Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Iconoclastic epoch (717-867)

Religious controversies and the first period of Iconoclasm 

Page 11

The decree of the council of 754, which has been preserved in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (perhaps in parts and in a somewhat modified form), definitely condemned image worship by proclaiming the following:

Supported by the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers, we declare unanimously in the name of the Holy Trinity, that there shall be rejected and removed and cursed out of the Christian Church every likeness which is made out of any material whatever by the evil art of painters. Whoever in the future dares to make such a thing or to venerate it, or set it up in a church or in a private house, or possesses it in secret, shall, if bishop, priest or deacon, be deposed, if monk or layman, anathematised and become liable to be tried by the secular laws as an adversary of God and an enemy of the doctrines handed down by the Fathers.

Besides the general significance of this proclamation for image-worship, this decree is notable also for prescribing that persons guilty of icon worship should be tried by imperial laws, thus placing the iconodules under the jurisdiction of temporal power. This fact was later used by the members of the Seventh Ecumenical Council as an explanation of the extraordinary harshness manifested by some emperors with regard to the church and to the monks. Anathema was proclaimed for any person who ventures to represent the divine image of the Logos after the incarnation with material colours and the forms of the saints in lifeless pictures with material colours which are of no value, for this notion is erroneous and introduced by the devil. The decree ends with the following: To New Constantine and the most pious, many years! . . . To the most pious and orthodox (empress) many years! You have established the dogmas of the Holy Six Ecumenical Councils. You have destroyed all idolatry. Anathema was proclaimed against the Patriarch Germanus, the worshiper of wood, and Mansur, i.e., John Damascene, inclined to Muhammedanism, the enemy of the Empire, the teacher of impiety, the perverter of the Scriptures.

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