Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/733

713 IMAGE WORSHIP 713 II. addressed to the emperor two important controversial letters in favour of images. They are preserved in the Acta of the second council of Nice. Apart from their direct historical importance, they are of considerable interest as literary and theological curiosities. To the objection which had of course been urged from the decalogue, he replied that the prohibition there was directed simply against the idolatry of Canaan, and could not have been intended in a sense inconsistent with the fact that Moses had been commanded to make cherubim and the like. Christ Himself was an image, the image of God. The charge that the iconoduli prayed to stones, walls, and pictures was easily met ; and the further difficulty that six oecumenical councils had met and separated, but enjoined nothing about images, it was held, told distinctly against the iconoclasts, for the same councils had equally failed to urge upon men the duty of taking their necessary food. Heedless of Gregory s remonstrances, the emperor continued, during the remaining twelve years of his life, to carry on the struggle with but little -effect ; the religious use of images was too intimately interwoven, not only with the church life, but also with the domestic habits of his people, to yield even to the most determined efforts of an arbitrary despotism. In 741 Leo was succeeded by Constantine Copronymus (741-775), who fully shared the iconoclastic views of his father, and in 754 convoked a council, attended by three hundred and thirty-eight bishops, but never recognized as oecumenical, which under his influence declared all reverencers of images to be men who had lapsed into idolatry ; decreed that &quot; Christ in His glorified humanity, though not incorporeal, was yet exalted above all the limits and defects of a sensuous nature, too exalted therefore to be figured by human art in an earthly material after the analogy of any other human body&quot;; and pronounced anathema on all who attempted to express by visible colours the form of the Logos in His incarnation, and on all who delineated dumb and lifeless pictures of the saints, which could never serve any profitable end. All images whatso ever of sacred persons or things were ordered to be ejected from Christian churches ; and to set them up either in public or in private buildings was forbidden under the gravest ecclesiastical penalties. The stringency of these decrees was justified by arguments drawn from reason and Scripture, as well as by appeals to such names as those of Gregory, Chrysostom, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Eusebius. The attempt to enforce the decisions of the council as imperial laws was in many instances marked by oppres siveness and cruelty, and the general feeling of the com munity, fostered diligently by a numerous class of its most energetic and pious members, the monks, continued unchanged in its aversion to iconoclasm ; and, although at the end of his reign Constantine succeeded in imposing upon every citizen of Constantinople an oath never again to worship an image, there can be little doubt that in a vast number of households secret leanings to image worship had been intensified rather than weakened by repressive measures. During the early part of the brief reign (775- 779) of Leo IV. Chazirus, the stringency of the law was somewhat relaxed, until it was discovered that the empress (Irene) was herself a secret iconolater, when she was brought into disgrace, and numbers of her accomplices were seized and imprisoned. On the death of Leo, Irene became regent for her infant son Constantine, and, as was to be expected, used the power which she now possessed in favour of the cause she had long had at heart. With the assistance of the monks, after an abortive attempt to hold a synod at Constantinople in 786, there met at Nice in 787 a general council (the seventh oecumenical), the proceedings of which are of considerable historical importance. It was there decided that, not only the figure of the cross, but also other holy images (Christ, the Virgin Mary, angels, and saints), whether painted or executed in mosaic or other material, might be set up in churches, placed on holy vessels and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and by highways, and were to be honoured with do-7racr/xos and Trpoo-KiVr/cris, though not with Aarpeta, which is given to the divine nature alone. The decrees, which were signed by all present, were afterwards solemnly ratified at a final session (the eighth) held in Constantinople, and thus, after a struggle of sixty-one years, the worship of images asserted in the Greek Church that ascendency which, with only one brief interruption of a few years, it has ever since maintained. The decisions of this Eastern council were in full harmony with the personal views and practices of the popes, who, however, were compelled to show considerable mod3ration in the attitude they assumed. The Latin Church also, as is shown by the writings of Agobard of Lyons and Claudius of Turin, contained strongly iconoclastic elements, which, if full scope had been given them, might conceivably have altered very considerably the current of Western opinion. On political as well as on religious grounds, however, it was felt to be inexpedient to push matters on either side to extremes; very important therefore at this juncture was the step taken by the emperor Charlemagne in the publi cation of his De Impio Imaginum Cultu Libri IV., com monly called the Libri Carolini, in which, condemning alike the fanaticism of iconoclasts and the superstition of iconoduli, he maintained the right of images to exist for pur poses of commemoration and ornament (propter memoriam rerum gestarum et ornamentum). At the synod of Frank- fort-on-the-Main, held in 794, his general position was maintained, and adoration of images (adoratio et servitus imaginum) was wholly condemned. Great injustice was done, however, to the fathers of the second Nicene council when they were accused of maintaining that the same worship ought to be given to images of saints as to the Holy Trinity, a doctrine which they had been at special pains to repudiate. The settlement which had been obtained in 787 did not subsist entirely undisturbed even in the Eastern Church. In 815, two years after Leo the Armenian had ascended the throne, a council convoked by him at Constantinople formally abolished the decrees of Nice, and again banished the images from the churches. The new controversy, with which the name of Theodore of the Studium is still more prominently associated than was that of John of Damascus with its previous phase, went on with vicissitudes very similar to those which had formerly occurred during the reign of Leo and his suc cessors Michael (820-830) and Theophilus (830-842). At length, during the regency of the empress Theodora, the decrees of Nice were reaffirmed by a synod at Con stantinople, and the banished images were triumphantly and finally reintroduced into the metropolitan church on the day which on the first Sunday in Lent is still cele brated throughout the Greek Church as a great festival under the name of eoprr? or Travryyvpis TT/S 6p6o8ota&amp;lt;;. One incident in this second iconoclastic controversy had been the mission of an embassy by Michael Balbus to Louis the Pious in 825. The reply was given through the synod of Paris, held in that year : in open disagreement with the opinions of Pope Hadrian I., the relatively neutral ground taken up at the synod of Frankfort was maintained. Down to the close of this period the &quot; images &quot; spoken of in ecclesiastical controversy are almost entirely pictures or mosaics, the religious use of sculptures, and particularly of statues (ayuA/Aara, dv8pidvre&amp;lt;;, crn/Aai), being little known, and, so far as known, disapproved. This distinction does not indeed appear in the actual decrees of the council of Nice ; but it is clearly drawn in the statements of the patriarch Germanus and by Stephen Bustrenus, as quoted XII. 90