Council of Hiereia
The Council of Hiereia was convened by Emperor Constantine V in 754 in Hiereia (today Fenerbahçe / Istanbul ) near Constantinople . The council , chaired by the Metropolitan of Ephesus , Theodosius (a son of Emperor Tiberios II ), condemned the worship of images and excommunicated John of Damascus and Germanus of Constantinople . The Second Council of Nicaea rejected the Council of Hiereia 33 years later as a "pseudo synod".
Constantine V was an iconoclast . After a rebellion by his brother-in-law Artabasdos , he recaptured Constantinople and is said to have cracked down on the Iconodules . However, since only sources from the picture enthusiasts have survived, this representation is obviously tendentious (see Byzantine picture dispute ). There is a lack of reliable evidence that persecutions occurred because of the worship of images. It is more likely that political opponents of the emperor were later transfigured into martyrs for friends of pictures. The decisions of the council do not seem to have resulted in any tough action against the friends of the pictures. Vandalism against church institutions was even explicitly prohibited. It is unclear whether the emperor's policy really met with rejection from the population, as the later sources suggest. In any case, the Kaiser does not seem to have been a merciless iconoclast.
literature
- Leslie Brubaker: Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. Bristol Classical Press, London 2012, ISBN 1-85-399750-1 .
- Torsten Krannich, Christoph Schubert , Claudia Sode , Annette von Stockhausen: The iconoclastic synod of Hiereia 754 (= studies and texts on antiquity and Christianity. Vol. 15). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147931-9 .