The Early Medieval Era · 726-843 · Constantinople, Bithynia
Iconophile Byzantine Monasticism
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About This Movement
Twice over a century and more, the Byzantine court tried to purge Christian worship of images, and both times the strongest organised resistance came from the monasteries. The monks argued that because God had genuinely become a human being who could be seen, he could be depicted — that refusing the image was, in the end, refusing the Incarnation. And they paid for the argument. Stephen the Younger was killed in 765, and Theodore, abbot of the great Stoudios monastery in Constantinople, was beaten, imprisoned and exiled more than once while still producing letters, talks to his monks, and treatises on the holy icons. Images were restored once at the Council of Nicaea in 787 and finally in 843, a day the Orthodox churches still keep as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. One thing is worth knowing about the story as we have it. The winning side wrote the record, and the iconoclasts' own case survives almost entirely in quotations made by the people refuting it.
In Its Own Record
Formed From
- Desert Monasticism — Basil visited Egypt; the whole Greek monastic tradition claims the desert as its root.
Sources
- John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (trans. Andrew Louth, SVS Popular Patristics) (primary) — The foundational iconophile theology, written from Mar Saba outside imperial reach; Louth's translation is the standard English version.
- Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons (trans. Catharine Roth, SVS Press, 1981); Letters (ed. Fatouros, CFHB 31, 1992) (primary) — Roth's translation of the icon treatises. The ~550 letters exist in Fatouros's Greek edition with German summaries; there is no complete English translation, only selections.
- The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) (trans. Richard Price, TTH 68, Liverpool, 2018) (primary) — The iconophile victory documents, first full English translation with commentary. Also the main source for the iconoclast side's own arguments, which survive only as excerpts quoted in order to refute them - the 754 Horos survives only this way.
- Life of Stephen the Younger (ed./French trans. M.-F. Auzépy, 1997) (primary) — The premier iconophile martyr-life (monastic milieu, Bithynia); French only, no complete English translation.
- Leslie Brubaker & John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680-850 (Cambridge, 2011) (secondary) — The standard modern history. It is deliberately revisionist, arguing that persecution was far more limited than iconophile sources claim.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 2: 'The emergence of Byzantine Orthodoxy, 600-1095' (Andrew Louth) (reference) — From the vol. 3 TOC; the iconoclast controversy sits at its center.