Modern scholarship on this question [of icons] has, almost universally, taken the side of the iconoclasts; for most scholars it is beyond question that icons and their veneration are a late phenomenon in the life of the Church.
Greek East and Latin West; The Church AD 681-1071, Andrew Louth
About a third of the page on which this quote appears is one long footnote of sources backing up this statement.
The eighth century and the first half of the ninth was dominated by this issue: iconoclasts wanting to destroy icons, iconodules who defended and venerated icons, and iconophiles who loved icons.
The controversy reverberated through every level of Byzantine society – from the emperor to the people, and for the Eastern Church with Rome. The issue cannot be separated from the Muslim advances of the time in the East and the Carolingian Empire in the West.
What role did devotion to icons play in the Church at the time? This question is the most fundamental. As noted above, modern scholarship regarding the early Church takes the side of the iconoclasts. The view in real time was that the iconoclasts believed that icons were not inherited as part of the apostolic tradition – it was an innovation resisted by some of the Fathers, but “spread like cancer” anyway. Those who defended the practice claimed it was there from the beginning.
Archeological evidence demonstrates Christian art early on, but literary texts are not available to explain the meaning or use. Evidence becomes more clear beginning in the fourth century and on – just as is true for evidence on any “Christian” history once the religion was no longer persecuted. By the fifth and sixth centuries, there is ample evidence of a developed cult of icons.
Lacking in those same centuries – the fifth and sixth – is any evidence condemning the practice of icons. Louth considers that this points to the possibility that by then it was a well-established practice – not a recent innovation. The earliest objections we have come from Jews in the seventh century, who saw veneration as tantamount to idolatry.
The outbreak of iconoclasm came in either 726 or 730 – a dispute about when Emperor Leo issued his decree. By this time, icons were an established practice within the life of the Church and of the Christian community.
The immediate historical circumstances prior to the outbreak of iconoclasm are sketched out by Louth. Suffice it to say, it involved political intrigue, deposing and exiling emperors, escaping exile and returning with a vengeance, establishing partnerships with non-Christians to retake power from the “nominally” Christian usurpers, etc.
Ultimately, Bardanes, an Armenian, took the throne and took the name Philippikos. He would call a synod that repudiated the sixth council; the pope then ordered pictures of all six council to be set up in St. Peter’s. Meanwhile, the Arabs were advancing in Asia Minor. More rebellions would follow, until Leo took the throne.
It was in the context of these Arab threats to the empire that Leo III invoked the policy of iconoclasm. Then there was a volcanic eruption in the sea, resulting in the creation of a new island – another portent from God to Leo. Leo attempted to introduce his policy to Italy, but Pope Gregory II condemned iconoclasm in return. Papal lands were seized by the emperor as payback.
If it seems little of this explains at the root the causes of iconoclasm, Louth agrees:
A good deal of obscurity surrounds the early period of iconoclasm…
I wonder how much of this is because the texts of what are ultimately deemed as heresies often are destroyed. In any case, the best Louth can do with this history is that somehow all of these changes and the chaos of the events led to the policy of iconoclasm. One benefit, for an emperor, is that the removal of icons eliminates the competition for images; what was left were images of the emperor and empress.
A Palestinian monk, John of Damascus, offered the most comprehensive response to Leo’s iconoclasm. It perhaps helped that he was an Umayyad subject, out of the reach of the empire. Yet he wrote as a Byzantine churchman, providing a characteristically Byzantine statement of the relationship between the Church and the Emperor.
Over the course of about fifteen years, beginning in 726, he would write three treatises “against those who attack holy images.” He writes with assurance, and says that icons are not some peripheral area of Christian devotion, but lie at the very root of the Christian faith itself.
Idolatry is, he argues, worshipping the creature instead of the Creator, and the veneration of icons is far from this, for two reasons: first, because of what an image is; second, because of what is meant by veneration (or “bowing down”).
Part of the argument hinges on two different words which are both translated as “worship.” One means to honor or “bow down,” and the second explicitly means to “worship.” Further, with the reality of the Incarnation – the invisible becoming visible – “you may depict the likeness of something seen.” He further appeals to St. Basil: “the honor offered to the image passes to the archetype.”
As to the emperor, he has no right to interfere in sacred matters. John writes:
“We shall not suffer the custom of the Fathers to be subject to an imperial constitution that seeks to overthrow it.”
Conclusion
A new emperor, the ten-year-old Constantine VI, would rule – and with him, his mother Eirene as co-ruler. More intrigues, palace coup attempts, blinding and mutilating enemies, etc., would follow. Eirene called what we now know as the seventh council, in Nicaea, the purpose of which was to condemn iconoclasm and to proclaim that the veneration of icons was orthodox.
Despite this somewhat damning record, the Orthodox Church has preserved fond memories of Eirene.
She restored icons, although this would only prove temporary; iconoclasm will have a “Round Two” after a brief respite of a few decades.
In the meantime, the entire controversy would bring repercussions with Rome and the West. This will be addressed in the next chapter.
In his "Descent of the Dove" (a perspective on Christian history that deserves reading for its startling insights and prose style), Charles Williams give two reasons for the banning of the Images. First, the military encounter with the armies of "the Unbegotten" (as Williams styles them) was drawing nigh, and the Emperor wished to dispense with unnecessary theological baggage in the area of religious polemics, since the Moslems charged that the Images were idols. Second, the presence of what Williams calls a "high church" party that viewed the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist as the only legitimate symbolic representation of the Lord Christ. Iconoclast churches surviving from that period are decorated with nature scenes: birds, trees, plants.