Second Council of Nicaea

History

Causes

In 726 the emperor Leo III published an edict declaring images to be idols forbidden by Exodus 20:4–5 and ordered them destroyed. The patriarch Germanus protested and resigned (Catholic Encyclopedia, secondary). His son Constantine V went further, and in 754 convened a council at Hieria where 338 bishops condemned religious imagery, declaring that “the unlawful art of painting living creatures blasphemed the fundamental doctrine of our salvation” (overview, secondary). Hieria claimed ecumenical status, but no patriarch outside Constantinople was represented and Rome rejected it.

Constantine’s son Leo IV died in 780, leaving his widow Irene as regent for their young son. Irene favoured the images. She had her secretary Tarasius made patriarch and sought Rome’s cooperation for a council to overturn Hieria. A first attempt at Constantinople in 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers. The bishops reassembled at Nicaea in 787, the city of the first ecumenical council.

Proceedings

The council met in seven sessions in the autumn of 787 with Tarasius presiding and two legates of Pope Hadrian I present. Much of its work was documentary: reading patristic testimonies for images, examining the decree of Hieria session by session, and refuting it. Bishops who had been iconoclasts were received back after a profession of faith.

The definition issued in the seventh session is the council’s lasting act. It orders that images of Christ, the Mother of God, the angels and the saints be set up in churches and on vestments and walls, “for by so much more frequently as they are seen in artistic representation, by so much more readily are men lifted up to the memory of their prototypes.” To these “should be given due salutation and honourable reverence, not indeed that true worship of faith which pertains alone to the divine nature.” The reason follows: “the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented” (definition). Twenty-two canons on church discipline were issued as well.

Aftermath and influence

The settlement did not hold at once. Iconoclasm revived under Leo V from 814 and ran until 843, when the empress Theodora restored the images in an act still kept in the Eastern Orthodox churches as the Triumph of Orthodoxy on the first Sunday of Lent.

The council is received as the seventh and last ecumenical council by the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. For Orthodoxy it closed the age of the councils and made the icon a settled part of worship and theology. In the West its reception was slower. Charlemagne’s court had the Libri Carolini (mid-790s, secondary) composed to refute it, and Frankish theology held a middle position for generations. Rome’s view eventually prevailed, and the Council of Trent cited the council by name in its twenty-fifth session (1563) against the Protestant reformers. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2131) still grounds Catholic teaching on images in it.

Most Protestant churches accept the first four or six councils and stop before this one. The Reformed tradition rejects its substance outright (Iconoclasm), which makes Nicaea II the dividing line in what might otherwise be a shared conciliar inheritance.

Key ideas and contributors

Veneration is not worship. The definition distinguishes proskynesis, salutation and honourable reverence, from latreia, the worship of faith owed to the divine nature alone. The council noted that Scripture says “you shall serve him only” without saying that veneration belongs to God only, and reasoned that veneration is a word of wider meaning (definition).

The honour passes to the prototype. The council’s governing principle comes from Basil, who used it of the Son and the Father: “the honour paid to the image passes on to the prototype” (On the Holy Spirit 18). Applied to icons, it means reverence is never directed at the material object.

Images belong with the other holy things. The definition treats icons alongside the cross, the book of the Gospels and the vessels of the altar, all of which receive incense and lights “according to ancient pious custom.” The argument is that nobody thinks a Gospel book is being worshipped when it is kissed.

The incarnation. The theological case the council ratified came from John of Damascus: the invisible God has taken visible flesh, so depicting Christ confesses the incarnation rather than denying the commandment (Exact Exposition 4.16). The Catechism (§2131) summarises the council the same way.

Tradition as evidence. The council appeals to “the tradition of the Catholic Church, which from one end of the earth to the other has received the Gospel,” and spent whole sessions reading the fathers. Its method is as significant as its conclusion (Holy Tradition, Conciliarity).

Other contributors: Tarasius, who presided and drafted; Irene, who convened it; Pope Hadrian I, whose legates and letters gave it Western standing; and Theodore the Studite, who defended its decision through the second iconoclast period.

Key controversies

Whether it is ecumenical. Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches count it as the seventh ecumenical council. Most Protestants do not, and some Reformed and Baptist writers argue that a council whose substance contradicts the second commandment cannot be binding however it was convened (Sola Scriptura).

The Frankish rejection. The Libri Carolini rejected both the destruction of images and the veneration Nicaea defined, and two Frankish tracts were sent to Rome in 792 before that fuller rebuttal was written (secondary). The episode shows that the council’s authority in the West was contested almost immediately.

Reliance on contested texts. The council’s patristic case included testimonies whose authenticity iconoclasts disputed, and its opponents’ own writings survive only in the quotations the council’s acts preserve. Modern historians, notably Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon in Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (2011), argue that the picture of the whole controversy has been shaped by the winning side’s documents.

Politics. Irene convened the council as regent and later ruled in her own name, and the restoration of 843 was also the act of an empress acting for a child emperor. Critics have read the icon question as a struggle over imperial and ecclesiastical power as much as theology; defenders answer that the same could be said of Nicaea I without touching the doctrine.

What remains unresolved

Nicaea II settled the question for the churches that receive it and sharpened it for those that do not. The live issue is whether its central distinction between reverence and worship holds in practice, and whether a church can bind consciences on a matter that a plain reading of Exodus 20 appears to decide the other way.