had scarcely begun when the
church was invaded by a regiment of soldiers, and despite the presence of
the empress and her son, Constantine VI, the bishops were put out of the
church. The army was, notoriously, one of the chief strongholds of the
Iconoclasts--loyalty to the religious peculiarities of the great soldier-
emperors, Leo III and Constantine V, was a thing seriously to be reckoned
with. Irene resigned herself, sent the bishops home to their sees, and
turned to the task of securing for the garrison of the capital troops on
whom she could rely.
This took time, and it was May 787 before the call to the council was again
issued. This time the bishops were not convoked to the capital, but to
Nicaea, fifty miles away, and separated from the turbulent city by the
waters of the Bosporus. There, on September 24, with memories no doubt of
the other council held there centuries before,[191] the seventh General
Council held its first session, with something like three hundred bishops
in attendance.
The council opened with an address by Tarasios. Then the letter of the
empress was read, guaranteeing freedom of speech to all, and ordering that
the pope's letter to her should be read. The remainder of the session was
taken up with the question of reconciling the handful of iconoclastic
bishops who appeared--and a discussion whether they should then be allowed
a place in the council. It was made a condition sine qua non that each
should renounce and anathematize the council of 753.
At the second session (September 26) the pope's letter was read. It began
with the statement of the powers divinely given to St. Peter to bind and to
loose, and that this power was the inheritance of his successors. Now
Peter's successors had never wavered, in this matter of the devotion to
images, and with regard to the controversy of the last sixty years, the
pope recalled all that had been done since the reign of Gregory II in
protest against the innovations, and what the popes had done to defend this
pious practice from the charge of idolatry. Adrian cited such well-known
Biblical facts as the figures of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, and
the brazen serpent. He quoted the long line of authority for the practices
as it is found in the Greek Fathers of the Church. And then he passed on to
matters of a different kind, where the late emperors had grievously wronged
the Roman See, matters where he demanded that injustices should be righted.
This part of the pope's letter was not read out to the council. Were the
legates aware of the omission? It is hardly likely. The matter of complaint
was Leo III's confiscation of the papal properties in Sicily, and, what
mattered still more, his adding to the jurisdiction of the see of
Constantinople the sees of Calabria[192] and Sicily. Adrian also reproved
the elevation of a layman--Tarasios--to the patriarchal see.
When the letter was read the legates rose and demanded that the patriarch
declare his acceptance of the doctrine as there stated. Tarasios did this,
and the legates next asked that each bishop should rise and personally make
the same declaration. This also was done, and the monks present also
professed this as their faith.
It was after this act of submissive faith that the council, in its fourth
and fifth sessions (October 1 and 4), went into the theological case for
the practice of venerating images and praying to the saints. For two days
long extracts were read from Scripture and the Fathers and explained and
commented by various speakers, and stories were told of marvellous
happenings in one diocese after another that proved the duty of honouring
the saints through their images. The writers who had taught otherwise were
condemned, among them such leading Monophysites of bygone years as Severus
of Antioch and Philoxene of Mabboug. The fifth session closed with the
solemn enthronement of an image, in the church where the council was held;
this at the proposition of the legates.
Two days later, at the sixth session, the prescribed condemnation of the
council of 753 took place. The decree of that assembly was read out, and
after each clause there was read a lengthy refutation of what it stated, a
reprobation worded, as to the bishops of 753, in language too coarse to
reproduce. It is more interesting that one reason given for denying that
council's claim to be oecumenical was that the pope was not represented at
it; and it was boldly stated that it was just not possible that the Church
of Christ should ever fall away into idolatry.
At the seventh session the final dogmatic profession of the council was
drawn up. It followed the now traditional fashion of a declaration of
faith, beginning with the creed of Nicaea and anathematizing all past
heretics--Pope Honorius among them, but not (curiously) the Three Chapters.
Coming to the crucial point, "We define," the decree states, "that, as with
the priceless, life-giving cross,[193] so with the venerable and holy
images, they may be set up in their various forms in the churches, on the
sacred vessels and vestments, on the walls; likewise in private houses, and
along the wayside.... The more often we look upon them, the more vividly
are our minds turned to the memory of those whom they represent ... to give
to them, the images, an adoration of honour, but not, however, the true
latria, which, as our faith teaches, is to be given only to the divine
nature ... so that, like the holy cross, the gospels, and the relics of the
saints, to these images offerings of incense and lights may be made, as was
the pious custom of our ancestors. For the honour rendered to the image
passes to that which the image represents, and whoever adores[194] an image
adores the person it depicts. For in this way, is the teaching of the holy
Fathers strengthened, that is to say, the tradition of the holy catholic
church, receiving the gospel, from one end of the world to the other....
Those, therefore, who dare to think or to teach otherwise, or, as the
wicked heretics do, to spurn these traditions of the church ... if they are
priests or bishops, let them be deposed; if monks or laymen, let them be
excommunicated."[195] And the decree ends with words of praise for the two
bishops who had been leading opponents of the heresy, Germanos of
Constantinople and George of Cyprus, and for the great theologian whose
writings had been the heart of the resistance, John Mansour, John of
Damascus, our St. John Damascene.
With regard to the words here italicised in the decree, it may be noted
that Honorariam adorationem is the Latin translation given of the original
Greek timetiken proskynesin, where the second word, a noun, means literally
"a paying obeisance to," "a prostrating oneself before"--a gesture of great
respect, obviously; the degree, or kind, of respect intended being
something in the mind of the doer, primarily; and the significance, as it
is done, a thing known only to himself. A Christian in front of an image,
and an idolater in front of an idol, each gives the same salute--with a
wholly different meaning in each case. The newly appointed Anglican bishop
(in England), clad in his robes, kneels before Queen Elizabeth II, his
hands joined--he is not adoring her, nor praying to her, but taking an oath
of allegiance. It is folly to judge by appearance what we have never
experienced personally, or have studied in the declarations of those who
have had the experience. Which said, we may be allowed to regret that, from
so early a time, the one Latin word adoratio was used officially to mean
acts wholly
As to latria: the Latin does not here translate, but takes over bodily the
actual Greek word, whose original meaning "hired service, servitude," came
to be restricted to the special meaning "the service of the gods," and so
to "worship," the act by which we publicly recognise that God is the
creator and sovereign lord of all that is--the uniqueness of His being, and
of the dependence of all upon Him. As a technical term in theology, latria
denotes the reverence especial to God, reserved to God--what the English
word "worship" nowadays usually means and only means; although, a survival
of other ages, the mayor of an English town is still "Your worship"; the
bridegroom in the marriage service still says to the bride, "With my body I
thee worship"; and in recent English translations of papal documents, the
pope's address to the bishops, Venerabiles fratres has been rendered
"Worshipful brethren." But neither mayors, nor brides, nor bishops are
therefore regarded as divine!
In addition to this definition of faith, the council also enacted twenty-
two disciplinary canons. They are of a routine character, reminders to the
bishops and clergy of existing laws; a reminder to the modem reader that
the council marks the beginning of the restoration of order, after sixty
years of persecution and a regime of emergencies.[196]
The fathers of this General Council of 787 did not ask the pope to confirm
its decrees, nor did the pope ever do so of his own initiative. Indeed,
seven years later Adrian took great pains to explain to Charlemagne that he
had not done so, and why. Here we are brought up against another of those
strange sequels that would suggest that not every one of these twenty
councils was, at the time it took place, regarded by all concerned as what
we understand as a General Council.
But first of all, the appearance of the great name of Charlemagne suggests
the usefulness of recalling to the reader the revolutionary changes in the
"political" state of Italy and France which the hundred years had witnessed
that separated the council against the Iconoclasts from the council against
the Monothelites. These changes had a great influence upon the relations of
the popes with the emperors at Constantinople in the eighth century (715-
95); and they were to influence powerfully these same relations for the
hundred yeas that followed, the century in which the eighth General Council
(869-70) took place, the council conventionally regarded as marking the
beginning of the breakaway of Constantinople from Rome that still endures.
Briefly, within a matter of months after the death of Justinian (565), the
emperor who at such a cost had restored the imperial authority in Italy,
there came into that much ravaged land, from the north, the last and least
civilised of all its invaders, the Arian Lombards (568). Throughout the
century of the Monothelite troubles, of Pope Honorius and St. Martin I,
there was constant petty warfare between the various Lombard chiefs and the
imperial officials at Naples and Ravenna--this last being the central city
of the new Byzantine-governed Italy. Very slowly, but very surely, in the
course of 150 years the invaders established themselves, and in that time
they gradually gave up their heresy and became Catholics. By the time of
Pope Gregory II (715-31), whom we have seen threatened with deposition by
the Iconoclast emperor Leo III, the real bulwark of the empire in Italy was
no longer the exarch at Ravenna and his little army, but the prestige of
the pope as the heir of St. Peter. Time and time again, armed only with
this, the popes of the eighth century persuaded the Lombards to retreat
from new conquests--this in the time of the persecuting Iconoclasts, Leo
III and Constantine V. The day was to come, however, when a Lombard king
grew tired of thus "obeying St. Peter as his son" for the benefit of the
distant Byzantine czar. And the popes then turned for help to the Catholic
barbarians north of the Alps, to the Franks. How their appeals were finally
heeded, the pilgrimage of Pope Stephen II to the court of Pepin in the
winter of 753-54 (the winter following Constantine V's pseudo-council at
the Hieria), how Pepin agreed to expel the Lombards from the territories
around Rome and to convey the conquest to St. Peter in sovereignty, and how
the pope ratified Pepin's hold on the Frankish crown by anointing him king
with the holy oils, Pepin and his two sons, Carloman and the future
Charlemagne--this is what every textbook tells at length.
Pepin was a great ruler (741-68) as his father Charles Martel (716-41) had
been before him, and as Charlemagne was to be after him (768-814). Pepin
not only defeated the Lombards, and mocked the demand of Constantine V that
he reinstate Byzantium, but he watched with care over the apprenticeship of
the popes as temporal sovereigns. And Charlemagne was no less interested,
that they should be firmly established and rule in peace the far from
peaceful lay lords who, all but independent each in his own fortress,
resented the notion that priests were now their masters; and who, if the
chance offered of seizing the supreme place, would make light of
sacrilegiously going through the ritual formality of ordination and
consecration in order to attain it.
All which is recalled to explain the harsh statement that the first twenty
years of the new papal state were a bloody chapter indeed of Italian
history. The election of Adrian I in 772, the pope of this seventh General
Council that is our subject, brought a beginning of statesmanship. He ruled
for all but twenty-four years--the longest-reigned pope hitherto--wisely
and firmly and humanely, with the young Charlemagne as his protector and
counsellor, and yet without subservience to him: for all that Charlemagne,
in a rather attractively naive way, made it ever evident that if it were
his duty to protect the pope, it was the pope's duty to accept that
protection, e.g., to hearken to the protector's advice, and carry it out.
The two great men, however, managed together marvellously. The findings of
the General Council of 787 were the greatest test to which their relations
were put.
Charlemagne, by this time, had utterly destroyed the Lombard kingdom. It
was he who was now, in title and in fact, King of the Lombards, the ruler
of all Italy to the north of the little papal state as well as of the whole
of what we call France, and over the Pyrenees to the Ebro, and east as far
as the Rhine. The Holy See, not yet realising it, is now facing a pattern
of potential dangers from the powerful protector which will be repeated
century after century for the next thousand years--which, however, is none
of our business just now. But the pope and his protector met in what
promised to be a head-on collision a propos the decrees of this Second
Council of Nicaea.
What we would first like to know, as we study this crisis, is how much
information Charlemagne had about the council of 787 at the time it took
place. This may seem an odd remark, seeing who Charlemagne was, and what
his relations with the pope were, and given the undoubted fact that
Charlemagne was in Italy from January to Easter of that year. But the
suggestion is that the pope took care not to inform Charlemagne of the new
rapprochement with Constantinople, and its sequel the council. And that
politics were the reason for Adrian's deliberate silence: Byzantium (still
in 787 master of Sicily and southern Italy) being the secret sustainer of
resistance to the Franks of certain Lombard "pockets" in central Italy. And
in the spring of that same year Charlemagne broke off the long-drawn-out
negotiation for the marriage of his daughter to Irene's son, Constantine
VI.[197]
Such was the situation, ominous for the papal state, in the weeks while the
bishops of Asia Minor were journeying to Constantinople and there convening
with Adrian's legates, under the aegis of Irene. Charlemagne, in this same
autumn, was occupied with the business of destroying a treacherous vassal,
the duke of Bavaria. On October 3 the rebel surrendered--the council was
now busy examining the dossier of Scriptural authority for the cult of
images. In the spring of 788 Charlemagne's diplomacy won the Lombards from
their alliance with Constantinople. Irene's countermove was a command to
her generals in Italy to destroy the Lombard duchy of Benevento. But the
Lombard had now the Franks on his side, and it was Irene's forces that were
destroyed, and the Byzantine frontier pushed back to the south.
These few details are set down to show the reality of the Charlemagne
versus Constantinople animosity in these years, its importance to the great
papal problem of political security as the protection of the independence
of religion. The pope, needing the Frank most urgently, was walking on thin
ice when, in these years of war, he had to be friendly with the Byzantines.
Which is why not too much was said--if anything was said--to Charlemagne
about the negotiations that produced the council. This may also raise the
question whether the council was, in Adrian's mind, anything more than a
council of the bishops of the Byzantine empire which, under his direction,
was re-establishing Catholic belief and practice after sixty years of
disorder.
Charlemagne's first news about what had been happening elsewhere while he
dealt with Bavaria was the arrival of a Latin translation of the acta of
the council of 787. The date of his receipt of this we do not know[198]--
most likely it was around 791. This translation--an incredibly bad one, by
all accounts, and to judge from what has survived--perished long ago. When
the scholars in Charlemagne's council came to examine it they were
seriously disturbed, and by the king's command they prepared a lengthy
systematic refutation of the council's decrees--the so-called Caroline
Books.[199] The essence of what so moved the Frankish world was a statement
that images are to be given the very same veneration that we give to the
Trinity itself--the arch-mistranslation of the whole masterpiece of
illiteracy. Now what historians have, for centuries, called the Caroline
Books, was, in form and fact, an official state paper, a law of the King of
the Franks. In this Charlemagne reviews the history of the two councils, of
753 and 787, and he condemns both, criticising in detail, and with biting
sarcasm, the evidence for the lawfulness of image-veneration officially set
forth by the council of 787, a council convoked and animated by a woman,
over which a woman had presided. And such a body as this is to impose its
erroneous ideas on all the churches of the world, the bulk of whom have
never even heard there has been such a council? Are these Greeks orthodox,
even on the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity? Do they not believe that
the Son proceeds from the Father alone? No wonder they blunder about the
right and duty to venerate images. And so the long indictment rolls on.
But there is in it not a word of criticism for the pope. The document is
written as though he had had no share in the council at all, and it
contains the remonstrance that "Whenever a dispute arises about matters of
belief, we must consult the holy, roman, catholic and apostolic church,
which is set in authority over the other churches"[200]; understand,
perhaps, "and not a synod of Greek bishops." For the note that sounds
through all this polemic "is not so much one of hostility to the doctrine
set out at Nicaea, as to the fact of these Greeks sitting in council and
giving forth as though they were the infallible rulers of Christendom."[201]
The trouble is that there is now a second empire in Christendom, although
its chief as yet only calls himself king--and this chief is a genius, and
as passionately interested in culture and religion as in politics and war,
and this new western potentate will not tolerate that questions of doctrine
shall be decided for the whole church by a council of those churches where
his Byzantine rival is lord. That the force behind the Caroline Books and
the law called the Capitulary About Images, and behind the action,
regarding the council of 787, of the council about to meet in 794 at
Frankfurt, is a political force is what no man can easily deny.[202]
The great council which met at Frankfurt in the summer of 794 was not
called merely in order to deal with the situation just summarily described,
but with a serious heresy about the Trinity that had arisen in Spain. There
had been appeals about this matter to the pope, an intervention from Rome,
and a refusal to accept this; then a council at Ratisbon, and the trial of
a leading Spanish bishop for heresy. It was to a council whose task was to
settle this Spanish affair that Adrian agreed to send legates, and a
dogmatic letter stating the true belief on the point at issue.[203] It was
an imposing assembly, three hundred Latin bishops from every part of the
West, the equal, in this material sense, of any of the General Councils,
save the exceptionally large gathering at Chalcedon three hundred years
before.[204] All that concerns our present subject is that the criticism of
the council of 787, as made in the Caroline Books, was now put before the
three hundred bishops at Frankfurt, and that they thereupon condemned the
idea that images were the lawful object of adoration properly so called,
and that they condemned the council of 787 for encouraging this heretical
notion. The evidence, for this last serious charge, upon which the Latin
bishops acted is explicitly stated--it is the mistranslated extract from a
speech made at the council by one of the Greek bishops.[205] It is worth
noting, first, that to these Latins the council they are rebuking is merely
"the recent Greek synod at Constantinople," and next, that none of the wild
language of the Caroline Books and nothing of the erroneous teaching just
noted[206] appear in the proceedings of the council.
To strengthen the impression which the council of 794 might make upon
Adrian, Charlemagne now sent to him the famous Capitulary About Images,
eighty-five extracts from the Caroline Books. The pope examined the
indictment, and patiently refuted the eighty-five, point by point,
patiently and with studied moderation, correcting the vast series of
misunderstandings and ignoring the impudence and malice.[207] As to the
alleged difference in belief between the two councils, of 787 and 794, the
pope says very simply, "With regard to images, the belief of St. Gregory
[the Great][208] and our belief are the same; and so the Greek bishops
themselves, in this very synod, accepted the definition, [namely] to
reverence images with salutations of honour, but by no means to give to
them that true worship which, according to our faith, we give to the divine
nature alone.... And therefore it is that we have accepted this said
synod."[209] This, so far as the pope was concerned, was the last word. A
few months later he died, December 25, 795.
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