Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/690

ICONOCLASM invisible things; sacraments, words, the sign of the Cross, and all tangible signs of this kind; how. then, can people who admit these reject images? (The fragment of this letter that has been preserved is published in Pitra, " Spicileg. Solesm.", 11, p. xi sq.) The letter did not have any effect on the emperor; but it is from this time especially that the Catholics in the East turn with more loyalty than ever to Rome as their leader, their last refuge in the persecution. The well- known texts of St. Theodore in which he defends the primacy in the strongest possible language — e. g., "Whatever novelty is brought into the Church by those who wander from the truth must certainly be referred to Peter or to his successor. . . . Save us, chief pastor of the Church under heaven " (Ep. i, 33, P. G., XCIX, lOlS); "Arrange that a decision be re- ceived from old Rome as the custom has been handed down from the beginning by the tradition of our fathers" (Ep. ii, 36; ibid., 1331 — were written during this persecution).

The protestations of loyalty to old Rome made by the Orthodox and Catholic Christians of the Byzantine Church at this time are her last witness immediately before the Great Schism. There were then two separate parties in the East having no communion with each other: the Iconoclast persecutors under the emperor, with their anti-patriarch Theodotus, and the Catholics led by Theodore the Studite, acknowledging the lawful patriarch Nicephorus and above him the distant Latin bishop who was to them the "chief pastor of the Church under heaven ". On Christmas Day, 820, Leo V ended his tyrannical reign by being murdered in a palace revolution that set up one of his generals. Michael II (the Stammerer, 820-29), as emperor. Michael was also an Iconoclast and continued his predecessor's policy, though at first he was anxious not to persecute but to concihate every one. But he changed nothing of the Iconoclast laws, and when Theodotus the anti-patriarch died (821) he refused to restore Xicephorus and set up another usurper, Antony, formerly Bishop of Sylæum (Antony I, 821-32). In 822 a certain general of Slav race, Thomas, set up a dangerous revolution with the help of the Arabs. It does not seem that this revolution had anything to do with the question of images. Thomas represented rather the party of the murdered emperor, Leo V. But after it was put down, in 824, Michael became much more severe towards the image-worshippers. A great number of monks fled to the West, and Michael wrote a famous letter full of bitter accusations of their idolatry to his rival Louis the Pious (814-20) to persuade him to hand over these exiles to Byzantine justice (in Mansi. XIV, 417-22). Other Catholics who had not escaped were imprisoned and tortured, among whom were Methodius of Syracuse and Euthymius, Metropolitan of Sardes. The deaths of St. Theodore the Studite (11 Nov., 826) and of the lawful patriarch Nicephorus (2 Jime, 828) were a great loss to the orthodox at this time. Michael's son and successor, Theophilus (829-42), continued the persecution still more fiercely. A monk, Lazarus, was scourged till he nearly died; another monk. Methodius, was shut up in prison with common ruffians for seven years; Michael, Syncellus of Jerusalem, and Joseph, a famous writer of hymns, were tortured. The two brothers Theophanes and Theodore were scourged with 200 strokes and branded in the face with hot irons as idolaters (Martyrol. Rom., 27 December; Nilles, "Kal. Man.", I, 369). By this time all images had been removed from the churches and public places, the prisons were filled with their defenders, the faithful Catholics were reduced to a sect hiding about the empire and a crowd of exiles in the West. But the emperor's wife Theodora and her mother Theoctista were faithful to the Second Nicene Synod and waited for better times.

Those times came as soon as Theophilus died (20 January, 842). He left a son, three years old, Michael III (the Drunkard, who lived to cause the Schism of Photius, 842-67 and the regent was Michael's mother, Theodora. Like Irene at the end of the first persecution, Theodra at once began to change the situation. She opened the prisons, let out the confessors who were shut up for defending images and recalled the exiles. For a time she hesitated to revoke the Iconoclast laws, but soon she made up her mind and everything was brought back to the conditions of the Second Council of Nicæa. The patriarch John VII (832-42), who had succeeded Antony I, was given his choice between restoring the images an retiring. He preferred to retire, and his place was taken by Methodius, the monk who had already suffered years of imprisonment for the cause of the icons (Methodius I, 842-46). In the same year (842) a Synod at Constantinople approved of John VII's deposition, renewed the decree of the Second Council of Nicæa, and excommunicated Iconoclasts. This is the last act in the story of this heresy. On the first Sunday of Lent (19 February, 842) the icons were brought back to the churches in solemn procession. That day (the first Sunday of Lent) was made into a perpetual memory of the triumph of Orthodoxy at the end of the long Iconoclast persecution. It is the "Feast of Orthodoxy " of the Byzantine Church, still kept very solemnly by both Uniats and Orthodox. Twenty years later the Great Schism began. So large has this, the last of the old heresies, loomed in the eyes of Eastern Christians that the Byzantine Church looks upon it as a kind of type of heresy in general. The Feast of Orthodoxy, founded to commemorate the defeat of Iconoclasm, has become a feast of the triumph of the Church over all heresies. It is in this sense that it is now kept. The great Synodikon read out on that day anathematizes all heretics (in Russia rebels and nihilists also), among whom the Iconoclasts appear only as one fraction of a large and varied class (for the text of the Synodikon see Nilles, "Kal. Man.", II, 109-18). After the restoration of the icons in 842, there still remained an Iconoclast party in the East, but it never again got the ear of an emperor, and so gradually dwindled and eventually died out.

IV. —There was an echo of these troubles in the Prankish kingdom, chiefly through misunderstanding of the meaning of Greek expressions used by the Second Council of Nicæa. As early as 767 Constantine V had tried to secure the sympathy of the Prankish bishops for his campaign against images, this time without success. A synod at Gentilly sent a declaration to Pope Paul I (757-67) which quite satisfied him (Hefele, " Concilienge- schichte", III, 431). The trouble began when Adrian I (772-95) sent a very imperfect translation of the Acts of the Second Council of Nic{subst:ae}}a to Charles the Great (Charlemagne, 76S-S14). The errors of this Latin version are obvious from the quotations made from it by the Prankish bishops. For instance, in the third session of the council, Constantine, Bishop of Constantia, in Cyprus, had said: "I receive the holy and venerable images; and I give worship which is according to real adoration [] only to the consubstantial and life-giving Trinity" (Mansi, XII, 1148). This phrase had been translated: "I receive the holy and venerable images with the adoration which I give to the consubstantial and life-giving Trinity" ("Libri Carolini", III, 17, P. L., XCVIII, 1148; Hefele, 1. c, 705). There were other reasons why these Frankish bishops objected to the decrees of the council. Their people had only just been converted from idolatry, and so they were suspicious of anything that might seem like a return to it. Germans knew nothing of Byzantine elaborate forms of respect; prostrations, kisses, incense, and such signs that Greeks used constantly towards their emperors, even towards the emperor's statues, and therefore applied naturally to holy pictures, seemed to