| ### CHAPTER 4: THE CHURCH AND THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, 714-814 ###  |

| #### 1. THE HERESY OF THE ICONOCLASTS |

| #### #### THE century that opened with the pontificate of St. Gregory closed very gloomily. The Lombards, for all that they were now Catholics, still menaced the security of Rome; the churches of the East were once again tamely acquiescing in the imperial defiance of the Roman supremacy; and if England and Ireland, the new provinces of Christ's kingdom, were thriving vigorously, morality and Christian order in the older church of Gaul were in worse condition even than in the time of St. Gregory. Finally, the new power which, sixty years before, had so dramatically conquered the lands whence Christianity had originally come, was once more moving; and it was capturing the West, now, as easily as it had then captured the East. #### Carthage fell to the Mohammedans in 698 and in the next ten years they were masters of the whole of Roman Africa to the Atlantic. The internal quarrels of the aristocracy in Spain, and the assistance of the governor of Ceuta, the Byzantine Empire's last scrap of territory in the West, gave them their chance. They crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (711) in the imperial vessels-12,000 men in all, of whom but a poor 300 were Arabs. The chief and the army were Moors, Catholics only a few years earlier. The Visigothic army they routed in one decisive battle, and, victorious, spread like a flood over southern Spain. Cordova, Elvira, Merida, Toledo, were occupied in turn. In 718 Saragossa was taken and in 720 the Mohammedans crossed the Pyrenees They took Narbonne, and though, in 721, they failed to take Toulouse the whole of the south-west was soon in their hands. Bordeaux, Nimes, Carcassonne were Mohammedan towns, and even Autun. In these same years other Arab-directed armies pressed with equal success to the conquest of the East. From Persia, a conquest since the first days of the new religion, they now overran Turkestan and central Asia, the valley of the Indus and the Punjab. Armenia and the Caucasus fell to them and, masters of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Wall of China, they laid siege in 717 to Constantinople. #### The rulers of what had been the Eastern division of the old Roman Empire, for all that they resisted stoutly, had been for many years powerless against this new force. Heraclius, upon whom the first disasters fell at the moment when he had barely completed his deliverance of the East from Persia, died in despair (642). Constans II (642-668) had the unhappy experience of a monotony of defeat. With his son Constantine IV (668-685) affairs mended somewhat. The new emperor was a more vigorous personality than his father and he held off for five years the boldest venture the Arabs had yet attempted -- the siege of Constantinople (673-678), defeating their fleet with terrible losses at Syllaeum, and their armies in Asia Minor. It was Islam's first real check and for twenty years there was peace. #### The next emperor, Justinian II, was, alas, a fool, a half-crazed tyrant, thoroughly incompetent. A revolution drove him out and for sixteen years the empire was given over to anarchy. These were the years of the new Arab advance, of the loss to them of Africa and Spain, and of the Arab seige of Constantinople. The capital was threatened, this time, by the Bulgarians, barbarians lately settled between the Danube and the Balkan mountains. Its deliverer was the military commander of the province of Anatolia, Leo the Isaurian. He marched on the capital with his army and was proclaimed emperor as Leo III. He was to reign for twenty-three years (717-740) and in that time to re-establish order and security for centuries yet to come. Leo III is, with his son and successor, Constantine V (740-775), the creator of that Byzantine State which for another five hundred years effectively staved off the ever recurring assaults from the East. #### Gradually the Arabs were driven out of Asia Minor, and Constantine V, taking the offensive, recaptured Cyprus and harried Armenia and Syria to the Euphrates. To these two princes, very largely, do we owe it that the nascent civilisation of the Catholic Middle Ages was not stifled by Islam while it was yet painfully learning to breathe. At the same time, they crippled the power which menaced from the west this one civilised Christian State-the half-civilised Bulgarians. #### These warrior princes did the State equally valuable service as reformers. The process which, in the previous century, recognising the facts of the case, had consciously worked to make of the Roman Empire of the East, a Greek-speaking, Oriental-mannered State, was pressed forward more and still more vigorously. A new reorganisation of the provinces, a new distribution of powers, a military code, a code of agricultural laws to arrest the development by which the wealthy landowner was growing more and more wealthy and the peasant becoming a slave, and above all a new code of civil law -- it is for this reconstruction of the State, as well as for the military genius which ensured that there should be a State to reconstruct, that the Isaurian emperors deserve their high place in the history of civilisation. #### They have another, very different, title to fame as the agents of a new religious controversy which rent the empire for sixty years, embittered their relations with the pope, who by this was the sole surviving power in the West that remained loyal to the empire, and which gave to the Church hundreds of new martyrs. This was the celebrated controversy as to the lawfulness of the reverence paid to the images of the saints, a practice which these emperors began to forbid under extreme penalties. A quotation from the classic historian of the empire, Finlay, shows the connection of this apparent aberration with the general policy of the Isaurian emperors and it explains the bitterness with which, from the beginning, they attacked the practice and punished its adherents. " [The period 717-867] opens with the efforts by which Leo and the people of the empire saved Roman Law and the Christian religion from the conquering Saracens. It embraces a long and violent struggle between the government and the people, the emperors seeking to increase the central power by annihilating every local franchise, and even the right of private opinion among their subjects. The contest concerning image-worship. . . became the expression of this struggle. Its object was as much to consolidate the supremacy of the imperial authority, as to purify the practice of the Church. The emperors wished to constitute themselves the fountains of ecclesiastical as completely as of civil legislation." [ ] #### Images -- painted and sculptured representations of persons and mysteries, allegorical scenes, scenes from biblical history, or the liturgy, images even of definite historical personages, of Our Lord, His mother, and the saints, had been used by the Christian churches from at least the first century as testify, not merely the reference to them in the early writers, but the numbers of such primitive images which still survive. It is less easy to be certain that a definite cult was paid, in the period before Constantine's conversion at least, to the actual image for the sake of its subject. With Constantine's conversion there is very definitely a cult of the Cross, and apparently, about the same time, the beginnings of a cult of other images, for already the practice has its critics, and the Council of Elvira in 305-306 definitely forbids the placing of pictures in the churches "lest what is worshipped and adored be painted on the walls." [ ] A little later, at the other extremity of the Christian world, Eusebius of Cesarea, the father of Church History, is explaining to Constantine's sister that he cannot send her the image of Christ for which she asks since the Scriptures forbid the making of images. He adds that, having recently found one of the faithful with what passed for pictures of Our Lord and St. Paul in her possession, he had confiscated them, lest the practice should spread, and Christians, like the idolaters, should come to think they could carry God round in a picture. #### That such reasons should prevail in a time when idolatry had hardly ceased to be the State religion and when it was still fashionable, was only natural. Despite such critics -- Eusebius did not lack successors -- the use of images spread, however, and by the time of Justinian (527-565) it was generally established in the East at least, and along with it, but more slowly, the practice of paying a reverence to the image itself. Theologians noted carefully the precise import of such reverence. Thus Leontius, Bishop of Neopolis (c. 582-602), explains (in reply to a Jewish gibe that the Christians, too, are idolaters in their veneration of images and the cross) that the reverence is purely relative; the prostrations before them, the kisses lavished upon them, the place of honour given to them in the churches are directed to the personage they represent. The whole apologetic of Catholic practice in the matter appears here so fully developed that fifteen hundred years of further controversy have added nothing to it. #### The practice of the Church in the West was, in this as in other matters, somewhat behind the practice in the East. One of the earliest traces of reverence to images of the saints in the West is the reference, in a poem of Fortunatus, written at the latest in 576, to the lamps that burn before the picture of S. . Martin of Tours. Twenty years later than this we have a witness to the custom in no less a personage than St. Gregory. The pope writes to the Bishop of Marseilles who, fearing his people may make an idolatrous use of the statues, had had them broken up. He points out to the bishop that such pictures and images serve as books to the illiterate. Since it is for this purpose, and not for adoration, that the images are placed in the churches, the bishop does wrong in destroying them. Does he set himself against the universal practice of the Church? Does he claim a monopoly of sanctity and wisdom? #### St. Gregory, in these texts, can hardly be claimed as urging the use of images for devotional purposes. [ ] Still less can he be said to oppose it, or condemn it. The practice continued to spread in the West, and within a century from the death of St. Gregory it was as general there as in the East. The criticism from outside the Church did not cease. Besides the Jews there were the Manichees of the type known as Paulicians. They refused to reverence the Cross because they regarded with horror all that it represented. The Monophysites, too, opposed the use, and even the making, of sacred images. Severus, Peter the Fuller, and other leaders of the party have all gone down to history as strenuous opponents of the practice. To make an image of Jesus Christ was to imply that He had a true human nature and since many of the Monophysites believed Him to be only partly human their objection to the picture or statue is understandable. #### It is not easy to say exactly why the emperor Leo III suddenly showed himself in the role of iconoclast. It may have been associations of his youth, for he came from a province not far from the centre of the Paulician movement. It may have been from Monophysite associations, for again he came from a region where the sect had been strong and persecuted. Or again his opposition may be taken as an example of the anti-Hellenist side of that revival of the East which, in progress now for two hundred years, was about to reach its climax, the century of Mohammedan culture's apogee, of Asiatic emperors and Oriental popes. The cult of the beauty of the human form was one element of the domination of Hellenism to which not all the centuries had ever really converted the East. Now, in a variety of ways, the reaction against that cult was showing itself. One of its fruits, perhaps, was the revolutionary religious policy of Leo III. #### There was nothing to shock or surprise contemporary opinion in the circumstance that the emperor should occupy himself with reform in religious matters. These were, and had been, his acknowledged province -- so far as the mass of the Eastern bishops were concerned -- almost from the days of Constantine himself. [ ] The semi-divine emperor of the pagan empire had never so abdicated his prerogative as to be no more than one of the faithful in the body of the Church. Gradually, in all that concerned its administration, he had come to be its head. He patronised orthodox or heretic as he chose, and whom he patronised prospered. He never, of course, pretended to exercise spiritual powers, to give sacraments for example, nor, if he were a Catholic, did he claim to alter the faith. On the other hand he certainly claimed the right to decide the expediency of issuing condemnations of heresy, and to choose the method of condemnation. He never denied the Church's infallibility, but he expected to control the movement of its exercise. He named the bishops of his empire, and when they crossed his path, as to their credit they frequently did, he deposed and exiled them without scruple. When Justinian came to give the imperial law its classic recasting, the Church law went into his code en bloc. "Nothing should escape the prince, to whom God has confided the care of all mankind," he said. Never did any State lay its hand on the Church so effectively; and when Leo III declared "I am priest no less than emperor," he was little more than a faithful echo to his predecessors. #### It was in 726 that the first edict against religious images appeared. The text has long been lost, but apparently it provided for the removal of the images, and the attempt to take down the image of Our Lord which was placed above the gate of the imperial palace, provoked a riot at Constantinople. Throughout the European provinces, in Greece and in Southern Italy, there were similar demonstrations, and even an attempt to dethrone Leo. The Greek insurrection came to an end with the defeat of the pretender's fleet: in Italy the Iconoclasts were less fortunate. In 730 the emperor advanced his policy a step further. He summoned the Patriarch of Constantinople, Germanus I, to sign a decree condemning the veneration of images. Germanus refused, and was promptly deposed and imprisoned. Shortly afterwards he was put to death. A compliant successor was provided and soon the emperor had a substantial following in the very episcopate. The pope, Gregory II (715- 731), one of the rare popes of this time who was not an Oriental, now intervened. He had had a long experience of the Byzantine tyranny in ecclesiastical affairs and, in the days when he was still no more than a deacon and the half-mad Justinian II was emperor, he had by his diplomacy extricated the reigning pope -- Constantine -- from a difficult situation (710). [ ] Later, as pope, he had been the chief means of preserving the empire's Italian territories for Leo III in the first difficult years of his reign. His letters to Constantinople [ ] dealing with the new crisis recall bluntly to the emperor the realities of the situation. The empire's hold on the pope is but a name, and he has at hand more powerful protectors, the new Barbarian princes: " If you send troops for the destruction of the images of St. Peter, look to it." The successor of St. Germanus was threatened with deposition unless he amended. This correspondence must have been one of the pope's last activities, for in 731 Gregory II died. #### His successor, Gregory III (731-741), took up his policy. Five times at least he wrote to the emperor, begging him to return to the traditional practice, and then, summoning a council at Rome on November 1, 731, the pope condemned and excommunicated whoever condemned the veneration of images or destroyed them. The emperor, for reply, copied his predecessors. As Justinian I had arrested Vigilius in 545 and brought him to the capital, as Constans II in 654 had similarly outraged St. Martin I, as Justinian II had attempted to kidnap Sergius I in 695, and had forced the appearance in 710 of Constantine, so Leo III now sent off a fleet to arrest Gregory III. The fleet was, however, destroyed by storms as it crossed the Adriatic, and the emperor contented himself with the seizure of the papal estates in Sicily and Calabria -- the main part of that Patrimonium Sancti Petri from whose revenues the popes financed their administration of Rome and the relief of its poor. #### Leo III aroused another adversary, in addition to the pope. This was the great scholar whom we know as St. John Damascene, in whose writings the theological genius of Greek-speaking Catholicism makes its last notable appearance. #### To the iconoclast controversy St. John contributed, between 726 and 730, three essays. They defend the lawfulness of making images, and the Catholic practice of paying them honour. To deny them honour because they are material things is Manicheeism. As to the honour paid them it is never more than relative. The varied usefulness of images, as a means of instruction, as reminders of the love of God, and of the virtues of the saints, as stimulating devotion -- are all set forth. As to the recent legislation, the saint declares roundly that religious matters are outside the emperor's competence. "It is not for princes to give laws to the Church. . . . The princes' business is the State's political welfare. The state of the Church is a matter for bishops and theologians." Despite St. John’s reasoning, and despite the papal decision, Leo III persevered in his policy, and when he died, in 741, the new regime was triumphant in the Asiatic provinces at least, and the Eastern church was once more out of communion with Rome after a peace of fifty years. #### The new emperor Constantine V (741-775) was determined to reduce the European provinces as his father had reduced those of Asia Minor. He is the curiously violent and crude figure who has gone down to history as Copronymos -- a soubriquet not so impossible to translate as, translated, to print. The accident by which as a baby he soiled the font of his baptism, whence the name derived, was an unconscious foreshadowing of one distorted side of his later life. His accession gave the Iconoclast movement new life. Once the political troubles that followed his father's death were ended Constantine made a bid to capture for the movement the support of the whole Greek episcopate. At a council held at the palace of Hieria (February 10, 753) 338 bishops assented to a declaration that to make images, to honour them, to give them any veneration was sinful. Particularly was this so in the case of images of Our Lord, for such images claimed either to present merely His humanity -- separating the natures as Nestorius had done -- or, if they claimed more, they confused the two natures. To make images of the saints is, further, a sacrilegious attempt to prolong their earthly life. All images, then, are to be removed from the churches as things contrary to faith and abominable. Whoever contravenes this decree is excommunicated, and, if a priest or bishop, deposed. The emperor would have gone further and denied the belief in the saints' power of intercession, along with the doctrines which were that belief's foundation -- the doctrines, that is, of the resurrection of the body and of the eternity of hell and heaven. The bishops, however, held firm and their orthodoxy here prevailed. #### The decrees of the council were the beginning of a general war on images and on all who venerated them. They were torn down in church after church and in their place were set, for decoration, landscapes and pictures of animals and birds. From the bishops and the generality of their clergy the emperor met with little opposition. They accepted the decrees without difficulty. But in the monks he met a resistance as determined and as prolonged as the Catholic emperors had met in the matter of Monophysitism. Many were exiled, and then the emperor turned to worse penalties. From 761 when the first monks were martyred to 775, when Constantine died, was a very real reign of terror. The monasteries were forbidden to receive novices, the monks were forcibly married, the cult of the saints was forbidden. It became criminal to pray to them, and the very term " saint " was declared unlawful. #### With the death of Constantine V (September 14, 775) the persecution halted, for his son, Leo IV, though himself an Iconoclast, was by no means so violently attached to the movement as his father, who had been one of its creators. Moreover his wife, the Empress Irene, secretly favoured the Catholics. Leo IV's short reign prepared the way for the reaction which followed, for on his death (780) Irene took over the government as regent for his child successor Constantine VI. #### The first move towards a restoration of the tradition was the resignation of the Patriarch of Constantinople, as an act of reparation for his former surrender. In his place the Secretary of State, Tarasius, was appointed, who immediately denounced the decision of the Council of 753 and appealed for a general council. The empress agreed and the pope too -- one of the great popes of the century, Adrian I (772-795). But the first attempt to hold the council failed. The army, largely recruited from the highlands of Isauria, had always been a centre of the Iconoclast movement and it was still attached to the innovations of the first two great Isaurians. The soldiery, then, drove out the council and threatened a revolution. Irene gave way and bided her time. The mutineers were gradually replaced by troops on whom she could rely and, a year later, on September 24, 787, the council met at Nicea beyond the Bosphorus where, three hundred years earlier, the first of all the general councils had assembled. #### More than 300 bishops attended the council, the pope was represented by two legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople presided. There were in all eight sessions, the last of them on October 23, 787, just one month from the first. The Roman legates, as in preceding councils, [ ] were the bearers of a letter from the pope which set out the traditional belief. The pseudo-council of 753, he lays down, is to be anathematised in the presence of the papal legates since it was held without the Apostolic See and went against tradition. Thus will the words of Our Lord that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and "Thou art Peter. . . " be fulfilled of that see whose tenure of the primacy shines throughout the world and which is set as head of all the churches of God. The papal letters were read and accepted; and, in successive sessions, with much citation of texts from early writers, it was declared to be part of the Church's faith and practice, that the saints should be invoked in prayer, that images and relics should be received and embraced with honour. The Council of 753, its acts detailed, was condemned; and, in a final decree, the kind of honour due to sacred images was defined-it is an adoration of honour, not the adoration of worship reserved to God as Divine. It is therefore lawful to light lamps before the pictures of the saints or to burn incense before them, since the honour paid to the image is really given to the personage it represents. #### The Council of 787 should have ended the controversy for ever. Of the events that led to its reopening, and of the repercussions of the dispute in the distant western kingdom of the Franks we must, however, treat elsewhere. ####  |