When looking at the numerous disputes that the early Catholic church had with splinters movements and sometimes within its own hierarchy, it is almost uncanny that many disputes today among Christians and skeptics mirror situations now hundreds of centuries old. Some examples:
Present day skeptic: The God of the Old Testament is a tyrant – he can’t be the same God as the God of the New Testament.
Present day Christian theologian: Yup, Marcion had the same issue about 1900 years ago, but then the
matter was eventually resolved.
Skeptic: The trinity is confusing. Is Jesus the same as God the father? Has he always existed? Or was he begotten during creation? How do we know the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and not through the Father to the Son? Is Jesus consubstantial with the Father or?
Theologian: Yup, Catholics and Arians argued over this about 1700 years ago, but then the matter was eventually resolved.
Skeptic: What about Jesus’ nature? Is he fully human and fully God? Or is he human with a divine calling? Or is divine only in the spiritual sense, but not in the bodily sense? Was Jesus capable of sinning because he was a man?
Theologian: Yup, the Antiochenes and Alexandrians argued over this about 1500 to 1600 years ago, but then the matter was eventually resolved.
Skeptic: And what about worshipping statues and other things that looks like idols?
Theologian: Yup, the East and West Catholic churches argued over this about 1300 years ago, but then the matter was eventually resolved.
Not to say there is no need to pursue answers to big theological questions or consider any new developments. But at what point should an issue be put to rest? When does a debate get so maxed out, that all that is left is the same argument continually regurgitated or redressed into a new argument that is actually an ancient one? Plato or Aristotle probably would have produced a wonderfully abstract answer.
In the meantime, examining the iconoclast controversy may at least explain the circumstances around this debate, and what can be learned from how the debate was resolved. This begins with the political and religious conflicts in the eighth century: As Islam spread throughout much of the East and West, the Catholic church was essentially double-whammied by the threat of an invading religion and yet another theological debate creating further division between the Eastern and Western churches (Irvin and Sunquist 360).
This theological tug-of-war, started by emperor Leo and then perpetuated throughout the Western churches, boiled to down whether icons or images should be used for devotional or reverential purposes. Over in the East, icons were a staple in devotional life; they helped believers reflect on the greater spiritual truth they upheld (Irvin and Sunquist 360).
Having migrated from East to West, Leo was well familiar with the Eastern practices. Still, he was not a fan. So much so, he helped build a following of iconoclasts, who spent the next several decades persecuting iconodule nuns and monks and deploying troops to destroy icons and images wherever necessary. Leo’s reason was pretty straightforward (and yet another mirror to debates in modern times): the Ten Commandments forbid worshipping idols (Irvin and Sunquist 360, 361).
Over in the East, the patriarch of Constantinople naturally opposed this view, to which Leo threw him out of office and found a replacement who aligned the iconoclast view. Constantine, Leo’s son, continued the legacy until, sort of ironically, the next “Leo” (Constantine’s son) married Irene, an Athenian woman who was, well, an iconodule, and apparently made no bones about it.In fact, when Leo passed in 780, Irene started a campaign to terminate the iconoclast-iconodule feud (Irvin and Sunquist 362).
This led to the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. With representatives from the Eastern and Western churches, they had multiple meetings from September through October, with the fourth session on October 5th directly – and somewhat suspensefully — addressing the issue at hand. Namely, while it appeared that the council was still leaning toward forbidding icons, the ruling ended up in favor of restoring icons / images (Catholic Encyclopedia par. 3.).
But as it happens in life sometimes, not everyone in the church was on board with the ruling. And for the next several more decades, iconoclasts continued to persecute iconodules, which caused a one-step-forward-two-steps back situation for iconodules. Iconoclasts, still clinging to the Old Testament, drew parallels between iconodules and Israelites repeatedly breaking covenant and instead worshipping idols. Yet, like the Leo and Irene story, Empress Theodora put an end to the persecution after Theophilus’ death in the ninth century (Irvin and Sunquist 362, 363).
And though the issue was finally put to rest, an overarching theological point was still at play: As the church still considered Christ as having two natures – fully God and fully man – this meant reexamining how Christology fit with creation also having two natures: the material and the spiritual. John of Damascus, who wrote extensively on this topic about 20 years before the Second Council of Nicaea, argued that the term nature was not limited to Jesus’ human nature or body (Irvin and Sunquist 363.
That said, and just as Theodosius II had helped settle the two-nature matter at the Council of Chalcedon (Irvin and Sunquist 192, 193). John of Damascus applied this understanding an all-encompassing, two levels of reality: the material and the divine. In short, just as the liturgy has material elements to represent the divine, this applies across the board to all of creation.
Which leads back to the opener to this post: If an issue has been thoroughly vetted, and if the outcome is based on equally thorough reasoning, why the now 2000-year-old urge to keep tearing it down and reframing into already debunked arguments?
Works Cited
Irvin, Dale T., and Scott W. Sunquist. History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001.
Catholic Encyclopedia. Edited by Knight, Kevin. The Second Council of Nicaea. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/second-council-of-nicaea-10756