From the desk of the pastor for August 3, 2025

The Lord be with you! Today we are discussing what happened to the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire as the West fell apart. As the de facto religion of the Eastern Empire, Christianity had to take part in politics whether it wanted to or not.

Typically histories of this time focus on the ecumenical councils that continued to clarify the Faith, but we are going to summarize. The Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 articulated the Hypostatic Union in which we understand that Jesus Christ has two natures (human and divine) under one Person. About a hundred years later, the Second Council of Constantinople reaffirmed these teachings and condemned the heresy of Nestorianism, which held that Jesus was two distinct persons. In AD 680 the Third Council of Constantinople affirmed that Jesus had two wills that always acted in unison. This council thus condemned the belief that Jesus had a single will - monothelitism. The last vital council was Second Nicea in AD 787, which clarified the teachings of the Church about icons. In short, icons are cool and should not be smashed.

Of the councils mentioned, all of them were centered on Christ except Second Nicea, which focused on icons. That tempest did not come from nowhere. In the East (and it is still the case today among Eastern Christians) icons play a central role in worship. In fact the tradition of icons goes back to a relic we often associate with the West: the Shroud of Turin. The traditional view is that the first icon of Christ was created using the Shroud as a template. Accordingly, all iconography can be traced back to Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Whereas Western Christians will eventually focus on Eucharistic piety (a story for another article), the Easterns developed a deep and abiding devotion to icons.

This devotion went to extremes that disturbed some, including Emperor Leo III. After a major earthquake in 726 caused major tsunami’s, Leo III thought that God was punishing the Eastern Empire for worshipping images. What started as a movement of reform quickly degenerated into a low intensity civil war between iconodules, those who loved icons, and iconoclasts, those who smashed icons. Depending on the town or city’s religious fervor, one faction or the other won out and would punish - often with riots and street killings - the other side. We now speak of iconoclasm any time that a culture decides to destroy its own art after this incident.

Second Nicea would affirm Pope Gregory III’s position - icons are cool - and bring some respite to the East. Although another wave of iconoclasm would erupt in 814, the iconodules had prevailed. At the root of iconoclasm is a misunderstanding of other people’s piety and desire to impose one’s own purer form of faith. Differences in piety are a blessing to be celebrated, not an impurity to be removed.

In His Sacred Heart,
Fr. John