Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine. The name by which this emperor was known is a perpetual testimony to the hatred of a large part of his subjects. Even in his infancy he was believed to have shown a natural aversion to holy things, and in his baptism to have defiled the font. Constantine Copronymus sounded to Greek ears as a constant taunt against his filthy and sacrilegious character.
The accession of Constantine (741), although he had already been acknowledged for twenty years with his father as joint emperor, met formidable resistance. The contest for the throne was a strife between the two religious parties which divided the empire. During the absence of Constantine, on an expedition against the Saracens, a sudden and dangerous insurrection placed his brother-in-law, Artavasdes, on the throne. Constantinople was gained to the party of the usurper by treachery. The city was induced to submit to Artavasdes only by a rumour, industriously propagated and generally believed, of the death of Constantine. The emperor on one occasion had been in danger of surprise, and escaped by the swiftness of his horses.
[742-746 A.D.]
In the capital, as throughout Greece and the European part of the empire, the triumph of Artavasdes was followed by the restoration of the images. Anastasius, the dastard patriarch of Constantinople, as he had been the slave of Leo, now became the slave of the usurper, and worshipped images with the same zeal with which he had destroyed them. He had been the principal actor in the deception of the people by the forged letters which announced the death of Constantine. He plunged with more desperate recklessness into the party of Artavasdes. The monks, and all over whom they had influence, took up the cause of the usurper; but the mass of the people, from royal respect for the memory of Leo, or from their confidence in the vigorous character of Constantine and attachment to the legitimate succession, from indifference or aversion to image-worship, still wavered, and submitted rather than clamorously rejoiced in the coronation of Artavasdes.
But Constantine Copronymus with the religious opinions inherited the courage, the military abilities, and the popularity with the army which had distinguished his father Leo. After some vicissitudes, a battle took place near Ancyra, fought with all the ferocity of civil and religious war. After an obstinate resistance, and after having suffered all the horrors of famine, Constantinople was taken. Artavasdes was punished by the loss of his eyes.
Constantine was a soldier, doubtless of a fierce temper; the blinding and mutilation of many, the beheading a few of his enemies, the abandonment of the houses of the citizens to the plunder of his troops, was the natural course of Byzantine revolution; and these cruelties have no doubt lost nothing in the dark representations of the emperor’s enemies, the only historians of the times. But they suffered as rebels in arms against their sovereign, not as image-worshippers. The fate of the patriarch Anastasius was the most extraordinary. His eyes were put out, he was led upon an ass, with his face to the tail, through the city; and after all this mutilation and insult, for which, considering his tergiversation and impudent mendacity, it is difficult to feel much compassion, he was reinstated in the patriarchal dignity. The clergy in the East had never been arrayed in the personal sanctity which, in ordinary occasions, they possessed in the West; but could Constantine have any other object in this act than the degradation of the whole order in public estimation?
THIRD COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (746 A.D.)
[746-766 A.D.]
For ten years Constantine refrained from any stronger measures against image worship. In the tenth year of Constantine rumours spread abroad of secret councils held for the total destruction of images. Either the emperor must have prepared the public mind for this great change with consummate address, or reverence for images must have been less deeply rooted in the East than in the West, otherwise it can scarcely be supposed that so large a number of the clergy as appeared at the Third Council of Constantinople (746) would have slavishly assented to the strong measures of the emperor. Three hundred and forty-eight bishops formed this synod.
Part of the proceedings of this assembly have been preserved in the records of the rival council, the second held in Nicæa. The passages are cited in the original words, followed by a confutation, sanctioned apparently by the Nicene bishops. The Council of Constantinople proscribes the lawless and blasphemous art of painting. The fathers of Constantinople assume, as boldly as the brethren of Nicæa their sanctity, that all images are the invention of the devil; that they are idols in the same sense as those of the heathen. Nor do they hesitate to impute community of sentiment with the worst heretics to their opponents. They thought that they held the image-worshippers in an inextricable dilemma. If the painters represented only the humanity of Christ, they were Nestorians; if they attempted to mingle it with the divinity, they were Eutychians, circumscribing the infinite and confounding the two substances. It was impiety to represent Christ without his divinity, Arianism to undeify him, despoil him of his godhead.