[3] Liber Pontificalis, i. 498.
[4] The question may be read in Mgr. Duchesne's Introduction to the Liber Pontificalis, ccxxxvii.-ccxlii.; and Dr. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vii. 387-97.
[5] Liber Pontificalis, ii. 6.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY
We have spoken already of two important periods in the history of the
Eastern Church. We must now briefly sketch another.
[Sidenote: Sketch of the period, 725-847.]
The third period (725-847) is that of Iconoclasm. Of this, the originator was the emperor Leo III., one of those soldiers who endeavour to apply to the sanctuary the methods of the parade-ground. He issued a decree against the reverence paid to icons (religious images and pictures), and, in 729, replaced the patriarch S. Germanus by the more supple Anastasius; a docile assembly of bishops at Hieria, under Constantine V. (Copronymus), passed a decree against every image of the Lord, the Virgin, and the saints. A fierce persecution followed, which was hardly ended before the accession to power of Irene, widow of Leo IV., under whom assembled the Seventh General Council at Nicae in 787, a Council to which the West and the distant East sent representatives. This Council decreed that icons should be used and receive veneration (proskuêsis) as did the Cross and the book of the Gospels. A persecution followed, as bitter as that of the iconoclastic emperors, and the troubled years of the first half of the ninth century, stained in Byzantium by every crime, found almost their only brightness in the patriarchate (843-7) of S. Methodius, a wise ruler, an {156} orthodox theologian, a charitable man. In Antioch and Jerusalem, about the same period, orthodox patriarchs were re-established by the toleration of the Ommeyads and the earlier Abbasaides; but on the European frontiers of the Empire conversion was at a standstill during the whole period of iconoclastic fury and reaction, while in the north-east of Syria and in Armenia the heresy of the Paulicians (Adoptianism) spread and flourished, and the Monophysites still throve on the Asiatic borders. In theology the Church of Constantinople was still strong, as is shown by the great work of S. Theodore of the Studium, famous as a hymn-writer, a liturgiologist, and a defender of the faith.
Such are the facts, briefly summarised, of the history of rather more than a century in the East. But we must examine more attentively the meaning of the great strife which divided the Eastern Church.