Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (75 page)

Among the Emperor Heraclius's multiform efforts to defend and strengthen his empire, perhaps the most far-reaching, encouraged by Patriarch Sergius, was to promote a theological reconciliation of his warring subjects. The group of theologians chosen to find a solution to the empire's doctrinal disagreements sought to be true to Chalcedon in acknowledging that two natures (human and divine) came together in Christ, but in order to accommodate the Miaphysites, they suggested that once these natures had thus met, the natures gained a unity of activity or will (
energeia
or
thelma
). Maximus was one of the chief voices opposing this 'Monenergism' or 'Monotheletism'. He said that God had too much respect for his creations, humans included, to allow the
Logos
to assume anything less than true created human nature in all its fullness: so the incarnate Christ must have had a fully human activity and fully human will. When Christ, in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, submitted to his Father with 'Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt', he was as a man using his human will to obey his divine will. This was a bold claim, based on a largely novel vision of the will as self-determination both rational and beyond conscious reason; no Greek philosopher, let alone theologian, had fully enunciated this before, or made the will so central to an understanding of Christ.
³³
For his opposition, Maximus suffered appallingly on the orders of Emperor and Patriarch: the Confessor is said to have had his tongue cut out and his right hand amputated, to stop him speaking or writing.

For all their novelty, the intensively repeated arguments in Maximus's later writings, and his final maltreatment for his convictions, embedded them deep within Orthodoxy. The increasing desperation of the imperial authorities to reap political benefits from their Monothelete compromise in the face of Arab military successes led them into brutal measures, not merely against Maximus but against Pope Martin (see p. 345); that did more to harm than help the Monothelete cause. Maximus did not live to see the final condemnation of Monotheletism at the sixth Council of Constantinople in 680-81. The successful assertion of Christ's human will is a theme which gives a human immediacy to the sufferings of the Saviour - so much greater than those of the believer, but not separated in kind from them. That conviction has strengthened many in the varied sufferings of Orthodoxy in later centuries.
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SMASHING IMAGES: THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY (726-843)

When the Monotheletes were defeated in 681, they pointed grimly to a new setback for the empire as a sign of God's disapproval: a move southwards by the Bulgars, another in that long sequence of peoples who had drifted westwards from central Asia to seek a home in Europe. In 680 Bulgars defeated Byzantine frontier forces and set up a new headquarters at Pliska, in territory which forms part of the modern Bulgaria. In the centuries afterwards, the Bulgars remained one of the more uncomfortable recurrent problems for Byzantine emperors. But the wrath of God on the empire seemed even more concentrated in the menace of Islam, which despite the repulse of Arab armies from the walls of Constantinople in 678 continued to threaten the imperial territories in Asia Minor. It was natural to wonder whether elements in the faith and practice of such successful warriors represented God's will for the Christian Church; and this became the conviction of a military commander whose grim persistence in the unending slog of protecting Byzantine frontiers earned him the imperial throne in 717 as Leo III.

Leo was known as 'the Isaurian' from his origins in a frontier province of Asia Minor, and it may be that already here, in close proximity to Islamic territories, he had become impressed with one aspect of Muslim austerity, the consistent rejection of pictorial representations of the divine. That contrasted significantly with a growing feature of devotion in Byzantine religion: the importance and indeed divine power attributed to images or icons. Islamic iconophobia, hatred of images, confronted Byzantine iconophilia, and Islam seemed to be winning. God's message was particularly emphatically conveyed in a spectacular episode of the volcanic and seismic activity so characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean. In 726 a massive eruption devastated the Santorini archipelago and resulted in an entire new island emerging in the sea nearby. Among Leo's advisers was the bishop of a city in Asia Minor, Constantine from Nakoleia, who is known even before the Santorini eruption to have remarked on the apparent inability of wonder-working icons to achieve much against Arab armies, and he was by no means the only bishop who thought like that.
³⁵
Iconophobia could easily turn to destructive action: iconoclasm. Accordingly, Leo began to implement iconoclast policies.

The struggle which followed over more than a century was not simply inspired by Islam; it exposed one of the great fault lines within Christianity itself, reflecting its dual origins in Hebrew and Greek culture. The pre-Christian Greeks, as we have seen, regarded it as natural to portray the divine in human form, and their sculptural art was dominated by such depictions (see p. 23). After the Jews had struggled with the various cults around them, Judaism came to take precisely the opposite attitude. Although in certain cultural settings Jews were capable of producing sacred painting and even sculpture (see pp. 178-9), they had at the heart of their observance the statement in the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses (the 'Decalogue') that 'You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them'.
³⁶
This does seem very categorical, and mainstream Christians, having decided after their struggles in the second century CE to retain the Tanakh as sacred scripture, could not ignore the Ten Commandments any more than Jews. Nevertheless, questions remained. Biblical commentators both Jewish and Christian noted that the prohibition on graven images is the longest and most verbose of the Commandments. Far from reinforcing its authority, that raised the possibility that it was not part of the foundation Commandments at all, but a subsidiary comment on God's first Commandment and basic prohibition, which went before it: 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.'

This raised a further possibility for Christians. They could not contemplate altering the total number of ten in the Commandments, which had been foundational for Judaism since at least the Deuteronomic period (see pp. 60-61), but they might renumber the Commandments. A renumbering would involve tucking the graven-image prohibition inside Commandment One, rather than making it a free-standing Commandment Two (that meant dividing up the Commandment against covetousness at the end of the sequence to preserve the number ten). This was the conclusion drawn by Augustine of Hippo, and in it he was followed by the entire Western Church down to the Reformation, when some (but, as we will see, not all) Protestants returned to the question and pointedly began numbering the Decalogue once more in the Jewish fashion, thus justifying their deep hostility to traditional ecclesiastical art (see pp. 618-19). In the Church which Augustine knew, where sculptural sacred art had been generally accepted since at least the time of Constantine and possibly before (see p. 172), it was natural to feel that everyday devotion told strongly against any fundamental divine prohibition on the graven image.
³⁷

One might have expected the Eastern Church, with its spectacular devotion to the sacred image, to take the same line as Augustine on numbering the Ten Commandments. However, it did not: it remained true to the biblical exegesis of Origen, who continued to be deeply (and rightly) respected as a commentator on scripture even when much of his theology lay under condemnation. Origen had noted the questions around the Commandments, but firmly maintained his stance alongside the Jews on the question of their numbering; so the graven-image prohibition stood as Commandment Two. Self-evidently, this had not inhibited the Easterners from creating a wealth of sacred art, but what they did was to observe the Commandment to the letter: their figural art was characteristically not graven (that is, sculpted) but was created on flat surfaces - the busy jewelled surfaces of wall and floor mosaics in glass and stone, and the paintings on wooden tablets which became the image
par excellence
for the Orthodox Church: the icon.
³⁸

It may be, as has recently been argued, that icons took their cue from the ancient tradition of painted funeral portraits for Egyptian mummies, a tradition taken over with enthusiasm by Egyptian Christians.
³⁹
Certainly the saints in icons share much of the impact of those haunting Egyptian mummy portraits with their gaze intensely directed to the viewer, but Egyptian funerary custom seems inadequate to account for the general phenomenon of non-sculptural Eastern Christian art. It had a theological origin: it was an ingenious solution to the dilemma posed by the Second Commandment, and it was of course regarded as pure hypocrisy by the eighth-century iconoclasts, again on theological grounds. What else was at stake in the iconoclastic controversy? One of the problems in understanding the issues is that virtually all the iconoclasts' arguments of their case have been destroyed by the eventually victorious iconophiles. The sole major iconoclast statement to survive is from the council of iconoclast bishops called by the Emperor Constantine V to his Hieria Palace in 754; and this was preserved only in the proceedings of the later iconophile Council of Nicaea in 787 so that it could be systematically contradicted and condemned (the council sadistically forced one of the repentant former iconoclast bishops who had been present at Hieria to read it all out).
⁴⁰
It has been plausibly suggested that behind the arguments over Church art was an argument about how to reach out to God's holiness. How does the divine relate to the human world?
⁴¹

Iconoclasts said that we meet holiness in particular situations where the clergy represent us to God, such as in the Church's liturgy, so icons are at best irrelevant; they argued that icons cannot be holy, as no specific prayer of blessing is said over them by a cleric (probably as a result, a blessing of icons with designated prayers is Orthodox practice in modern times).
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Iconoclasts shared their emphasis on the performance of the liturgy with their opponents, but they had nothing else to offer those for whom the liturgy had become impossibly grand and remote to satisfy every spiritual need. Iconophiles had more to offer. They thought that no officially sanctioned initiative is needed to bring something into the realm of the holy: the sacred can be freely encountered by everyone, because all that God has created is by nature sacred. Everyone can reach God through icons whenever they feel that God calls them.

That became both the salvation and the strength of icons through the years in which they were torn down in churches: the little wooden tablets could take refuge in the privacy of people's homes, and in this domestic space, it would often be mothers or grandmothers who exercised their customary power within the home to take the decision to save the image, and then impressed their love for this private source of divine power on their children. Equally, icons and their defence became associated with holy men who might owe little to the Church hierarchy and its compromises with the emperor's wishes: men who were ordinary yet extraordinary, who might wander from place to place, yet still claim the holiness of a monk or hermit. Monks and nuns who loved icons could ally with a movement rooted among laypeople to save images from the consequences of high clericalism and imperial policy.

To begin with, the campaign against imagery and icons probably did not amount to much, little more than a few token removals of prominent icons from imperial buildings and the application of a good deal of whitewash to mosaics. As Leo was succeeded by his equally iconophobic but much more theologically literate son Constantine V, further action was taken. One spectacular iconoclast-inspired church survives intact from Constantine's patronage in Constantinople, a rebuilding of Constantine I's Church of Hagia Eirene after an earthquake in the 740s - it was preserved later by the Ottoman invaders ignominiously as an armoury beside the Topkapi Palace, and its memorably cavernous space has more recently served as a concert hall. Here the semi-dome of the apse sheltering the altar is decorated with a huge and plain black mosaic cross on a gold mosaic background, instead of the usual panoply of mosaic figures (see Plate 34). This was a characteristic substitution in iconoclast art. The Cross meant a great deal to iconoclasts: it was a symbol not merely of Christ's death and resurrection, but of the conquest of the Churches in the East by Islam and the loss to Arab armies of Jerusalem together with Heraclius's painfully recovered True Cross (see pp. 253-4).
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Crosses from this period still lurk in shadowy form under later figural mosaics in other churches besides Hagia Eirene.

The iconoclast emperors of the eighth century enjoyed a run of luck in their military campaigns, which must for the time being have vindicated their policies. They do seem to have been riding a widespread mood in Eastern Christianity, as is indicated by church mosaics excavated in what had now become Umayyad- and Abbasid-ruled Palestine. Some of these mosaics have been carefully altered to replace figured by non-figured designs. The dates of the original mosaics help to date the alterations to the decades beyond the second quarter of the eighth century - so the changes are contemporary with the iconoclastic campaigns of Leo's dynasty, but they are to be found beyond the Byzantine frontiers.
⁴⁴
Equally, we know of a rather earlier iconoclastic movement beyond the north-east frontier of the empire in Armenia.
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What is also clear is the high level of destruction; there are very few surviving icons in the Byzantine world dating before this period, the most notable collection being those preserved beyond the reach of the emperors at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai.