The Apogee - Byzantium 02 by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online Page B

account, the Church of God remained tranquil for a number of years, and the people enjoyed peace, until the government passed from men to a woman, and the Church became the victim of fem inine simplicity. This woman followed the counsel of ignorant bishops; she convoked an injudicious assembly; she laid down the doctrine of painting in a material medium the Son and Word of God, and of representing the Mother of God and the Saints by dead images; and she enacted that these representations should be adored, thus heedlessly defying the proper doctrine of the Church. In such a way did she sully our adoration which is due to God alone, declaring that what should be given only to Him should be offered to lifeless icons. Furthermore she foolishly maintained that they were full of divine grace, encouraging the lighting of candles and the burning of incense before them. Thus did she cause the simple to err.
    We do therefore now forbid throughout the Orthodox Church the unauthorized manufacture of pseudonymous icons; we reject the adoration denned by Tarasius; 1 we annul the decrees of his synod, on the ground that they granted to images undue honour; and we condemn the lighting of candles and the offering of incense.
    1 Patriarch at the time of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787.
    Gladly recognizing, however, the Holy Synod which met at Blachernae in the temple of the unspotted Virgin in the reigns of Constantine and Leo as firmly based on the doctrine of the Fathers, we decree that the manufacture of icons -we abstain from calling them idols, for there are degrees of evil - is neither worshipful nor of service.
    With iconoclasm once again introduced throughout the Empire, the dangers of civil disruption removed - at least for the immediate future -and continued peace established on all his frontiers, Leo V could congratulate himself on an excellent start to his reign. Lacking any deep religious convictions of his own, he took no stringent measures against the general run of icon-worshippers who refused to submit to the new edict. A few of its most vociferous opponents - those who continued publicly to demonstrate against it and openly to defy the ban on images - were punished for form's sake: Abbot Theodore, for example, now the acknowledged leader of the iconodule camp, was thrown into three different prisons. His biographer recalls with relish his repeated floggings and the hideous extremes of heat and cold - to say nothing of the enthusiastic visitations of rats, fleas and lice - that he was called upon to endure. But then, as the Emperor would have been quick to point out, Theodore had asked for it: he had never minced words during his imperial audiences, and on the Palm Sunday before the Synod he had staged a procession in which the monks of the Studium had flagrantly paraded round the monastery, carrying all their most precious icons shoulder-high before them. More serious still, in 817, he was found to be in regular correspondence with the newly elected Pope Paschal I, not only informing him of the plight of the Orthodox faithful but on one occasion actually proposing an appeal for help to the Western Emperor. Such a proposal was obviously treasonable, and in the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Leo should have taken firm action against him. Most of those churchmen who shared his opinions found, on the other hand, that provided they kept a suitably low profile they were permitted to carry on as they always had, without molestation or interference. Leo's primary interests were State security and public order. So far as he was concerned, the doctrinal considerations so dear to Theodore and his followers were at most of secondary importance.
    Inevitably, however, the edict of 815 unleashed a new wave of wholesale destruction. Any holy image, we are told, could be smashed or desecrated by any person at any time, without fear of punishment. Any vestment or piece of embroidery bearing representations of Jesus Christ,