Iconoclasm: The Battle over Icons

The storm broke around the year 726, when the Emperor Leo III turned against the icons; a formal edict against them followed within a few years. The reasons were tangled: a run of military defeats and natural disasters that looked like divine displeasure, the pressure of a resurgent Islam and of Judaism, both of which condemned religious images, and a literal reading of the commandment against "graven images." To the iconoclasts, the icons were idols, and idolatry explained the empire's misfortunes.

Leo's son Constantine V pressed the attack far harder. He convened a large council at Hieria in 754 that claimed to be ecumenical and condemned the icons outright, and he persecuted those who defended them — above all the monks, who resisted most stubbornly. The strongest theological answer came from beyond the emperor's reach: St. John of Damascus, living under Muslim rule and so safe from Byzantine arrest, wrote the classic defense of the images. The first wave ended when the Empress Irene convened the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 — the Seventh Ecumenical Council — which restored the icons and defined the Church's teaching about them.

The quarrel looked like a fight about art; it was a fight about the Incarnation. The iconoclasts believed they were defending God's transcendence — the unseen God cannot be drawn. The defenders answered from the heart of the Gospel: the invisible God has made Himself visible in Christ, who took real flesh, and what has been seen and touched can be depicted. To forbid an image of Christ, they argued, is quietly to deny that His flesh was real. The council also drew the sharp line that the whole controversy turned on — the icon is venerated, not worshiped, and the honor shown it is not given to wood and paint but rises to the person portrayed (see veneration versus worship). The full doctrine belongs to the entries on icons and the theology of the icon; here it is enough to see that the Church would not surrender it.

Peace lasted a generation. In 815 the Emperor Leo V revived iconoclasm, and it continued under his successors, hardest of all under Theophilus. A new generation of confessors stood against it: the Patriarch St. Nikephoros, deposed and exiled, and St. Theodore the Studite, who marshaled the monks and suffered repeated banishment. Some were imprisoned, some flogged; two brothers, Theodore and Theophanes, had verses of insult branded into their faces with hot iron and are remembered as "the Branded."

The end came in 843, after Theophilus died. His widow, the Empress Theodora, ruling for her young son, moved to restore the icons for good — the event the Church keeps every year as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

The victory of the icons was not a victory for decoration. It was the Church's confession that God truly became man, that matter can carry holiness, and that the Christian faith is not too spiritual to be seen and kissed. That is why the restoration of the icons became the Church's yearly celebration of Orthodoxy itself — the whole faith, standing or falling with the reality of the Word made flesh.