The Second Council of Nicaea

The empress Irene, ruling for her young son, moved to end the imperial policy against religious images that had run for two generations. Her first attempt in 786 was broken up by soldiers of the capital garrison loyal to the iconoclast tradition, so the council reassembled at Nicaea the following year, away from the troops. The venue was not accidental: meeting where the first ecumenical council had met was a claim about continuity.

The council's definition rests on a distinction that had been developed by John of Damascus, writing safely outside the empire under Muslim rule. Worship in the full sense, latreia, belongs to God alone. What is offered to an icon is veneration, timetic proskynesis, an honour that passes to the person represented and does not stop at the wood and paint. The theological ground is the Incarnation: what has been made visible in flesh may be depicted, and refusing to depict it implies a discomfort with the flesh itself.

The council also legislated on how icons should be treated, on the relics required in a consecrated altar, and on abuses in the appointment of bishops. It is counted the seventh ecumenical council by both Eastern and Western churches and is the last for which that is true, which is why the phrase the seven councils marks the shared inheritance of a period before the divisions that followed.

The council's reception in the West is one of the clearest cases in church history of a division manufactured by a translator. The acts reached Charlemagne's court in a Latin version that rendered the Greek terms for worship and veneration with the same word. What the Frankish theologians read, therefore, was a council decreeing that images should be worshipped, which they rejected with some vigour.

The response drawn up at the court, the work usually called the Opus Caroli regis and long known as the Libri Carolini, attacks the council at length, and a synod at Frankfurt in 794 condemned the position it thought Nicaea had taken. Rome had approved the council and did not join the condemnation, leaving the awkward situation of a Frankish church rejecting a council its pope accepted, on the basis of a text neither had in the original.

The episode is worth holding onto for two reasons. It is a caution about how much of doctrinal history runs through the quality of translations, in a period when few in the West read Greek and few in the East read Latin. And it shows that the Western reservation about images was real and not merely a misunderstanding: even after the terminology was clarified, the Carolingian position remained that images are useful for teaching and memory rather than objects of honour, and the difference of instinct between Eastern and Western piety about images has never entirely closed.