[Sidenote: The rule of the Studium.]

Professor Marin[2] has collected interesting details from many sources as to the rule of the house, its dress, liturgical customs, learning, discipline. The liturgy was said at six on days when the fast lasted till nine, at three on other days; and the monks were expected to communicate daily. While the house was essentially a learned society, a community of sacred scholars, Theodore stands out from its whole annals as a great preacher, and no less for the charm of his personal character. It was he, fitly, who gave to the house that special Rule, which stood in the same relation to the general customary observance by Eastern monks of that somewhat vague series of laws known as "the Rule of Basil," that the reform of Odo of Cluny stood to the work of S. Benedict himself. It was an eminently sensible codification of floating custom in regard to monastic life. All that Theodore did—and this applies with special force to the sermons which he {164} preached—seems to have been eminently practical, charitable, and sane. There is an underlying force of the same kind in the argument of his three Antirrhetici, in which he triumphantly vindicates the worship of Christ in His Godhead and His manhood as being inseparable and essential to the true knowledge of the faith as it is in Jesus. There can be no rivalry between icon and prototype: "The worship of the image is worship of Christ, because the image is what it is in virtue of likeness to Christ."

This was the point on which the orthodox met the theologians who defended iconoclasm: the iconoclasts in seeking to destroy all images were seen to strike at a vital truth of the Incarnation, the true humanity of Jesus. The theologians demanded the preservation and worship,—reverence rather than worship in the modern English use of the words,—of the icons as a security for the remembrance of the Manhood of the Lord. The worship was not latreia, which can be paid to God alone, but proskunêsis schetikê. Christ, said S. Theodore, was in danger of losing the quality of being man if not seen and worshipped in an image.

The long dispute ended, as we have said, after the accession of the Empress Irene, who, unworthy though she was to have part in any great religious movement, yet had always been attached to the traditional opinions of the Greek people. The monks of Constantinople had exercised a steady influence during all the years of disturbance: and they were to triumph. [Sidenote: The Seventh General Council, 787.] The Empress Irene replaced the patriarch Paul in 783 by her own secretary Tarasius, and it was determined at once to reverse the decrees that {165} had been passed at Constantinople in 754. In 787 for the second time a council met at Nicaea, across the Sea of Marmora, which became recognised as the Seventh General Council. To it came representatives of East and West, and the decision which was arrived at was practically that of the whole Church.

The persecution of the orthodox was renewed for a time under Leo V. (813-20), and it is said that more perished in his time than in that of Constantine V. Theophilus (829-42) was almost equally hostile. It was not till his widow Theodora assumed the reins of power in 842 as regent for her son that the final triumph of orthodoxy was assured; and this was followed by the five years' patriarchate of S. Methodius, a man of peace and of wisdom.

To some the action of the emperors in attacking image worship has seemed a serious attempt at social reform, an endeavour to raise the standard of popular worship, and through that to affect the people themselves intellectually, morally, and spiritually. But history has spoken conclusively of the violence with which the attempt was made, and theology has decisively pronounced against its dogmatic assertions.

The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so expressively illustrates the close attachment, the abiding influence, of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development of theology and religious life.

[1] See above, pp. 8, 14.

[2] De Studio Coenobio Constantinopolitano, Paris, 1897.

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