© GEORGE FINLAY

HISTORY OF

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

FROM DCCXVI TO MLVII

First Edition February 1906

Section III
CONSTANTINE V., (COPRONYMUS,) A.D. 741-775

Part VII

The time and attention of Constantine, during his whole reign, were principally engaged in military occupations. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was judged by his military conduct. His strategic abilities and indefatigable activity were the most striking characteristics of his administration. His campaigns, his financial measures, and the abundance they created, were known to all; but his ecclesiastical policy affected comparatively few. Yet by that policy his reign has been exclusively judged and condemned in modern times. The grounds of the condemnation are unjust. He has not, like his father, the merit of having saved an empire from ruin; but he may claim the honour of perfecting the reforms planned by his father, and of re-establishing the military power of the Roman empire on a basis that perpetuated Byzantine supremacy for several centuries. Hitherto historians have treated the events of his reign as an accidental assemblage of facts; but surely, if he is to be rendered responsible for the persecution of the image-worshippers, in which he took comparatively little part, he deserves credit for his military successes and prosperous administration, since these were the result of his constant personal occupation. The history of his ecclesiastical measures, however, really possesses a deep interest, for they reflect with accuracy the feelings and ideas of millions of his subjects, as well as of the emperor.
Constantine was a sincere enemy of image-worship, and in his age sincerity implied bigotry, for persecution was considered both lawful and meritorious. Yet with all his energy, he was prudent in his first attempts to carry out his father’s policy. While he was struggling with Artavasdos, and labouring to restore the discipline of his troops, and re-establish the military superiority of the Byzantine arms, he left the religious controversy concerning image-worship to the two parties of the clergy who then disputed for pre-eminence in the church. But when his power was consolidated, he steadily pursued his father’s plans for centralising the ecclesiastical administration of the empire. To prepare for the final decision of the question, which probably, in his mind, related as much to the right of the emperor to govern the church, as to the question whether pictures were to be worshipped or not, he ordered the metropolitans and archbishops to hold provincial synods, in order to discipline the people for the execution of the edicts he proposed to carry in a general council of the Eastern church.
This general council was convoked at Constantinople in the year 754. It was attended by 338 bishops, forming the most numerous assembly of the Christian clergy which had ever been collected together for ecclesiastical legislation. Theodosius, metropolitan of Ephesus, son of the Emperor Tiberius III., presided, for the patriarchal chair had been kept vacant since the death of Anastasios in the preceding year. Neither the Pope nor the patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem sent representatives to this council, which was solely composed of the Byzantine clergy, so that it had no right to assume the rank of an ecumenical council. Its decisions were all against image-worship, which it declared to be contrary to Scripture. It proclaimed the use of images and pictures in churches to be a pagan and antichristian practice, the abolition of which was necessary to avoid leading Christians into temptation.
Even the use of the crucifix was condemned, on the ground that the only true symbol of the incarnation was the bread and wine which Christ had commanded to be received for the remission of sins. In its opposition to the worship of pictures, the council was led into the display of some animosity against painting itself; and every attempt at embodying sacred subjects by what it styled the dead and accursed art, foolishly invented by the pagans, was strongly condemned. The common people were thus deprived of a source of ideas, which, though liable to abuse, tended in general to civilise their minds, and might awaken noble thoughts and religious aspirations.
We may fully agree with the Iconoclasts in the religious importance of not worshipping images, and not allowing the people to prostrate themselves on the pavements of churches before pictures of saints, whether said to be painted by human artists or miraculous agency; while at the same time we think that the walls of the vestibules or porticoes of sacred edifices may with propriety be adorned with pictures representing those sacred subjects most likely to awaken feelings of Christian charity. It is by embodying and ennobling the expression of feelings common to all mankind, that modern artists can alone unite in their works that combination of truth with the glow of creative imagination which gives a divine stamp to many pagan works. There is nothing in the circle of human affairs so democratic as art. The council of 754, however, deemed that it was necessary to sacrifice art to the purity of religion. “The godless art of painting” was proscribed.
All who manufactured crucifixes or sacred paintings for worship, in public or private, whether laymen or monks, were ordered to be excommunicated by the church and punished by the state. At the same time, in order to guard against the indiscriminate destruction of sacred buildings and shrines possessing valuable ornaments and rich plate and jewels, by Iconoclastic zeal, or under its pretext, the council commanded that no alteration was to be made in existing churches, without the special permission of the patriarch and the emperor – a regulation bearing strong marks of the fiscal rapacity of the central treasury of the Roman empire. The bigotry of the age was displayed in the anathema which this council pronounced against three of the most distinguished and virtuous advocates of image-worship, Germanos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, George of Cyprus, and John Damascenus, the last of the fathers of the Greek church.
The ecclesiastical decisions of the council served as the basis for penal enactment by the civil power. The success of the emperor in restoring prosperity to the empire, induced many of his subjects to believe that he was destined to reform the church as well as the state, and few thinking men could doubt that corruption had entered deep into both. In many minds there was a contest between the superstition of picture-worship and the feeling of respect for the emperor’s administration; but there were still in the Roman empire many persons of education, unconnected with the church, who regarded the superstitions of people with aversion. To them the reverence paid by the ignorant to images said to have fallen from heaven, to pictures painted by St. Luke, to virgins who wept, and to saints who supplied the lamps burning before their effigies with a perpetual fountain of oil, appeared rank idolatry.
There were also still a few men of philosophic minds who exercised the right of private judgment on public questions, both civil and ecclesiastical, and who felt that the emperor was making popular superstition the pretext for rendering his power despotic in the church as well as in the state. His conduct appeared to these men a violation of those principles of Roman law and ecclesiastical legislation which rendered the systematic government of society in the Roman empire superior to the arbitrary rule of Mohammedan despotism, or the wild license of Gothic anarchy. The Greek church had not hitherto made it imperative on its members to worship images; – it had only tolerated popular abuse in the reverence paid to these symbols – so that the ignorant monks who resisted the enlightened Iconoclasts might, by liberal-minded men, be considered as the true defenders of the right of private judgment, and as benefactors of mankind.
There is positive evidence that such feelings really existed, and they could not exist without producing some influence on society generally. Less than forty years after the death of Constantine, the tolerant party was so numerous that it could struggle in the imperial cabinet to save heretics from persecution, on the ground that the church had no authority to ask that men should be condemned to death for matters of belief, as God may always turn the mind of the sinner to repentance.
Many of the clergy boldly resisted the edicts of Constantine to enforce the new ecclesiastical legislation against images and pictures. They held that all the acts of the council of Constantinople were void, for a general council could only be convoked by an orthodox emperor; and they took upon themselves to declare the opinions of Constantine heterodox. The monks engaged with eagerness in the controversy which arose. The Pope, the patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, replied to the excommunications of the council by condemning all its supporters to eternal perdition. The emperor, enraged at the opposition he met with, enforced the execution of his edicts with all the activity and energy of his character; his political as well as his religious views urged him to be a persecutor. It is evident that policy and passion were as much connected with his violence against the image-worshippers as religious feeling, for he treated many heretics with toleration who appeared to be quiet and inoffensive subjects, incapable of offering any opposition to his political and ecclesiastical schemes. The Theopaschites, the Paulicians, and the Monophysites enjoyed religious toleration during his whole reign.
In the year 766 the edicts against image-worship were extended in their application, and enforced with additional rigour. The use of relics and the practice of praying to saints were prohibited. Many monks, and several members of the dignified clergy, were banished; stripes, loss of the eyes and of the tongue, were inflicted as legal punishments for prostration before a picture, or praying before a relic. Yet, even at this period of the greatest excitement, the emperor at times displayed great personal forbearance; when , however, either policy or passion prompted him to order punishment to be inflicted, it was done with fearful severity.
Two cases may be mentioned as affording a correct elucidation of the personal conduct of Constantine. A hermit named Andreas the Kalybite, presented himself before the emperor, and upbraided him for causing dissension in the church. “If thou art a Christian, why dost thou persecute Christians?” shouted the monk to his prince, with audacious orthodoxy. Constantine ordered him to be carried off to prison for insulting the imperial authority. He was then called upon to submit to the decisions of the general council; and when he refused to admit the validity of its canons, and to obey the edicts of the emperor, he was tried and condemned to death. After being scourged on the hippodrome, he was beheaded, and his body, according to the practice of the age, was cast into the sea.
Stephen, the abbot of a monastery near Nicomedia, was banished to then island of Proconnesus, on account of his firm opposition to the emperor’s edicts; but his fame for piety drew numerous votaries to his place of banishment, who flocked thither to hear him preach. This assembly of seditious and pious persons roused the anger of the civil authorities, and Stephen was brought to Constantinople to be more strictly watched. His eloquence still drew crowds to the door of his prison; and the reverence shown to him by his followers vexed the emperor so much, that he gave vent to his mortification by exclaiming: “It seems, in truth, that this monk is really emperor, and I am nothing in the empire.” This speech was heard by some of the officers of the imperial guard. Like that of Henry the II. concerning Thomas Becket, it caused the death of Stephen. He was dragged from his prison by some of the emperor’s guard, and cruelly murdered. The soldiery and the people joined in dragging his body through the streets, and his unburied remains were left exposed in the place destined to receive those of the lowest criminals. Both Stephen and Andreas were declared martyrs, and rewarded with a place in the calendar of Greek saints.

TO BE CONTINUED