3

orthodoxy was celebrated by a solemn festival service in St. Sophia, on the first Sunday in Lent (March 11, A.D. 843). The monks from all the surrounding monasteries, and perhaps even hermits from the cells of Athos, flocked into the city, and we may be sure that sacred icons were hastily hung in the places from which others had been torn in all the churches of the capital. A nocturnal thanksgiving was held in the church of the Virgin in Blachernae, and on Sunday morning the Empress, with the child Emperor, the Patriarch and clergy, and all the ministers and senators, bearing crosses and icons and candles in their hands, devoutly proceeded to St. Sophia. It was enacted that henceforward the restoration of icons should be commemorated on the same day, and the first Sunday of Lent is still the feast of Orthodoxy in the Greek Church.

All our evidence for this ecclesiastical revolution comes from the records of those who rejoiced in it; we are not informed of the tactics of the iconoclastic party, nor is it hinted that they made any serious effort to fight for a doomed cause. We can hardly believe that the Patriarch John was quiescent during the year preceding the Council, and silently awaited the event. But the only tradition of any countermovement is the anecdote of a scandalous attempt to discredit Methodius after his elevation to the Patriarchate. The iconoclasts, it was said, bribed a young woman to allege publicly that the Patriarch had seduced her. An official inquiry was held, and Methodius proved his innocence, to the satisfaction of a curious and crowded assembly, by a cynical ocular demonstration that he was physically incapable of the offence with which he was charged. He explained that many years ago, during his sojourn at Rome, he had been tormented by the stings of carnal desire, and that in answer to his prayer St. Peter's miraculous touch had withered his body and freed him for ever from the assaults of passion. The woman was compelled to confess that she had been suborned, and the heretics who had invented the lie received the mild punishment of being compelled every year, at the feast of orthodoxy, to join the procession from Blachernae to St. Sophia with torches in their hands, and hear with their own ears anathema pronounced upon them."

There was

1

some

Apostles to the Augusteon, the street had porticoes; we know nothing about the road from Blachernae to the Apostles). The Emperor went to St. Sophia from the Palace.

The story is told by Gen. 83-85, and repeated, with the usual elaboration, in Cont. Th. 158-160. It was unknown to the author of the Vita Methodii, and his silence is a strong external argument for rejecting it entirely. But that there was moti behind, which we are not in a position to discover, is proved, as Hirsch has pointed out (154), by the fact that Genesios identifies the

mother of Metrophanes, afterwards bishop of Smyrna, who was prominent in the struggle between Photius and Ignatius. There must have been some link of connexion between her and Methodius. A second motif probably was the impotence of the Patriarch. The story had the merit of insulting the repentant iconoclastic clergy, who, as a condition of retaining their posts, were obliged to take part in the anniversary procession. We cannot put much more faith in the anecdote that the ex-Patriarch John, who was compelled to retire to a monastery at Kleidion on the Bos

woman

as

3

kernel of truth in this edifying fiction, but it is impossible to disentangle it.

It would seem that the great majority of the iconoclastic bishops and clergy professed repentance of their error and were allowed to retain their ecclesiastical dignities. Here Methodius, who was a man of moderation and compromise, followed the precedent set by Tarasius at the time of the first restoration of image-worship. But the iconoclastic heresy was by no means immediately extinguished, though it never again caused more than administrative trouble. Some of those who repented lapsed into error, and new names were added, twenty-five years later, to the list of the heretics who were held up to public ignominy on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and stigmatized as Jews or pagans.”

The final installation of icons among the sanctities of the Christian faith, the authoritative addition of icon-worship to the superstitions of the Church, was a triumph for the religious spirit of the Greeks over the doctrine of Eastern heretics whose Christianity had a more Semitic flavour. The struggle had lasted for about a hundred and twenty years, and in its latest stage had been virtually confined to Constantinople. Here the populace seems to have oscillated between the two extreme views, and many of the educated inhabitants probably belonged to that moderate party which approved of images in Churches, but was opposed to their worship. Of the influence of the iconoclastic movement on Byzantine art something will be said in another chapter, but it must be noticed here that in one point it won an abiding victory. In the doctrine laid down by the Council no distinction was drawn between sculptured and painted representations; all icons were legitimized. But whereas, before the controversy began, religious art had expressed itself in both forms, after the Council of phorus (Simeon, Cont. Georg. 811), Ortakeui, on the European side of the ordered a servant to poke out the eyes Bosphorus. of an icon in the church of that cloister, For the policy of Methodius and and for this offence received 200 stripes the disapproval which it aroused, see by the command of the Empress (Gen. below, p. 182. 82). Cont. Th. 151 says that he was 2 Condemned by the Council of A.D. banished to his suburban house called 869 (Mansi, xvi. 389). τα Ψιχά (there was another place of 3 εαυτούς τη των Ιουδαίων και Ελλήνων this name near the Forum of Constan- μερίδι καθυποβαλλομένοις, Uspenski, tine, Cont. Th. 420). Probably Psicha op. cit. 98. "Elnu is here used for was at Kleidion, which is the modern Defterdan Burnu, a little north of Cp. Bréhier, 40.

A.1. 843, sculpture was entirely discarded, and icons came to mean pictures and pictures only. This was a silent surrender, never explicitly avowed by the orthodox Church, to the damnable teaching of the iconoclasts; so that these heretics can claim to have so far influenced public opinion as to induce their victorious adversaries to abandon the cult of graven images. After all, the victory was a compromise.

CHAPTER V

MICHAEL III

A.D. 842-867

§ 1. The Regency MICHAEL III. reigned for a quarter of a century, but he never governed. During the greater part of his life he was too young; when he reached a riper age he had neither the capacity nor the desire. His reign falls into two portions. In his minority, the Empress Theodora held the reins, guided by the advice of Theoktistos, the Logothete of the Course, who proved as devoted to her as he had been to her husband. During the later years, when Michael nominally exercised the sovranty himself, the real power and the task of conducting the administration devolved upon her brother Bardas. In the first period, the government seems to have been competent, though we have not sufficient information to estimate it with much confidence; in the second period it was eminently efficient.

The Empress Theodora? occupied the same constitutional position which the Empress Irene had occupied in the years following her husband's death.

She was not officially the Autocrat, any more than her daughter Thecla, who associated with her brother and mother in the Imperial dignity;2 she only acted provisionally as such on behalf of

1 At the beginning of the reign above, p. 150, n. 2. coins were issued with the head of 2 Acta 42 Mart. Am. 52 (A.D. 845) Theodora (despoina) on one side, on the βασιλεύοντος της Ρωμαίων άρχής Μιχαήλ other the child-Emperor and his eldest και Θεοδώρας και Θέκλης. Cp. Wroth, sister Thecla robed as Augusta. A 431 (PI. xlix. 19) Μιχαήλ Θεοδώρα και few years later Michael and Theodora Θέκλα εκ θεού) βασιλείς Ρωμαίων on appear together on the obverse ; on reverse of silver coins. the reverse is the head of the Saviour,

was

CP;