The Triumph of Orthodoxy (843)

The last iconoclast emperor, Theophilus, died in 842, leaving his widow, the Empress Theodora, as regent for their small son Michael III. Theodora had quietly kept the icons herself, and she now moved to restore them for good. Early in 843 a synod at Constantinople reaffirmed the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787, deposed the iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian, and enthroned in his place St. Methodios, a confessor who had suffered years of imprisonment for the icons.

Then, on the first Sunday of Great Lent — by tradition the eleventh of March, 843 — the empress, the boy-emperor, the new patriarch, and a great company of clergy and monks processed through the city bearing the sacred images and set them back in their place. The confessors who had suffered for the icons were honored, and those who had died in exile, like the Patriarch St. Nikephoros and St. Theodore the Studite, were vindicated at last. The long battle described in the entry on iconoclasm was over.

For that first restoration the Church composed a special service, kept to this day on the first Sunday of Lent (see the Sunday of Orthodoxy). Its heart is the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, a solemn proclamation read aloud: "Memory eternal" is sung for the champions of the true faith, and an anathema is pronounced against the old heresies, so that the whole assembly renews its confession together. In many parishes the faithful take up icons and process around or through the church, re-enacting the procession of 843.

Over the centuries the day grew beyond the question of icons alone. It became a yearly celebration of the entire Orthodox faith — a public "This is what we believe" — which is why the Synodikon ends with the acclamation, in words the tradition has cherished, that this is the faith of the apostles, the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the Orthodox, the faith that has established the world.

The word is not a boast. The restoration was the Church's calm, public statement that the long controversy was finally settled: because God truly became man, He can be depicted, and the honor paid to His icon rises to Him and is no idolatry (see the theology of the icon). This was the last of the great doctrinal storms of the age of the councils, and after it the Christian East defined itself precisely by this settled, whole faith.

Because the feast is tied to the movable cycle of Great Lent rather than to a fixed calendar date, it falls on a different day each year, always the first Sunday of the fast. That is fitting: the Sunday of Orthodoxy opens Lent by setting the whole faith before the Church at the very start of its journey toward Pascha. The day carries the very name of the tradition — Orthodoxy, "right belief" and "right worship" together — and its yearly return is felt not as a museum-piece anniversary but as a fresh confession of the faith once delivered.