the foot of the altar. Theophilus (829–842) was the last and the most cruel of the iconoclastic
emperors. He persecuted the monks by imprisonment, corporal punishment, and mutilation.^550
But his widow, Theodora, a second Irene, without her vices,^551 in the thirteenth year of her
regency during the minority of Michael the Drunkard, achieved by prudent and decisive measures
the final and permanent victory of image-worship. She secured absolution for her deceased husband
by the fiction of a death-bed repentance, although she had promised him to make no change. The
iconoclastic patriarch, John the Grammarian, was banished and condemned to two hundred lashes;
the monk Methodius of opposite tendency (honored as a confessor and saint) was put in his place;
the bishops trembled and changed or were deposed; the monks and the people were delighted. A
Synod at Constantinople (the acts of it are lost) reënacted the decrees of the seven oecumenical
Councils, restored the worship of images, pronounced the anathema upon all iconoclasts, and
decided that the event should be hereafter commemorated on the first Sunday in Lent by a solemn
procession and a renewal of the anathema on the iconoclastic heretics.
On the 19th of February, 842, the images were again introduced into the churches of
Constantinople. It was the first celebration of the "Sunday of Orthodoxy,"^552 which afterwards
assumed a wider meaning, as a celebration of victory over all heresies. It is one of the most
characteristic festivals of the Eastern church. The old oecumenical Councils are dramatically
represented, and a threefold anathema is pronounced upon all sorts of heretics such as atheists,
antitrinitarians, upon those who deny the virginity of Mary before or after the birth of Christ, the
inspiration of the Scriptures, or the immortality of the soul, who reject the mysteries (sacraments),
the traditions and councils, who deny that orthodox princes rule by divine appointment and receive
at their unction the Holy Ghost, and upon all iconoclasts. After this anathema follows the grateful
commemoration of the orthodox confessors and "all who have fought for the orthodox faith by
their words, writings, teaching, sufferings, and godly example, as also of all the protectors and
defenders of the Church of Christ." In conclusion the bishops, archimandrites and priests kiss the
sacred icons.^553
§ 104. The Caroline Books and the Frankish Church on Image-Worship.
I. Libri Carolini, first ed. by Elias Philyra (i.e., Jean du Tillet, or Tilius, who was suspected of
Calvinism, but afterwards became bishop of Meaux), from a French (Paris) MS., Paris, 1549;
then by Melchior Goldast in his collection of imperial decrees on the image-controversy,
(^550) Hefele, IV. 105, says that under this reign the famous poets, Theophanes and his brother, Theodore of the Studium,
were punished with two hundred lashes and the branding of Greek mock-verses on their forehead, whence they received the
name "the Marked" (γραπτοί). But, according to the Bollandists, Theophanes died in 820, and Hefele himself, III. 370, puts his
death in 818, although in vol. IV. 108 be reports that Theophanesγράπτοςwas made bishop of Smyrna by Theodora, 842. See
on this conflict in chronology above, p. 407.
(^551) The tongue of slander, however, raised the story of her criminal intimacy with the patriarch Methodius, whom she
had appointed. The court instituted an investigation during which the patriarch by indecent exposure furnished the proof of the
physical impossibility of sexual sin on his part; whereupon the accuser confessed that she had been bribed by his iconoclastic
predecessor. Hefele, IV. 109.
(^552) ἡκυριακὴτη̑ςὀρθοδοξίας.
(^553) See the description of Walch (X. 800-808) from the Byzantine historians and from Allacci, and King (on the Russian
church).