2.8 Picture This: Iconoclasm and Second Nicaea

The last of the classic councils was, like so many of the others, a comic production worthy of the Marx Brothers—and simultaneously a tragedy worthy of Tolstoy. In the eighth-century run-up to the Second Council of Nicaea we encounter an emperor known as “Poopyhead,” who summons a synod known as the “Headless Council”—all for the sake of forbidding the use of devotional images. That’s where it started anyway. Eventually the emperor got around to condemning any honor paid to saints, and then he desecrated their relics, removing their bodies from tombs and casting them into the sea. He tried to ban celibacy, and he closed monasteries and turned them into hotels. Second Nicaea, in 787, was called to repair all that damage.

LINKS

Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3819.htm

Canons of the Second Council of Nicaea https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum07.htm

St. John of Damascus, Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Images https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/johndamascus-images.asp

Mike Aquilina’s website https://fathersofthechurch.com

Mike Aquilina’s books https://catholicbooksdirect.com/writer/mike-aquilina/

Theme music: Gaudeamus (Introit for the Feast of All Saints), sung by Jeff Ostrowski. Courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed http://www.ccwatershed.org

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