Lecture 20: Icons, Forgeries, and Bad Popes: The Road to Corruption

The lecture, section by section

1. Losing to Islam, looking for a cause

   By the early 700s the eastern empire had lost Jerusalem (637), Syria, and North Africa to Muslim armies, and its Christians concluded they must be under divine judgment. The emperor found his culprit in the icons: images of Christ and the saints that had crept into worship as a baptized empire christianized its old pagan habits, saints inheriting the deities' roles under new names. Cities under an icon's supposed protection kept falling, and the monks' defense, that the people's faith, not the image, had failed, sounded then as it does now from prosperity healers.

2. Iconoclasts and iconodules

   The iconoclasts, image breakers, argued that veneration was idolatry: an image of Christ can depict only his humanity, mutilating the two natures Chalcedon had just secured, and making any image of him runs against the second commandment of Exodus 20. The iconodules, image servants, answered that in the incarnation God himself gave the image, Scripture's description of Christ as the image of the invisible God, and that they venerated rather than worshiped. Busenitz sides, on the substance, with the iconoclasts: the line between veneration and worship is so blurry as to vanish, as it manifestly has in the later cult of Mary. The same divide resurfaces at the Reformation, Zwingli and the Reformed as iconoclasts, Luther milder, and it is why some conservative Presbyterian children's Bibles to this day show only the hem of Christ's garment.

3. The empire strikes at the icons

   Busenitz tells it as a Star Wars plot with the sides reversed. In 726 the soldier-emperor Leo III replaced the great icon of Christ at his palace gate with a plain cross and banned images; the patriarch Germanus was removed for objecting, and Pope Gregory II condemned the policy from the west. Leo's son Constantine V pressed on, convening the eastern Council of Hieria in 754, which formally banned icons; his son Leo IV held the line. Then Leo IV died, and his widow Irene, secretly an iconodule, became co-regent, undid three generations of iconoclasm, and convened the second council of Nicaea in 787, which, with two papal delegates present, overturned Hieria and restored the images.

4. The sequel

   History ran the plot twice. In 814 Leo V reinstated the ban, followed by Michael II and Theophilus, three more iconoclast reigns, until Theophilus died in 842 and his widow Theodora, another closet iconodule co-regent, restored the icons for good. After the mid ninth century the images were never again seriously challenged in the east, and the west, which had favored them throughout, welcomed the outcome. Two empresses, twice, settled what councils and emperors could not.

5. A quarrel that split the map

   Chamberlain's account, which the lecture reads at length, shows the controversy driving east and west apart decades before 1054. Gregory II defied the emperor's edict outright, boasting that he need only withdraw a day's ride from Rome to be beyond imperial reach, and his own words about the statue of Peter, which all the kingdoms of the west esteem as a God on earth, illustrate exactly how blurry veneration had become. Open fighting followed; a Roman synod of 731 excommunicated attackers of images; and once again the bishop of Rome filled the power vacuum the eastern emperor could not reach.

6. The Donation of Constantine

   Into this contest came one of history's most consequential forgeries: a document claiming that Constantine, departing for his new capital, had ceded Rome and its surrounding territories to the bishop of Rome, making the pope by imperial gift the region's rightful temporal ruler, superior even to emperors. Fabricated in the eighth century and not exposed until centuries later, the Donation was believed genuine and wielded constantly: popes used it to summon the Franks against the encroaching Lombards, and it converted the papacy, in principle and increasingly in fact, from a pastorate into a throne.

7. Christmas Day, 800

   The Frankish alliance sealed the transformation. The Carolingian line ran from Pippin of Herstal through Charles Martel, victor of Tours in 732 and grandfather of Charlemagne, to Pippin the Short and then Charles the Great. When street factions assaulted Pope Leo III, intending to take his eyes and tongue, he fled to Charlemagne, who restored him; and on Christmas Day 800 Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans. A pope now made emperors. Under Charlemagne came a genuine renaissance of learning, built on the monasteries that had kept scholarship alive through the feudal centuries.

8. The bloodstained throne

   Political power did to the papacy what it does. The lecture's catalog, drawn from Chamberlain's The Bad Popes: Hadrian I, the first styled Holy Father, introducing nepotism; Paschal I, who murdered two officers to gain election; Hadrian II, whose wife and daughter were murdered in a factional revenge; and in March 896 the Cadaver Synod, when a pope exhumed his predecessor's corpse, dressed it in papal vestments, tried it, mutilated its hand, and threw it in the Tiber. That pope was strangled; his successor Sergius was driven from the city and returned seven years later behind a feudal lord's swords; four popes held the throne within a single year, seven popes and an antipope within six. Between 880 and 1000, thirty popes reigned less than two years each, most dying at the hands of the faction that produced the next one. Even the papal historian Baronius could only argue that an institution surviving such monsters must have supernatural foundations.

9. What this does to the succession claim

   Rome's answer, then and now, is that the office transcends the men who disgrace it. But papal succession is an appointment-based claim, Peter to his successor and on down the line, and in this era the chair was seized by murder, against the will and over the body of the predecessor, by rival factions of Roman nobility. Whatever else that is, it is not a line of succession, and Busenitz offers the century as a standing apologetic against the claim of Petrine supremacy.

10. Were there no Christians for a thousand years?

    The lecture closes with Catherwood's needed caution: revering the Reformation must not mean concluding that no one was born again for a millennium. Late antiquity was an age of slow, steady conversion, brave monks entering the forests, some martyred, the Franks converting around 496, and mass movements of whole peoples, strange to modern individualists, can be genuine when God is in them, as Nineveh's repentance at Jonah's preaching reminds us. The gospel was being obscured, and the next lectures will trace how far; but it was never extinguished.

1. The iconoclast debate turned on whether veneration can stay short of worship. Where do modern evangelicals keep helps to devotion that risk becoming objects of it?

2. The Donation of Constantine shows how one accepted falsehood can steer centuries. What guards a church against building real authority on unexamined claims?

3. Catherwood warns against writing off a millennium of believers. How do you honor the Reformation without despising the saints who lived before it?