Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/42

 the empire of Charles the Great the Latin church advanced to a clearer consciousness of her individuality, as apart from her oriental sister, than was possible before the state as well as the church had a western head. The old points of controversy which had once been common to all Christendom now vanish away. From the time of the British Pelagius, the heresies of the west had occupied themselves with a different class of speculations from those which convulsed the eastern church. Henceforward we shall find the former almost exclusively represented. The last of the eastern heresies, eastern in spirit if not directly in origin, is stamped out with the condemnation of the Spanish adoptians by the council of Frankfort, a proceeding in which Alcuin took a conspicuous part. The last controversy between the churches is signalised by the repudiation of image-worship at the same council.

The immediate antecedents of this decision in the matter of image-worship are worthy of notice. The second council of Nicea, seven years earlier, had unanimously approved the practice. It had decreed, under penalty of excommunication, that images of the Saviour and of his Mother, of angels, and of all saints and holy men, should be everywhere set up, should be treated as holy memorials and worshipped; only without that peculiar adoration which is reserved for God alone. In this ordinance the pope, Hadrian the First, concurred. The value of the pope's opinion was however now, and remained for several centuries, an extremely variable