Byzantine Culture

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The Second Council of Nicaea, 787

The seventh ecumenical council ended the first phase of iconoclasm and defined the distinction between veneration and worship. Its proceedings, its theology, and the western misunderstanding that followed.

The seventh and last of the councils recognised as ecumenical by the Orthodox Church met in the same town as the first, 462 years later, and dealt with a question none of the earlier councils had faced: whether Christians may make and venerate images of Christ and the saints.

Its answer — yes, with a carefully drawn distinction about what the veneration is and where it goes — is the theological foundation of everything described in Byzantine iconography and of the continuing practice of the Orthodox churches.

The Background

Imperial hostility to religious images began under Leo III in the 720s and was made official policy under his son Constantine V, who convened a council at Hieria in 754 that condemned images as idolatry and ordered their destruction. The reasons, the destruction and the resistance are described in Byzantine iconoclasm.

The iconoclast case was theological, not merely puritanical. Its strongest form, argued by Constantine V himself in treatises that survive in quotation, was Christological: an image of Christ either depicts only his humanity, which divides his person like Nestorius, or claims to depict his divinity, which is impossible and confuses the natures like Eutyches. Therefore no orthodox image of Christ is possible, and the only legitimate image is the eucharist.

The defence had been articulated most fully by John of Damascus, writing from outside the empire, and it is the argument the council adopted.

The Empress Irene

Constantine V’s son Leo IV died in 780, leaving a nine-year-old heir, Constantine VI, and a widow, Irene, as regent. Irene was an iconophile and moved carefully.

She replaced the patriarch with her own secretary, Tarasios — a layman, rapidly ordained, whose appointment was itself controversial — and secured papal cooperation. A council convened in Constantinople in 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers of the guard who burst into the church with drawn swords. Irene had the units concerned transferred to Asia on campaign, replaced them, and reconvened the council at Nicaea in 787, away from the capital.

The whole sequence is a good illustration of the practical relationship between imperial power and church councils described in Byzantine church government.

The Proceedings

Around 350 bishops attended, with papal legates and representatives of the eastern patriarchates — the latter irregular, since Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were under Muslim rule and could not correspond freely.

The sessions were largely documentary. Bishops who had supported iconoclasm were examined and received back after confession. Patristic texts supporting images were read out. Iconoclast arguments were read and refuted, including a detailed session-by-session demolition of the council of Hieria. Some of the texts the iconoclasts had cited were shown to be forged or quoted out of context — and the iconophiles used one or two dubious citations of their own.

The council also passed twenty-two disciplinary canons, including prohibitions on simony, on the appointment of bishops by secular rulers, and on monks and nuns living in the same monastery.

The Definition

The doctrinal decree affirms that images of Christ, the Virgin, the angels and the saints may be made in colours, mosaic and other materials, placed in churches and on vessels and vestments, and honoured with incense and lights.

The crucial distinction is between two Greek words:

  • Proskynesis — reverence, honour, the bow one makes to an emperor, a bishop or a relative. This is due to images.
  • Latreia — worship, adoration, service. This is due to God alone.

And the crucial principle, quoted from Basil the Great: “the honour paid to the image passes to the prototype.” Veneration does not stop at the wood and paint; it moves to the person depicted. An icon is not worshipped, and it is not merely a picture; it is a point of contact.

Underlying both is the Incarnation. God, being invisible, could not be depicted; but he became visible in Christ, and to deny that the visible Christ can be depicted is to deny the reality of the Incarnation. This is the core of the argument, and it is set out further in the theology of icon veneration.

The Western Misunderstanding

Charlemagne’s court received the council’s acts in a bad Latin translation that rendered proskynesis and latreia by the same word, adoratio, thereby erasing the entire distinction and making the council appear to authorise the worship of images.

The Frankish response, the Libri Carolini of about 792, therefore attacked a position nobody held, and a synod at Frankfurt in 794 rejected what it took to be the council’s teaching. Rome had approved the council, and the papacy spent some effort explaining the difference to the Franks.

The episode is a useful reminder that the estrangement of east and west owed at least as much to translation failures and political rivalry as to genuine doctrinal disagreement — a theme that recurs through to the Great Schism.

The Second Iconoclasm

Nicaea II did not end the matter. Iconoclasm returned under Leo V in 815 and ran for another thirty years, with a second phase of persecution in which Theodore the Studite was the leading resister.

It ended on the first Sunday of Lent in 843, when the empress Theodora, regent for her young son, restored the icons definitively. That event is commemorated annually as the Triumph of Orthodoxy, and in the service a text called the Synodikon is read, anathematising iconoclasts by name and proclaiming the faith of the councils. The Synodikon was extended over later centuries to cover subsequent controversies, including the Palamite one, which makes it a rolling record of what Orthodoxy has decided it is not.

Why It Was the Last

The Orthodox Church has held no council since that it recognises as ecumenical, and Nicaea II is therefore the terminus of the conciliar era for a tradition that defines itself by councils.

Various explanations are offered: that the essential questions had been answered; that the political conditions for a genuinely universal council disappeared with the schism and the shrinking of the empire; that the Orthodox understanding of reception makes it impossible to declare a council ecumenical in advance, so that the status can only be conferred by time.

The Holy and Great Council held in Crete in 2016 was the first pan-Orthodox council in more than a millennium. Four autocephalous churches declined to attend, and its status remains disputed — which is, in its way, a demonstration of exactly how the reception criterion works.

The Iconoclast Case, Reconstructed

Almost all iconoclast writing was destroyed after 843, and what survives does so inside the documents refuting it — chiefly the sixth session of Nicaea II, which reads the definition of the council of Hieria clause by clause and answers each.

Reassembled, the case runs like this:

The scriptural argument. The second commandment forbids graven images. The prohibition is not abrogated in the New Testament, and God is by nature indescribable.

The Christological argument, which is the strong one, and appears to be Constantine V’s own. An image can depict only what is circumscribable. Christ’s divinity is not circumscribable. Therefore an image of Christ either depicts only his humanity — separating the natures, which is Nestorianism — or claims to circumscribe the divinity, which confuses them, as Eutyches did. There is no orthodox image of Christ.

The eucharistic argument. The only image of Christ he himself authorised is the bread and wine, which are his body and blood. Painted images are a substitute for the one legitimate one.

The practical argument. Ordinary people venerate the wood and the paint. Whatever theologians say about honour passing to the prototype, what happens in churches is idolatry.

The last point was not without force, and iconophile writers concede more of it than one might expect.

The Answer

The iconophile reply, drawn from John of Damascus and developed by Theodore the Studite and the patriarch Nikephoros after 815, met the Christological argument directly.

Their move was to distinguish nature from hypostasis. An image depicts neither a nature nor two natures; it depicts a person — a hypostasis. The icon of Christ depicts the person of the incarnate Word, who is genuinely visible and circumscribable because he genuinely took flesh.

To deny that the incarnate Christ can be depicted is therefore to deny that he was genuinely visible, which is to deny the reality of the Incarnation. The iconoclasts, on this argument, are the ones with the Christological problem.

The argument turns on the same vocabulary the Christological controversies had hammered out three centuries earlier, and its success depended on that groundwork being available.

The Forgotten Attendee

One detail of the council’s composition is worth noting because it complicates the usual picture.

The eastern patriarchates — Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem — were under Muslim rule and could not correspond freely with Constantinople. Their “representatives” at Nicaea II were two monks who had come from Palestine, and whose credentials were, by any strict standard, irregular: they had no mandate from their patriarchs.

The council knew this and proceeded anyway, on the argument that the eastern churches’ agreement was known even if it could not be formally conveyed. Everyone involved understood that a council claiming ecumenical status needed all five patriarchates present in some form.

This kind of practical accommodation recurs throughout the conciliar period and is worth holding onto when reading claims about the procedural requirements for ecumenicity. The criteria were applied after the fact, by a church deciding what it had received.

What Iconoclasm Destroyed

The physical losses are difficult to quantify precisely and were clearly severe.

Portable icons from before 726 survive almost nowhere in the former empire. The Sinai collection, outside imperial jurisdiction from the 640s, holds essentially the entire surviving corpus of pre-iconoclast panel painting — something over a dozen works.

Monumental decoration fared somewhat better, because plastering over is cheaper than destruction, but the great sixth- and seventh-century mosaic programmes of Constantinople are gone. The apse of Hagia Sophia was redecorated after 843, and the homily Photios preached at the unveiling of the new Theotokos in 867 survives as the programmatic statement of the restored image cult.

What the iconoclast decades did produce, and what survives in the rock-cut chapels of Cappadocia, are aniconic schemes: crosses, vine scrolls, geometric ornament and birds. They are the only physical evidence of what an iconoclast church interior looked like, and they are worth seeing for that reason alone.

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