Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), Definition on the holy images

This is the Second Council of Nicaea's own 787 conciliar definition on the holy images, the primary document that upheld the veneration of icons in Christian worship and drew the doctrinal distinction between the honor paid to an image and the worship reserved for God alone, ending the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm. As the council's own primary text it is the correct source for what that doctrinal distinction actually states. Its limit is that it records the council's formal decree, not a narrative account of the iconoclast controversy that preceded it or the second iconoclast period that followed decades later, so a claim about that wider historical conflict needs a historical source alongside the decree.