Lasting Significance of the Issue.

The iconoclastic controversy had a lasting influence upon the intellectual life of Byzantium. Four aspects of this influence seem particularly relevant to theological development.

a. At the time of the Persian wars of Emperor Heraclius in the seventh century, Byzantium turned away culturally from its Roman past and toward the East. The great confrontation with Islam, which was reflected in the origins and character of iconoclasm, made this trend even more definite. Deprived of political protection by the Byzantine emperors, with whom they were in doctrinal conflict, the popes turned to the Franks and thus affiliated themselves with the emerging new Latin Middle Ages. As a result, the social, cultural, and political background of this separation became more evident; the two halves of the Christian world began to speak different languages, and their frames of reference in theology began to diverge more sharply than before.

Byzantium’s turn to the East, even if it expressed itself in a certain cultural osmosis with the Arab world, especially during the reign of Theophilus, did not mean a greater understanding between Byzantine Christianity and Islam; the confrontation remained fundamentally hostile, and this hostility prevented real dialogue. John of Damascus, who himself lived in Arab-dominated Palestine, spoke of Mohammed as the “forerunner of the Anti-Christ.” Giving second-hand quotations from the Koran, he presented the new religion as nothing more than gross superstition and immorality. Later-Byzantine literature on Islam rarely transcended this level of pure polemics.

However, even if this orientation eastward was not in itself an enrichment, Byzantium remained for several centuries the real capital of the Christian world. Culturally surpassing the Carolingian West and militarily ― strong in resisting Islam, Byzantine Christianity kept its universalist missionary vision, which expressed itself in a successful evangelization of the Slavs and other Eastern nations. But its later theological development took place in an exclusively Greek setting. Still bearing the title of “Great Church of Constantinople-New Rome,” it became known to both its Latin competitors and its Slavic disciples as the “Greek” Church.

b. Whatever role was played in the Orthodox victory over the iconoclasts by high ecclesiastical dignitaries and such theologians as Patriarch Nicephorus, the real credit belonged to the Byzantine monks who resisted the emperors in overwhelming numbers. The emperors, especially Leo III and Constantine V, expressed more clearly than any of their predecessors a claim to caesaropapism. Thus, the iconoclastic controversy was largely a confrontation between the state and a non-conformist, staunchly independent monasticism, which assumed the prophetic role of standing for the independence of the Gospel from the “world.” The fact that this role was assumed by the monks and not by the highest canonical authority of the Church underlines the fact that the issue was the defence not of the Church as an institution but of the Christian faith as the way to eternal salvation.

The monks, of course, took their role very seriously and preserved even after their victory a peculiar sense of responsibility for the faith, as we saw it in the case of Theodore the Studite. Theologically, they maintained a tradition of faithfulness to the past as well as a sense of the existential relevance of theology as such. Their role in later-Byzantine theological development remained decisive for centuries.

c. The theological issue between the Orthodox and the iconoclasts was fundamentally concerned with the icon of Christ, for belief in the divinity of Christ implied a stand on the crucial point of God’s essential indescribability and on the Incarnation, which made Him visible. Thus, the icon of Christ is the icon far from excellence and implies a confession of faith in the Incarnation.

The iconoclasts however objected on theological grounds not only to this icon but also to the use of any religious pictures, except the cross because, as their Council of 754 proclaims, they opposed “all paganism.” Any veneration of images was equated with idolatry. If the goal pursued by Constantine V to “purify” Byzantine Christianity, not only of the image cult, but also of monasticism, had been achieved, the entire character of Eastern Christian piety and its ethos would have evolved differently. The victory of Orthodoxy meant, for example, that religious faith could be expressed not only in propositions, in books, or in personal experience, but also through man’s power over matter, through aesthetic experience, and through gestures and bodily attitudes before holy images. All these implied a philosophy of religion and an anthropology; worship, the liturgy, religious consciousness involved the whole man, without despising any functions of the soul or of the body, and without leaving any of them to the realm of the secular.

d. Of all the cultural families of Christianity — the Latin, the Syrian, the Egyptian, or the Armenian, the Byzantine was the only one in which art became inseparable from theology. The debates of the eighth and ninth centuries have shown that in the light of the Incarnation art could not retain a “neutral” function, that it could and even must express the faith. Thus, through their style, through symbolic compositions, through the elaborate artistic programs covering the walls of Byzantine churches, and through the permanent system, which presided over the composition of the Byzantine iconostasis, icons became an expression and a source of divine knowledge. The good news about God’s becoming man and about the presence among men of a glorified and deified humanity first in Christ but also through Him and the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mary and in the saints — all this “adornment of the Church” was expressed in Byzantine Christian art. Eugene Trubetskoi, a Russian philosopher of the early-twentieth century, called this expression “contemplation in colors.”²⁵

Notes

1. Porphyry, Against the Christians, fragment 77; ed. A. Harnack, AbhBerlAk (1916), 93.

2. Text of Eusebius’ letter in Nicephorus, Contra Eusebium, ed. J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense (Paris, 1852; repr. Graz, 1962), I, 383-386.

3. Mansi, XIII, 252AB, 256AB.

4. Ibid., 261p-264c. See pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, PG 3:124A.

5. Mansi, XI, 977-980.

6. Germanus I, De haeresibuf et synodis; PG 98:80A.

7. John of Damascus, Or. I; PG 94:1236c.

8. lbid.; PG 94:1245A.

9. Mansi, XIII, 377D.

10. Ibid., XXXII, 103.

11. Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetic 1; PG 99:332o-333A.

12.., III; PG 99:396c-397A.

13. Ibid., 409c.

14. Ibid., 405A.

15. Theodore the Studite, Letter to Naucratius, II, 67; PG 99:1296AB; see also Antirrh., III; PG 99:420o.

16. Antirrh., III; PG 99:420A.

17. Nicephorus, Antirrh., I; PG 100:272B.

18. Ibid., 328BD.

19. Nicephorus, Contra Eusebium, ed. Pitra, I, 401.

20. Antirrh., PG 100:268B.

21. Ibid., 440, 447.

22. Ibid., 252B.

23. Ibid., 317B.

24. John of Damascus, De Haer.; PG 94:764A.

25. E. Trubetskoi, Umozrenie ν Kraskakh (Moscow, 1915-1916; repr. Paris: YMCA Press, 1965); trans. Icons: Theology in Colour (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973).

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 508