But the more eminent clergy were likewise at first almost unanimous in their condemnation of the emperor. Constantine, bishop of Nacolia, indeed, is branded as his adviser. Another bishop, Theodosius, son of Apsimarus, metropolitan of Ephesus, is named as entering into the war against images. But almost for the first time the bishops of the two Romes, Germanus of Constantinople and Pope Gregory II, were united in one common cause. Leo attempted to win Germanus to his views, but the aged patriarch (he was now ninety-five years old) calmly but resolutely resisted the arguments, the promises, the menaces of the emperor.
But the conduct of Gregory II, as leading to more important results, demands more rigid scrutiny. The Byzantine historians represent him as proceeding, at the first intimation of the hostility of the emperor to image-worship, to an act of direct revolt, as prohibiting the payment of tribute by the Italian province. This was beyond the power, probably beyond the courage, of Gregory. The great results of the final separation of the West from the inefficient and inglorious sovereignty of the East might excuse or palliate, if he had foreseen them, the disloyalty of Pope Gregory to Leo. But it would be to estimate his political and religious sagacity too highly to endow him with this gift of ambitious prophecy, to suppose him anticipating the full development of Latin Christianity when it should become independent of the East.
Mosaic, Representing the Temporal and Spiritual Power of Jesus Christ
Like most ordinary minds, and if we are to judge by his letters Gregory’s was a very ordinary mind, he was merely governed by the circumstances and passions of his time without the least foreknowledge of the result of his actions. The letter of Pope Gregory to the emperor (729 A.D.) is arrogant without dignity, dogmatic without persuasiveness; in the stronger part of the argument far inferior, both in skill and ingenuity, to that of the aged Germanus, or the writer who guided his pen. The strange mistakes in the history of the Old Testament, the still stranger interpretations of the New, the loose legends which are advanced as history, give a very low opinion of the knowledge of the times.
[731-742 A.D.]
When Gregory addressed this and a second letter to the emperor Leo, the tumult in Constantinople, the first public act of rebellion against iconoclasm, had taken place; but the aged bishop Germanus was not yet degraded from his see. Germanus, with better temper and more skilful argument, had defended the images of the East. Before his death (731), he was deposed or compelled to retire from his see. He died most probably in peace; his extreme age may well account for his death. His personal ill treatment by the emperor is the legend of a later age to exalt him into a martyr.
But these two powerful prelates were not the only champions of their cause whose writings made a strong impression on their age. It is singular that the most admired defender of images in the East was a subject not of the emperor but of the Mohammedan sultan. John of Damascus was famed as the most learned man in the East, and it may show either the tolerance, the ignorance, or the contempt of the Mohammedans for these Christian controversies, that writings which became celebrated all over the East should issue from one of their capital cities, Damascus.
In the West, all power, almost all pretension to power, excepting over Sicily and Calabria, expired with Leo;[90] and this independence partly arose out of and was immeasurably strengthened by the faithful adherence of the West to image-worship.