[Sidenote: The orthodox doctrine of images.]
The orthodox doctrine, as it is now defined, is this—that "the icons are likenesses engraved or painted in oil on wood or stone or any sort of metal, of our Saviour Christ, of the Mother of God, and of the holy men who from Adam have been well-pleasing to God. From earliest times the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential, for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to their example. On this account also the Church decreed in early times that due reverence should always be paid {157} by Christians to the holy icons, which honour of course is not rendered to the picture before our eyes, but to the original of the picture." This statement represents the views of the orthodox Eastern theologians of the eighth as clearly as it does the teaching of the nineteenth century. It represents also the opinions of the popes contemporary with the Iconoclastic movement, who withstood the emperors to the face. Leo was threatened by Gregory II., and the patriarch who had yielded to the storm, Anastasius, was excommunicated. The pope advocated, in clear dogmatic language, the use of images for instruction of the ignorant and encouragement of the faithful. In Greece there was something like a revolution, but it was sternly repressed. [Sidenote: The acceptance in the West.] In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from all the unity and fabric of the Church." The answer to this, it would seem, was the separation of the Illyrian territories and sees from the Roman patriarchate, as well as the sees in Sicily and Calabria: the pope's authority was restricted to the territory of the exarchate, including Rome, Venice and Ravenna. In Constantinople the resistance of the people to the Iconoclastic decrees was met by a bitter persecution, which Constantine V. began in 761. Under {158} his father Leo III. the virgin Theodosia was martyred, who is revered among the most popular of the Saints in Constantinople to-day. [Sidenote: The Iconoclastic persecution.] The position of the people who clung to their old ways of worship in the eighth century was indeed not unlike that of those who to-day struggle on, always in dread of active persecution, under the Muhammadan rule. Muhammadanism, with its stern suppression of all representation of things divine or human, was believed to have been one of the suggesting forces which brought about the Iconoclastic movement. Leo III. had been brought into intimate association with the Saracens; and it was said in his own day that he had learned his fury against images from one of them. The tale was a fable, but it showed how entirely Leo's action was contrary to the religious feeling of his time.
[Sidenote: Iconoclastic theology.]
It is difficult perhaps for a Western, or at least an Anglican, to-day to form a just estimate of the strong feeling of the majority of the Eastern Christians in favour of "image-worship." It is easy to see how the stern simplicity of the Muhammadan worship, which in all the strength of the creed that carried its disciples in triumphant march over continents and over ancient civilisations was present to the eyes of the soldiers of Heraclius and Leo, appealed to all those who knew the power and the need of stern self-restraint. That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. And if the controversy could have been kept away from the field of pure theology it might well have been that an Iconoclastic victory would not have been other than a benefit to religion. Leo was content to replace the crucifix by a cross. But it is impossible to sunder the symbol from the doctrine, and the Greeks would never rest satisfied with a definition, still less with a practical change, without probing to its inner meaning. This feeling was expressed in form philosophical and theological by one of the last of the great Greek Fathers, S. John Damascene, and by the united voice of the Church in the decision of the Seventh General Council.
[Sidenote: S. John Damascene.]
S. John of Damascus, who died about 760, was clear in his acceptance of all the Councils of the Church, clear in his rejection of Monophysitism and Monothelitism. He described in clear precision the two natures in one hypostasis, the two wills, human and Divine, with a wisdom and knowledge related to each; but he was equally clear that the composite personality involves a communicatio idiomatum (antidosis idiômatôn). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its own glories, remaining itself impassible and without share in the passions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future, though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased in age, and {160} that only for our sakes did He progressively manifest His knowledge. While he declared that each Nature in the Divine Person had its will, he explained that the One Person directed both, and that His Divine will was the determinant will. It might well seem that in his desire to avoid Nestorianism he did not attach so full a meaning to our Lord's advance in human knowledge as did some of the earlier Fathers. But the practical bearing of S. John's writings was in direct relation to the great controversy of his age, to which he devoted three addresses in particular. He defined the "worship" of the icons as all based upon the worship of Christ, and attacked iconoclasm as involving ultimately an assault upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. On this ground S. Theodore of the Studium and Nicephorus the patriarch of Constantinople, who was driven from his see by the emperor, are at one with S. John Damascene.
[Sidenote: S. Theodore of the Studium.]
Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is, perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers. He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. Born in the last half of the eighth century, and dying on November 11th, 826, Theodore lived through the most vital period of the Iconoclastic struggle, and he left, in his {161} theological and familiar writings, the most important memorial of the orthodox position which he did so much to render victorious.
Theodore of the Studium is a striking example of the influence of environment, tradition, and esprit de corps. His life is inextricably bound up with the history, and his opinions were indubitably formed to a very large extent by the influence, of the great monastery of S. John Baptist of the Studium, founded towards the close of the fourth century by Fl. Studius, a Roman patrician, the remains of which still charm the traveller who penetrates through the obscurest part of Constantinople to the quarter of Psamatia. The house was dedicated to S. John Baptist, and according to the Russian traveller, Antony of Novgorod, it contained special relics of the Precursor. A later description shows the extreme beauty, seclusion, severity of the place, surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies of the later fifth century,[1] and fell themselves into error, but from the date of the Fifth General Council to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic controversy they remained in comparative obscurity.
The era of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by Constantine Copronymus, they were restored at his death in 775, but had dwindled, it seems, to the number of twelve. A new era of power began for them under their Archimandrite Sabbas, and this was increased by his successor, Theodore, whose life covered the period of the greatest theological importance in the history of Iconoclasm. When the patriarchal see was held for seven-and-twenty years by Iconoclasts, Theodore upheld the spirits of his brethren, and even in exile contrived to be their indefatigable leader and support. His was never a submissive, but always an active resistance to the imperial attempt to dragoon the Church, and a typical audacity was the solemn procession with all the monastery's icons, the monks singing the hymn "Tên achranton eikona sou proskunoumen, agathe" which caused his expulsion. His exile produced a series of impressive letters in which, with every vigour and cogency of argument of which a logical Greek was capable, he exhorted, encouraged, and consoled those who, like himself, remained steadfast to their faith. The Studium gave, too, its actual martyrs, James and Thaddeus, to the traditional belief; and Theodore in exile, who would gladly have borne them company in their death, commemorated their heroism and {163} implored their intercessions. Theodore's whole life was one of resistance, active or passive, to the attempt of the emperors to dictate the Church's Creed; and though he did not live to see the conclusion of the conflict, its final result was largely due to his persistent and strenuous efforts. For a while after his death there is silence over the history of the Studites, till, in 844, we find them bringing back his body in solemn triumph from the island of Prinkipo. Till the middle of the ninth century they remained a potent force; from that time up to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, if they retained their fame, their activity was diminished.