The Historians' History of the World 08

Theophilus could not but perceive the failure, and disdained to imitate his father’s temporising policy, who endeavoured to tolerate the monks, while he discouraged image-worship. He avowed his determination to extirpate both at once. Leo the Armenian and Michael the Stammerer had attempted to restrict the honours paid to images; Theophilus prohibited the making of new ones, and ordered that in every church they should be effaced, and the walls covered with pictures of birds and beasts. The sacred vessels, adorned with figures, were profaned by unhallowed hands, sold in the public markets, and melted for their metal. The prisons were full of painters, of monks and ecclesiastics of all orders. The monks, driven from their convents, fled to desert places; some perished of cold and hunger, some threw off the proscribed dress, yet retained the sacred character and habits; others seized the opportunity of returning to the pleasures as to the dress of the world.

The history of iconoclasm has a remarkable uniformity: another female in power, another restoration of images. After the death of Theophilus his widow Theodora administered the empire in the name of her youthful son Michael, called afterwards the Drunkard. Theodora, like her own mother Theoctista, had always worshipped images in private. No sooner was Theophilus dead than the monks, no doubt in the secret of Theodora’s concealed attachment to images, poured into Constantinople from all quarters. She now ventured to send an officer of the palace to command the patriarch, Joannes the Grammarian, either to recant his iconoclastic opinions, or to withdraw from Constantinople. The patriarch is accused of a paltry artifice. He opened a vein in the region of his stomach, and showed himself wounded and bleeding to the people. The rumour spread that the empress had attempted to assassinate the patriarch. But the fraud was detected, exposed, acknowledged. The abashed patriarch withdrew, unpitied and despised, into the suburbs (842). Methodius was raised to the dignity of the patriarchate. The worshippers of images were in triumph.

But Theodora, still tenderly attached to the memory of her husband, demanded, as the price of her inestimable services in the restoration of images, absolution for the sin of his iconoclasm and his persecution of the image-worshippers.

All was now easy; the fanaticism of iconoclasm was exhausted or rebuked. A solemn festival was appointed for the restoration of images. The whole clergy of Constantinople, and all who could flock in from the neighbourhood, met in and before the palace of the archbishop, and marched in procession with crosses, torches, and incense, to the church of St. Sophia. There they were met by the empress and her infant son Michael, Feb. 19th, 842. They made the circuit of the church, with their burning torches, paying homage to every image and picture, which had been carefully restored, never again to be effaced till the days of later, more terrible iconoclasts, the Ottoman Turks.

The Greek church from that time has celebrated the anniversary of this festival with loyal fidelity. The successors of Methodius, particularly the learned Photius, were only zealous to consummate the work of his predecessors, and images have formed part of the recognised religious worship of the Eastern world.b

FOOTNOTES

[84] Felix III, if the anti-pope Felix (356 A.D.) is reckoned as Felix II.