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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.
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