ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY, The, Sylvester Hassell The Iconoclastic (or image breaking) controversy lasted from 716 to 842. Both the Greek and the Roman Catholics had long been sunk in the Pagan worship of images or pictures of Biblical personages. In the eighth and ninth centuries six Eastern Roman Emperors assembled councils and issued decrees against this degrading idolatry; but they could not change the hearts of their paganized subjects, and, therefore, they achieved only a temporary success.
The monks, the ignorant and corrupt priestly rulers of the people, monopolized the manufacture of the images and accumulated wealth thereby. Seeing their craft in danger, they contended with all their might against the imperial decrees. They invented lying wonders in regard to the images, build up sophistical arguments, declared that a failure to worship images was worse than the vilest sins, and they succeeded in thus deluding and persuading the people until other emperors arose who seconded their efforts and again (A.D. 842) legalized the old idolatry.
The popes of Rome zealously favored the worship of images all the time, and used their “accustomed policy by elevating the popular idolatrous feeling into a dogma of the faith.”
The Germans, under Charlemagne, in the Council of Frankfort, A.D. 794, declared not against the use but against the worship of images, as idol-worship was the practice of the Pagans against whom they fought. This decision helped to restrain the pope’s championship of images until the death of Charlemagne.
A Greek Monk, John of Damascus, in the civil employ of the Mohammedan caliph, was the ablest defender of image worship. He was said to have been “a child of light from his birth,” and was the most learned man in the East. He advocated the worship of images in three elegant orations, which were rapidly and widely distributed by the monks; and he declared that opposition to such worship was Manichaeism, as representing matter as essentially evil.
No wonder that the spiritual-minded Paulicians, who abominated idolatry, were stigmatized as Manichaeans. And no wonder, either, that the spiritually blind and dead honored John Damascus, the child of darkness, as “a child of light.”
Mingling Aristotelianism, traditionalism and Pelagianism, he also wrote a summary of Greek Catholic theology, which was the standard of faith in the communion for a thousand years.” (Hassell’s History ppg 421, 422)