Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (76 page)

However much popular support there was for iconophobia, the iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. The policy caused deep offence in Rome, driving popes into increasingly close alliance with the Frankish monarchy (see p. 350). In the emperors' own dominions, it provoked much anger, bitterly dividing Byzantium during its continuing military emergencies. It is not surprising that monks were prominent in the iconophile opposition, because Constantine V was not merely a vigorously opinionated man, passionately fond of secular theatre and music, but he was also contemptuous of the monastic way of life. He took measures to restrict monasticism and executed a number of iconophile monks; one was whipped to death in Constantinople's Hippodrome.
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His reward for this was his bad press in Byzantine historiography, despite his military achievements and the fact that he did much to rebuild Constantinople after a sequence of natural disasters.

Far away in St Sabas's monastery in Palestine, beyond the imperial frontiers, the greatly respected John of Damascus (see pp. 263-4), after a lifetime contemplating and criticizing Islam at close quarters, saw the developing conflict as a familiar struggle. If Muslims despised the veneration of the Cross, he asked in his dialogue with a straw-man Muslim opponent, how did they justify the veneration of a black stone in the Ka'aba?
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John proved one of the most damaging propagandists against iconoclasm: he was among the acutest minds of his day, a philosopher formidable enough to stir intense admiration much later in Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas frequently quoted from John, claiming to have read a few pages from his works every day of his adult life, and he followed the Arab Christian divine in his discussion of images, as in so much else.
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John was the last Eastern theologian to have a continuous impact on Western Christian thinking until modern times.

John was famed in the centuries that followed the triumph of his defence of images not merely as a theologian and preacher, but as a poet, and it was as a poet that he treasured images of all sorts, verbal and visual. They illuminate and intensify our vision of God, and indeed in relation to God they are essential, because of the ultimately unknowable quality of God. We can only know him through his activities, and through the created things which result from his energy: they provide the images by which we can take a sideways glance at the divine. So John not only defended icons as justified in the face of the Old Testament prohibitions, which he said applied only to the period before Christ, but he vigorously promoted their positive value. He followed in the tradition of Maximus the Confessor in seeing Chalcedon's balance between the human and the divine in Christ as showing how the divine could inter-penetrate the created: 'The divine nature remains the same; the flesh created in time is quickened by a reason-endowed soul. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with His grace and power.'
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John was the first champion of icons to set out another of those careful Greek distinctions about words, rather as four centuries previously Basil the Great and the Cappadocian Fathers had worked out how to set up an acceptable vocabulary for the Trinity (see pp. 217-18). In this case, he separated a usage between absolute and relative worship.
Latreia
, worship as adoration, is appropriate only when offered to God; the veneration appropriate to God's creations is
proskynsis
, which is that offered for instance to the emperor in Constantinople. Such created things 'are truly called gods, not by nature, but by adoption, just as red-hot iron is called fiery, not by its nature, but because it participates in the action of the fire'. It was
proskynsis
which the worshipper at home or in church offered to an icon.
⁵⁰
Long before this, that same Cappadocian Father, the Great Basil, had observed of an image of the emperor that the honour done to the image passes to the prototype: in the same way, the honour and prayers offered to the image of a saint could pass beyond it to the saint, and hence to God, the Creator of all things and Saviour of the saints in Heaven.
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Behind John's distinction of words there lurked a workmanlike grasp of Aristotle's discussion of categories and causes, which he bequeathed to later defenders of icons. Naturally a created human being would have a different relationship to the first cause of all things than she or he would to other objects of creation which were capable of secondary causation - such as the emperor. If one accepted this vocabulary and Aristotelian framework, then devotion to visual images in Christianity was safe.
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Constantine V might nevertheless have carried the day and set patterns for his successor had it not been for the intervention of the Empress Irene, widow of his son Leo IV. Irene became regent for her son Constantine VI on Leo's death in 780. There was a long tradition in Byzantine history of imperial women intervening in political decisions which became theological decisions, even before Pulcheria, who had so shaped the Council of Chalcedon (see pp. 226-7), and Irene was not the last. Now she took the initiative in convening a council to authorize images once more. Her motives for switching imperial policy so drastically are impenetrable. Later, when the twenty-six-year-old Emperor Constantine showed signs of wishing to exercise real power, she ordered him to be blinded in the same palace chamber where she had given birth to him, leaving her free to become the first sole-ruling empress in Byzantine history. This does not suggest a contemplative spirit any more than it reveals a strong maternal instinct. Irene was determined to assert her will against the establishment in Church and Palace; after a first set of meetings had been taken over by iconoclast bishops and sympathetic troops, she followed the example of Constantine the Great nearly five centuries before and in 787 called the bishops together at the more easily controlled venue of Nicaea. The Patriarch - actually a hastily consecrated layman chosen for his hostility to iconoclasm - presided, but his proceedings were scrutinized closely by the Empress regent and her teenage (as yet unblinded) son. The council made official the distinction already set out by John of Damascus between
latreia
and
proskynesis
.

It might have been supposed that this reaffirmation of images would have gratified the outraged Church authorities in the West - and indeed Pope Hadrian I gave an enthusiastic reception to the Acts of the second Council of Nicaea. This was one of the last occasions when a pope would thus hail the work of a patriarch in Constantinople, but in politics there were other realities to consider. In Francia, Charlemagne was shaping an empire for the West, based on his Frankish monarchy, and after his coronation, in 800, the relationship of this newly minted emperor with the holders of the ancient imperial title in the East was fraught (see pp. 349-50). Charlemagne's hostility to the imperial power in the East was sharpened by a disastrous Latin mistranslation of one part of the council's Acts: one of the bishops of the Church in Cyprus was represented as saying that he gave the same veneration to images as to the Trinity, when he had in fact been following the iconophile party line and said precisely the opposite. Charlemagne was impelled to condemn the theology of the East which promoted images, and he authorized theological statements which minimized the value of images; they have been known in history as the 'Caroline Books' (
Libri Carolini
). A council of Frankish bishops at Frankfurt am Main in 794 followed up their message with trenchant criticism of what it took to be Eastern misuse of images.
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This was a curious moment in the history of the Western Church. The iconophobic mood in Carolingian circles undoubtedly had a political dimension, which is for instance revealed when the
Libri Carolini
sneered at the presumption which had led Eastern emperors to commission images of themselves, subsequently attracting veneration: this was another good reason to claim that the Byzantines had forfeited their claim to imperial honour.
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But there was a more profound unease in Western circles about images. A number of theologians with a background in Spain reacted to their closeness to the Islamic frontier in the same way as iconoclasts in the East, drawing the conclusion from Muslim success that God disapproved of images. One of them, Theodulf, whom Charlemagne made Bishop of Orleans after the Council of Frankfurt, is now reckoned to be the author of the
Libri Carolini.

Theodulf also became abbot of the powerful monastery at Fleury on the Loire (see p. 354). Nearby there still stands the oratory which he built for himself in his episcopal palace, and which is now the parish church of a little village called Germigny-des-Pres. The golden mosaic of the sanctuary apse semi-dome, revealed when plaster fell off it in the nineteenth century, is an extraordinary treasure from Theodulf's time. The style transports the viewer to Byzantium, but the theme does not - not, at least, to anything which now survives in the Byzantine world. At the centre is the hand of God - no superstitious representation of his face - flanked by twin angels, who point to twin cherubs beneath them covering the Ark of the Covenant with their wings; an inscription around the apse exhorts the viewer to look on the Ark and pray for Theodulf. There is a corresponding passage of biblical commentary on the Ark in the
Libri Carolini
. Amid the tranquillity of the Loire valley, we are unexpectedly pulled into the bitter theological debates between East and West in the time of Charlemagne. We are viewing iconoclast art.
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The iconophobic mood soon passed in the West, because the later Carolingians became alarmed at the extreme versions which their patronage had encouraged. Particularly vehement was another Spaniard, called Claudius, an energetic and widely read if not especially profound or elegant biblical commentator. Charlemagne's son Louis 'the Pious' made him bishop of the important Italian city of Turin around 816, considering that his views might be useful for diplomatic negotiations with the Eastern Emperor Leo V, who was now once more promoting iconophobic policies. Claudius had little reverence for the papacy; he frequently attacked all images of the human form, pilgrimages and relics and the whole cult of the saints, and even veneration of the Cross, the symbol which still meant so much to the Eastern iconoclasts - he actually destroyed crosses in the churches of his diocese. In a sneer of portmanteau offensiveness, he characterized pilgrims as 'ignorant sort of people who in order to obtain eternal life, want to go straight to Rome, and esteem any spiritual understanding of less account'. Despite condemnation by the Pope and censure by a synod of Frankish bishops, he died unabashed and in possession of his diocese, still protected by his patron the Frankish Emperor Louis, but a volume of hostile comment on his works continued to swell, and he was increasingly seen as a heretic, although his commentaries went on being read. Even in his lifetime, Claudius recognized that he was going against the popular mood in his diocese: pilgrimages and shrines were going to survive his biliousness, and the Frankish rulers would not stand against the tide.
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The medieval Western Church became as fixated on visual images as Easterners, and given its alternative numbering of the Ten Commandments, it had no inhibitions about continuing to develop a vigorous tradition of figural sculpture. Statues rather than icons became the centre of Latin Western devotion, particularly in cults of Our Lady (see pp. 394-5). Moreover, Westerners improved on the terminology of Nicaea, while still recognizing that subtleties could be expressed so much more neatly in Greek than in Latin: they replaced
proskynsis
with another Greek word for veneration,
dulia
. By the thirteenth century, the growth of devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, in both East and West led John of Damascus's admirer Thomas Aquinas to formalize a further refinement: the concept of an exceptional sort of veneration,
hyperdulia
, offered to the greatest of God's creations, Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was only in the sixteenth century that Protestants who hated images rediscovered Claudius of Turin, the Council of Frankfurt and the
Libri Carolini
, and gleefully resurrected them to demonstrate that Protestantism was saying nothing new. The first printed edition of the Frankish bishop's
Libri Carolini
was published in 1549 by another reform-minded French bishop, Jean du Tillet; he was a friend of John Calvin, and Calvin was quick to exploit the sensational find. Roman Catholics lamely protested that Calvinists had made it up.
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The conclusions of Nicaea II therefore remained contested, partly because Empress Irene's rule proved controversial and in most respects unsuccessful, ending in her deposition and exile - her blinding of her son was certainly one element in her unpopularity, but her proposed marriage to Charlemagne (see pp. 349-50) seems to have been the last straw. From 813, the iconoclastic struggle resumed with even greater ferocity, after Emperor Leo V declared war on images and once more pulled down a key icon from the Great Palace.
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The fury of the iconophile party revealed that the Church's reverence for the emperor remained conditional, even in Constantinople. Theodore the Stoudite (then abbot of the monastery of Stoudios, and a major reformer of monastic life) was emerging as the chief champion of icons, and he had no compunction in telling Leo 'Your responsibility, Emperor, is with affairs of state and military matters. Give your mind to these and leave the Church to its pastors and teachers.'
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Theodore and a network of monks kept in touch with each other even after the Stoudite had been packed off into exile; they were confident of support from the Pope in the West, who remained determinedly cold to the Emperor's conciliatory overtures. Meanwhile, iconoclasm proved no more capable of delivering military success than the armies of Empress Irene. A particularly bitter blow came in 838 with the fall to Muslim armies of the major frontier city of Amorion in Asia Minor. The loss was long remembered in Byzantine folklore and song, and one cannot help thinking that this was partly thanks to its association with the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos.