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Iconoclasts

The dispute about the worship of images, known in church history as the "War of the Iconoclasts." which broke out in the eighth century between the Greek churches of the East and the Latin churches of the West, drew after it farreaching consequences as respects the growing power of the Roman Pontiffs.

Even long before the seventh century, at which time the power of Mohammedanism arose, Christianity had lost very much of its early simplicity and purity. It had undergone a process of paganization. The churches both in the East and in the West were crowded with images or pictures of the apostles, saints, and martyrs, which to the ignorant classes at least were objects of adoration and worship. They were believed to possess miraculous virtues and powers. Every city and almost every church possessed its wonder-working image, the patron and protector of the place. It is easy to understand then the effect produced upon the minds of men, when in the seventh century the Cross everywhere throughout the East went down before the Crescent, and the images of apostles and saints were found powerless to protect even their own shrines. The feeling awakened among the Eastern Christians by these disasters was precisely the same as that aroused among the pagan inhabitants of the Roman Empire, when, amidst the calamities of the barbarian invasion, the ancient deities were found powerless to give protection to the cities and temples of which they had been thought the special guardians.

The Moslem conquerors, reproaching the Christians as idolaters, broke to pieces the images about the very altars, and yet no fire fell from heaven to punish the sacrilege. The Christians were filled with shame and confusion. A strong party arose, who, like the party of reform among the ancient Hebrews, declared that God had given the Church over into the hands of infidels because the Christians had departed from his true worship and fallen into gross idolatry. These opposers of the use and worship of images took the name of Iconoclasts (image-breakers). They were the reformers of the East. At a great ecclesiastical council held at Constantinople in 754, it was decreed that "all visible symbols of Christ, except in the eucharist, were either blasphemous or heretical; that image-worship was a corruption of Christianity, and a revival of paganism ; and that all such monuments of idolatry should be broken or erased."

Leo the Isaurian, who came to the throne of Constantinople in 717, was a most zealous Iconoclast. The Greek churches of the East having been cleared of images, the Emperor resolved to clear also the Latin churches of the West of these symbols of idolatry. To this end he issued a decree that they should not be used.

The Bishop of Rome not only opposed the execution of the edict, but by the ban of excommunication cut off the Emperor and all the iconoclastic churches of the East from communion with the true Catholic Church. The final outcome of the matter was the permanent separation, in the latter half of the eleventh century, of the churches of the East and those of the West. The former became known as the Greek, Byzantine, or Eastern Church; the latter as the Latin, Roman, or Catholic Church.

By the decree of a synod held at Constantinople in 842 images were restored in the Eastern churches, the event being marked by a festival known as the Feast of Orthodoxy. But by this time other causes of alienation had arisen, and the breach between the two sections of Christendom could not now be closed.