Christendom was superseded by the spiritual worship of God alone.

A few months after the Nicene Council, Irene dissolved the betrothal of her son, the Emperor Constantine, to Rotrude, a daughter of Charlemagne, which she herself had brought about, and forced him to marry an Armenian lady whom he afterward cast off and sent to a convent. From this time dates her rupture with Constantine. In her ambition for despotic power, she rendered him odious by encouraging his bad habits, and at last incapable of the throne by causing his eyes to be plucked out, while he was asleep, with such violence that he died of it (797). It is a humiliating fact that Constantine the Great, the convener of the first Nicene Council, and Irene, the convener of the second and last, are alike stained with the blood of their own offspring, and yet honored as saints in the Eastern church, in whose estimate orthodoxy covers a multitude of sins. She enjoyed for five years the fruit of unnatural cruelty to her only child. As she passed through the streets of Constantinople, four patricians marched on foot before her golden chariot, holding the reins of four milk-white steeds. But these patricians conspired against their queen and raised the treasurer Nicephorus to the throne, who was crowned at St. Sophia by the venal patriarch. Irene was sent into exile on the Isle of Lesbos, and had to earn her bread by the labors of her distaff as she had done in the days of her youth as an Athenian virgin. She died of grief in 803. With her perished the Isaurian dynasty. Startling changes of fortune were not uncommon among princes and patriarchs of the Byzantine empire.

1 Charlemagne afterwards offered Irene his hand with a view to unite the Eastern and Western empires, and she accepted the offer; but her prime-minister, Aëtius, who wished to raise his own brother, Leo, to the throne, prevented the marriage.

2 The memory of Irene is celebrated by the Greeks on the 15th of August. Her patriarch, Tarasius (d. 806), is canonized in the Roman as well as the Greek Church.

§ 103. Iconoclastic Reaction, and Final Triumph of ImageWorship, A. D. 842.

WALCH, X. 592-828. HEFELE, IV. 1-6; 38-47; 104-109.

During the five reigns which succeeded that of Irene, a period of thirty-eight years, the image-war was continued with varying fortunes. The soldiers were largely iconoclastic, the monks and the people in favor of image-worship. Among these Theodore of the Studium was distinguished by his fearless advocacy and cruel sufferings under Leo V., the Armenian (813–820), who was slain at the foot of the altar. Theophilus (829-842) was the last and the most cruel of the iconoclastic emperors. He persecuted the monks by imprisonment, corporal punishment, and mutilation.'1

But his widow, Theodora, a second Irene, without her vices, in the thirteenth year of her regency during the minority of Michael the Drunkard, achieved by prudent and decisive measures the final and permanent victory of image-worship. She secured absolution for her deceased husband by the fiction of a death-bed repentance, although she had promised him to make no change. The iconoclastic patriarch, John the Grammarian, was banished and condemned to two hundred lashes; the monk Methodius of opposite tendency (honored as a confessor and

1 Hefele, IV. 105, says that under this reign the famous poets, Theophanes and his brother, Theodore of the Studium, were punished with two hundred lashes and the branding of Greek mock-verses on their forehead, whence they received the name "the Marked” (уpañτоí). But, according to the Bollandists, Theophanes died in 820, and Hefele himself, III. 370, puts his death in 818, although in vol. IV. 108 he reports that Theophanes yparrós was made bishop of Smyrna by Theodora, 842. See on this conflict in chronology above, p. 407.

2 The tongue of slander, however, raised the story of her criminal intimacy with the patriarch Methodius, whom she had appointed. The court instituted an investigation during which the patriarch by indecent exposure furnished the proof of the physical impossibility of sexual sin on his part; whereupon the accuser confessed that she had been bribed by his iconoclastic predecessor. Hefele, IV. 109.

saint) was put in his place; the bishops trembled and changed or were deposed; the monks and the people were delighted. A Synod at Constantinople (the acts of it are lost) reenacted the decrees of the seven oecumenical Councils, restored the worship of images, pronounced the anathema upon all iconoclasts, and decided that the event should be hereafter commemorated on the first Sunday in Lent by a solemn procession and a renewal of the anathema on the iconoclastic heretics.

1

On the 19th of February, 842, the images were again introduced into the churches of Constantinople. It was the first celebration of the "Sunday of Orthodoxy," which afterwards assumed a wider meaning, as a celebration of victory over all heresies. It is one of the most characteristic festivals of the Eastern church. The old oecumenical Councils are dramatically represented, and a threefold anathema is pronounced upon all sorts of heretics such as atheists, antitrinitarians, upon those who deny the virginity of Mary before or after the birth of Christ, the inspiration of the Scriptures, or the immortality of the soul, who reject the mysteries (sacraments), the traditions and councils, who deny that orthodox princes rule by divine appointment and receive at their unction the Holy Ghost, and upon all iconoclasts. After this anathema follows the grateful commemoration of the orthodox confessors and "all who have fought for the orthodox faith by their words, writings, teaching, sufferings, and godly example, as also of all the protectors and defenders of the Church of Christ." In conclusion the bishops, archimandrites and priests kiss the sacred icons.2

§ 104. The Caroline Books and the Frankish Church on ImageWorship.

I. LIBRI CAROLINI, first ed. by Elias Philyra (i. e., Jean du Tillet, or Tilius, who was suspected of Calvinism, but afterwards became

1 ἡ κυριακὴ τῆς ὀρθοδοξίας.

* See the description of Walch (X. 800-808) from the Byzantine historians, and from Allacci, and King (on the Russian church).

bishop of Meaux), from a French (Paris) MS., Paris, 1549; then by Melchior Goldast in his collection of imperial decrees on the imagecontroversy, Francof., 1608 (67 sqq.), and in the first vol. of his Collection of Constitutiones imperiales, with the addition of the last ch. (lib. IV., c. 29), which was omitted by Tilius; best ed. by Ch. A. Heumann, Hanover, 1731, under the title: Augusta Concilii Nicæni II. Censura, h. e., Caroli Magni de impio imaginum cultu libri IV., with prolegomena and notes. The ed. of Abbé Migne, in his “Patrol. Lat.," Tom. 98, f. 990-1248 (in vol. II. of Opera Caroli M.), is a reprint of the ed. of Tilius, and inferior to Heumann's ed. (“Es ist zu bedauern," says Hefele, III. 696, "dass Migne, statt Besseres, entschieden Geringeres geboten hat, als man bisher schon besass".)

II. WALCH devotes the greater part of the eleventh vol. to the history of image-worship in the Frankish Church from Pepin to Louis the Pious. NEANDER, III. 233–243; GIESELER, II. 66–73; HEFELE, III 694-716; HERGENRÖTHER, I. 553–557. FLOSS: De suspecta librorum Carolinorum fide. Boun, 1860. REIFFERSCHEID: Narratio de Vaticano librorum Carolinorum Codice. Breslau, 1873.

The church of Rome, under the lead of the popes, accepted and supported the seventh oecumenical council, and ultimately even went further than the Eastern church in allowing the worship of graven as well as painted images. But the church in the empire of Charlemagne, who was not on good terms with the Empress Irene, took a position between image-worship and iconoclasm.

The question of images was first discussed in France under Pepin in a synod at Gentilly near Paris, 767, but we do not know with what result. Pope Hadrian sent to Charlemagne a Latin version of the acts of the Nicene Council; but it was so incorrect and unintelligible that a few decades later the Roman librarian Anastasius charged the translator with ignorance of both Greek and Latin, and superseded it by a better one.

1 See Walch, XI. 7-36; Hefele, III. 461-463. The sources are silent. Walch carefully gives the different conjectures of Baronius, Pagi, Daillé, Natalis, Alexander, Maimburg, Fleury, Sirmond, Spanheim, Basnage, Semler. Nothing new has been added since. But the preceding iconoclastic zeal of Bishop Serenus of Marseilles, and the succeeding position of Charlemagne and the Frankish church, rather favor the inference of Sirmond and Spanheim, that the synod rejected the worship of images.

Charlemagne, with the aid of his chaplains, especially Alcuin, prepared and published, three years after the Nicene Council, an important work on image-worship under the title Quatuor Libri Carolini (790).1 He dissents both from the iconoclastic synod of 754 and the anti-iconoclastic synod of 787, but more from the latter, which he treats very disrespectfully." He decidedly rejects image-worship, but allows the use of images for ornament and devotion, and supports his view with Scripture passages and patristic quotations. The spirit and aim of the book is almost Protestant. The chief thoughts are these: God alone is the object of worship and adoration (colendus et adorandus). Saints are only to be revered (venerandi). Images can in no sense be worshipped. To bow or kneel before them, to salute or kiss them, to strew incense and to light candles before them, is idolatrous and superstitious. It is far better to search the Scriptures, which know nothing of such practices. The tales of miracles wrought by images are inventions of the imagination, or deceptions of the evil spirit. On the other hand, the iconoclasts, in their honest zeal against idolatry, went too far in rejecting the images altogether. The legitimate and proper use of images is to adorn the churches and to perpetuate and popularize the memory of the persons and events which they represent. Yet even this is not necessary; for a Christian should be able without sensual means to rise to the contemplation of the virtues of the saints and to ascend to the fountain of eternal light. Man is made in the image of God, and hence capable of receiving Christ into his soul. God should ever be present and

1 Alcuin's share in the composition appears from the similarity of thoughts in his Commentary on John, and the old English tradition that he wrote a book against the Council of Nicæa. See Walch, XI. 65 sqq.; Hefele, III. 697.

2 He calls it posterior tempore, non tamen posterior crimine, eloquentia, sensuque carens, synodus ineptissima, etc. He distrusted a Council in which the Church of his dominions was not represented. He also objected to a woman assuming the office of teacher in the church, as being contrary to the lex divina and lex naturæ (III. 13, ed. Migne, fol. 1136). He had reason to be angry with Irene for dissolving the betrothal of her son with his daughter.