Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/138

 BYZANTINE

106

BYZANTINE

Leo V, the Armenian Michael II Balbus, the Phrygian (from Amorium)

Theophilus

Theodora

Bardas

Michael III, the Drunkard.

During this period two dynasties occupied the throne, each lasting for several generations. Both were of Eastern origin, the one from Northern Syria, the other from Phrygia. Leo V (813-20) also was of Oriental extraction. On the other hand, Nicepho- rus I (802-11) and his son-in-law Michael I, Rhan- gabe (Sll 13), were Greeks. In other words, the government of the empire became orientalized. This racial antagonism must be borne in mind in order to grasp the bitterness of the religious conten- tions of the period. The same period shows a second dynastic anomaly: for the first and last time there is an empress on the throne not as regent, but with the full title Basileus. This is Irene, perhaps the most disagreeable character of all the great Byzan- tine women. Like Athenais, she was an Athenian, but in the charm of the Muses she was totally lacking. Two passions possessed her soul: ambition and re- ligious fanaticism; but her piety was of a strange kind. She persisted in her devotion to her party with the unswerving conviction that her opinion was right, and she did not hesitate to commit the most atro- cious crimes of which a woman could be guilty in order to ruin her son morally and physically. Not without reason has Irene been compared to Cathe- rine de' Medici. On the death of her husband, Leo IV (775-80), in her desire for power she strove to keep her son as a minor as long as possible, and finally to set him aside altogether. Of her own authority she cancelled the betrothal of Constantine VI (7S0-97) to Rotrud. the daughter of Charlemagne, and forced him to marry Maria, an Armenian, a woman wholly distasteful to him. When the seventeen-year-old emperor showed a disposition to escape her power, she had him scourged with rods. She finally lent her sanction to his marriage with a woman of the court, Theodota, a union regarded by the Church as biga- mous. In this way she thought to make his acces- sion to power impossible. The worst, however, was still to come; Irene took advantage of an uprising to rid herself of her son permanently. Constantine V 1. blinded at the command of his mother, ended his life in an obscure apartment of the imperial palace, where Theodota bore him a son. His mother now ruled alone (797-802) until the elevation of the grand treasurer, Nicephorus, put an end to her power, and she spent her remaining years on the island of Lesbos in sickness and poverty.

Irene is honoured as a saint in the Greek Church, because it the Seventh General Synod of Nica?a (787), she obtained important concessions in the matter of the veneration of images. Though the adoration of images, as well as other abusive practices of ven- eration, which had already been condemned as idolatrous, were again wholly forbidden, prostrate veneration, incense, and candles were permitted. Theodora achieved a similar prominence. After the fall of Irene, the Iconoclasts again sained the upper hand, and the brief reign of Michael I, who supplanted his brother-iii 1 ,\ Stauracius (811 I, "as powerless to change this. The Emperor Theophilus (829 12) in the vigourof his religious persecution approached the energetic Constantine V (Vti 75), Known to the op- posite party, and later to historians, by the insulting epithet of Copronymus. When Theodora became re- gent, through the early death of her husband, she introduced milder measures. A compromise >■

fected between the partii \t the -ynod ol s|:i per-

mission was given for the veneration of images, and at

the same time the anathema was removed from the name of the Emperor Theophilus. In order to re- move it, Theodora, it is said, was guilty of a pious fraud and the false declaration that the emperor, before his death, had been converted to the venera- tion of images. Of more importance, however, is the fact that the members of the ecclesiastical party, by removing the anathema against the emperor, yielded to state authority, and while victorious in the dogmatic controversy acknowledged that they were vanquished in the ecclesiastico-political.

The questions of this time seem to have concerned matters of far-reaching importance, problems which, despite their strange dress, appear fundamentally quite modern and familiar. The dogmatical side of these contests was not connected with the old con- troversy about the two natures of Christ, but with the heretical views of different Oriental sects, in- fluenced by Judaism and Mohammedanism. The eastern frontier of the empire in Asia Minor was the home of these multifarious sects, which guaranteed the separate existence of the tribes which belonged to them and regarded themselves as the "faithful" in opposition to the state Church. Leo III, the Sy- rian (717-41), who saved Byzantium from the Ara- bian peril, repulsed the last serious attack of the Arabs on the capital (September, 717, to August, 718), by his reforms made the empire superior to its foes, and brought the views of these sectaries into the policy of the Byzantine empire. In the celebrated edict of 726 he condemned the veneration of images, a decree which he considered part of his reforming activity. Probably he hoped by this means to bring the people of the empire closer to Islam, to lessen the differences between the two religions. This may be regarded as another attempt to orientalize the empire, such as the dynasty of Heraclius and others before had previously made. The Greek nation answered by promptly repudiating the attempt, all the more emphatically because here again dogmatic and national antagonisms were connected with the struggle between Church and State.

It is unjust to attribute unworthy motives to the party who called themselves image-worshippers and rallied around such men as Plato, abbot of the mon- astery of Saceudion, and his nephew Theodore, afterwards Abbot of Studium. The fact is that the whole movement was based on a deeply religious spirit which led to detachment from the world and indeed to complete insensibility towards all earthly ties, even the most legitimate. The ideal of thi - men is not the Christian ideal of to-day; their rigorous stand might not always meet with our approval. But it was a party that exerted a powerful influence on the people, which could only be intensified by persecution. In this movement it seems possible to discern the forerunner of the great reform movement of the West during the tenth and eleventh centuries, a movement which tended to intensify rel life and which stood for the liberation of the Church from the control of the State.

The Iconoclasts, on the other hand, represented a principle which we know to have been forced into the Greek-Byzantine world as something foreign. It encountered sentiments and views, however, with which it could combine, In spite of the Christianiza- tion of Byzantium, then' remained there a residue of ancient pagan Roman ideas. The Byzantines of this school often appear s, > modern to us precisely because they were permeated with rationalistic, anti- ecclesiastical sentiments. Such men were found most frequently among the cultured classes, the high dignitaries of Church and State. This is why lcono- clastn, which was sympathetic to this rationalistic

tendency, could develop into a general movement,

and why it reminds lis in so many ways of the ration- alistic movement of the eighteenth century; it also