The Second Council of Nicaea

In 726 the Emperor Leo III ordered the icon of Christ over the great bronze gate of the imperial palace to be taken down. The soldiers sent to do it were attacked by a crowd of women, and the first of them was killed on his ladder. So began 120 years of persecution over pictures — a struggle that looks, at this distance, like a quarrel about religious art, and was in fact the last great battle over the Incarnation.

Why anyone objected

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The iconoclasts were not vandals with no argument. They had the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image… thou shalt not bow down thyself to them.” They had the memory of a pagan world full of statues that people really did think were gods. They had the criticism of Jews and, increasingly, of Muslim neighbours, whose armies were winning and whose faith forbade images — a fact the emperors could hardly ignore after a century of defeats. And they had a theological argument: if you paint Christ, either you are painting only His humanity, which divides Him, or you claim to circumscribe His divinity, which is blasphemy.

The strongest emperors of the eighth century were iconoclasts, and they were not gentle about it. Under Constantine V monasteries were closed, monks were paraded in the hippodrome and forced to marry, relics were burned, and those who resisted — St Stephen the New among them — were killed. In 754 an assembly of 338 bishops at Hieria condemned the icons and called itself the seventh ecumenical council.

The answer from outside the empire

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The classic defence was written by a man the emperor could not touch: St John of Damascus, a Christian Arab living under Muslim rule in the caliphate. In three treatises On the Divine Images he made the argument that the Council would receive.

First, the commandment forbids images of God because in the Old Testament God had not been seen: “you saw no form” (Deuteronomy 4:15). That situation has changed. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” What was invisible has made itself visible; to refuse to depict the visible Christ is to say that He was not truly visible.

“I do not venerate matter; I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake, and who through matter accomplished my salvation.”St John of Damascus, On the Divine Images

Second, John drew the distinction that settles the charge of idolatry. Greek has more than one word for the reverence a person may show. Latreia — worship, adoration, the total self-offering owed to God alone — is never given to an icon, a saint, or an angel. Proskynesis — honour, reverence, the bow one gives to what is holy — is given to the icon, and it does not stop there. St Basil had already said it of the Trinity, and the Council quoted him: the honour given to the image passes to the prototype. Kissing an icon is like kissing a photograph of someone you love: no one imagines the paper is the person.

The Council

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After Constantine V’s son died, his widow St Irene governed for their young son and set out to restore the images. Her first attempt, in Constantinople in 786, was broken up by iconoclast soldiers who burst into the church with drawn swords. She moved the troops out of the capital on campaign, and in September 787 the council reconvened at Nicaea — deliberately, in the city of the First Council — under Patriarch St Tarasius, with about 350 bishops and legates of the Pope of Rome present.

The sessions were unusually careful with evidence. The fathers had the acts of the iconoclast council of 754 read out and answered paragraph by paragraph; they traced the patristic quotations used against images back to the manuscripts and showed several to be mutilated or forged; they heard the testimony of bishops who had themselves been iconoclasts and now repented, and received them back in their orders. Then they issued the definition.

The second iconoclasm, and the Triumph of Orthodoxy

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The peace lasted a generation. In 815 a new emperor revived the persecution, and the second iconoclasm produced its own confessors — above all St Theodore the Studite, who was flogged and exiled three times and who deepened the theology: an icon does not depict a nature but a person, and the Person depicted in the icon of Christ is the Son of God who took a human face. In 843 the Empress Theodora and Patriarch St Methodius restored the icons for good, and the Church has kept that day ever since as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, on the first Sunday of Great Lent, when the icons are carried in procession and the Synodikon is proclaimed: “This is the faith of the Apostles, this is the faith of the Fathers, this is the faith of the Orthodox, this faith has established the universe.”

What the icons are actually saying

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It would be a mistake to think this council merely licensed decoration. Its logic runs through the whole of Orthodox life. If matter can carry the holy, then water can be the bath of new birth, oil can heal, bread and wine can be the Body and Blood, relics can be venerated, a church building can be more than a hall, and the human body can be a temple of the Holy Spirit rather than a cage for the soul. Iconoclasm always travels with a suspicion of the physical; the Seventh Council refuses that suspicion in the name of the Incarnation.

And the icon says something about the human person. Christian icons are not portraits of anonymous holiness: they are faces, with names written beside them, of particular people transfigured by God. The word icon is the word Genesis uses when it says that man was made in the image of God. Every icon on the wall is a statement that this destiny is not theoretical — that ordinary people, some of them recently alive, have in fact been filled with the light of God.

The last of the seven

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Nicaea II is the last council the whole Orthodox Church receives as ecumenical, and there is a fittingness in the fact that it met where the first had met. Between them the seven councils answer, in order, the questions that had to be answered: who Christ is (Nicaea I), who the Spirit is (Constantinople I), that Christ is one Person (Ephesus), that He is one Person in two natures (Chalcedon), in what sense that is to be understood (Constantinople II), that He wills as man as well as God (Constantinople III), and that this God-made-man may be depicted and venerated (Nicaea II). Every one of them defends the same thing from a different angle: that God has really come to us, and really taken us into Himself.

What the Council did not settle

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It is worth noticing what the fathers left free. They laid down that the image must be identifiable and that its subject belongs to the tradition of the Church — the composition, as a later formulation put it, belongs to the Fathers, and the art to the painter. They said nothing about style, materials or schools. That is why Orthodox iconography could develop from the encaustic panels of Sinai through Byzantine, Georgian, Serbian, Russian, Cretan and now American hands without ceasing to be the same thing. An icon is not judged by whether it copies a period, but by whether it shows a real person made holy, and shows him truthfully.

The strange reception in the West

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The Council’s acts were sent to Charlemagne’s court in a Latin translation so poor that it rendered the crucial distinction backwards, making the Greek fathers appear to command that images receive the adoration due to God alone. On the strength of that translation the Frankish theologians composed the Libri Carolini and a synod at Frankfurt in 794 rejected a council it had never accurately read, though Rome continued to uphold it. Few episodes illustrate better how much of church history is caused by bad translation and how much charity is owed to people who are objecting to something we have not actually said.

The canons

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The Council also issued twenty-two canons, and they read like the agenda of a Church repairing itself after a persecution. Simony — buying ordination — is condemned repeatedly and at length. A bishop must know the Psalter by heart and be able to explain the Scriptures and the canons, and must teach his clergy and people daily. Monasteries plundered during the iconoclast years are to be restored and never turned to secular use. Monastic property may not be alienated by an abbot; women’s monasteries and men’s are to be kept separate; clergy are not to take on stewardship of secular estates. The council that defended images also defended the ordinary conditions of a serious Christian life, which is characteristic: doctrine and discipline stand or fall together.

Why it still matters

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Walk into an Orthodox church and the first thing you meet is a wall of faces. Newcomers sometimes find it strange, and the strangeness is the point: this is a room full of people, most of them dead in the world’s reckoning and all of them alive in Christ, who are present at the same Liturgy. The Seventh Council is the reason we may kiss them, light a candle before them, and teach children to greet them by name — and the reason we know exactly what we are doing when we do it: honouring the person, worshipping God alone.